So the one guy with the best excuse not to post on here is the first one to post a new string in 10 days? Have you guys lost the fervor of your first love with traber6updates??? So this post requires twofold responses:
1) What's your excuse not to post anything here? Satirical answers welcomed.
2) Do we really have a general consensus condemning online dating services? I'm interested to know. What, if any, are the conditions when it would be okay to meet people that way? My own feelings may be posted at a later time.
I know that these questions don't have the same gravitas as our previous thread based on Coye's article, but maybe we can get people talking again. And you, there in the nosebleed section, feel free to contribute.
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Well, since even this post is struggling to attract attention, I will get the proverbial ball rolling (even as I relapse into Rykenisms--note, that will only be funny to Coye). I have no new excuses for not posting, save that I have been waiting for responses to some of the other things I've written of late.
On the matter of online dating services, I do not see any necessary reason to abjure them, although there is the stigma of introducing that special someone as "the girl I met online." Eyebrows go up, opinions go down, and you are instantly the most interesting gossip anyone has heard this week. "______ is really dating someone he met on the internet? No way!" But, if one can get over the social stigma, I think it's just as legitimate means of meeting potential dates as Christian singles events at churches, etc. Put that in your proverbial pipe and smoke it.
Online dating sounds kind of like inline skating.
Dobson says it's ok.
One of the reasons I'm not posting up a storm is that this new "pop-up" window system is really slow. On my computer, anyway. I don't have the patience to "wait for a page to load."
I haven't been posting because my nose has been bleeding so profusely that my vermilion fingers are too slippery to type. I beg your forgiveness, and I will punish myself. [ouch]
And online dating is the archetypal faux pas.
Post up a storm.
Does Dobson really say it's OK?
Much of Dobson's relationship advice is rather suspect, anyway, so I, for one, hope he condemns it in the strongest of terms, as this will make it more likely that the practice of online dating is actually good and useful for all.
And I am with Aeijzsche, this new popup window system for comments is, in the technical lingo of web designers, a stupid idea.
My hopes lay dashed upon the pavement. Dr. Dobson says eHarmony is good, though no comment about online dating in general (eHarmony's founder is a Focus on the Family man himself, it should be noted). This from Christianity Today:
"Still, Warren's highly structured approach has received nods from leaders such as James Dobson, who recently endorsed eHarmony on his Focus on the Family radio program. And other single Christians have praised the site: "We found a sense of peace in the realization that we had a blueprint for the type of deep, intimate, caring relationship we want to experience," wrote David, an eHarmony member from Seattle who apparently found his match."
Ha! I knew it.
The necesary logical pre-requisites for sites like eHarmony (ie, their "blueprint" for intimate relationships) does an inconscionable amount of violence to the particularity of human persons and makes a soulless equation out of the living organism of intimacy.
In more "Logemmonesque" terminology, it turns human beings into commodities.
My excuse for not posting is I gave up the Internet for Lent. I can do anything I really need to do, though, so for the sake of doing something really necessary I am going to post this comment: online dating services are commercial, impersonal and unromantic and therefore I am not interested. I know a couple or two who have met that way and that's fine, but as for me for my wife, I prefer the quest.
My excuse for not posting is I gave up the Internet for Lent. I can do anything I really need to do, though, so for the sake of doing something really necessary I am going to post this comment: online dating services are commercial, impersonal and unromantic and therefore I am not interested. I know a couple or two who have met that way and that's fine, but as for me for my wife, I prefer the quest.
Ryan, the quest of meeting a girl in a sake bar, or that one special girl you suddenly ran into while swimming at the beach, etc? I wish there were more T6 guys posting on here, because I know there is at least one who is dating someone they met online. By the way, what is wrong with meeting other Christians in your area that have similar interests, not as a date, but just to hang out and get to know them? It is time to go beyond the "meet them in your church" attitude to one that is open to new fun ways of meeting people. Let us not be too "old-fashioned".
For starters, the one you meet while snow-boarding. Steve and I went out the other day and actually did meet a neat Christian girl. Basically she introduced herself to us and one of the first things she asked us was "Are you Christian"? We with our Japanese host ended up spending a little time snow-boarding with her and then eating lunch with her at the ski-house. She was Brazilian, spoke little English, more Japanese, and consequently we all had a very interesting conversation. No one is talking about dating here, but I for one found it inspiring how open she was with her faith. Granted this situation has limited applicability since it was foreigner meeting foreigner in Japan.
I do agree with you though that meeting Christians outside of church is fine and good, but if they are indeed Christians then you ought to be seeing them IN church real soon anyway. Not your church, necessarily, but some church.
So I say getting to know other churches in your area is key. That's where all the eligible ladies are going to be on Sunday. Commit yourself to one church, one home church, but then find out all about the other churches in your area, especially the ones similar to your own. Once a month on Sunday, visit one. Go to various mid-week services. And look other kinds ofvChristian organizations too, in particular the ones aligned with your own values.
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So I guess my "coffee shop and bar" stratagy is going to be frowned upon here?
Ok, to play along with that, what about finding out what churches in your area these girls go to, checking the denomination, and then visiting that church? What about if you were put in a place where there were not any girls who could fit your standards. What if it took 2 hours to drive to a normal city. What would you do then? I have always wanted to try one of these Christian speed meeting things, where you have dinner, spending 3 minutes with each person, talking to them, and then later if any two people requested further communication, the contact information is emailed to both parties. I thought that would be entertaining.
And by the way, just because they are online or wherever, does not mean that they do not go to church, are not active in their faith, or that you even need to attend their church.
I have to say Dusty has a point. While I appreciate the romanticized notion of the process of meeting eligible young ladies implied by Coye's post, pragmatically, one is seeking (whether you put it in these terms, or even think about it at all) a way to qualify the women you meet, to seperate the sheep from the goats, to use an awkward, if somewhat apt, metaphor. And this is essentially what Ryan is saying-- that you will find "compatible" people in churches or at church related activities. So, in the language of online dating, e-harmony style, these young women have answered many of the questions on the survey in a manner consonant with what you are looking for in a girl—about the same age, similar theological beliefs, etc. So what you are doing at church, or where ever this Christian mixing is taking place, is seeking to assess issues of personality and taste, now that the big issues like spirituality are out of the way. Is this really so different from what you would be doing with a young woman who you were matched up with on a site like e-harmony? Feel free to argue with me, as I am just shooting in the dark during my (as usual) unattended office hours.
Alas, even you, Andy, my friend and "fellow traveler", have begun referring to women like commodities. The image of "Christian romance" that you, and a few of our compatriots, are building is that of the car lot:
You know that you want a car, but you are confused because it's a huge investment and there are a lot of cars out there. What you need to do is figure out what kind of things you're looking for in a car. First, you decide whether you want an American or a Japanese model (or perhaps even European!), and then you need to narrow it down to just a few brand names. Perhaps your family were Chevy people and that's the only kind of car you'd really feel comfortable with-- that's fine, there should be plenty of Chevy dealers in your area. What you need to do is pick a few Sunday afternoons when you're free to look, and go hang around a few different dealerships (that's where the available cars will be, after all). Maybe you should have a few features in mind to help you narrow the field, but try to have an open mind about exactly which car is best for your needs (I mean, you wouldn't want the perfect Cavalier to get away because it had a red paint job instead of a black one). Dare I mention that you might also want to keep your price range in mind? (But you should be able to manage that somewhat just by carefully selecting your dealership.) If there don't happen to be any good Chevy dealers in your area-- or if the ones that are there don't have the car you're looking for-- then why not jump online and see what the web has to offer? Yes, it can be risky to shop for cars online, and people might stigmatize you for making that kind of investment in something you found on eBay, but it's really no different than using your local dealership if you make an effort to see the car in person before you buy. And online car-shopping has the added benefit that you can pre-select the options and features you want using the convenient search fields provided by your online car-shopping service, so you don't have to waste time looking at cars that aren't exactly what you know you want already. God bless the information age!
Replace "car" with "woman" and "dealership" with "church", and this is the conversation we've been having. Doesn't anyone else see a problem with that!?!
I think the best place to find good Christian girls is college. We should all go back. I could use a second BA and a third one if need be.
Does anybody else dislike the idea of visiting other churches to hit on their women? Although I must admit that I wish my love life wasn't nearly so dried up.
Good observations, Coye. I do see problems in approaching "finding a wife" the same way as "finding a car."
They are both "finding," however, so the process could basically look the same at one level. You have to be at the right place at the right time.
I would look to hear more specifically what you think is wrong with an online approach (as Dusty has been describing it...meeting, not dating) and additionally what you think is a better approach; i.e., your idea of "Christian romance"
Dusty, I think church is a necessary part of the picture because this "making friends" we are talking about is serious business. If you want to have want make friends with a girl the best (only?) place you can do that and still be guarded against your (mutual) strong desires for intimate companionship (i.e. marriage) is church where values and standards of proper behavior between the sexes are shared and explicit.
Now, I'm ready to be corrected here, too, for being too idealistic, but basically my point is that relationships with women are not just a simple matter of making friends and having fun. You always need accountability to other Christians, until you are married.
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The idea of visiting other churches to hit on their women or even to scope them out is NOT what I had in mind. I am talking more about building up ties between your own church and the other churches in your area. I grew up never having gone to another church in my home-city. That's great, and that's probably how I'm going to do it with my kids. But I think it's terribly important for churches to build stronger ties with one other. For the Christians to know one other, to know what they look like, how they worship, how they think, etc. With this priority in mind, you can go to other churches. Probably you will end up talking to some of the young people and perhaps sometime you will meet an attractive young lady.
Coye, I am somewhat chastened, although I would (and perhaps tomorrow, when I don't have to write more drivel about Barthes, Adorno and Levi-Strauss, I will) contest your assertion that my comments are necessarily invested in a commodification of persons (female or otherwise). The potentiality is there, and for that I hang my head... but I hope to rehabilitate (or retreat from, as the case may be) my position later.
I second Ryan's question about what your conception of romance might be. The non-commodified variety, of course.
Well, Andy and Ryan have turned the tables and started asking the gadfly questions. Since I don't kow exaclty how to respond to that right now (or am too lazy to answer what I really think right now: it has to do with "the who or the what?"... maybe later), I will pretend that the only person talking to me right now is Dusty and make an unnecesarily abusive reply...
Don't give me that bullshit, Dusty! You know perfectly well that you're trying to "find a girl," and that's EXACTLY what eHarmony is promising: "meaningful, lasting, committed relationships"--they advertise on tv and radio all the time, so it's not like we don't know what they are and what they're peddling. You need to cowboy up and admit that it's a dating service; no one pays to meet friends to hang out with. At least a meat market just auctions your body; these people want you to sell your soul.
There's nothing wrong with using a dating service, but I'm a big fan of do the things that you believe God wants you to be doing. From time to time girls enter the picture and you have to decided if you're interested in dating them, assuming they'd say yes. (Last time I tried, I failed to get a yes.) I suspect that few of us live in a region completely devoid of Christian females. My opinion may be skewed though by me living in an area with lots of young people.
Sell my soul? Guess a lot of us have, ouch.... End of story.
Look, I'm willing to admit that my last rhetorical flourish may have been a little too...flourishy, but I still think it accurately describes what these people do. Think about it this way...imagine with me a dating service that asked it's clients to fill out a form with these answers: height, weight, eye color, hair color, complexion, hip-waist-chest measurements, whiteness of teeth. We would all find this offensive and call it, as Dusty aptly said, a meat market. It offends us because it ignores the person and replaces him or her with a quantifiable set of characteristics; it does violence to the person by reducing her to a set of measurements. This is the same operation performed by eHarmony et al: they ask you for a list of quantifiable data that they substitute for your personality/self/mind/etc. They run a meat-less market. It is a gnostic urge that tells us the problem with the meat market wasn't the quantifying and selling of people but that it dealt with bodies. The eHarmonies of the world have moved on to our non-physical selves, but their founding movement remains violence against the person.
Here's a dangerous concept of love. Imagine the possibility of loving someone who isn't just like you-- someone who would challenge you to re-examine what you think and how you live. Imagine a love that might change who you are.
The garden is gone; Pa's gone to sleep forever; now buildings--vast steel buildings, rows and rows of buildings--inhabit the plot and write us into roles; electricity plunges through our veins, we plug and unplug like lamps, we light up when pleased, the whole city blinks in stunned complexity. All this, too fast. There is too much complexity to rest.
Where is the growth that comes up deep and branches out wide and glows in phospherescent wonder in the middle of the lonely streets? Where is the life that turns these moving boxes into temples that grow still above the moving conventions--holy, other, strangely full of life and peace and deep relationship?
O Jesus Christ, who died that I would live in you: Let me hear more than this angry buzzing, let me see more than these lonely streets, let me breath a breath far deeper than exhaust and exhaustion. Let me taste the fruit of presence, let me know you where you are.
I think the chief reason for me not posting has been that there have been very few posts that I felt like joining. However, that being said, this one has begun to interest me.
I've never used any online dating services or any dating services at all for that matter. I think that they are looking more attractive to me though after following this blog. Because after years of the "quest" I can say that right now I am completely, 100% sick and tired of all the *%#&$#* crap that usually comes along with it. And meeting women at churches or christian functions etc. doesn't mean that they will have christian morals. Every girl that I've dated or been in a relationship was or at least claimed to be a christian. God and church seemed to be important to them. i got to know them gradually, didn't let myself plunge into anything. But with the exception of the one girl that I dated at Wheaton they ALL have either lied or cheated on me or BOTH!
For Coye, yes I have greatly enjoyed your dangerous concept of love. Getting to know someone, the many different facets of their person, is a wonderful feeling. But like you said it can be dangerous. And after being hurt several times now I find that I'm increasingly less likely to risk myself again. And if a service such as e-harmony could potentially help me to avoid or lessen this risk then i find myself more inclined to give it a try.
Maybe it's because I haven't been burned too badly in the process of dating, but I'm still a fan of "living dangerously." I think most of us would agree that we're looking for someone to be with as long as we both shall live, which could be a while. Not that online services can't work, but I want to do the adventure old fashion. I like casual first meetings when not necessarily expected or introductions by a friend, etc. I like the idea of falling into it.
Jon, sorry about your bad streak, but way to take chances!
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