Not sure...

My dear friend Jess has started a blog about her growing-up years in the Christian subculture. In fact, she and I are thinking about writing a book. I think I have some valuable things to say, mostly in response to the courtship and "courtship-lite" movement, but that's not really what I want to talk about right now.

I want to continue my last post and thinking about dating a little more. My best friend here in MyCity is dating someone. I mean REALLY dating someone. It's super-serious. I'm happy for her, but I'm also a little frustrated. If I'm going to be totally honest, I get upset because I don't understand why I can't have that too. Her boyfriend is nice, but he just attempted to "help" me think about meeting men by asking me to explain in detail what I do when I meet a guy I like. I don't want to talk about that with him. I don't know him. It feels very personal, and very vulnerable, to be talking to a semi-stranger about why I can't seem to meet someone who I'm really interested in and who is also interested in me. If I'm going to be completely honest (and why not? I don't think anyone has found this yet), FirstBoyfriend left some fairly deep-seated wounds about my desirability. I worry that the kind of man who would make a good partner for me will not find me attractive or want me. I have no reason to think any different, either.

So I'm going out on dates, and I'm getting out and meeting different people, and I'm hoping--even though hoping is hard right now.

I wrote out an objective list of things to accomplish in this year and posted it on my other blog. Noticeably absent was my desire to fall in love this year. It's time. But I left it off the list because, for whatever reason, it feels like opening up too much of myself in "mixed company" and I get uncomfortable with the idea. I think this is another remnant of what the Christian subculture has taught me about relationships. Nice little Christian girls aren't supposed to want to fall in love. We talk about how love comes when you're not looking for it, and how it just comes out of no where when you're most focused on your relationship with God. We're told that we are not to look for partners at church. Why? Sure, it could get a little weird, but isn't it a good idea to encourage Christian young people to be open to relationships with other Christian young people? We are a culture that has limited the dating options for ourselves (and I don't necessarily have a huge problem with that), but we don't provide places for Christian singles to meet and form connections with one another. Other religious subcultures do, and they don't seem to be having the same crisis we're having. There has to be a solution.

My pastor spent a couple of weeks talking about hope, and his point was that hope, in the biblical sense, is a sense of certainty of how things will turn out in the end. If I had that kind of hope, instead of the fingers-crossed-make-a-wish kind of hope, I think I could rest easier. But the reality is that I'm just not there yet. I'm discouraged, I feel like I'm too much and not enough, and I can't rest yet. I know God has a good plan--I just wish He'd let me in on the next step!