Recently over at Boxer’s Blog, Derek Ramsey made the following (slightly edited) observations:
From statistics, we know that over half of people have lasting marriages. The problem is that you can’t marry people who are already married, and presumably you don’t want to take the chance on a non-virgin. By age 25, ~95% of women are not virgins (and most of the best are married). You’ll have to find a quality wife before she is 25. By the time you (or she) are ~32, your options become much more limited and your divorce risk steadily increases. Thus, a man’s window of opportunity to find a quality wife is time-limited.
Please share your thoughts about this.
hummm … well, i married the first time at 21 and the second time at 44.
some of the differences purely from a wife’s pov …
– it’s much easier to adapt to a man when you’re young. even though my second husband is so kind and forgiving, it’s been a huge big deal mentally to adapt to another man. i had just so fully adapted to and become one with my first husband and didn’t hold back – i gave him and that marriage everything i had. so starting over again and adapting to another man was really rough mentally.
– i would think, even unmarried, adapting to a man in one’s 30’s would be much more difficult than in one’s early 20’s b/c we’re still so pliable in our early 20’s. the older we get, the more set in our ways … and i *think* our brains become more ‘set’ but i don’t know for sure – i’m guessing there’s some scientific data on that out there.
– a woman in her 30’s who has a multiple N count has created a lot of comparisons. from what i’ve learned, men don’t like to compete in their marriages – with their wives, or with other men. i would guess it’s similar to men having this permanent, mental photo album of every hot woman they’ve ever seen … and women seem to have a permanent, mental ’emotional’ album of every man she’s been with.
it would seem, then, that the younger she is, the more likely she is to be a virgin and to be unexposed to so many men and opinions and emotional attachments.
these young women, now-a-days, though, seem to think that sex is a part of ‘friendship,’ or something. my sister was telling me that her son (my nephew), who’s 20, was telling her that this girl he works with thinks they should have sex b/c they’re friends at work. i don’t get that way of thinking.
I agree with what Derek and Ame wrote. The best time for a woman to get married is between the ages of 18-25. This means that women should be thinking about and preparing for marriage between the ages of 14-20. If that shocks you, then you’ve been converged. The problem is that women are focused on other things during this time, and they don’t consider marriage until after 25. Also, sexual promiscuity delays marriage and decreases the quality of marriage.
I was married at 20. My marriage (nearly 18 years) has been fraught with difficulty. I guess that’s what happens when you marry a narcissist.
From what I’ve seen, happy marriages are about the choices people in the marriage make; not the age of the bride.
I concur.
The first principle is that a man’s prime prospects are time-limited. He can still get married past 30, but he’ll have to put forth a lot more effort and rely on greater luck with progressively less chance of success. For better or worse, once he reaches a certain age, his chance of marrying a virgin becomes quite small.
The second principle is that the choices you make (including the preparation you have) have a huge impact on marital success.
The second principle is why some of the very best and very worst marriages occur at younger ages. The optimally low divorce rate occurs with marriages that start around age 25. The older you get, the more responsible you are, but only to a point. As Ame pointed out, the older you get the more difficult it is to adapt.
Ace – the question wrt men: Thus, a man’s window of opportunity to find a quality wife is time-limited.
i think that one of the super tragic things that fractured families and society and feminism has done is created an environment where women make these choices solo without any help, or real help, from those who know better – their parents, esp their dad’s, their brothers, their uncles, their pastor, etc.
my mother said to my sisters and me once, after i’d been married about 13 years, in the most blase, matter-of-fact, oh-well, sucks-to-be-you, tone, “Well, you all three married men like your father.”
and i was thinking … “And where the *&^%#!! were you?!!!”
i’ve promised my daughters i will NOT do that to them. i tell them the truth – (too much, so,sometimes, if you ask them ???? lol! )
in light of my comment … i’ve found it extremely rare for anyone to ever tell a woman the truth about anything. even if she’s wrong. even if she *wants* to know what she did wrong and why so she can fix it. no one tells her anything.
if she’s dating a bad man, she’s likely not gonna be told that – of if she is, it won’t be in a constructive way. it would be more in a laughing, joking, “You *always* pick the bad ones!” kinda way that makes it seem good.
unfortunately, this feminist woked out culture repels the truth but desperately needs it.
this is definitely truth in the church, too … granting blanket forgiveness for promiscuity and selfishness and being all ‘go gurl,’ pumping them up with lies.
Young men are not necessarily being given any better advice than young women. I was pretty much told just to marry a “Christian” and you could then count on them to dutifully work the rest of the details out with you. I was taught that a “Christian” is basically anybody who consistently professes to be a Christian. And that as a professed Christian, leading them would be as simple as pointing out what the scripture says they ought to be doing, and then asking them to comply with God’s word.
LOL I got completely blindsided by a liar who deceived me, and then defrauded me, and now works against me constantly.
The only bit of wisdom I was given, by my father, was to avoid marrying across race or culture lines, because: just being male and female is different enough already. And that the additional differences would only make things more difficult, especially with the in-laws and also regarding acceptance of your “blended” children by both sides and by society at large. Evidently, even though my parents were both White, because my mom was not brought up in my father’s Mennonite culture, there were additional conflicts to deal with regarding their cultural norms.
I was pretty much told just to marry a “Christian”
that seems to fall into the advice pool of ‘just go to church.’
Slightly off topic, but…
Bnonn Tennant is content to harangue his straw-Sharkly over at his blog, while continuing to delete any replies that I leave.
Yesterday he wrote :
Unfortunately, I suspect men like Sharkly are probably independent fundamentalists or similar, and have no foundation in systematic and covenant theology—so because they are bitter and angry towards women on account of what are probably legitimate grievances, this kind of reasoning strikes them as special pleading and they simply dismiss it.
I posted the following reply, but it was again deleted later that day:
Jesus Christ is my cornerstone and the foundation I seek to build my house upon. Colossians 2:9 For in Him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.
Imagine that. Jesus, the son of man, circumcised on the eighth day, without a vagina, without a woman’s moody periods, and yet somehow our entirely male savior was not lacking any part of the image of God but was the fullness thereof. Without needing a sister, or an idolatrous “Queen of heaven” to fully flesh out the image of God.
You still refuse to answer me, if in Ephesians five, the husband images Jesus Christ, and the wife images the church, which one of those two is the image of God?
You try to confuse the clear gender of words in the Bible just to make your woman-worship a seemingly viable misconstruction.
You teach that “Adam” was female too, when necessary for your heresy.
You disregard that the early church fathers, who were taught by the apostles, unanimously wrote that women were not the image of God, and that this great whore worship did not begin until the fourth century AD when Constantine coopted the church and made it a worldly power which has become drunk with the blood of God’s own saints.
You blasphemously make God either androgynous or hermaphroditic to force women into God’s image when God takes great pains to never include them in His image.
1 Corinthians 11:7 For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man.
Early church father Ambrosiaster said: Paul says that the honor and dignity of a man makes it wrong for him to cover his head, because the image of God should not be hidden. Indeed, it ought not to be hidden, for the glory of God is seen in the man. … A woman therefore ought to cover her head, because she is not the likeness of God but is under subjection.
Even the term “God” is masculine. A female deity is a goddess.
Psalm 8:4 What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? 5 For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. 6 Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet:
Yes, even the woman was made subject to the man, and wives are commanded to reverence their husbands.
You claim I don’t emasculate and effeminize the image of God, like you do, because I am “bitter and angry towards women”. Well I see that you are reduced to impugning my motives, because you can’t find any woman anywhere in the Bible, of whom it is said, that she is an image of God. You are wrong to elevate the defilers(Revelation 14:4) into the image of God. God says women should be shamefaced, and that women should cover their heads when even approaching His presence in prayer. But not a man. Forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God. Bnonn, you do men a great disservice by stealing their birthright, the image of God, and the glory and dominion that goes with it, and trading them a stew of Feminist words for it. I’m not bitter nor vaginaphobic, I just know the truth and it has set me free from permitting weaker vessels usurping my claim to being made preeminent in God’s image and glory.
Bnonn seems to like to claim that “man” means all people, so I gave him a scripture with the further clarifier “and the son of man”(“Son of Adam” in the Hebrew) which makes clear that God is talking about males when God gives man(Adam in the hebrew) the dominion over the works of God’s hands. Bnonn claims that the “dominion” was given to both men and women, and that having dominion, is in fact imaging God. Bnonn can apparently ignore all the male pronouns and retranslate things better than history’s best translation experts, without having studied biblical languages, when it suits his woman-worship. Bnonn also seems to fail to have read that wives are to be subject to their husbands, as Eve also was fittingly under the dominion God gave to Adam.
Colossians 3:18 Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.
Bnonn calls his wife “Smokey the Magnificent”. LOL But apparently he doesn’t want the woman he worships to see him get refuted on his own site, by a man showing that men are the glory of God, while women are merely the glory of men. LOL The poor pedestal licker! Smokey clearly wasn’t made as magnificent as myself, but yet she deserves a stand up man, and not such a supplicant groveler. LOL I hold out hope that Bnonn can learn he is superior to all women by nature of God’s preeminent creation of the man in God’s own divine image, and that the woman was made for the image of God, to serve and reverence the image of God. That’s foundational!
If I only read the part about “Smokey the Magnificent, ” and if I didn’t know the sexes, nor the issue being argued, I would conclude that the writer is afraid of Smokey.
That’s a strange and telling tidbit.
Sharkley,
If your wife has an addiction and doesn’t live with you, then how is she acting out? Via distance with you, or worse, has she started using your sons to act out? She’ll need to get that anorexic addiction itch fulfilled.
Swanny River,
It only makes sense, that if women are the image of their God, then they should fear and reverence women, just like our masculine God tells wives to see to it that they fear/reverence their husbands, in Ephesians 5:33.
Regarding my wife’s intimacy-anorexia: While I can read about the condition and understand what I am reading, I don’t think I’ll ever fully be able to get inside the head of one, and appreciate the payoff they get from their intimacy destroying behavior. Yes, she uses our sons as instruments of her warfare against me. That’s part of why I’m still trying to reconcile, because once I’m permanently out of the picture, she will of necessity turn her addiction towards emotionally distancing them, and unless she has passed on her own fear and loathing of intimacy to them, that will be very painful to them. Unfortunately it does now seem like she has influenced my eldest son, and he is emotionally closing himself off, distancing himself, and not wanting to discuss or remedy the distance he is choosing, and also like her, he has a tendency to always want to imagine himself as a victim. And of course she cheers him on for disobeying and distancing his father. I have not seen him in over a month. My wife had refused to ever let me have my sons come see me when they wanted to, except for the minimum time she had to. But now that she has briefly got my oldest son claiming he doesn’t want to come over to my house, she claims that the child’s wishes must rule, and that she will not encourage him to spend any time with me. However my youngest son, is still only allowed to come over every other weekend, now that I got stuck back on second shift and can’t see him on weekday evenings. My youngest son, on the other hand, seems to be wanting to spend every possible moment with me, even when I was sick in bed and couldn’t really do anything with him. My guess is he is starved for intimacy, and I’m the only other member of the family who isn’t intentionally refusing to love him how he wants to be loved. I do think that with my oldest son, since he is just 13, that if my wife could pull her head out of her ass and submit to treatment for her intimacy anorexia soon, and we could work with him, we could probably prevent him from ever becoming as messed up as my wife was. But it is really sad, and maddening to watch her work to pass her evil disorder on to him, while cunt-court makes sure she controls our situation and I get no consideration, even though she already has three diagnosed mental disorders and is on psych-meds. I just have to watch in slow motion as Satan’s forces work to turn my son against his own father and cunt-court is ready to send me to jail if I don’t bend over for still further violation of myself and my God. I hate this world! I can’t wait until Jesus shows up to beat the hell out of all those who oppose Him, with a rod of iron. How long, oh Lord? Come!
Psalm 139:21 Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee? and am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee? 22 I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies.
Bnonn writes, “…. and have no foundation in systematic and covenant theology …”
I have noticed that Bnonn frequently uses this “I am a Super Theologian and you are not” argument to divert from the actual discussion of the text. It is a form of the Credentialed Expert fallacy.
Sharkly – you may not remember, but ages ago, I think it was on Lori Alexander’s blog, you used one of Bnonn’s posts to back up your opinion. I told you at the time that I knew him personally, and he did not believe/teach what you thought he believed/taught. Now you know why I said that.
Swanny River’s observation is not too far off the mark.
Also Sharkly, I was so sad reading your last comment. Boys need their fathers. All children do, but especially boys. However, at 13, chances are he’s far wiser and sees far more than what you realise. At that age, when parents try to use their children as pawns against the other parent, it backfires majorly. Of course he will be confused now, but he will be processing it all in his head and sorting out what he knows to be the truth.
I have a degree in child & and adolescent psychology and I work with kids so I’m speaking from experience here.
All hope is not lost. You’re walking a truly hard path (mine is similar in some ways so I know how difficult the journey is) but hang in there. At church this morning we were reminded that God works all things out for good.
i am so very sorry, Sharkley.
as author D.I. Telbat writes at the beginning of all his books, “There is no redemption without sacrifice.” your sacrifice for your sons is … beyond description and of eternal value.
Holy God, I pray that You would place on Sharkley and his sons Your Helmet of Salvation to protect their minds, their thoughts, their dreams and daydreams, their eyes and what they see, their ears and what they hear, their noses and what they smell, and their mouths and what they taste, eat, and speak. I pray that You would place on all of them Your Breastplate of Righteousness to protect their heart, their feelings, their character, and their integrity. I pray that You would give them all Your Shield of Faith that they may ward off all the flaming arrows of the evil one and his minions. I pray that You would give them all Your Sword of the Spirit that they would crave Your Holy Word and hide it deep in the wells of their hearts and souls so they might not sin against You. I pray that You would wrap them all in Your Belt of Truth, that You would weave Your Truth in and through every fiber of their beings that they might always know the difference between Truth and lie. And I pray that You would fit their feet with the Readiness that Comes from Peace, that Your peace would follow them all the days of their lives. I pray that You would cover and seal them in Your Blood of Jesus to protect them from all forms of evil. I pray that You would fill them with Your wisdom, discernment, discretion, knowledge, grace, peace, mercy, and forgiveness. I pray that You would protect the minds and hearts of these boys and of their Dad as only You can. In Jesus’ Holy Name I pray, Amen.
Reading the controversy between you and Bnonn, it would seem he is not in the habit of being gored.
Sharkly, keep going. I pray for your situation whenever it comes to mind. I too, am concerned about my relationship with my young child because her mother regularly threatened my life (including with firearms) when I did not do or say whatever she required me to say. Since our divorce (which was prompted because of her escalating violence), I have dealt with her stealing away (or trying to) our child several times. In the last three months I had to perservere through baseless child abuse allegations. Consequently, I am sure I will have to deal with parental alienation in the future as well.
God bless.
Although most people wouldn’t know it by my posting, I probably agree with Bnonn on over 95% of things. It is just the parts where I am trying to correct him, that get my public focus. Perhaps I might try to contact him privately sometime, and see if he is more receptive to disputing our disagreements that way.
Wayfaring Man,
Wow! That sounds like quite trying circumstances. I don’t envy your trouble. I will say a prayer for you. Is there anywhere online where you have posted your story?
Wayfaring Man,
I too, am concerned about my relationship with my young child because her mother regularly threatened my life (including with firearms) when I did not do or say whatever she required me to say. Since our divorce (which was prompted because of her escalating violence), I have dealt with her stealing away (or trying to) our child several times. In the last three months I had to perservere through baseless child abuse allegations. Consequently, I am sure I will have to deal with parental alienation in the future as well.
i am so deeply sorry to hear this.
i will suggest to you what i suggest to others in similar situations …
1. keep a journal of letters to your child. you don’t have to write formally or every day, but do be specific in detailing the date and other events, such as that you saw her and she was wearing a pink dress with ruffles and she looked adorable when she twirled and giggled. write out prayers for her. either hand written or digital. this is something tangible you can give her someday to show that you never forgot her, that you were thinking about her, that you prayed for her. our words are powerful, and written words that we can hold onto for a lifetime are super powerful.
2. do pray for her. i firmly believe a father’s prayers are super powerful. again, make sure some of these get into the journal.
3. remember this is a war being fought in the spiritual world, so call on the force of God. ask that God send His angels to protect her. pray the armor of God over her – and yourself – daily. she needs your prayers of protection over her as she cannot get out; she needs an advocate before God praying over her.
4. make ephesians 4:31-32 your continuous prayer: 31 Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. 32 Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.
Holy God, i ask that You send legions of angels to protect this precious daughter of Wayfaring Man. I ask that you put a hedge of thorns of protection around her and protect her mind, thoughts, emotions, spirit, and body from all forms of evil, including and especially the evil from her mother. i pray that you magnify the prayers of her father and that, even though he will not be able to see the effects of his prayers, he will trust that You are caring for and protecting his daughter, especially in his absence. Comfort and encourage this man who loves his daughter as only You can. In Jesus’ Holy Name, amen.
My response is as off-topic as the original comment, but this is an old post that refers from my blog so let’s see if Sharkly lets it through…
Bee writes…
That hasn’t been my experience. I started reading Bnonn after he wiped the floor with you, Dalrock, and all your pals. The fact that you disagree with him doesn’t mean that he relies on logical fallacies. I think your own fallacious attempts at rhetoric –illustrated here– is typical of what you all have done to him (for years), and is a result of your own inability to argue the points he raises.
Regards,
Boxer
As I’ve argued with Derek, ad navsevm, for years…
The fact that a marriage lasts doesn’t succinctly imply that the same marriage is happy or healthy. I’d argue that many (if not most, then a non-trivial minority) of the lasting marriages, in the decadent west, are operating under an artificial and ever-present threat of state-sanctioned violence. The average husband knows that it only takes one visit to the courthouse by an unhappy bitch of a wife to start the liquidation of his life’s work, and the redistribution of his assets to the bitch, the state, and a passel of scumbag divorce attorneys. With this in mind, many husbands are more accurately described as hostages.
Boxer
I think your own fallacious attempts at rhetoric –illustrated here– is typical of what you all have done to him (for years), and is a result of your own inability to argue the points he raises.
Boxer,
While I don’t personally care to argue on behalf of Bee, Dalrock, or Derek,(they can speak for themselves) if you would care to be more specific, maybe I can address the points you mention regarding my arguing with Bnonn. I feel that Bnonn refuses to respond to certain questions I raise. For example:
“You still refuse to answer me, if in Ephesians five, the husband images Jesus Christ, and the wife images the church, which one of those two is the image of God?”
He refuses to answer, because he is cornered by God’s word there, and he’d rather just delete my comments instead, and argue on other more tangential points where he isn’t so obviously arguing directly against the scripture. Bnonn also dodges around 1 Corinthians 11:7 which is one of the clearest declarations speaking of the image of God as the basis for some differences between the sexes, sometimes he will use that verse while explaining that women should wear head coverings, yet he seems to refuse to apply it as it was given, as a definitive statement differentiating why God doesn’t want men to wear head coverings while praying or prophesying when He does want women to wear them.