I'm writing this more so I don't forget it, so it's not very well fleshed out, but take what you will from it.

IS v. SHOULD

The church is highly invested in marriages. However, it comes from a misguided framework for understanding marriage. At a very fundamental level, marriage is created and continues successfully through attraction. If you are not attracted to someone, you won't marry them. If you are attracted, the greater the attraction the greater desire to marry them. Likewise, if you're already married but not attracted to your spouse, your desire to stay in the marriage or fulfill your marital role is minimal; but if you are highly attracted to your spouse, you have a large motivation to fulfill your role within that marriage.

The church occasionally (albeit rarely) gets the roles bit right, despite the generally horrible application on that point. But more significantly is the error the church has in its framework on attraction. The church's position on attraction is not about what actually IS attractive, but on what the various leaders believe SHOULD BE attractive.

Their conclusion on this point is that men and women should be attracted to the qualities that God looks for in a person, setting aside all other more pragmatic factors. That is, the church will tell a man that he is wrong for wanting a beautiful wife, when he should really be concerned with the quality of her heart. There is some wisdom in this on a pragmatic level, but it ultimately fails for a number of reasons.

The Great Mystery

The primary concern is that this view neglects the fact that the spiritual relationship we have with God is paralleled with the physical relationship we have with our spouse. The church suggests that God looks at the heart, and therefore we must look to the heart also and not to the outward appearance. This sounds nice in theory, but if that were the case, we would be cutting off the first half of 1 Samuel 16:7 - not to say that this verse is meant to exalt the way man looks to the outward appearance; rather, it is providing a pragmatic description of reality. More to the point, this type of thinking makes moot the spiritual parallel in the first place.

Imagine if Jesus tried to teach a spiritual concept and his disciples did not understand it. They beg and plead with him, "Give us some parable so that we can understand by analogy what you're talking about." Then Jesus responds to them, "You should not care to look to physical parallels when I'm giving you the spiritual truth. Just keep trying harder to understand without worrying about the physical examples that might otherwise help you." This seems somewhat absurd, especially given the massive number of parables Jesus told. Why did Jesus tells parables? Because he recognizes that people need to understand and experience the physical reality of things before they can grasp the spiritual truth that it reveals, which our eyes cannot see and our ears cannot hear.

To that end, when a pastor says of attraction, "You should only care about the spiritual things that matter to God," he is bypassing the physical things that help us understand why those spiritual concepts matter to God in the first place. He is also putting the spiritual things where they don't belong. Imagine if Jesus told a parable, "A farmer was sowing the Word of God one day. Some Word went onto the good soil ..." and the disciples cut him off: "Don't you mean seed, Jesus?" Jesus answers, "Of course not. The spiritual truth I'm referring to is that God's Word is what is sown, so why should farmers throw seed ever again?" A few years later all of his followers starve to death.

The Church Gets it Wrong

Even in their own game, the church's insistence to look toward the internal qualities of a person lends itself to unhealthy conclusions. Let me be clear: I'm NOT saying that the church's suggestions are bad. I AM saying that their suggestions are impractical and incomplete.

God does reveal in Scripture what qualities he wants his bride to have. This is abundantly clear. But are those qualities what attracted God to us in the first place? No. Of course not. Romans tells us, "While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." God's clear plan for having a bride with the qualities he desires has less to do with the selection process and more to do with the sanctification process. That is, God picks people with pretty awful qualities and redeems them the same way that Ephesians 5 instructs a man to purify and redeem the faults in his wife.

I'm not suggesting that men should abandon their standards. I'm saying that Jesus created his bride rather than expecting to find a unicorn in the wild. As a result, when the church says to find a woman with certain characteristics, the more biblical approach is to find a woman you have the hots for and to sanctify her into your likeness - to meet your standards after the relationship begins. In the meantime, Jesus didn't just call anyone willy nilly who seemed eager. The rich young ruler seemed to be an attractive person on a spiritual level. Jesus looked at him and loved him. But he still let the guy walk away. Why? Because he wasn't willing to conform to Jesus's expectations. He would not submit himself to being sanctified to Christ's standard of a follower.

So, (1) find someone you have the hots for, then (2) assess whether or not she is willing to be molded to meet your standard. In my view, this is far more important than finding someone who has certain prefabricated qualities that a few pastors think are important, at the expense of other qualities that are actually important to a man, which the pastor tells him he must sacrifice.

"Look to the Heart" is Impossible

When the church says to "look to someone's heart" to assess their qualities and whether or not they're marriage material, at best what they're saying to do is: (1) ignore what makes you attracted to a woman, (2) study and examine their external patterns and behaviors of living, (3) create a psychological and character profile of the person you're evaluating, (4) select someone whose profile has qualities that lend to things that the pastor thinks are important in a functional marriage (and there's a good chance he's wrong about his list), then (5) hope that your profiling skills are exceptionally accurate or that the other person isn't faking any behaviors that would upset your profile.

This is, of course, insanely complicated and leaves a lot of room for doubt. I like Jesus' approach: First he finds a bride who sees what he has done and is submissive to him because of it. Then he says to himself, "I want her. She wants me. I take her, ravage her, and then sanctify her throughout the course of the marriage." When you're living the lifestyle that lets you Find the Girl You Can't Keep Yourself From Banging, this makes a lot more sense.

In the meantime, don't live in your pastor's frame. Live in your own from, which if you are in Christ should also be Christ's frame.