A Response Piece

It isn't often that you see your face on the internet.
Not just on your Facebook profile, but on the actual internet.
About nine months after Josh and I got married, this picture began circulating the web:





















Photo taken by the incredibly talented Grant Daniels. You can find his information here at  grantdanielsphotography.com




It started on Pinterest. I would log on, and there would be four or five different people who would have tagged me or sent it to me saying, "This is so crazy! Your picture is on Pinterest!"
Over the next year and a half, Josh and I have probably had over 150 people either tag or email us to say that they saw our picture on some random website. I have had mere acquaintances as well as total strangers recognize me from this picture. At first, it was pretty bizarre. I once tracked the picture to a tumblr page that showed it had been reblogged over 60,000 times. What?! That's insane! Our faces have been on 60,000 people's computers, phones, or tablets. But over time it has become pretty commonplace. Once every couple of months, someone will forward something to me and let me know the picture is still out there, and Josh and I will chuckle about how weird it all is. But it did begin to make me think, "What can we do with this? How can we use this as a positive thing?"

And then today, I received an unexpected message. A very sweet girl that I used to work with sent me a message making me aware that an article was going around and The Picture was being used as the cover. My first reaction was, "Here we go again..." But then I read the article. And wow. I just don't think the Lord could have been more clear in giving me an opportunity to use this picture for His glory.

The article is titled "5 Things You Can Do Right Now To Find A Husband In Your 20's" After reading the article, my pride and anger began to flare up. "How dare they put our faces on something like this?! Don't they have to ask our permission?! I do NOT want my face associated with something that I so completely disagree with!" But then as the dust settled, I began to realize that this was such an incredible opportunity. As of now, the article has been shared at least 1,000 times. There is no telling how many people have read it. I don't expect this response to be shared nearly that many times, but it is my sincere hope that someone will read it and find a little more hope and encouragement than the article that I am responding to.

The basic premise of the article is that it is totally okay for young girls in their twenties to be on the Husband Hunt and lists five ways to make the search a little easier. The hard thing about what this writer says is that so much of it sounds so close to being right, but instead it turns out so completely wrong.

She says,

"Marriage isn’t for everyone.

Are you sure that you want a lifelong commitment to one man? Are you confident that you can spend the rest of your life putting his needs before your own?

Honestly, that’s the basis of a good marriage — each of you putting the needs of the other at the top of your priority list."

This is one of the few things in the article that she and I agree on, but I'm pretty sure it isn't for the same reason. I feel like there are a few things I could touch on in this brief paragraph, but for the sake of time I'm going to focus on her question, "Are you confident that you can spend the rest of your life putting his needs before your own? Honestly, that’s the basis of a good marriage — each of you putting the needs of the other at the top of your priority list." Josh and I have only been married for two and half years, but man, the only thing I am confident in is that I am SO not confident I can spend the rest of my life putting his needs before my own. And I know Josh would say the same for me. The basis of a good marriage is not putting each other's needs first. The basis of a good marriage is looking at the other person and saying, "I am so broken and selfish and sinful, but if you will have me I will spend every day of my life working my hardest to love and serve and honor you, and when I fail (because I WILL fail), I'm asking you to forgive me, and help me, and push me to be better." And it's the other person looking back at you and saying "Woah, me too. I will forgive you when it is the last thing I want to do, and I will push you to be better, and I will give this thing everything that I've got if you'll do all of that for me too." The BASIS of a good marriage HAS to be Jesus. It just has to be. If it is anything else then I promise you, it will flounder. And that's not to say that just being a Christian is going to save your marriage. I'm a child of divorce in a Christian home. Putting the other person's needs above your own is definitely vital, but it isn't the answer. The willingness to choose to love someone who is guaranteed at some point not going to put your needs above their own is far more vital. 

Josh and I got married very young. I was just 20 when he proposed, and 21 when we were married. Before I met him, I had a life plan all set out to graduate, take a year off, maybe go to grad school, travel, and then start a career. Then Josh came in my life and everything was turned upside down. For the better? Yes. For the harder? Absolutely. ( I realize that "for the harder" is not a grammatically correct phrase, but work with me here.) So while I fit into this writer's category of a young, married 20 something, I want to be very clear:

Marriage is not the end all be all. 

Not even close.

This writer is encouraging young girls essentially to nail down a husband now because you're young and hot and if you wait 10 years to live your life then your chances of getting one of the good ones decrease like crazy. 

And my heart BREAKS to think about how many girls have read this and have taken her words to heart. 

She says,
"If you wait until you’re in your 30s (as in, “… I’m going to take the first 10 years out of college to build my career and then think about finding a husband and starting a family…”), you’ll be competing for the same men with women 10 years younger than you. That’s not a competition that you will fare well in.

Women in their 20s are fresh, dewy, innocent and irresistible to men… They have 10 more years of fertility than women in their 30s.

A man who has also taken 10 years after college to build his career, sow his wild oats, and is now ready to settle down and start a family, wants a bride who has a long fertility life ahead of her. At 35, your pregnancy is already considered high risk due to advanced maternal age.

You are at your most beautiful and most desirable in your early 20s, and should use this time to your very best advantage."

Women reading this- please, please hear me: These are NOT reasons to find a husband. Not now, not ever. I hate, hate that she writes this as if to pit women against one another, as if we don't struggle with comparison and jealousy enough. Marriage and dating should not be a competition. This idea that you should go out right now and marry some guy before your looks fade and before your fertility window closes or some younger, hotter girl scoops him up is absolutely devastating to me. Why? Because it promotes the idea of settling for something less than the very best of what God has planned for you just so that you will have a husband, instead of patiently continuing to live your life and trusting that there is so much more out there than a guy who wants to marry you just because you're pretty and you can give him babies. I know plenty of women who did not get married until they were 30+, and that's not to say that they couldn't if they had wanted to. They dated, and they had potential men in their lives, but they didn't rush into a marriage with a guy they weren't sure about just because their time was running up. They continued pursuing their dreams and careers, knowing full well that they might be single forever. And I can guarantee you that not a single one of their husbands thinks, "Man, I bet she was way hotter 10 years ago." 

Later on in the article she says,
"Okay, so we agree that you should find a husband while you are a student, but men on campus aren’t interested in marriage.

How do you overcome that? Easy: Don’t have sex with them."

She goes on to say,
"Girls, you know that as soon as you have sex with him, the relationship changes — irrevocably. At the risk of sounding old-fashioned, men won’t buy the cow if the milk is free.

This isn’t complicated game theory. If you offer men sex without commitment, you eliminate the incentive for men to commit."

I want to first say that, yes, I absolutely agree that sex changes a relationship in every way. Our generation has become so inundated with the normalcy of casual sex and I am really glad that this writer is seeing the flaw in that- but her advice so completely misses the mark. "If you offer men sex without commitment, you eliminate the incentive for men to commit." 

Young women, I cannot stress this enough:
Sex is not a toy.

Sex is not something to use in order to get a man to settle down. Withholding sex should never be used as a tool for manipulation, before marriage or during. The writer is so right when she says that sex changes things, but that is because we were each made to have one sexual partner and only inside of a covenant relationship. 

If you are getting married so that you can have sex, or if a man is marrying you so he can have sex with you, you are going to be severely disappointed. 

Sex is about 10% of marriage. If even. My husband uses the illustration that if you have 24 hours in a day, and one of those hours each day is spent having sex (which if we're being honest is probably not true in most cases, but if that's your marriage then power to you!), that is still 23 hours of the rest of the day spent NOT having sex, which in turn is 161 hours a week spent NOT having sex, and 616 hours a month spent NOT having sex, and so on and so forth. You get the picture. That is a heck of a lot of time to spend with someone NOT having sex. Don't get me wrong: sex is a crucial part of marriage, where intimacy, trust, and vulnerability are grown. But there is so, so much more to marriage than that. The writer talks about finding someone who goes to your school so that you will have things in common, and again, that's important as well, but there are things that go so much further and deeper than that, like respect, honesty, friendship, trust, unconditional love, extending grace and forgiveness, compassion, gentleness, humility...the list goes on. The man you look to marry does not have to excel in these things, in fact he probably won't. But he does need to be willing to work towards these things every single day, and be willing to love you when you aren't doing so well in those areas either. And if those things aren't being cultivated your marriage will fall apart. Again, sex is definitely important, but what's more important is that you and your spouse work well together outside the bedroom.

The article goes on to list five ways and places to hopefully meet the love of your life, but I'm not even going to hit on those. I could probably spend several more hours dissecting each of them but I feel like it is far more important for me to say this:

The overwhelming theme of this article, in my opinion, is that marriage is going to make you happy. Finding a husband is synonymous to finding happiness. Lock that guy down, and don't give him sex until he's ready to commit to you. 

I am still a rookie as far as marriage goes, but I know this to be true: If you are looking for total happiness in marriage, you are going to be so, so disappointed. If happiness is your goal, you are setting your husband up for intense and devastating failure. The expectations you put on him cannot be met, by him or any other man for that matter. Marriage is hard. It's work. It's wonderful and sweet and unlike any other relationship I've ever experienced, but if I relied on it to bring me total happiness then my marriage would fall apart. That's not to say that Josh doesn't make me happy; he does. But he also makes me mad, sad, confused, thrilled, silly, and a host of other emotions. Relying on someone else to make you happy is the fastest way to make you unhappy.

If you take nothing else from this post, please let it be this: the only thing that can fill you up and satisfy you is a relationship with Jesus. The only thing that will enable you to look at a sinful man and continue to love him the best that you can is a relationship with Jesus. The only thing that will keep you from walking out the door when you are angry and your husband is stubborn and you feel like you are at the end of it all, is a relationship with Jesus. Your beauty WILL fade, no matter how much botox or makeup you use. Your list of things in common will always differentiate and you will argue about these things for years to come. Your sex life will take time and effort and the magic of it all will die very quickly. Your children will be difficult and time consuming and you will have to fight to prioritize time with each other. It will be wonderful, and it will be work, but it will not fill up that aching hole that you feel every time you watch a romantic movie or attend a wedding. It might subdue it for a time, but it cannot satisfy. Only Jesus can. Jesus wants to draw you into himself and love you in a way that no husband ever could. There is no judgement, no shame, no condemnation, no criticism, no hatred, no bitterness in a relationship with Him. There is unconditional love, healing, and pure joy, which is so much better than simple happiness.

I realize that the majority of readers for this article are more than likely not on the same page as me when it comes to a relationship with Jesus Christ, and more than likely will not agree with my stance. But if this is a new concept to you, or if you have any questions, or if something about this resonates with you and you want to know more, comment to me or ask someone you know who is a Bible believing Christian. I would love to dive into this further with you and answer any questions you may have.

And if you are a 20 something thinking about getting married, good! You should be thinking about it. I hope every single person that reads this gets to experience the gift that marriage is. But you should not be basing your life around it. You should not be obsessing about it and planning your life around it when you have no prospect in sight. You should not be chasing after it and making it the ultimate goal for your life. You will miss out on so many good and wonderful things because you are idolizing something that is not guaranteed to happen.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. I apologize if it is scatter brained or doesn't read well. But I could not pass up this opportunity, or condone something with this message that has my face plastered all over it. If you care to, please share this message, and maybe we can counteract the other one that has been spread.