tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3810856233092461784.post6137090320196423242..comments2023-09-09T10:11:05.858-04:00Comments on Learning Beautiful: no touchylearning beautifulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17481661205080589340noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3810856233092461784.post-29045611859124225962008-03-15T16:40:00.000-04:002008-03-15T16:40:00.000-04:00Sorry to be so late to the party, just catching up...Sorry to be so late to the party, just catching up on my RSS feeds.<BR/><BR/>This issue frustrates me, too.<BR/><BR/>Also, it makes it difficult to hang out and/or make friends with either Christians (God-fearing, humble, church-going women who genuinely do believe the hogwash that you need to set boundaries and define your terms and be very clear and repent and say the Protestant equivalent of eight Hail Marys to cleanse yourself of your sinful thoughts if a man hugs you or makes a genuine error in spatial reasoning and accidentally touches something that made you blush) as well as non-Christians.<BR/><BR/>I'm sick of the semantics behind whether something is a 'date,' for instance, or not. If I take a girl out one-on-one, it's a date; get over it. If I take a girl out and we do or don't do X, Y, or Z: it's not a date? What? Where do you draw the line of expectations? If I go out with a girl I know is real cute and real atheist (ultimately a tragic oxymoron, but I digress), it's pretty well expected that we'll do certain things. If not on this occasion, then on another. And God forbid you should ask a girl over after a beer or vice versa, because EVERYBODY knows what that means, from Cosmopolitan to Men's Health. Maybe I really DO want to show a girl a book I just read without making some subtle insinuations about my bed, damn it!<BR/><BR/>And on the other side of the coin, of course, God forbid I should talk "like that" with one of the aforementioned Christian ladies. (I don't hold you to be one among their rank. Yours is a deeper faith that can love people through four letter words and half-drunken tirades, and that's not only classy and heartbreakingly rare, it's appreciated.) I grew up with girls who used piety as a shield against frightening male-ness and "vulgar speech," and it's tiresome. Not only that, but going on a "date" with a good little girl (almost all of them see a one-on-one meeting of any sort as a "date") means you get all the implications of the D word: you string too many Dates in a row and you've got yourself a woman quoting you Paul's admonition that it's better to marry than to burn, wink wink nudge nudge where's my ring drop to a knee and promise me your soul and your loins <I>thankyouverymuch</I>.<BR/><BR/>You well know I have no problem with kissing someone I'm dating; nor with being affectionate with my friends, even to the point of walking a very thin line! But in all reality it's simply very difficult to find genuine companionship in either of the aforementioned camps. Sadly, because of the reasons you cite, the suspicions of the group, the admonitions of counselors who don't want to have to deal with sexual nonsense if something ever does turn out to blow up on their watch, the attitude of fear and mistrust where companionship is "never simply companionship," and because of a Hawthorne-novel-era approach to affection and sexuality, it's virtually impossible to meet and really get to know members of the opposite sex in the one place it ought to be the most supported.<BR/><BR/>tl;dr companionship: do want? cannot has!tek1024https://www.blogger.com/profile/04829302377615272440noreply@blogger.com