You all should know my position pretty well by now: that people should avoid marriage and make no active effort to find marriage-candidates until their undivided devotion to God situations them alongside someone else and they can't keep their hands off each other. This ensures that (1) the man is leading, (2) both parties are very spiritually mature, (3) the mission remains unhindered, (4) sexuality is maximized and understood in its proper degree of importance to the marriage, (5) that blue pill ideologies about marriage as a goal in itself are not part of the foundation of the marriage in the first place, (6) etc. etc. etc.

But I know that not everyone agrees with me. I accept the fact that there are other views out there and they may have a rational basis. Accordingly, I want to open this conversation up to the entire community for response, as I have yet to see a theological (as opposed to philosophical) basis for opposing views.


SPECIFICALLY: For those of you who do believe that men should be actively dating and trying to find someone to marry, what is your BIBLICAL basis for thinking that this is a good idea or a godly attitude to have toward marriage?

For discussion purposes, let's assume as a baseline that we're talking about a single guy who has hot Christian women asking him out periodically, but so far he has only gone on a few dates and resisting their advances was relatively easy. He only looks at porn on rare occasions, mostly because he's lonely. One day he thinks to himself, "I really want to get married. I don't want to end up alone." [Or if you want to create some other hypothetical man and respond to that, feel free to do so - just state how the differences in your hypothetical affect your response.]

Is there a biblical (not philosophical) basis for the man to argue, "God wants me to be married, so I better start looking for a wife"? Or is his desire for marriage a product of blue pill conditioning that


Common arguments I want to address up-front

To be clear, I've heard the argument a million times in my life: "I struggle with porn, so it'd be better for me to marry than keep sinning." But the fact is that virtually 100% of men who struggled with porn before marriage still struggle with it after marriage - marriage is not a cure. Additionally, this means you're letting your sin tell you what God's will is for you. So, I'm looking for other explanations with biblical references to any passages that encourage men to get married.

I will hear out OT references, although beware that my reply will likely be that physical marriage in the OT was clearly shown in the NT to be a road-map to help us understand the relationship between Christ and his Church (us), and that post-Gospel the physical things of the OT were rendered moot once the spiritual reality is achieved (see Hebrews 8 and 9, for example).

Lastly, I'm also aware of Proverbs 18:22 and when it says "whoever finds a wife finds what is good," the word for "finds" [matza/matsa] with a 3:1 ratio is most often translated in the same way as, "I just found a penny on the ground!" and not "I was looking for a penny and found one."

I also want to be clear that I'm not looking for anti-marriage passages to be explained away. I'm sure many of you have lots of thoughts on 1 Cor. 7 (the standard anti-marriage passage) and how it can be interpreted in a way that's less anti-marriage. But even if you are right on that point, it doesn't prove a pro-marriage case; it only chips away at the anti-marriage case. Accordingly, it does little to contribute to the conversation I'm looking for.