(
Publication note: Since I wrote this post on Wednesday, social media has really gone crazy over this entire issue, in part because of Rachel Held Evan's response
here. I seriously considered not publishing my own response due to the rather controversial nature of the discussion -- and the semi-nasty comments people seem really keen on throwing around. I asked myself if
my words were grace-filled and intent on healing. I edited, and edited some more. I sought advice from those I consider wise. And I thought about the girls I know. And I hit publish.)
Kiss me, kiss me/Infect me with your love and/Fill me with your poison/Take me, take me/
Wanna be a victim/Ready for abduction.
- Katy Perry, “Extraterrestrial”
Guys, you know I love Donald Miller, right?
Because I do. I really, really do.
Blue Like Jazz rocked my world, and
A Million Miles in a Thousand Years changed my life.
But if I hear one more man telling a woman how to live her life of singlehood, I am going to scream, not because men don’t really know a woman’s heart and therefore their advice is inherently bad, but because the advice they so often offer isn’t constructive. Instead, it’s contributing to diminished self-worth and increased insecurity.
In case you have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s a (somewhat brief) recap.
Last week, Donald Miller posted a two-part series about living a great love story on his blog. Since
One Million Miles, Miller has devoted a lot of time and effort into this idea of living our lives like a story; it’s a concept I really appreciate and value. And, since becoming engaged a couple of months ago, Miller has also begun to turn his attention to dating and marriage, writing a few posts on the subject. It makes sense to me that he’d combine the two.
But just a few paragraphs into Miller’s first post in the series,
“How to live a Great Love Story, Vol. 1 (For the Girls),” I was a little turned-off. I stopped reading. It’s not that what I had read was super offensive; I just felt like it didn’t really apply to me anymore. I’m married. The dating phase of my life is over. I’m moving on.
So I stopped reading, ignored
part II, and went about my merry way.
Then my Twitter account kind of blew up with responses to his posts.
Apparently, people were ticked.
I went back and re-read, and honestly? I could see why some people were upset.
Here’s the thing: Lately, I’ve come across a lot of broken Christian women.
It’s nothing new, I know.
I taught and mentored teenage girls for three years — and have successfully been a girl for a little over 25 years — so I know: the soul of a girl is a fragile thing.
But now that I’m meeting women well into their 20s and older who are still hurting, confused, and insecure, I’m realizing yet again how much we (the church, society, you name it) are failing our girls.
Absolutely failing.
Maybe that’s why, according to
a recent study by the Barna Group, so many women have stopped going to church.
Maybe we’ve hurt them so badly that the damage can’t be undone, and instead of fleeing to, they are fleeing from churches in droves, because deep down, they know: This is not how it’s supposed to be.
In
his post directed to girls, Donald Miller writes that there are five principles to a good love story:
Boy meets girl.
Boy falls in love with girl.
Girl is a bit hesitant knowing her heart is tender and could get hurt.
Boy proves himself strong enough to handle and defend her heart.
Girl trusts boy and they live happily ever after.
---
If you’re a boy, you’re probably thinking, yep. Sounds about right.
If you’re a girl, maybe you’re thinking, wait… what?
Look, I’ve read the books. (I’ve also chucked some across the room — that means you,
I Kissed Dating Goodbye.) I know that as a woman, I was not created to pursue man. (Although, can I just say for a quick minute: Isn’t that exactly what
Ruth did? Okay. Moving on.) Instead, I was designed to be pursued.
Fine.
But here’s where I think I lose a lot of Christian writers (male and female, by the way): What’s a girl supposed to do while she’s out “not pursuing” a man?
If Miller and other writers are correct, a girl is supposed to wait and trust until she finds the boy that’s “strong enough to handle and defend her heart.” In other words, the role she plays in her love story is almost entirely passive.
There are a lot of problems with that ideology, but here’s one:
No man is strong enough to handle and defend your heart.
Almost a year ago, I taught a class on dating to the high school girls at my church. It was a really humbling, awesome experience. Looking back, I wish I’d been able to say more, because, guess what? Girls are getting the wrong message.
They’re being taught — sadly, if they’re being taught anything about dating at all — that somewhere out there is a man who can guard and protect their heart. (Sidenote: Is anyone else having flashbacks to
Kasey from Ali’s season of the Bachelorette? Just me? Okay.)
I’ll tell you what I told the teenage girls at my church:
No one can protect your heart but you and the God who created you.
Unfortunately, I don’t really think Christian pastors, authors, and teachers stop with that one misguided principle.
In his post, Miller goes on to offer a few suggestions for what women can do to live a great love story. They’re not groundbreaking principles; in fact, they’re mostly recommendations I’ve heard before. Things like “don’t hook up,” “make him work for it,” and “weed them out.”
I understand that women — and men, for that matter — should be reminded of the principles of purity, that promoting abstinence is a way of telling girls that their bodies are important and valuable, worthy of protection. The problem is that this is about the extent of what we (the church, in particular) tell our girls about sex and relationships. If they can just protect their physical bodies, they’ll be fine. Their hearts will be safe. I hope you’re shaking your heads right now, because surely you know: Intimacy can be had outside of sex. My heart breaks for girls — and their parents! — who think their girls are safe from bad men simply because they haven’t gone to bed with them. Meanwhile, they’ve given their hearts away. They’ve talked intimately about marriage and shared their deepest secrets. Without giving away their bodies, they’ve given away their souls.
What it boils down to, I think, is a woman’s self-worth, and I know plenty of virgin Christian women who have a self-worth of about zero.
Girls are being taught — by society, Disney movies, church — that their role in a love story is inactive and submissive, that we’re all supposed to behave like Rapunzel, waiting for just the right guy before we can let down our hair. Unlike so many of our Biblical counterparts, we’re told to wait, to sit back and have faith that our happy ending will come true. In the meantime, up in our castles, we should, according to Miller, “be willing to suffer.”
Miller writes, “What this means for you is that your love story needs to have a lot of lonely crying in it. Believe it or not, there will come a day when a man will fall madly in love with you, and you will have the honor of sitting down with him one special night to explain that, while you weren’t perfect, you turned down plenty of guys and cried yourself to sleep hoping somebody would come around and treat you with respect. He will be honored by this, and he will love you and feel humbled. If he doesn’t have the same story, he will feel intensely convicted and unworthy. You’ll really be giving him the foundation he needs to love your heart.”
I feel like I know guys pretty well. I have a husband, and I have a brother. I’ve got a great dad and a slew of uncles. In college, I had quite a few “guy friends.” In all of my conversations with them — and I feel like I’ve had some good ones — not one of them asked me if I’d ever cried myself to sleep over a guy. (The answer, by the way, would have been no.)
My parents did not raise me to cry over disrespectful, “unworthy” men.
They raised me to have more self-worth than that.
Did a guy ever hurt my feelings? You bet. Did a guy ever say things that haunted me for days that followed? Sure.
But this idea that in order to have a decent love story, you’ve got to suffer? You’ve got to let your heart be dragged through the mud, beaten up by men who don’t respect or care about your well-being?
I just don’t think it’s true.
And, as my husband reminded me, most girls don’t need to be told to cry themselves to sleep at night. Many of them already do. They’re lonely, and their hearts are aching, and the last message they should be hearing is one that condones the heartbreak. One that tells them their hearts might need to be torn in two just a few more times before it’s finally ready for “the one” who will make it all go away.
Girls instead need to be reminded of the strength they possess through the Father. In their singlehood — and, for that matter, in their marriages — women are capable of greatness. But in their admonitions to wait, evangelical leaders fail to mention that women can and should be pursuing their own adventures. Rarely is there talk of mission work, of prayer, of surrounding yourself with like-minded, loving friends, of experiencing nature and finding God in the quiet. Meanwhile, I think men are often encouraged to pursue these things prior to marriage. Can’t girls have that same luxury?
Traditional, societal feminism often teaches that women can do it all on their own, while modern evangelical thought tells us that women can’t do much without a man (and, in fairness, that man can’t do much without woman. The two are incomplete without each other, a thought in complete conflict with the oft-misquoted
I Corinthians 7). The idea behind Christian feminism, I think, is that women simply cannot do it alone, but it is not man that fulfills. It is Christ.
This is why our girls are confused. We’ve got a feminist society that tells our girls to be strong and bold and brave, all while Katy Perry is singing on the radio about wanting to be a “victim” of some kind of alien love. (Have you ever listened to what’s on the radio? Really listened? No wonder our girls are broken. The world isn’t doing any better job of raising our daughters than the church is.)
We tell our girls we want them to grow up to be creative, loving, kind, courageous individuals, but we suck the individuality right out of them. We tell them we want them to go do great things, but then we tell them if they want a husband, they better just wait patiently. We want them to be strong, but at the same time, hey, not too strong, because that’s intimidating. But, wait a second, not so weak, because then men will just treat you like a victim.
My heart is heavy over the number of women I know who have bought into these lies, and the number of little girls who are destined to follow suit.
This love story that Miller and others describe doesn’t sound that great to me. It doesn’t give the strong, bold, beautiful girls I know anything to do. It locks them up in their castles, journaling and crying until their prince shows up at the window, ready to save them.
It leaves the girls I know and love with a low self-worth, with the belief that they’ve just got to sit, suffer, and wait until their life can really begin.
One day, if Jordan and I ever have a little girl, I want her to know that she is so much more than a victim. More than a princess. More than a future wife and mother.
She is beautiful proof of an all-knowing and loving Creator, designed for her own separate and unique purpose.
And if she gets to live an earthly love story with a righteous man? Well, that will just be icing on the cake.
