Yes, maybe I'm just naive, on these recondite matters. (As no doubt I am in so many of the ways of this most wisely elitist, esoteric, complexity-loving Great Global World.)
But why is it these days, I never fail to be amazed at all the various podcasts out there - most but not all of them hosted by women - which presume to dispense every sort of urgent advice to lovelorn young men. Or if nothing else, love-perplexed young men.
What I notice - and again, it may be just my incurable world-dullness - is that, however wide-ranging the prescriptions may be, they seem in general to boil down to tips on one vital issue: how to succeed in being everything (and why should she settle for less?) - EVERYTHING every self-respecting attractive woman supposedly wants in a man. Everything except, of course, for being oneself. Because everyone knows how limited, how hopelessly quaint, how pitiably antiquated that resource most always turns out to be.
What bothers me most is the compulsively analytic, break-it-all-down, almost chemical focus of all this. Really, since when did masculinity - or any other component of male personal attractiveness - come down to something as simple and manipulable as a lab formula? As if what any of us has been made were a thing somehow elixir-able, distillable, reducible to something else, that we in our bold shrewdness "create", or concoct, and control. And so may freely spice and doctor up. Usually, I notice, more or less to the death of any real flavor. Again, as if any bottling we do, any mere potion we make of ourselves didn't cut us off irretrievably from an illimitable Source. As if, indeed, any reduction we perform on what God has made, however well-seasoned, weren't always a thing done at immense risk, and inconceivable cost, to both chef and preparation. But all the more, as in this case, when the latter two are one and the same creature.
And yes, I know there are lots of love-perplexed young women out there who seem more or less obsessed with control. (Which in practical terms often translates into obsession with a controller.) And that is commonly rooted in a kind of horror of anything hinting at real vulnerability, whether in themselves or in their prospective partners. At least in the relationship's so-called initial phases. Which ensuing clash of Titans typically not only erodes any basis their (mis)union might have had in friendship; it pretty much precludes any possibility of friendship between them in the future. With famously glorious results for our 21st-century Western stabs at marriage and raising families. Indeed, I wonder if our modern attempts at bringing "up" children would be half so hellishly hard if their parents weren't so busy trying discipline each other.
Again, I realize this is the glorious world we have made, whose latest Great Global version comes with the same old injunction, only this time still more imperative: ADAPT OR DIE. My question is, What's all this got to do with adapting to the God who made us? Except, of course, as a brilliantly efficient method of driving us ever farther away from Him?
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