The foundational elements of relationship formation.

Targeted Readership: All; Men;
Theme: IOIs and Vetting
Author’s Note: This post was requested by Jack.  The topic was inspired by an email exchange between Red Pill Apostle, Thedeti, Oscar, Caterpillar345, and Jack on 2023/8/29.
Length: 2,500 words
Reading Time: 14 minutes

Introduction

If you are an American Millennial or younger, you’ve probably never seen an actual community.  Most people don’t even know their neighbors anymore.  If you’re Gen-X or older, odds are that you at least got a glimpse of what American communities used to be like.  One of the effects of this phenomenon is that most Americans have no idea why communities are important at all.  Worse still, because the American family has been largely destroyed, most Americans don’t know the importance of family either.

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None of this is a criticism.  Younger Americans have a vague feeling that something good — even great — was stolen from them, but they don’t know what it is, or how, or why it was stolen, or by whom.  Those questions are outside the scope of this article, but I assure the reader that if you’ve found yourself asking those questions, you’re onto something.

In our recent review of Vetting, it has become apparent that the involvement of family and community is an important part of choosing a mate.  In this article, I’ll attempt to explain the importance of family and community, especially to Christian men, and especially as it relates to vetting.

Community

First, let’s define community.

Community: A unified body of individuals: such as,

  • The people with common interests living in a particular area.
  • A group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society.
  • A body of persons of common and especially professional interests scattered through a larger society.
  • A body of persons or nations having a common history or common social, economic, and political interests.
  • A group linked by a common policy.

Note that the word ‘common’ appears in every group definition — common characteristic, common interest, common history, etc.  That means people in a community are like minded and have a sense of unity and/or purpose.

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Here, we’ll focus on groups of people with the common characteristic or interest known as faith in Jesus Christ.

Obedience

Being a contributing, card-carrying member of a community requires an investment — of time and energy especially, but also money and resources.  This is more than just showing up on Sunday and putting some money in the plate.  It’s about putting your whole heart into the enterprise such that you make a respectable place for yourself in the community — NOT just virtue signaling.

This is where obedience to God’s Word comes into play.

35 Then one of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him, and saying, 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?”

37 Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’  38 This is the first and great commandment.  39 And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’  40 On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

Matthew 22:35-40 (NKJV)

It’s kind of difficult to love your neighbor if you have no neighbors, or if you don’t know them, or if you aren’t willing to take the time and effort to connect with others in the communities you are a part of.

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Love Your Neighbor

For some bizarre reason, most people today — including Christians — think Jesus told us to “love everyone”, but He didn’t.  He said, “love your neighbor as yourself”.  [See Jack’s Notes below.]

Time for another definition.

Neighbor: πλησίον (plēsion): Near, nearby, a neighbor.  Neuter of a derivative of pelas; close by; as noun, a neighbor, i.e. Fellow.

Normally, the people who are most “close by” to you are your family.  If you’re married, that means your wife and children — in that order.  Your love radiates outward from there in concentric circles.  Why is that important?  Because love requires action and resources, especially time.  Everyone has limited resources, so trying to love everyone results in loving no one.  It also results in woke virtue signaling.  It’s easy to “love” “oppressed” people in the abstract by holding up a stupid sign, or posting a black square on your Instagram profile.  It’s much harder to love your annoying brother-in-law, or the lady whose cat keeps pooping in your garden.  God calls us to take the difficult path (Matthew 7:13-14).

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Love Gets Its Hands Dirty

Another Pharisee asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?”  Jesus replied by telling the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37).  In that parable, the Samaritan man cared for the Jewish man who’d been beaten and robbed because he happened to be nearest him, thereby fulfilling two commandments — love your neighbor as yourself, and love the stranger as yourself (Leviticus 19:34).  In so doing, he taught us another lesson:

Family and Community give us opportunities to get our hands dirty in love, and for others to do the same for us in hard times.

A friend loves at all times, And a brother is born for adversity.

Proverbs 17:17 (NKJV)

9 Two are better than one,
Because they have a good reward for their labor.
10 For if they fall, one will lift up his companion.
But woe to him who is alone when he falls,
For he has no one to help him up.
11 Again, if two lie down together, they will keep warm;
But how can one be warm alone?
12 Though one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him.
And a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 (NKJV)

Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.

Galatians 6:2 (NKJV)
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Family and Community Provide a Venue for Our Sanctification

In so doing, family and community create the social dynamics that contribute towards our belongingness, our contentment, our security, our spiritual growth, and our maturity.  In a word, our sanctification.

Faithful are the wounds of a friend, But the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.

Proverbs 27:6 (NKJV)

As iron sharpens iron, So a man sharpens the countenance of his friend.

Proverbs 27:17 (NKJV)

Iron sharpens iron by scraping the rough and/or rusty surfaces off the edge.  That sounds unpleasant when applied to humans, but it’s necessary for sinners, and it can only happen in community.

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How does all of this apply to Relationships?

First, there’s the obvious.  Commonalities place lots of young men and women in close proximity to each other.  But the shared commonalities are central to the nature of the relationship that is formed.

  • If a man and woman meet in a bar, what do you think they would have in common?  Carousing, drinking, and maybe hookups — NOT a good foundation for an LTR.
  • As we all know, online dating is mostly a fool’s errand, especially for men.  What do they have in common?  They’re all desperate for attention, love, sex, etc. and they probably have no other community to turn to for these things.  Again, NOT a good foundation for an LTR.
  • Even if a man and woman meet in church, what do you think they would have in common?  Arminianism or Calvinism?  Churchianity?  Classism?  Complementarianism?  Egalitarianism?  A mental assent to the same religion?  All of these mean nothing at all in terms of relationship quality, and some may even be detrimental.  It is a shared faith that matters — NOT religious doctrine.  (Yes, there is a difference.)

Where else is a young man supposed to meet marriageable women?

In his community, of course.

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Communities make Men more Attractive.

No, really.  It’s true.

You may have noticed that young men who have trouble attracting women don’t just have trouble attracting women.  They usually have trouble making friends in general.  And no, online friends don’t count.

A man who has friends must himself be friendly, But there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.

Proverbs 18:24 (NKJV)

People mostly learn social skills through imitation.  That process starts when we’re babies learning social cues from our families.  However, not everyone learns good social skills from their family, and although they’re much harder to learn later in life, communities give men opportunities to sharpen their social skills and bone up on their faith and discernment.

Communities provide men opportunities to earn respect from other men, and women are attracted to men that other men respect.  Tingles follow respect.

Communities also provide a structure men can climb to earn status, and women are attracted to men with status, or at least the potential to earn it.

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Communities Honor Women and cause them to become more Relevant.

Families and communities also shape women, not just men.  As Jack noted, women are created to conform, and women tend to conform to their families and communities even more than men do.  It’s no wonder then that St. Paul and St. Peter spent so much ink instructing church communities on how they should shape young women.

1 But as for you, speak the things which are proper for sound doctrine: 2 that the older men be sober, reverent, temperate, sound in faith, in love, in patience; 3 the older women likewise, that they be reverent in behavior, not slanderers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things — 4 that they admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, 5 to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed.

Titus 2:1-5 (NKJV)
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Because God designed us, following His Word is like following the manufacturer’s specifications.  God’s Word instructs young women to be homemakers.  The Greek word for ‘homemaker’ used in Titus 2:5 is οἰκουργούς (oikourgous), which is a compound of “oikos” (household) and “ergon” (work, or employment).

Because women have wombs and breasts, it’s natural for them to be their children’s primary caregivers, especially from the womb to toddler age.  It’s normal (or at least it used to be) for a woman to bear a child every two years, so if she has four children, at one point she’ll have a 6-year-old, a 4-year-old, a 2-year-old, and a newborn.  Unless you’ve been in that situation yourself, you have no idea just how chaotic that can be, and how much work it takes.  This call to purpose and responsibility is why the Apostle Paul says,

Nevertheless she will be saved in childbearing if they continue in faith, love, and holiness, with self-control.

1st Timothy 2:15 (NKJV)

Because of all this, children are primarily shaped by their mothers, and a home is primarily shaped by the wife (c.f. Briffault’s Law).  We honor good mothers and wives for all these reasons.

Vetting Requires a Community

Furthermore, because we know that a person’s moral and social character is mostly set in childhood, if you want to see your possible future with a woman, look at her family.

How does she treat her father?  How does her mother treat her father?  How does she get along with her siblings, especially her brothers?  Women who have good relationships with their fathers and brothers tend to like and respect men in general.  That difference is observable in a community.  How does she behave around men in general?

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But, she and her family could fake it, right?

Not for long.  People do not consistently behave in ways that are inconsistent with their character.  They can fake it for a while, but eventually reality asserts itself.

Epilogue

Jack asked me to write this article because he came from a broken family and felt unqualified to write about this topic.  I’m honored by his request (and his humility in asking me), but this article barely scratches the surface.  A wiser, more knowledgeable, more skilled writer than I could write entire books on this subject.

We can’t blame our lack of community on individualism.  Americans used to have vibrant communities with churches, charitable organizations, social clubs, and professional organizations galore.  One major difference between individualistic cultures and collectivist cultures is that in individualistic cultures communities are voluntary, whereas in collectivist cultures communities are mandatory.

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Community is more than just attending the same church, or living in the same neighborhood, although those things help.  Community means being involved in each other’s lives.

God never intended for us to live alone (Genesis 2:18).  He designed us to live in Community with Him and each other.

Think about it.

  • The most basic Christian sacrament, the one we participate in the most, is called communion.
  • Go back and read the Scriptures above.  How could people accomplish any of that without being involved in each other’s lives?
  • The result of the lack of family and community in modern American culture is increased loneliness, depression, anxiety, mental illness in general, and just plain unhappiness.

The solution is to follow the manufacturer’s specifications and join a Christian community.  If a Christian man wasn’t born into a Christian community, it’s up to him to either find one and join it, or build one himself.

Or, don’t.  It’s your choice.

Which way, Western man?

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Jack’s Notes

As a comparison to Matthew 22:39 in which Jesus said, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”, St. Paul tells husbands to “love his own wife as himself”, and “he who loves his wife loves himself” (Ephesians 5:28-33).  It does NOT say a man should love his wife as Christ loves HIM.  Likewise, we cannot love ‘everyone’ the way Christ loves us.

We see the Genuine Authority structure at work in both cases.

In the Genuine Authority paradigm, the person who is able to love and care for others has more spiritual authority because others are depending on him to fulfill their needs, NOT because he does whatever they want him to do, according to the Gentile Authority paradigm.  Providing for the needs of others requires one to have a domain of authority, moral agency, and a sphere of influence — all markers of personal and spiritual maturity.

In the Genuine Authority structure, a man is only responsible for those within his domain of authority — those who have their needs fulfilled by him, whether it be physical needs, or emotional needs, or spiritual needs, or what not — those who continually depend on receiving love and care from him, those who look up to him, those who are inspired by him, those who are taught by him, those who are shepherded by him.  This is NOT a one-stint act of altruism nor is it being a Nice Guy™.

This Genuine Authority could be extended to those within his community, as this provides a venue in which he can be recognized as a capable and valuable person within the community, and thereby honored and respected as such.

A community sets the social stage in which a woman can give a man NATURAL IOIs (as opposed to IOCs or seductive come on’s), which signals to him that he has Genuine Authority over her in the area of granting her various relational needs, including sexual needs.

Many sincere thanks to Oscar for writing this article.

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