I toured some college campuses with my son this week.
Liberty University is amazing. Committed to their Christian identity and gorgeous campus. Cheaper than most. My son isn’t going there but we toured it. The tour guide there told me a story about how her professor asked a boy and a girl in his class if they thought the other was cute. They both said yes and he gave the male student twenty dollars to ask out the girl on a date. The tour guide said that couple is getting married shortly after graduating.
A great story, right?
I joked that on most college campuses that professor would be cancelled, banned, and possibly jailed. But I get why the professor did this. Young people just don’t date anymore. It’s a little weird. They just hang and talk online and then hook up or not. There’s no dating.
Young people don’t date. Nowhere is it more obvious that the art of dating is lost than those Project Veritas dates. The undercover journalist pretends to go on a date with someone from Big Pharma, the media, or some government job.
Listen, if your date is almost exclusively interested in talking about politics and your job. Yeah that’s a red flag. I’m an author. My wife hasn’t read my books.
If your date is talking politics and your job, get up and run. I haven’t had a political conversation with my wife in years. That’s not what normal people talk about.
And if you do talk about work you talk about how Dave keeps drinking all the yoo-hoos from the refrigerator break room or Ron doesn’t clean the microwave after making soup. You don’t answer questions about the experimental to secret research going on in the lab or the secret thing you’re doing at work to undermine others.
I think there is something missing if we’re not dating. Guys should have to get the guts up to ask a girl on a date. They should plan something. Because how he asks and what he plans says something about him.
I was speaking to my son about dating and my wife suggested something which I audibled out of. She asked if I thought I knew more about dating than she did.
I reminded her that I’m obviously better at dating than she was because she ended up with me and I got her. Clearly I’m the better dater.
February 2, 2023 at 1:32 pm
In my experience talking with college students, it’s not that men aren’t asking women out, despite all the fears of potential legal fallout from such actions. The problem is that the women have no intention of settling down or even dating. They need their independence. They need to focus on their career.
Until then, the women are participating in hook-up culture to a far greater degree than men.
Men will not be able to change women’s behaviour by merely asking them out or becoming more desirable. The solution needs to start with us women changing our behaviour.
February 2, 2023 at 2:44 pm
I assume you forbid your wife reading anything. Her job is to cook, clean, and do the shit work of childrearing — all the stuff that isn’t playing ball (only with the sons of course) spankings, and bragging to other men.
February 2, 2023 at 4:15 pm
Someone pee’d in your cornflakes this morning.
Bless your heart.
February 2, 2023 at 6:45 pm
Archbold says his wife knows nothing of what he does for a living, which implies lots of really terrible things about him. The conservative model of marriage requires women to be weak, stupid, cowards, or, worse, PRETEND to be weak, stupid, cowards so that men always think they’re superior to women. Archbold openly hates feminism, so he presumably treats his wife like dirt.
February 2, 2023 at 8:46 pm
Incorrect. Although feminism is clearly a logical fallacy and those who follow modern feminism have blinded themselves to the superior alternatives (as well as never noticing its errors). But it was my very empowered, highly educated and loving wife who elaborated all the hypocrisy of feminism. So no, your close-minded obedience to the outdated ideology of feminism is not logical, intellectual or impressive.
February 2, 2023 at 6:53 pm
Seriously, your model of marriage is inherently abusive. The Catholic Church is just fine with men beating their wives. Aquinas encourages men to KILL adulterous wives, whereas adulterous husbands suffer no punishment whatsoever. (There is an argument that Aquinas doesn’t even think husbands are capable of adultery, especially given his approval of prostitution.) Your church doesn’t really think women are even human! The Virgin Mary stuff absolutely fails to refute the idea that the Catholic church hates women, since most of the stuff about her makes her a goddess, not a human. The all-male priesthood is based in the idea that a woman cannot be the image of Christ, which means that women are much less of the image of God than males are. Every single thing the Catholic Church does screams that women are inferior and worthless.
February 3, 2023 at 5:55 am
Not one single sentence you just wrote about the beliefs of the Catholic Church or St. Thomas Aquinas has a single shred of truth to it.
I know that in order to have come up with such preposterous fabrications, you must either be trolling or so close-minded that you have no openness to discussion, so I’m not leaving this comment here for you, but just in case anyone who is ignorant of what the Catholic Church and the saints actually believe and teach stumbles across this comment:
NO, neither the Church, nor anyone who the Church calls a saint, has EVER said that prostitution was okay, that men are incapable of adultery, nor that the Blessed Virgin Mary is in ANY way a goddess. The Church has always taught that women are made in the image and likeness of God, that they share equal dignity with men, and historically in times when women have been oppressed and denied the same rights as men, the Catholic Church has been one of the only institutions where they were given a voice and could speak and publish writings and have their wisdom appreciated and their lives upheld as examples of moral virtue.
February 3, 2023 at 10:46 am
1. It wasn’t Aquinas, it was Augustine who said that prostitution was necessary to prevent sodomy, which translates into saying that some women have to be outcast and degraded beyond hope so that males won’t be sullied.
2. Your church teaches that the Virgin Mary had no labor pains and no menstrual period. That makes her something other than human and entirely separate from all other women, who are soiled with Original Sin in a way males simply are not. Women are disgusting under this system and men are human. Whatever else your church SAYS about women is a lie because of what it DOES to women. You simply cannot believe that women are equal to men if you also say that we’re supposed to be chained in the kitchen and inferior to men in every aspect of daily life.
February 3, 2023 at 6:33 am
Wow lol you are a piece of work. You are about as enlightened as a gnat on a horse’s arse. Now, as WC would say paraphrased: “Go away girl, you bother me.”
February 3, 2023 at 12:59 am
What do you base this assumption on? I assume you’d force your partner to read your books or listen to your politics, and they’d better agree with every word…
You must be new here, and have missed all the sports posts about son and daughters. But that wouldn’t suit your nasty little prejudices anyway, and you’d have to discount it, so never mind.
February 3, 2023 at 10:25 am
My husband wants to know about my job, and I want to know about his. I didn’t marry someone who thinks everything about women is boring; conservatives think that nothing women do is worthwhile and that men are supposed to be bored to distraction by everything female.
February 3, 2023 at 9:43 am
Let’s not feed the trolls.
With a name like Karen, no doubt she’s got something stuck in her craw!
Way to go, perfect troll!
February 2, 2023 at 7:42 pm
It’s a tricky business, hopefully I’m not guilty of calumny so take what I say with a grain of salt, I may be wrong. And sorry for the long post, but I think it’s pertinent.
I lived through the world of dating getting blown up by Joshua Harris’ book I kissed dating goodbye, in the evangelical community. I can’t lay everything at his door, we live in a wider society that had its influence, but this period of time was before Tinder and other apps came along and dynamited the remains of dating in America.
The evangelical community started believing that dating was basically immoral and IKDGB posited a model that was borderline impossible to follow. In the college scene, this lead to young people hanging out in groups, it became basically the only way to spend time with the opposite sex,, where, for the sake of easy math, say 10 boys and 10 girls are in the same social circle. In this group, all 10 girls basically “auditioned” for several years for the most attractive 1 or 2 boys. Towards the end of the college experience, basically those two boys would pick two girls, leaving everyone else feeling deprived and a bit bitter. Several years of this cycle and nothing is normal, people’s lives impacted by a book they may never have heard of.
In a normal society sure, men should ask out women. Unfortunately it’s become the sort of game where it’s hard to win. Dating is borderline discouraged in church (I knew two men who basically got run out of church by busybodies over nothing, i mean seriously, nothing any man or woman would think untoward before 1990) and actively dangerous to pursue in the workplace. If you’re a Christian man, bars and night clubs are basically out for obvious reasons. Not a lot is left.
Which I think was the point. If I was a man who believes in spiritual warfare , and I do, I’d say the idea is to funnel the sex impulse into unhealthy environments. To whipsaw back and forth between either a fundamentally retarded hedonism or a weird hypersensitivity that exacts severe penalties for normal behavior (many marriages arose from things that would get you fired and kicked out of polite society today).
So yeah, men should ask out women. But I can’t blame someone for not playing a game that doesn’t seem like it will pay off. Many men actually have had the guts in the past, they’ve just been so punished out of it they’ve checked out.
February 3, 2023 at 3:18 am
Although I agree with your concerns about young people avoiding dating I was amused about your comment on what “normal” people talk about. My husband and I enjoy discussing politics, we also discuss his work (even more so as he has worked from home the last several years). If he wrote books I daresay that I would even read them! I am glad it works for your marriage to not do these things but in this day of truly abnormal behavior being accepted as healthy it is perplexing for you to opine so strongly on what I consider normal. Several of our family friends also discuss such things and I would also consider those couples to be normal. All the marriages which I reference are first marriages of over twenty five years duration. And we all went through the normative -at that time – process of dating.
February 3, 2023 at 9:47 am
I agree, my husband and I are both engineers and we discuss our work. His field is completely different from mine (thankfully, hah!), but there are times where he’s asked me genuine questions related to what I’m doing as he’s having trouble in production with a material. Beyond that though, it does mostly boil down to “what so and so is doing to annoy me at work.”
Each marriage and couple are different. If it works for Matt to have a separation between what he does for a living and what he and his wife regularly discuss, so be it.
And yeah, it is more common in my marriage for us to complain about the workplace politics than necessarily get into the gritty details of your field. We’re pretty much on the same page politically, so our discussions mainly center around how absolutely absurd things are right now.
February 3, 2023 at 1:37 pm
Archbold absolutely does not respect his wife. I’ve read enough of his sly insults to her in the form of jokes to know that he really hates women, just like the Catholic church wants him to.