Courtship - The Crushing Weight/Wait of Emotional Ignorance

I came across this article at a forum I frequent. Although I'm gonna try, words may fail me in attempting to discuss it. The idea that "there's no such thing as a 'failed' courtship" is so far beyond ignorance that Rand McNally couldn't help it find its way back.


Let me start by saying that I pity this young lady. Sincerely and deeply. She's obviously a 2nd generation homeschooler/courter, and she probably had ZERO say in her belief system. Everything about her blog reeks of brainwashing and indoctrination, full of all the cultic buzzwords and Christianese you'd expect, lots of usage of "maiden", lots of fairy-tale/fantasy talk of love and relationships, lots of strange ideas about God and her faith, et cetera.


Poor girl.


As you can see, it was just a little over a year ago that her "courtship" ended. It was quite obviously a failure. Still, she dedicated a very emotional blog post into what amounts to an attempt to brainwash herself into thinking that what happened was all wonderful, for her good, and God's plan. Lots of religious rationalization and denial, lots of Imbibling to try and dull the pain. [although the context is a bit different, a great blog article on denial can be found here]

This girl's article represents everything that courtship is supposed to prevent - emotional attachment, and the pain it brings when a relationship fails. She's devastated. There's no denying it. If she weren't, she wouldn't have written this piece. Her courtship was a colossal failure, yet she's trying, with all her might, to rationalize all of it away as "God's will" and a good thing. Just because God, as long as we trust him, can make something good, for someone, out of the bad things that happen to us, that doesn't make those bad things "good", nor does it mean God wanted those bad things to happen.


Courtship proponents generally teach that emotional attachment can only properly occur AFTER a wedding ceremony. They seem to think there's some kind of switch that can be flipped, and all of the sudden you'll magically be able to "connect". They should know this is BS, being they impose courtship upon their children to prevent the emotional connections that happen naturally, AS GOD DESIGNED THEM TO. They try to take the emotion out of it, stressing ideas like "You love the one you marry. You don't marry the one you love." A ton of you who read here have had that one thrown at you. Whenever I hear people defending and promoting the ideas of courtship, I know they're talking out of their rear-end. You can't have it both ways. If emotion could be controlled so easily as to prevent an emotional connection prior to marriage but magically turned on after marriage, there'd be no need for a system meant to control emotion.


To just cut through the bull, people who practice and promote "courtship" are total emotional morons. Just so you don't think I'm being intentionally or unnecessarily mean...


moron: a person who is notably stupid or lacking in good judgment


When my ex expressed her devotion to me, several months after our engagement, and just weeks before our planned ceremony, her mother tearfully, pleadingly exclaimed, "It's too soon!" That's notably stupid on every imaginable level. Her mother, just like her father, is an emotional moron. They are what the P/QF paradigm has made them.


The courtship model treats emotion like a water faucet. Parents try to cap the pipe with the faucet and valve to prevent the free, natural flow of emotion. While this may seem to make sense to them, while this may seem to them to be the best way to prevent heartbreak, they've really just been duped by the promoters of the movement - the people with something to sell - they took the bait of "godliness", the hook was set, and they've been reeled in. Capping the natural flow of emotion that God placed in us just cheapens and devalues emotion - and it's the height of arrogance (not to mention ignorance) to believe that emotion is something we can turn off and on at will. Courtship doesn't prevent heartbreak. It's actually more apt to prevent genuine heartlove as it tries to control that which only God is capable of.


I look at this young lady's description of the courtship and its end...

The past few months of my life have been some of the happiest I have ever known.

God saw fit for me to enter into a courtship relationship with a young man who loves the Lord fervently and passionately desires to serve Him with his life.

However, this past Sunday, after over three months of courtship, Kelly and I decided to break off our courtship. It was truly one of the hardest things that I have ever had to do in my life BUT I know that we made the right decision. Our courtship was a success! Neither of us have any regrets and I know that God has a purpose that is so much bigger than either of us.

...and I see a person contradicting herself, contradicting and denying her own emotions, as if somehow this makes it all ok and "godly". She goes on...

Does this mean that it still doesn't hurt? Uh. NO! BUT, I have realized something:
I am not devastated.
The reason why is because Kelly did not complete me. 
Jesus Christ completes me.
Because Jesus Christ completes me.
I am hurt.
But not devastated.
I KNOW that I can do all things through CHRIST Who strengthens me!

Yes, faith should (ideally) remain constant despite human relationship and human error, but she's lying to herself. She IS devastated. If she weren't, she'd have never written this piece. More from her article...

Our courtship, although it is now ended, was a SUCCESS.
Now, I am finding the freedom to dream again. 

Lying to herself yet again. She hasn't discovered any "freedom" to dream. She's been left with the option of dreaming to survive the heartbreak. Period. For her to deny that she'd developed deep feelings for this guy would be an outright lie. In her world, when you hurt, the only option to escape it is to dream. What choice does she have, being that her belief system demands that she look at this breakup as the hand of God? To continue to love this guy would be "sinful" and "selfish".

I think that the Lord wanted to know if I really believed what I had been teaching my girls in my Friday night Bible studies.

I had to CHOOSE.

I CHOSE Jesus.

Total BS. Imbibling to numb her pain. I don't know the details of how and why her courtship ended, but I'm fairly positive Jesus had nothing to do with it, and as always, I hate seeing Jesus get the blame for things that people do. I very seriously doubt the guy told her, "Look, it's either me or Jesus, but you can't have us both!"


The rest of her piece is a bunch of religious rationalization and is symptomatic of religious addiction, not that there was any doubt that she's addicted. 


A few weeks after this piece, she met her new man, and about a month ago, they got married - and they've already announced that she's expecting their first child. Quick work. Reminds me of my situation. Shortly after my ex disappeared and eventually broke off our engagement, both my family and my former busmates can verify that I laid out to them exactly how everything would play out. I'd already seen the playbook in the situation with her older sister (parts 5 and 6 of "The Joke Was On Me" detail some of this). When asked what I expected to happen, my response was as follows...


"It's gonna take 'em a bit longer than with her sister. She loves me. Deeply. She can't just repress that in a matter of a couple of weeks or a month. It'll take a little time for them to sufficiently demonize me, because she knows who I am and loves me. Within about 4 months, her dad will push her into a relationship with a guy named ***. He's available and willing, and he'll shower her with attention and affection, and in her ignorance and vulnerability she'll misread it, accepting her family's interpretations of all of it as her own. The fact that her family approves will be a BIG deal. She'll see it as "God intervening" and such. About a year after that, they'll get married."


I was off by a couple of weeks on the start of their relationship, and off by a couple of months on their marriage. Like I said, I'd seen it all before. I knew what to expect. The marriage she's in will survive, as she'll "love" this guy dutifully, despite not having the emotion in her bank account to cover the checks, but I pity her the day when she emotionally awakens and can no longer repress not just her own emotions, but what she did to me.




As to the young lady from the linked blog, having been married to her "prince" for less than a month, there are already red flags for the emotional health of her marriage...

Truly-our love was

worth

waiting for!

Have the last

few weeks

been easy?

Honestly, they

have not been what
I thought they

would be.

I went through a

bout of depression

that really

was absolutely horrid.

The enemy really

attacked and sad

to say-I really was not

easy to live with

and yet-

Jason remained

(and remains)

ever patient

and oh so loving!

I am so blessed.

So very very blessed.

Dear Lord. Married to her dream man, her "prince", the man God has for her, and already suffering from depression? Practically immediate depression? Uh oh. Maybe this will help explain it...

So question to all

you married ladies out there:

How did you adjust

to being newly married

and did any of you

struggle with the

"I need to be a perfect wife"

mentality?

I can not

praise the Lord enough for

my precious husband!

He proves his love

for me each and everyday!

To think that

even though now

he REALLY knows

the real me

and yet,

he loves me in spite of me.

What a picture

of our relationship

with our Lord and Savior

Jesus Christ!

Ugggh. She didn't marry the man she loved. She's trying to dutifully love the man she married, and she's using my favorite analogy (SA), a "picture" of Jesus and the church. Good grief. Poor girl. Emotionally ignorant. Quite obviously religiously addicted and surrounded by other junkies, striving to be "godly". She loved the other guy. Poor girl. And poor guy - now married to a wife who is trying to concoct and exhibit emotion for him that she doesn't genuinely feel, loving him only "dutifully". And poor baby to be born into such an emotionally dysfunctional, religiously addicted dynamic in a few months.


[A few more of my thoughts on courtship can be found here]


If you practice or promote "courtship", you've either willfully chosen to be ignorant and an emotional moron, or you've been forced to be ignorant and an emotional moron. Don't be surprised if you and your heart get crushed under the weight of that choice, whether the choice was your own or made for you. Life itself will be FULL of heartbreak, regardless of whatever formula you use to navigate the waters. You can't prevent it.


You can't love a spouse from the outside-in, and trying to do so only diminishes any "faith" in God that you claim and makes your heart meaningless. That's YOUR effort of human vanity, and it has nothing to do with God.