Christlike or Pornlike? A Christian Woman’s Role in Marriage

Christlike or Pornlike?  A Christian Woman’s Role in Marriage by Andrew J. Bauman and Taylor May

(Link): Christlike or Pornlike?  A Christian Woman’s Role in Marriage

Excerpts:

by Andrew J. Bauman

I am proud to be writing this article in partnership with Taylor May, a survivor of emotional and spiritual abuse. She has boldly shared her own story about what it was like to be married to someone who had a Pornographic Style of Relating, (PSR) and what it felt like to be used by him with her Church’s consent.

*Trigger warning for those who have suffered this type of betrayal trauma.

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I’ve written about the pornographic style of relating here (PSR), but today we will hear from the perspective of a woman who has lived on the other side of this dynamic.

Many people have been talking about this with the release of this new book [Married Sex: A Christian Couple’s Guide to Reimagining Your Love Life by Gary Thomas] and some of its disturbing implications.

How can we talk about what these women are experiencing, and what can we learn from them?

Taylor May has offered her story and her experience below. My hope is that this can begin to clear up the muddy waters of what it means to live a Christlike marriage in a deeply pornified world.

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by Taylor May

I didn’t realize how a pornographic style of relating was so deeply embedded into my first marriage until I was firmly planted into my second marriage.

That’s when I began to see the impact my first husband’s issue with lust had on my new, much healthier relationship.

Let me tell you my story, and how I and countless other women feel when our significant others lust for other women, on-screen or off.

Those of us who grew up in the evangelical Church have been told that we are responsible for men’s lust issues. This lie has been perpetrated by the church for far too long.

Many men are leading our church conversations with 90% of pastors being men, and considering that nearly 50% of those pastors self-report having used pornography, it would make sense that they would try to gaslight women by minimizing the destructive nature of porn use.

One way they do this is by framing it as a women’s issue or a sex issue, rather than the objectification of women/sin issue–one that stems from the person doing the objectifying.

Why Putin’s Desperate Push for More Russian Babies Will Fail

Why Putin’s Desperate Push for More Russian Babies Will Fail

I placed parts of the following article in bold-faced type.

Too often, a lot of people, religious conservatives in particular, shame people who cannot or do not marry and have children, whether it’s by circumstance or choice.

Too many religious conservatives, and a lot of progressive secular culture for many years, implied or outright stated if an adult didn’t marry (or have children) that there was something “wrong” with them, they were a loser, not a “true” adult, or were being selfish.

It is just quite irritating and insulting how so many people in many cultures the world over don’t treat adult singleness (or being childless or childfree) with respect.

Complementarian Christians in the United States have often tried to sell a “fairy tale” view off marriage, that if you just trust God, God will send you a great soul mate, and you will find nothing but happiness as a result.

(Those same Christians, though, will tell Christian women married to abusive Christian husbands that they cannot divorce their abuser!)

Christians also set up unrealistic expectations for sex in marriage. At least while I was growing up, and into the 1990s, a lot of Christians sold this bogus view that if you just hung on to your virginity that God would not only send you a great spouse, but you’d have regular and fantastic sex.

But witness those of us who remained sexually abstinent and yet still remain single, or those who married but ended up in sexually unsatisfying marriages.

I’m not opposed to Christians advocating for a traditional, Christian sexual ethos, but they need to stop making grand, sweeping claims and promises claiming that you will have a rosy (marital) future if you just remain chaste – because often, those promises do not come to pass.

I am not Russian, but if gender roles and gender expectations in Russia are anything like I’ve grown up with in the United States, it sounds like (based on a quote by a Russian woman I’ve included below) as though Russian culture – like American culture, especially Christian complementarians – expect women to place every one and every thing as a priority over what they, the women, want.

I am so tired of cultures the world over expecting that women defer to men generally, to what governments want, etc.

(Link): Why Putin’s Desperate Push for More Russian Babies Will Fail

Anna Nemtsova
Mon, September 6, 2021

Russia is facing a dire demographic crisis, and it doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.

The country’s dramatic natural population decline in the past six months—more than double the rate from the same time period last year—is so severe that it prompted President Vladimir Putin to come out with a rallying cry in support of larger families last week. “A strong family bringing up two, three, or four children,” he said, “should be the image of a future Russia.”

Realizing this goal will be a Herculean task, for many reasons. No matter how conservative the country is made out to be on state television, the States Statistic Service reports that as of 2020 73 percent of Russian marriages ended in divorce, with 48 percent divorcing before having children.

Rampant Sexual Abuse of Women, and Its Cover Up, at Hope Community Church, Gives Single Christians Another Reason to Be Leery of the Be Equally Yoked Rule or Looking for a Spouse at a Church

Rampant Sexual Abuse of Women, and Its Cover Up, at Hope Community Church, Gives Single Christians Another Reason to Be Leery of the Be Equally Yoked Rule or Looking for a Spouse at a Church

The following article needs to be read in full, because, among other things, one learns that the church staff of the church discussed victim-blamed a teen-aged girl for wearing shorts as the reason as to why a male hired by the church sexually assaulted her.

What I wanted to focus on in this article, however, were the comments the single women made about this church.

Remember as you are reading this, that many Christians will advise you, if you are a single woman who’d like to marry, to try finding “husband material” at your local church.

Also remember as you read this, that a lot of Christians still push the spinster-making teaching of “be equally yoked” in regards to dating or marriage. (It’s a Christian view that holds that a Christian single should not date or marry any Non-Christians.)

(Link): Women Came to Hope Community Church Looking for Fellowship and Healing. Disrespectful Behavior from Church Leaders Drove Them to Leave.

Excerpts:

Feb 10, 2021
by Katie Jane Fernelius

…As members of Hope Community Church streamed in for services, the protesters held signs confronting Hope’s leadership on its record of handling sexual abuse and assault.

Over the last few months, the INDY has worked to vet these allegations and the church’s response to them.

Unfortunately, church leaders, including founder and lead pastor Mike Lee, have not responded to multiple inquiries, effectively stonewalling the INDY’s reporting around a fraught topic.

Sara Dye, who joined the megachurch looking for healing after she was raped by a stranger and went through a divorce, says she was assaulted by a member of the church’s worship team.

Outcry Over Plan to Educate ‘Bigoted’ Rape Survivors (biological women) About Trans Rights by Tom Gordon

Outcry Over Plan to Educate ‘Bigoted’ Rape Survivors (biological women) About Trans Rights

After having seen several news reports like the one below, I’ve found that the vast majority of persons – biological males claiming to be women – and the “trans rights movement”
– is about misogyny (biological men and some of their women allies harassing, threatening, and gas-lighting biological women), and also about harassing biological men and women who are homosexual.

In the last few years, I tried telling progressive persons, especially ones who host Facebook groups and so on, that despite the fact they often claim to care about victims of churches and of Christian culture,
that they have become so very partisan about politics,
that they are already excluding or bullying victims of sexual abuse (or other types of mistreatment) caused in and by churches, and they  do not care, all because these other victims don’t share their progressive political views.

That is what you see at work in this article below.
The rights and feelings of biological men who like to pretend to be women are now taking precedent over the rights, feelings, and safety of actual (biological) women. It’s disgusting.

You can see how this biological man who is pretending to be a woman who is at the head of this Rape Crisis Center is valuing “intersectionalism” above the safety of actual women.

With the far left, and “useful idiot” liberals, the politics always comes first and foremost – not the people who may be impacted.

This is no different from conservative Christian churches who teach biological women to stay in abusive marriages to men, and who teach divorce is not permissible, all because the church preachers place respect for the institution of marriage above the safety of the people in the institution. It’s the same thinking.

(Link): Outcry Over Plan to Educate ‘Bigoted’ Rape Survivors About Trans Rights

Excerpts:

Aug 12, 2021
by Tom Gordon

The head of one of Scotland’s biggest rape crisis centres has suggested “bigoted” rape survivors should be re-educated about transgender rights as part of recovering from their trauma.

Mridul Wadhwa, a transgender woman, said people would not truly recover unless they addressed their “unacceptable beliefs” because “therapy is political”.

She [he] said: “We will work with you… but please expect to be challenged on your prejudices.”

The comments imply rape survivors may be treated differently according to their political views.

One expert said “pushing a political view onto a woman at a time of profound trauma and crisis” would be “inappropriate, unethical and unprofessional”.

Twice-Divorced Lady Suggests That God Told Her He’d Send Her Husband Number Three and She Got Married a Third Time – I Actually Don’t Find This Story Uplifting

Twice-Divorced Lady Suggests That God Told Her He’d Send Her Husband Number Three and She Got Married a Third Time – I Actually Don’t Find This Story Uplifting

The woman who wrote this story for this publication (link is way, way below – she talks about having been twice divorced and was depending on God to send her spouse number three), seems like a genuinely wonderful person, and I am truly sorry she had a broken heart or two.

I am happy for her that her third marriage is working.

However… I stopped finding stories like this uplifting or inspirational years ago. I think they are untrue for most people. I think they’re misleading and give a sense of false hope to singles who’d like to marry.

Here is a link to the woman’s story, with a few excerpts, then I’ll say a few more words under it:

(Link): She Turned to God for Help Finding Mr. Right

After two failed marriages, this mother of two decided to have faith that He would bring her the right partner.

by Katherine Hutchinson-Hayes
July 29, 2021

[She opens her story by saying she was crying in her bathroom]

I held up my bare fin­ger, the one that had once boasted a gorgeous dia­mond ring. Divorced. For the second time. I was a woman of accomplish­ment, a school principal. Mother to two beautiful girls. Yet I was a magnet for men who were not what they seemed. Why couldn’t I get marriage right?

A Vaccine Or This Marriage: Conspiracy Theories Are Tearing Couples Apart

A Vaccine Or This Marriage: Conspiracy Theories Are Tearing Couples Apart

Ha ha ha haaaaa! And marriage-idolaters such as Al Mohler, and secular and Christian “pro nuclear family” organizations like to assure me, and try to brainwash me, to believe that marriage makes people more mature, giving, and ethical – and that it will “fix” society! LOL!

Marriage-idolater Bradford Wilcox has written articles in the past year to try to convince people that marriage makes people weather the Covid-19 virus fall out better than singleness.

Please understand, though, that the following is from left-leaning Huffington Post, and they will, of course, as liberals and leftists do, try to portray anyone who may have legitimate fears or concerns of coronavirus vaccines as being “conspiracy” crackpot kooks.

(This, from the same people who said when Trump was in office, that they’d not use any vaccines that were rushed out under or by the Trump admin. For example, see this CBS news article or this one from CNN. You liberals and Democrats have not been consistent on this vaccine situation.
You liberals and Democrats were against the vaccines before you were sniping at conservatives to hurry up and get vaccinated already.)

(Link): A Vaccine Or This Marriage: Conspiracy Theories Are Tearing Couples Apart

“He said if I take the vaccine I could pack my bags and leave his kids here.”
by Jesselyn Cook

For Lucy, a 59-year-old metastatic breast cancer patient from Washington state, getting vaccinated against COVID-19 was a matter of life and death.

After undergoing aggressive chemotherapy for months, the coronavirus almost certainly would have killed her.

Yet as relief washed over her upon receiving her final Pfizer dose in March, she knew she’d have to keep it to herself. Her husband had begged her not to get the shot.

Out: Pre-Nups. In: Pet-Nups

Out: Pre-Nups. In: Pet-Nups

(Link): ‘Petnups’ growing as heated divorces show pets aren’t always people too

(Link):  Millennial pet owners are driving a rise in ‘pet-nups’

Excerpts:

The survey, which included 2,000 pet owners and over 100 lawyers, found that divorce lawyers in cases involving pets spend an average of 25 hours of billable time on that single issue alone.

Enter the “pet-nup.”

Despite many pet parents considering their furry friends to be children, in the eyes of the law pets are simply regarded as personal property. Therefore, having a pre-determined agreement about care and custody should the relationship turn sour is an appealing idea for couples.

Divorce In China Plummet 70% Following New Government ‘Cool-Off’ Law

Divorce In China Plummet 70% Following New Government ‘Cool-Off’ Law

 The introduction (this is the section before I get to the links about divorce in China):
Not a big fan of China myself, but – I bet you anything that other American conservatives (I’m a conservative, but one who doesn’t idolize marriage) – will be jealous of this policy in China!

I bet anything that members of “Focus On the Family,” “Institute for Family Studies,” or Al Mohler, or Bradford Wilcox, and other such marriage-idolizing and Christian patriarchal groups or persons, will, should they comment on this news story, speak of it in sad, longing, envious terms, as though they wish the American government would and could force married adults to have “cooling off” periods before divorcing.

(And such groups almost always blame women for divorce (they especially love to go after “feminism.”
The sexist pigs who run around on the “Manosphere” and such complain that women “initiate divorces more often.” Hmm, it could be that many American men make for lousy husbands, not that women just like to, you know, divorce for the hell of it.)

The Case for Sleeping in Separate Beds – Sleep Divorce

The Case for Sleeping in Separate Beds

(Link): Spouse disrupting your sleep? It may be time for a ‘sleep divorce’

When snoring and other issues keep one partner awake, sleeping in separate beds or bedrooms may help. But how do you ask?

(Link): The Case for Sleeping in Separate Beds 

By Sean Illing
May 12, 2021

…I’ve battled light insomnia for most of my adult life, so sleep has always been a struggle. But I also like a little mindless TV before bed. She prefers music.

We could never compromise and it created … tension.

But the house with the extra room meant that we could occasionally sleep in separate beds. At first, we did it when someone was sick or especially tired.

Over time, we realized what should’ve been obvious: We slept way better apart.

The ‘Gray Divorce’ Trend: As The Gates Split Shows, More Older Couples Are Getting Divorced. Here’s Why.

The ‘Gray Divorce’ Trend: As The Gates Split Shows, More Older Couples Are Getting Divorced. Here’s Why. by J. Duffy

These news items seem cyclical. I just blogged on this a few years ago – there were headlines out about how Baby Boomers (people then in their what, mid to late 50s – they’d be older now) were divorcing in record numbers, and other articles said they were not re-marrying, nor were they interested in getting remarried

(Link): The ‘Gray Divorce’ Trend: As The Gates Split Shows, More Older Couples Are Getting Divorced. Here’s Why.

by John Duffy

….One might think that, if any of these issues suggested incompatibility, a marriage would end long before a couple was in their 50s or 60s.
That’s not the case anymore.

In my current work with couples, I have noticed a discernible difference in older couples in long-standing marriages.

Years ago, the vast majority of my client couples who weren’t happy in their relationship chose to remain married out of convenience or routine, or even a sense of familiarity.

Over the past few years, many are deliberately choosing to part ways. My client base mirrors the divorce rate for Americans 50 and over, which has doubled since 1990.

Marriage & Divorce Amid Pandemic: Couples’ Challenges Abound by D. Crary

Marriage & Divorce Amid Pandemic: Couples’ Challenges Abound by D. Crary

At points, this article unfortunately quotes the odious Bradford Wilcox. Other than that, it seems to be an okay article. (I have tried to omit any quotes by Wilcox in my excerpts below.)

(Link): Marriage & Divorce Amid Pandemic: Couples’ Challenges Abound

Excerpts:

by David Crary
Feb 14, 2021

For many U.S. couples yearning to be married, the pandemic has wreaked havoc on their wedding plans while bolstering their teamwork and resilience. For couples already married, it has posed a host of new tests, bringing some closer, pulling others apart.

Spending more time together — a common result of lockdowns, furloughs and layoffs — has been a blessing for some couples who gain greater appreciation of one another.

For other spouses, deprived of opportunities for individual pursuits, the increased time together “may seem more like a house arrest than a fantasy,” suggested Steve Harris, a professor of marriage and family therapy at the University of Minnesota and associate director of a marriage counseling project, Minnesota Couples on the Brink.

Gregory Popcak, a psychotherapist in Steubenville, Ohio, who specializes in marriage counseling for Catholics, says the pandemic has been particularly troublesome for spouses whose coping strategies have been disrupted.

Divorce Rates Will Rocket This Year as Further Lockdowns and Financial Pressures Push Already Strained Relationships To The Brink, Lawyers Have Said

Divorce Rates Will Rocket This Year as Further Lockdowns and Financial Pressures Push Already Strained Relationships To The Brink, Lawyers Have Said

The following is from a British paper, so I don’t know how applicable these findings are to the United States.

If it’s applicable here at all, you can bet that marriage-obsessed wackos Al Mohler and Brad Wilcox will write up bogus studies or commentary arguing that this is all a bunch of pish-posh and that the future of marriage rates is as rosy as ever.

Either that, or they will write fear mongering pieces declaring that anyone who doesn’t marry by the age of 35 will have a horrible existence and die a horrible, lonely death.

(Link): Divorce Rates Will Rocket This Year as Further Lockdowns and Financial Pressures Push Already Strained Relationships To The Brink, Lawyers Have Said

by Harry Brennan
January 9, 2021

Divorce rates will rocket this year as further lockdowns and financial pressures push already strained relationships to the brink, lawyers have said.

It follows an unexpected drop in the number of spouses looking to split in 2020. Around 52,000 people filed for divorce between the end of March and September last year, according to the Ministry of Justice. It is a 12pc drop compared with the same period in 2019, when almost 60,000 filed divorce proceedings.