Woman raised in the Bible Belt by religious parents says she ended up in TWO abusive relationships – because being banned from dating made her ‘ignorant’ about men
(A link to a woman’s testimony about how Christian or religious dating advice as a kid hurt her as an adult is linked to farther below in this post.)
As I’ve written of before on my blog, much Christian teaching about dating, gender roles, and marriage – especially if espoused by Christians who believe in and teach something called “gender complementarianism” – can often leave marriage-minded singles single far longer than they wish, or perhaps permanently.
Christian teaching on dating, while intended to help singles date “safely” (i.e., to prevent pre-marital sex) ironically erects obstacles for singles who’d like to get married.
One problem of Christian teaching about dating and singleness is to teach singles, to teach men and women, to be afraid of each other; never spend time alone with an opposite-gender person, lest it lead to fornication.
Well, the only way to marry is to first spend time with an opposite-gender person (assuming you are hetero), via dating.
If you are a lady, in order to discover if you are compatible with a guy, you need to spend time alone with him on dates, especially if you are an adult. (Group dating is for teens, not people over the age of 21.)
This woman’s testimony I link to farther down this page is yet another example of this situation, of how damaging the usual Christian dating advice and gender complementarianism is to singles, especially women.
The things she was taught growing up by her religious parents – things about dating, modesty, gender roles, etc – caused her relationship problems later in life.
Christian Gender Complementarianism infantilizes women, causes them to be naive, and teaches them it is wrong, unladylike, or selfish to have boundaries and to be assertive.
As you can see in this article, this was certainly a problem for the woman author, Lorens.
When she was confronted with vulgar, strange male clients at her job in a store, she did not know how to assert herself and tell them to shove off – or even if she could do so in the first place.
Gender complementarianism, as well as secular ideas about what is proper behavior for females (which generally teaches females they are to be un-assertive and be sweet doormats at all times to everyone, no matter how rude or obnoxious a person is), sets women up to be easy targets and easy prey for rapists, jerks, users, liars, and con artists.
I have an older blog post on my blog stating that I find “May-December” relationships disgusting, relationships where there is a large age gap, where one person is several years older than the other. That tends to be one of the most-read posts on my blog, for some reason.
One reason of several I object to people dating a person over five years their senior or junior (I’m especially against this if the age gap is ten years or more) is that the older person can manipulate the hell out of the younger, especially if the younger one is under 40.
Observe in this article how the author mentions being abused, in her 20s, by a 50-something man she was in a relationship with at that time.
Here are excerpts from the article at Daily Mail.
by Valerie Siebert, November 2015
Excerpts:
- Aussa Lorens, a blogger based in Denver, Colorado, was brought up in Oklahoma by parents who forbid her from being alone with boys as a teen
- When she finally entered the dating world in her 20s, her first boyfriend beat her and her next relationship ended with a threat on her life
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A woman who had a strict religious upbringing has claimed that being banned from dating – or interacting with men her own age – during her formative years led to her entering into abusive relationships as an adult
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In an essay for (Link): Cosmopolitan.com, Aussa Lorens, a writer and editor who was raised in Oklahoma and is now based in Denver, Colorado, explains how her parents told her as a young girl that ‘the sole purpose of dating was to find a suitable husband’ and forbade her from being alone with members of the opposite sex.
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At the time, Aussa writes, she felt comfortable with the idea, explaining that she was ‘too young to get married, so there was no point in having a boyfriend’.
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But, as it turns out, this strict and sheltered lifestyle ended up having a serious impact on her decisions when she finally became ready to find a husband.
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She was also confused to find that the men she met did not have the same inhibitions about dating – nor the same serious feelings about the importance of courtship. In fact, she admitted: ‘Keeping men from lusting after me turned out to be hard work.’
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But her religious parents did everything in their power to ensure that their daughter did not send out any ‘signals’ to men; they would make her parade her school outfits in front of them ‘so they could be viewed from every angle’, and Aussa remembers her mother obsessing over the length of her skirts and the necklines of her tops.
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She began to feel that her body must be ‘inherently sinful’ if men simply could not control themselves if she dressed to show it off in any way.
- .. Aussa claims that even then she found it confusing that men were purporting to know what is best for her and her body, yet also teaching girls that ‘all men were hyper-sexual and couldn’t resist temptation’.
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She also recalls the moment a man cornered her in a clothing store in the mall where she was working to describe the sexual acts he wanted to do with her. Aussa didn’t know how to handle the confrontation, she just let it happen.
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‘I didn’t realize I could ask him to stop or walk away,’ she writes. ‘I was ashamed that out of everyone who worked there, I’d somehow given him the impression I was that kind of girl.’
- When she left home at 18, Aussa had still never been kissed, and wouldn’t be for another five years. But, she says, that this ‘delayed entrance into the dating pool caused me to miss out on formative experiences that would have helped shape my adult interactions with the opposite sex’.
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In hindsight, the blogger says she didn’t have the perceptive tools to read the possible ‘sinister intentions’ of men she came across, and should have learned those lessons ‘when the stakes were lower’. Instead, Aussa bumbled into the dating world naive and vulnerable.
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‘My first kiss was a man who slammed my face into the side of a doorframe and left bruises all over my entire body,’ she says. ‘I waited a year before dating anyone else, only to end up with a man twice my age who eventually threatened to kill me.
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The older man that Aussa referred to in her Cosmopolitan article is a prominent feature on her blog, with all of the posts describing the fallout of the relationship under a post marked domestic violence.
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The pair met while working at a psychiatric hospital, he a 50-year-old former green beret, she a 25-year-old who had only had one boyfriend prior.
- (( read the rest of the post here))
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Related Posts:
(Link): Creepy, wrong, immature and pathetic: older men chasing after much younger women
(Link): Link): Groundbreaking News: Women Like Sex (part 1, 2) (articles)
(Link): Modesty and the Lust of Men from God Is Love Blog
(Link): When We Sacrifice a Girl’s Innocence from NatePyle.com Re: Modesty and Purity Teachings
(Link): The Annoying, Weird, Sexist Preoccupation by Christian Males with Female Looks and Sexuality
(Link): Modesty: A Female-Only Virtue? – Christian Double Standards – Hypocrisy
(Link): Beauty Redefined Site Discusses Modesty: Modest Is Hottest?
(Link): Male Modesty and Male Shaming
(Link): When Women Wanted Sex Much More Than Men – and how the stereotype flipped
(Link): Does God Require Singles to Be Perfect Before He Will Send Them a Spouse
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