The Paradox of Control

I don’t normally commit myself to a series of blog posts-even a short one-because it never seems as much fun to write on a topic you selected that was on your mind weeks ago.    Other things of interest always come up.  Well, with that out of the way, I said I’d write this, so here goes…

I last wrote about men being passive and detached from their relationships.  If you've not read that post, you may want to skim the two previous posts as they set up the context for this one.  Admittedly there is more to say on that topic but I kind of lost interest and need to move on to something that is perhaps a direct result of men’s passivity, especially in the church.  When men are passive, especially when they should be strong, women feel that they need to take control.  And who can blame them? 

Unfortunately, when women become accustomed to passive men, they may feel the need to take control.  Too many men are willing to forfeit their biblical leadership role.  It is, at least at first, easier for them to do what they are told rather than butt heads with yet another person in their lives.  Women, and I’d hazard to say men aren’t much different in this respect, don’t respect people they can control.  That isn’t to say that some women don’t enjoy controlling the key men in their lives, but the reality is that someone you control can never be an equal.  To control someone, they must submit to your authority.  And that is a hard realization to stomach.  Sure, we will submit to our bosses at work (at least when we have to) and we will submit to the authority of law enforcement (at least when an officer is present) but submitting in any relationship is rarely easy.  For a woman in a marriage with a passive or detached man, there is no authority to whom to submit!  In those instances, control is the option she must take if she wants her man to step up and lead… or so it may seem.

For a lot of people, “submit” has a profoundly negative connotation.  I have a fierce dislike to submitting to authority that I don’t respect.  (Sometimes that is because the authority is inept and other times it is because I am off-base.)  The church, and I suppose the Bible, is oft-criticized by those who say that “wives submit to your husbands” is an outdated, patriarchal, way of thinking that has no place in a modern society.  (And those are the people who are being diplomatic!) I suppose that if it weren’t for the part of the passage that states “submit to one another in reverence to Christ,” the critics would have a good point!  Unfortunately the criticisms are given credibility by insecure men in church or other leadership positions who dismiss women’s opinions as less important than theirs.  I don’t have time, or patience, to get into a discussion on women in leadership but I will mention that there are times when the Israelites were led by female judges in the Old Testament…

Men, if you haven’t experienced the tension between a woman’s desire to be in control and her desire for you to lead in a relationship, you’ve either not been in a relationship or you prefer more passive women than I.  Take, for instance, the awkward dance of selecting a place to eat: a woman may know exactly where she wants to go but that is classified information so far as you are concerned. Very rarely will a woman actually say where she wants to go.  She wants you to be decisive and pick …with the caveat that it is the place where she wanted to go but wouldn’t tell you.  She’ll either keep saying no until you pick the place she wants to go or will go and be displeased. (Does that tension of control seem any more familiar now?).  Here are some other examples that come to mind:  “Are you going to wear that?”  “Fine!” (said emphatically of course.) “You always (fill in the blank)!”  Of course there are many methods but the point of this post is not to detail them.

The big problem with women controlling the relationship is that either the man is passive to begin with, becomes passive to keep the peace, or there is a lot of fighting!  Typically the man begins to resent the controlling woman and the woman no longer respects the passive man.  If this occurs in a dating relationship it will soon end; if it occurs in a marriage it may continue for a long time and the damage may be irreparable.

Phil Knauer provided a less potentially divisive way of explaining the tension that women feel to control or submit by stating that women have a desire to “be loved but be independent, simultaneously.”  Not being a woman, and understanding women rather imperfectly, I could be off-base but from what I’ve observed from my female friends, I think Phil’s statement is on point.

Today some men and women seem to have reached the conclusion that being loved and independent are mutually exclusive.  There are compromises to be made in any healthy relationship but I would argue that a relationship of two equals cannot exist without each person maintaining some autonomy.  Unfortunately many men (and women) equate independence with doing things my way.  That leads to self-focused relationships which cannot mature.  After all, if I am always looking at me, how can I really love you?

I recently told someone that I tend to be interested in women who don’t need me.  It isn’t that I would prefer to date a woman who wouldn’t care if I disappeared.   I like women who are doing what they are called to do and wouldn’t need my help (or another man’s help) to accomplish their work. That is not to say that many of them do not want to be in a relationship; instead I would say that they have taken control of their lives to carry out their mission.  Many of them are, at least to me, the model of independent women who have taken control of their own lives in a positive manner.  Sadly, I also know that some of them have let men into their lives who weren’t interested in having an equal partner.  Others settled on a guy who seemed great because they perhaps thought that a better man wasn’t going to come their way.  Perhaps most disheartening were the candid admissions of women in relationships where they felt that they didn’t deserve the guys they were dating.  Most sacrificed some of their independence to be in a relationship, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Some sacrificed too much and still didn’t feel loved.

I am struggling to close this posting as there is so much to say on this topic so I’ll close it with a pair of quotes which I think summarizes much of what I’d like to say if I had only a few words to say it.  Jean Anouilh succinctly noted that “Love is, above all else, the gift of oneself.”  To love someone else you must be sufficiently autonomous to have a self to give.  

I’ll close with a quote from Thomas Merton as I think it speaks more eloquently to the struggle of loving people who are unique beings.  “The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”

Rejecting Passivity and Detachment

If you've not read the prior post, it is an introduction to this one and may be worth a read.

Two weekends ago, in simultaneous sermons at two different churches, Pastors Phil Knauer and Kelly Harrison spoke to tensions created in marriages from men detaching from their marriages to focus on the work of providing for their families and men being passive, respectively.  Though I am not married or in a relationship, I was reminded of instances in my own life and observations I’ve made which relate to this problem.

At some point in most every young man’s life, he dreams about being a hero to at least one woman.  I certainly dreamt about rescuing more than a few of my first crushes from dangerous situations in elementary school and that continued later in middle school and even into high school.  In elementary school, where my popularity in grade school peaked, I even had a group of boys who would run around the playground attempting to “rescue” women from other buys who were picking on them.  I should perhaps even admit that I’ve definitely imagined being a hero to women I’d hoped to impress as recently as this year.  

There is a point, however, for most men where reality sets in and we realize that we aren’t always going to be able to run in and rescue the woman of our dreams-or perhaps even the woman of our current interest. Perhaps we’ve finally learned that most of our childhood superheroes are just comic book creations or perhaps, like me, they’ve learned that the women they’d hoped to rescue have someone else in mind for that role!  Pastor Phil said that most women are looking for Prince Charming, and regardless of the veracity of that statement, I’d think that most men have lost their thoughts of being Prince Charming by their 30s.  We all fall short.  Sadly because of failed attempts at relationships, or perhaps worse, failure to even try due to lack of confidence or fear of failure many men lose hope that they will rescue anyone.  Too many of these men check out of the relationships in their lives, and many become detached or passive in the relationships that persist.

I should pause here for my female readers to address something I’ve hinted at above that greatly offends some independent, godly, women I’ve had the opportunity to know over the years.  When I speak of a man rescuing a woman, I am not implying that without that man’s help she would be lost.   I am certainly aware that there are many strong women and there is certainly Biblical precedent to women coming alongside other women and supporting them.  Furthermore, godly men I know have shared times of their wives’ strength and support in difficult times, which helped them get through.  Perhaps a better way of explaining what I am trying to say rather than coming to the rescue was that the man was able to put his strength to her service.  Whether that strength is physical, intellectual, emotional, or spiritual is not really the point.  

With that disclaimer behind me, I will attempt to get back on the topic of detachment and passivity.  Phil spoke of the biblical responsibility of men to provide for their families.  While I realize that in today’s society, this view is often misconstrued to say that men should be the primary breadwinners but let’s table that debate for now as this post is already becoming longer than planned.  Phil went on to explain how many men need to detach from their family and marriage relationships to focus on their careers and the demands of work.  As most would agree that men are not particularly adept at multi-tasking, it is a necessary detachment.  The problem, I would argue, arises when men put far too much of their strength into their work and become detached or passive in their relationships outside of work.  I don’t make any claim to be representative of my sex but in my own experience, I prefer to focus on my strengths.  Frankly, I’ve far more experience in my profession than I have in dating.  (Being single, I of course have no experience in marriage.)  Unfortunately, though it is too easy to focus on our work to the detriment of our other relationships.  Society tends to measure success for men more by their influence in the boardroom or their prowess in the bedroom than in their ability to serve and love their families and wives.  Meaningful, sacrificial, relationships may even be viewed as a distraction from their true purpose, which is ostensibly to work hard and make money to provide for their families and accrue lots of fancy toys so they can play hard when they aren’t working.

Not surprisingly, many hard-driving, career-minded men who are extraordinarily successful in their work are barely present in the lives of the people they’d profess to care about.  They leave early, come home late, and may even bring work home with them so they are rarely present even if they are physically with their families.   It may be accurate to describe them as married to their work.  They may be successful but at what cost?  Some become detached because they give their all at work and have nothing left, others detach because they come home to controlling wives and they aren’t willing or able to fight another battle. (more on this in a future blog.)  Some simply become passive, being present but never really engaging those they claim to love.  Love does not endure passivity.

As a single man, I can focus on my career without the struggle of balancing my work with a marriage or family.  (I am sometimes reminded of this by my married friends as part of well-intentioned advice.)  The reality is that I cannot allow my work to supplant healthy relationships with friends and family if I wish to have a wife and family of my own.  On a base level, I will not take the risks required to enter into a relationship that could result in marriage if my greatest risks are always in the workplace.  I cannot expect to have the type of relationship I hope for if I remain passive and wait for God to bring me the right woman.  (I do not hope she will fall from the sky because I’ve not been to the gym recently and I am doubtful I could catch her.)  All joking aside, if I detach and remain passive in my relationships, I forfeit the chance to demonstrate my strength and serve the people who are in my life. Engaging and taking risks may never be comfortable and it most certainly will result in failures that could leave greater scars than marketplace missteps.   

It is this realization, then, that forces all men to make a decision.  Do they wish to expend their lives to build themselves up or do they hope to have lasting, positive, impact on the lives of others?  Will they only carve their accomplishments into marble or be active participants in the formidable task of writing truth on hearts through love?  It is a decision with eternal significance but it must be made every day.

Post Valentine's Day Reflection (An introduction)

I had planned to write a Valentine’s Day post this year but was pretty tired for shoveling snow on Thursday and I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired. The blog posting scene on Valentine’s Day is typically more than a little oversaturated with material, whether it is comical, cynical, optimistic, pessimistic, hopeful, or bitter.

I was moving a bit slower than usual today and failed to get to church this AM so I watched an online sermon given by Pastor Kelly Harrison at Way of Life Church last week. Most years, around Valentine’s Day, pastors focus on messages of love and marriage-or perhaps it just seems that way to this perennially single guy. This year was no different with my church campuses focusing on a family and marriage-based series and Way of Life giving a series called “Mr. and Mrs. Betterhalf.”   

Admittedly, my first reaction to a relationships, marriage or family-focused series is usually to cringe and consider taking a hiatus to somewhere else until the series is on a topic I feel is more suitable to my needs. (We can unpack the attitude behind that statement some other time!)

My gut reaction to marriage series notwithstanding, I do hope to be married someday so I did my best to listen attentively. I was struck by the similarities between the key points of Kelly Harrison’s teaching and the key points that my church’s pastor, Phil Knauer, made at the same time last week.

The key points made by both pastors spoke to tension between the biblical gender roles described in Genesis and how those roles further break down when they are put into practice by imperfect people. Kelly spoke on women’s tendency to be controlling and men’s tendency to be passive, using the illustration of King Ahab and Jezebel.  Phil spoke to the tension between a man’s desire to serve his wife and a need to detach to focus on work so that he can provide for the family, and tied it back to Adam and Eve. He also mentioned that tension of a woman between the desire to submit to her husband and yet maintain control. 

Phil noted that Ephesians 5:21 & 23 basically say that a man is to love his wife and a wife is to respect her husband. That sounds pretty simple but since Adam and Eve chose a different path, it has been easier said than done.

As a single guy these messages helped me understand a bit of that disappointment and perhaps will help me improve some things in my singleness that will hopefully benefit a future marriage.  I’ll be trying to unpack of few of those things in my next few blog posts.  At present, I’m planning on wrestling with “rejecting passivity and detachment (men),” and “respect and the paradox of control (women),” and perhaps others depending on what thoughts come together.  I'll even take requests but I may authorize the right to decline to write on some topics!

Winning in Love

"To love and win is the best thing; to love and lose the next best." -fortune cookie

I posted the above quote to my Facebook page after a long day at work, a tough commute home, and an entertaining dinner. Frankly, loving anything other than the caramel chicken that had been, until very recently, on my plate wasn’t really on my mind when I read the fortune.  Even so, I appreciated the wisdom and it didn’t hurt that the cookie tasted pretty good too! 

I didn’t plan on giving it any more thought until a friend posted this introspective response: “Maybe someday I will believe the second part, instead of trying to protect myself from the prospect of losing and forfeit the chance of love (and win), although I'm not sure what "winning" in love looks like.”

I wanted to provide an encouraging response as quickly as possible but for all I don’t know about love, I have learned over time that matters of the heart are not best solved, or salved, with words alone.  If anything, the overwhelming number of cliched responses I’ve heard in the Church alone is enough to make someone pretend that everything is hunky-dory just to spare oneself from them!

Yet, there is part of my friend’s vulnerable statement that stuck out to me; the part about not really being sure what winning looks like when it comes to love.  I think we’ve all heard the expression that “It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”  In reality, if you have loved and lost, over and over, it is hard to continue to believe that loving is worth the pain that begins to seem inevitable.  It is justifiable, then, to withdraw and protect your heart.  As the phrase I’ve oft-quoted from C. S. Lewis’ book, The Four Loves starts:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken.”

Why would we make that choice, especially when past attempts and giving and receiving love have yielded nothing more than a broken heart?  It is a tough sell, but Lewis makes it clear that there is a greater loss that we risk if we attempt to protect ourselves fully from the pain that may come with love.  In the same passage, Lewis goes on to write:

“If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” 

More simply and less eloquently put, the walls I’ve built to protect myself from rejection, disappointment and heartbreak are a safe death.  In order to avoid being hurt by love, I need to shut off my heart entirely.  Otherwise I have to risk the pain that can come with being vulnerable, the prospect of which I am hardly enthusiastic!  

In my earthy experience, love can seem to be a bit of a twisted game really.  Like a higher-stakes version of grade school sports, there are some who make the key plays and win the game, there are some who drop the ball and lose, and there are some who never get off the bench.  Instead of a guy who yells a lot, our “coaches” may be friends and family telling us to “get back on the field,” “sit out a few plays,” or “go back to the locker room.”

But the simplicity of the sports love-game quickly breaks down.  As Jess Rothenberg writes in The Catastrophic History of You and Me, “Love is no game. People cut their ears off over this stuff. People jump off the Eiffel Tower and sell all their possessions and move to Alaska to live with the grizzly bears, and then they get eaten and nobody hears them when they scream for help. That’s right. Falling in love is pretty much the same thing as being eaten alive by a grizzly bear.”

 

Love sounds pretty serious (and pretty painful for that matter) but there are some who still try to play it as a game. There are the “relationship experts” who can sell you a foolproof set of steps to get the man or woman of your dreams (or perhaps just the one you want right now), the advertisers who promote this product or that as increasing your sex appeal, and the men and women who play with the emotions of others by giving or getting attention so they can get what they want.  The rules vary but when love becomes a game, there are no winners.

And so I return to the thought that was the genesis of this entire entry: What does it look like to win in love? With my limited experience, I have to say that I am not sure I can fully answer the question.  In my life thus far I have loved, but whether due to God’s hand protecting me from making worse mistakes or my own cowardice keeping me on the sidelines, I have not loved someone deeply enough to experience the deep loss experienced by many.  Sure, I have tried to love women who could not reciprocate and put demands on them which were rooted mostly in my own selfishness.  I’ve enjoyed the attention of women who loved me and hurt them by not being forthright in a timely fashion with how I felt (or didn't feel) toward them.  Those actions were certainly profound losses as I hurt the people I cared about.  Please do not think; however, that I am in any way equating them to the pain felt by those who have experienced the loss of someone they have loved deeply.  

But once again, I am slipping away from the original question.  For me, winning in love comes down to putting the needs of people I love above mine and reaching them where they are, on their terms.  There is a certain amount of recklessness involved, with which I am profoundly uncomfortable!  It is acceptable and appropriate to draw boundaries as there are those who counterfeit love for their own means, yet you cannot love without the risk that your heart will break over another-especially one who may not ever be able to reciprocate.  If I am honest, I only want to love people who can love me back, and what’s more, they need to love me back how I want to receive it.  Frankly, the least risk I have to take, the better, but that view of love cannot be further from how Christ loved others. 

It follows, then that my “wins” have been when my actions were rooted in Love that flowed from a source other than myself.  It seems to cheapen such profound opportunities to call them “wins” but for the sake of the original question, I’ll use the term.  For all the things I've got wrong and how imperfectly I have loved, I've had a lot of wins which I am more likely to be thankful for than regret.  I've had the opportunity to speak encouragement into the wounded heart of a woman whose heart I had selfishly ignored in past attempts to put to rest my own feelings of longing brings a kind of healing that is hard to explain.  I've had the chance to teach at least one woman, through example, how she deserved to be treated by the men in her life on whose approval she based far too much of her self-worth.  I've slowly gained the ability to be vulnerable with a woman when my feelings toward her made it easier (and safer) to erect walls to protect myself provided the opportunity to speak the truth in love to a heart that needed to hear it.  I've got a second, and even third, opportunity to love someone going through a rough patch where they are at, albeit not in the way I'd originally planned.  These were honors I don't feel I deserved but perhaps would not have experienced, had I not first fallen on my face.  Most importantly, my halting, imperfect attempts at love still made a positive impact in the people I loved-even when I didn't love them particularly well!  If it took the losses I’ve experienced to have those wins, they were worth it.

I’ve written quite a bit on a subject one which I have much to learn so in closing I’d like to share some responses I received when I put the question of what it means to win in love on Facebook.  (I’ve edited some slightly to make them more anonymous.)  Feel free to add your own comments following this post.

* Welp... I don't know if I like the term "winning" in love. I'm not sure it's a game or contest. But I think winning is finding someone with whom you share the same core beliefs and who adds to your life in all areas and you do the same. It shouldn't be stressful, but it should be worth working on.

* I agree with your considerations of the semantics involved in your initial postulation, but I have to jump in with a reply that generally "answers" your question. I have found myself thinking about how my life might look different without my wife and kids (Oh, let me count the ways!) how different I would be, and I can describe many ways that I have grown in patience, and peace, in faith, in hope, in joy - the list could go on. Winning in love is the only way I can describe success. No matter what I have worked for, I always return to a personal need for a home, and love to fill it.  And… love looks like me - it has made me what I am

* It looks like fulfilling God's will. Trust me; my personal testimony backs it up!

* The way I look at it is just like you said, as long as were able to show that said woman or in our cases women, that there really are respectable, loving, kind and genuine men left in this world, then at least we did our job. And the friendships that come about as a result can be more fulfilling than a relationship, even if they only last a season, or a lifetime. 

* I'll chime in. I'm currently dating someone who, hands down, has presented me with the clearest, most tangible picture of Christ's love for me. For everyone, really. Even if I wasn't dating him (and therefore his affections weren't aimed at me) but I had the opportunity to witness them- I would still be able to experience a small part of the way Jesus loves us all. My fella is a servant. His good mood never changes because his circumstances do not define his joy. I have never heard him complain. Seriously. He looks at everyone-not just me-and freely gives them friendship or love because, as he often tells me, 'I know Who we all belong to.' He had an encounter with Jesus and it forever changed his heart. But beyond that, he is disciplined. He reads the bible every single morning, without fail. I say that not to grant him Sainthood but to apply context. Love and reflecting Perfect Love takes discipline. He's not perfect. But he knows the One in whom he has believed and he doesn't keep it to himself. And if that's not winning at love, I don't know what is.

* Winning in love, for me, entails experiencing a love that is ferocious, willing to fight, and at the same time willing to be vulnerable in its pursuits. Love like that is brimming with confidence and allows no place for fear to reside. Being unafraid -- that is essential to winning in love.