I was talking to one of my friends a week or two ago about some of the differences between Christian women and secular women. We were talking about the past couple months of our interactions with Christian women and seeing where attraction led as we are both looking to get married.
To preface this he’s not RP, but he does understand women to some decently good degree. Although I have talked with him before and we disagree on some of the understanding of male-female interactions in terms of Christianity which does still reveal somewhat of a BP and/or feminized mindset. Whatever the case, I would estimate he’s at least 80% better off than the average Christian man with women.
The conversation eventually turned to expectations.
Expectations
Expectations play a major role in the phases of initial attraction when meeting a potential spouse because they serve as disqualifiers. Obviously, some are “red flags” while others can be “yellow flags.” A red flag for a Christian would be dating a non-Christian (2 Cor 6). If someone doesn’t meet expectations right off the bat, we as humans tend to categorize them into the won’t marry ever category.
Obviously, the filter that Christian women have when they meet a man is the old “is this man husband material” versus a secular woman’s “insert expectations here” where it may range from is he attractive enough to have sex with, or is he boyfriend material, or other types of things like that. The point being that Christian women compare to a higher standard right off the bat which makes expectations harder to achieve.
Don’t get me wrong. As a Christian man and talking to various Christian men, we all do this too to some extent as well. However, we know that attraction is more nebulous for Christian women and not tied directly to physical appearance like it is for men. Thus, it’s more detrimental for Christian women to initially dismiss men right off the bat for marriage material if they lack attraction to them.
Given the state of the men in Christianity, the majority of the dismissals would probably be considered right in the overall scheme of things if we are telling Christian women to only marry men they are attracted to. However, there is some sizable minority of men that don’t make the cut.
Sadly, I find myself experiencing the sad fact that I often enjoy talking to non-Christian women more because there isn’t the expectation that things must be focused on God either overtly or subconsciously. Even in this atmosphere, a sizable amount of my conversations with non-Christian women do involve some aspect of how I live my faith. Ironic, no?
However, the really crazy expectation with [the majority of] Christian women is that there is some non-verbally expressed barometer of how much she expects you to talk about God — too much or too little and she’s not interested. I’ve been on both ends of that one before. Interesting how some people think they can determine how “spiritual” or “religious” someone is about how much they talk about God. I don’t really want any part of that one.
Obviously, I don’t think I’m alone in this experience.
Expectations and atmospheres
Anyway, aside from that analysis I made the point to my friend that because women are women, the fact that Christian women have additional Christian expectations on men aside from being also attractive means that it is much easier for Christian men to talk to secular women. Men generally can sense a pressurized atmosphere of expectations when they are talking with a woman, even if they don’t overtly recognize shit/fitness tests.
This leads to the interesting phenomena that expectations that are set change the atmosphere into one where the expectations trend towards being met. For example, most men don’t have the ability to ignore expectations with pure outcome independence, so often the case is that because of the perceived expectations Christian men will end up not expressing themselves with as much confidence as they usually do moving throughout life (however much that may be). Thus, the high expectations create and warp the atmosphere around Christian women’s interactions which set up an environment for failure for men.
In other words, the more expectations you have the more likely you are to be discontent. Expectations aren’t bad in themselves. We have faith and trust in God that He will far exceed our expectations with His love, grace, and mercy. However, the majority of Christians have taken on a performance mindset which is at odds with the Scripture. Expectations combined with a performance mindset creates negative atmospheres and leads to said discontent, complaining, whining, and the like which are summed up in:
Where have all the good men gone?
“Good” being the signal that there are expectations and that men are failing to perform up to those expectations. Performance based mindsets will never be satisfied much like unrestrained hypergamy.
I’m not going to say that Christian men are immune from this as I have been guilty of doing this exact thing as well. It’s definitely something to take into account for both Christian men and women looking to get married. But as I said earlier because a woman’s sexual attraction is rooted in PSALM and not primarily looks as it is with men that women need to be aware that they can more easily self-select out Christian men without giving them a shot.
