This was something I wrote a few days ago I wanted to feed into the hopper. I think I have 6 parts left. Lunch break dump today.
This is also part of the spiritual awakening, because what has happened in our society over the last 100 years has slowly turned our culture into garbage. With this, there is a direct threat long term to the western societies/cultures as we know it. With this, I believe Christianity is needed more than ever to save us. I don’t mean to just suddenly run into a church and be saved. This has a LOT of layers of analysis to it, and this is also something that is drawing me more to learning about Christianity. I am not going to try and be biblical here, because frankly, I don’t know my ass from my elbow with this. I want to present the issues, and with this, present possible solutions.
This is some deep analysis and thinking here, and the payoff may be pretty interesting if you say to the end.
Dating 100 years ago
I am not going to use EXACT dates. I want to more or less take us from a “Little House on the Prairie” vibe and move to today, and with this, you will see a slow erosion, what happened – and posit where to go from here.
My cousin Steph is a minister – we grew up sort of like siblings in close proximity and we had family things all the time. She was 3 years younger than me, and her older brother Eric was 6 days older than me – and we grew up very close. With these family things, we all carried on downstairs – kids were relegated to the basement, and honestly, it was Lord of the Flies. This basement was the basement of my maternal grandparents, Mary and George. I am going to use some shorthand here so I don’t have to type that out 900 times.
I don’t know their entire Marvel Origin Story – but I do know they married very young. At my wedding in 2013, I surprised them by having the dance with the longest marriage have them win, at 60 years.
Anyone who embarks on marriage hopes for such longevity. Perhaps their secret was Christianity? Both went to church every Sunday. In 1972, they lost their home to Agnes, a hurricane that leveled a lot of my state. My mother was rescued from the second story window from the Schuykill River. Well, during that time, everyone rebuilt their homes. I am not sure what insurance was like back then, but from what I recalled – people helped my grandfather rebuild his home with his bare hands, and he helped his neighbors rebuild their home. During Hurricane Andrew in Florida, he was retired by then and with the church, went to help people rebuild their homes.
I never heard either of them, for one day, quote scripture to me. It wasn’t “preachy”. It was, “this is how we live”. They gave of themselves to others. They weren’t “poor” like you would think. They would help needy folks in Appalachia as well I recall. Every year my mom would buy toys for the needy and donate. So the church was really good at accepting these types of donations and distributing to those in need.
I remember they had a few acres or so, and there was a big garden in the back. My grandfather would tend to the garden every day. Some day as a kid I would get peas out of the pods. They had a stand up freezer there they put their food in. Other family members may have had cattle or corn or whatever and share with them or us. But they were poor in the sense they could not afford much of anything. They didn’t covet material possessions. For Christmas each year, each grand kid would get two presents. I used to get a mint silver coin a lot. While that may have been like $5 then, I LOVED it. But my grandfather would make us wood toys in his shop, and my grandmother knitted a giant blanket for me – ALL of them I still have. They are prized possessions to me.
They were not rich with money. My inheritance passed down wasn’t much, but some of the silver I got (maybe $75 worth) is what put me on my journey today with silver and gold.
They gave of themselves to their church community. To their neighbors. To their family. To the scout troop my grandfather ran. They were revered in the community.
They were rich with love.
And today, to find a mate – this is near impossible to quantify or comprehend.
100 years ago – let’s go back to the single school house rooms in the rural areas. How everyone went to church. You had men being “good providers” who may have worked the fields with their families. You may have had the women learning to cook, cleaning the homes. But families were tied into the community. Everyone gave to each other. They shared. Everyone had “hand me downs”. Money was scarce. Times were hard, no doubt.
But if you think of the LHOTP type of TV shows, you may have had children from as young as 5 playing in creeks together, going to school together, going to church together, seeing each other when families would visit one another. When you were 18 or so and you got married, you perhaps knew this person for a decade or more of your life. You learned a moral code with Christianity. You didn’t ever want to hurt someone for fear of shame to you and your family within the community.
Your dating pool was maybe a handful or 3 handfuls of people. You had chemistry with them from the time you were young. You grew up through adolescence together. And perhaps at 18 he went to work on a farm, in the mines, in the factory – and she took care of the home. He would come home every day to a home cooked meal. The home would be tidy. He may have been covered in coal dust or beaten down from 10 hours of hard labor. Maybe she made a pie for them for dessert.
What you see here is:
- limited dating pool
- knowing someone for many years
- families connected
- moral structures taught in church
- defined roles
- physical and emotional love
- each spouse SERVING the other. He serves her by beating his body up to provide. She serves him by keeping the house clean, food coming, clothing done, and children taken care of
I’m not trying to tell us to go back to this. I want to OBSERVE what may have worked for people to have been married for 60 years. M&G had three children. Each of them had 2 children. And of the 6 of us children, only 2 of us have 2 children (myself and my minister cousin). Can you see how this birth rate thing works?
Our birth rates are plummeting. So our country wishes to avoid a massive deflationary shock by importing people from other countries. ZERO issues with this, as long as the process is followed and we can vet in new people.
But what is it like now?
Generally speaking, women are told that if a man isn’t a 6-6-6 then he isn’t worth their time
That is, 6 figure salary, 6’ tall, and 6 pack abs.
What is then funny is if you remove those who are married, and those who are gay, this tends to be something like .5% of the male population in this country.
Then, you have the “tall dark, and handsome” so this removes us blondes and the red heads. Then, you have to look at the features of this sub group for attractiveness. This turns out to be something like .1% of the male population now fits into who is “datable” for women.
Why? Standards have changed.
Why? Infinite dating supply.
Remember above, I talked about the one room school house. The church. Today, everyone is PROGRAMMED they must go to college. This has a lot of people then having a HS sweetheart, then going off to college and having thousands of people interested in you suddenly.
If you have someone long distance, this means that you have temptation around you at all times, and if you do not have a strong Christian structure – it is possible you give in to “temptations of the flesh”. Maybe even if you are Christian, you still sin. To go from a one horse town to thousands of people who are attractive, horny, and drunk – leads to a toxic combination if you came to college with a love.
Almost everyone that goes to college with a SO ends up breaking up with them by the end of the first semester. There’s just too much temptation, too much alcohol. Too much peer pressure to fit in.
The results of this then are….
Many then find someone in college they fall for, and by the end of college they tend to marry a few years out of college. College friends are in their wedding pictures. By 25-28, you have 2 kids, and all is good.
Except now we have social media. And now what happens is maybe the college people don’t get SUPER serious because one person may want to move to California after graduation to get a new job out there, and they are now in the dating pool there in a new city and at a new job with MILLIONS of people to choose from.
Is your college sweetheart enough? Could you now be tempted by some rich and handsome doctor or lawyer if you are a woman? Could you be 25 and meet some new 22 year old college cheerleader from Texas who is an intern and wants to work in your office?
Things like Facebook can be toxic because now you see what OTHERS have. I never CARED what others have. I knew enough not to covet others. I grew up poor, and while I wish I had newer and nicer things, the newer and nicer things I eventually got never made me happy. I didn’t CARE about any of that. But what happens to all husbands – is their wives see their friends all going on these lavish trips. They live in these giant homes. And – they COVET this. They tell their husbands they want this, and if they do not get it, guess what? There are now 8 million Chads out there who will gladly scoop your wife up from you.
This means men today have pressures to deliver on someone ELSE’s unhappiness. Where 80 years ago a man may have to go ff and work in the mines, today men who do this are completely overlooked by women because women know that these men cannot give them what other men give their wives.
Men then have to work to be maximum providers, or risk losing the love of their lives. They then have to go to grad school. Do 8 side hustles. They work themselves to the bone to get their wives something that would make them happy. They save up for a year, and give her this one thing. It makes her happy for 8 minutes, and then it is off to the next thing.
Men then have to be on this hamster wheel to provide. And with this, they feel their value to the relationship is now just contributions of money to their spouse. And, of course, “a happy wife means a happy life”. That is some bullshit right there.
Furthermore, men 100 years ago didn’t go to college a ton. When they grew up working the farm, they learned basic machinery. Engines. Carpentry. Agriculture. Animal husbandry. Plumbing. Electrical. All of these basic “man” skills were part of their education on being a provider.
Today, men are told they need to get into elite colleges in order to make a decent living. They then have to take to books in HS rather than a wrench. By the time they get out of HS and college, most of us have no idea how to change oil, fix a toilet, change an electrical socket, etc. We pay service people to do this.
But when wifey wants more because her friend Sally just went on this awesome vacation to the Caribbean because her mega layer husband took them, you need to now save money. So you now have to spend years of your “free time” to figure out all of these skills to now save money, so all of these things can be taken care of without having to call in a plumber or handyman.
They all want these big houses too. So now there’s a lot of cleaning to be done, and because of where we are in society, I now have to do 50% of the cleaning. If I do only 25%, then I get shit.
This isn’t just me. This is every man I know.
And you have kids. So then on top of all of this stuff, you have to be at every one of little Timmy’s baseball practices or else you are shunned as a shit parent. Weekends where you used to have fun and date are now replaced by slaving in the yard, and then spending your time at little Timmy’s travel baseball team all day long. Timmy goes 0 for 26 on the day, but don’t worry – if you pay for private lessons, he will surely go 4-26 next week.
And guess what?
If the man doesn’t perform at all of these levels? She cheats on you with the pool boy, divorces you, kicks you out of the house, takes you for spousal support, child support – and you lose your fucking dog. Your friends vanish. Suddenly, for all of your hard work, you are living alone in a small apartment eating spaghetti Os out of a can, sitting on a lawn chair in your living room, and you have 15 more years of this before you might be able to get a sofa.
And the best part is, if you do not feel this is fair, you go to jail for not paying.
Now….
Why the FUCK would men today sign up for that?
We will touch on the woman’s perspective next. I’m not taking away from their workload – I’m telling you why men have no interest in a contract that could lead them to jail for being the best person they could be. Taking their family away from him – because he could not live up to a standard she saw on Facebook.
This has a lot of men in a mental health crisis.
And for the most part – if we FEEL love, it might be worth it. But what happens if one day she just decides to withhold love? Emotion? Sex?
She now has leverage on you to “comply or else”.
And this all stems from the woman in this case “coveting” what others have.
In Christianity, you aren’t to covet what other people have, and perhaps this could help marriages?
I want to be fair to women – which I will do in the next section.
Standards
What I may have observed 100 years ago as these children who grow up together and fall in love and marry for 60+ years may be a rarity today. How many people do you know who divorced?
How did it GET THERE?
I feel like the STANDARDS people are looking for may be the root cause. “I deserve xyz” is perhaps the core root.
You don’t deserve shit.
You give of yourself to others, as they give to you. Generally speaking, how you treat others is hopefully how you feel you should be treated. In dating today, it’s about the ME. What can I GET from THEM. This becomes a TAKING rather than finding the right person to GIVE YOURSELF to. I believe there is part of this in the bible with submission, and I do not think of it as someone enslaving another – but giving of your whole heart and being to another. To want to be led in someone’s vision of love.
But today, women want “equal”. That’s fine, but what you have just done is take the man’s leadership ability away. Where it used to be a yin and yang of serving each other in different roles, it’s now taking ALL roles and having a dividing line 50% down the middle. There is no leadership in this scenario. It thus pits people against each other to ensure the other person is giving 50% to each role. And if they fall short, you call them out in it.
This means that modern marriage today is not a yin and yang with defined roles and leadership. It is pitting people against each other in a competitive sense. Each person is now bean counting what they do and what their partner is doing, and these gaps create rifts. In theory, the gap should be filled by the person who notices it. But it becomes an opportunity to measure someone’s shortfalls. So each day, partners are now in a position to collect debts from the other on how they fell short.
What started as love, now becomes battles over the dishes. And this is a big reason that love fails. It’s the “death by a thousand paper cuts”.
Taking someone out to dinner on a Saturday isn’t going to solve this problem. You just now put another bill due to the man, and now he must take on this additional task of “wooing” her and being romantic. Eating food together doesn’t solve this, it ignores root cause problems.
In our modern society where few go to church, we are thus judged by our non-church peers for being able to be included. We need to have “couple” status to belong. With this, when the man meets the woman, his friends as “what does she look like”. If she is not of a certain attraction level, the men in his tribe will make fun of him, not invite him to things, and distance him from them. Social status is needed so he needs to find a reasonably attractive mate.
Likewise, when women meet men, her friends ask “what does he do for a living” and if he is “beneath” her social status, her friends will distance themselves from her. Meaning – outside of church, modern society – to belong, requires men and women to perform this form of ritual when finding a mate – instead of needing acceptance in the eyes of God, they need acceptance in the church of Facebook.
So this 6-6-6 standard put on men now, also happens to be the Devil’s number. Interesting, huh?
Women are this told, if you cannot land a 6-6-6 guy, you aren’t good enough. This means that 99.9% of men today aren’t good enough for women to get high social status.
And with this, became the concept of the “incel” or involuntarily celibate male. Whether you are single and an incel, or married and an incel, the implications for society as a whole are dangerous.
Birth rates have dropped off of a cliff. Men who cannot get dates from perhaps a “2” because he’s not a 6-6-6 guy are aggregating in the millions. There’s essentially a whole generation of men now who have been left behind. And with this, women online make fun of incels as “losers”. I saw Jordan Peterson cry over this, as he said it’s one of the most heartbreaking things he has had to deal with as a clinical psychologist.
But women – 100 years they were born to be the belle of the ball. To look dainty. Be feminine. “Submit” to your husband (biblical sense). Have faith in HIM. Marriage was in front of God. To promise to honor, love, and cherish – till death to you part. It meant something. It meant that man went to the coal mines to provide for his family. And the women nurtured and took care of him in return.
Today, women are thrown into the rat race from the time they are small children to compete for the same jobs as men. They all now go off to college. They all enter this rate race at 22, and the problem is now – they have rents to pay for because they didn’t get married to their college sweetheart. They now have to travel everywhere, and live this booge life to show off to their friends. They plan on grad school. And have to work 50-60 hours per week to get that raise and that promotion. Now, before they realize it, they are 32 and have no spouse and no children. They are set in their ways. Fiercely independent. They submit to NO ONE. They start looking around, and realize all men their age are already married with kids. And, men who are a little older may be divorced with children.
Any man they date at this point knows “her biological clock is ticking. She is going to pressure me into marriage and children quickly, and I cannot rush getting married – because I have a REAL risk here of her marrying me, popping out kids – then taking me financially for all I have, and if I don’t pay, I go to jail. Fuck that. Maybe I can date a 22-26 year old that is interested in a family but I can take a few years to get engaged with her and get to know her first”.
And now, there is a crisis of women over 30 that no man wants to marry. These women over 30 are now also demanding the 6-6-6 person. Or, they aren’t good enough.
Then, the funny thing happens. Maybe they get a date with their 6-6-6 man. Maybe he is a “9” and she is a “6”. Given his social status, he can’t marry a 6. So she wants him, but he doesn’t NEED her. What is now happening is these 6-6-6 men who are in high demand? None of them NEED to get married. They literally have harems of women they can call whenever they want.
The funny part? The woman in this gets her “social status” by telling her friends she’s dating this amazing guy. What she is not telling her friends, is this guy has his way with her and kicks her out. When she finally does get the shits of it, she can’t break up with him.
How can she go from a Chad she could see and have a great time with once every few weeks to then “settling” for a “7” who is not a 6-6-6? Her EGO will not let her. She now has social status of this incredible guy, but now her friends are calling this guy a jerk because he won’t commit to her.
The STANDARDS set now in society by SOCIAL MEDIA have:
- Assured our lower birth rates
- Assured divorce rates will increase
- Assured us more single parent homes will exist
- Increased our workforce for GDP and tax purposes
None of these outcomes have benefited the nuclear family.
ALL of these outcomes have come because people have lost their way from Christianity.
Women are put in these incredibly hard positions. They are told they must enter the rate race, have a 6-6-6 guy, and if they don’t they will be shunned by their peer group.
The solution for both incels and the women who need a 6-6-6 guy?
Change their standards. How?
Change your peer group? How?
Read the bible and walk into a church.
While this doesn’t assure a perfect outcome, I can tell you in even my very limited reading of it, I am wanting to be a better husband every day. I may never be perfect, but I am trying. I can see how some of my ways can negatively affect marriage. Does my wife have to be Christian? No. But can I see how a lot of this might help her? Yes. Could both of us reading this help our marriage? I think so.
Competition
I can see a lot of similarities now between capitalism and modern dating. The same people who say they are “anti-capitalism” also wish to ensure they have the maximum dating pool possible. These are not congruent belief structures.
In a socialist society, competition is limited. One thing immigrants that come here from Communist regimes comment on is the toothpaste section at a grocery store. In their home countries, there was maybe one type of toothpaste the government approved. Here, we have endless competition. If you have a good product, and you market it correctly, you can make a killing in the toothpaste industry here. But now imagine there’s all of these tooth pastes and one plain package that says TOOTHPASTE. All of the others talk about how they make your teeth white. Others have cavity reduction. Others are colorful! 10 different flavors!
Then you see TOOTHPASTE and ignore it.
This is modern dating in the sense that when you leave the church – and enter the dating world of millions of people with internet dating, you have millions of colorful tubes of toothpaste to pick up and look at the package to see what’s in it, and what it does for you.
Now I want to go back to standards for a minute. If only one out of 1000 men are “good enough” for you to marry, you now need to market yourself to him.
What do you THINK you need?
- Boss bitch. College degree. Great job
- Insta. Gotta show a lot of skin and how fabulous and interesting you are
- Bikini body at all times, let’s now wear skin tight yoga pants to the gym to market ourselves to Chad, and anyone else who pays attention to us we will label as a creep and lurker so they aren’t associated with us at the gym and I am available for Chad
- Put down other women to club competition like a baby seal
The truth is, this is all you need:
- Be moderately attractive and take care of yourself a bit
- Be agreeable, loving, and desire him
Done.
But in the reverse, if you are a man without a 6 pack, and you do not meet the 6-6-6 thing, you have to find your product differentiator.
- Are you attractive?
- Are you intelligent?
- Are you interesting?
- Are you accomplished?
- Can you build a house with your own two hands?
- Are you a good earner/provider?
- Are you exciting?
- Are you a world traveler?
- Are you funny?
- Are you talented?
Whatever you put on your brand of toothpaste now is how you have to market yourself in social circles for acceptance.
In my personal case, I am 5’9.5”. I don’t have a six pack, I have had a keg around my waist at times. I never had problems getting dates, as I always marketed myself well. I have been a good earner. Intelligent.
But what happens if your core identity for social status is intelligence and your tribe starts to attack it? If you do not defend yourself, perhaps the reason your partner is with you? Maybe your tribe tries to humiliate you or question your intelligence?
Because of how we are setup in society, and because I don’t have this six pack – an attack on my intelligence is an attack on my tooth paste brand, and I MUST shut down this attack, or my social status is eroded. And, if I’m married, perhaps if my social status is then questioned, my wife loses her social status with her peers and maybe wishes to divorce me.
I know this sounds silly, but work through the mechanics. Minor league ball player marries the pretty girl. She isn’t marrying him for the tiny salary – but he is amongst perhaps the top 1% physically. While he doesn’t have the 6-figure salary now, perhaps in a few years he may have an EIGHT figure salary! She invests in him now. But what if he never makes it to the majors? How many of those marriages fail when she realizes she is now married to an insurance agent or car salesman and barely getting by?
When social status changes for a man, his relationship is threatened. I have run into this a lot in my life. I feel like someone is attacking me, and I have to defend myself. But I don’t do measured responses. I go nuclear to show my people to stop trying to attack me, or I will destroy you. I win these battles. But I am left hollow inside and feel terrible about what I just did. Why do these people try to attack my social status? My identity? My talents? Is it to bring me down to make them feel better? Is it to hurt me? I struggle to understand why someone would do this to me, and I defend myself. My understanding of the bible from when I was a kid was “turn the other cheek”. But in THIS WORLD to turn the other cheek means to – lose social status, and perhaps lose your love interest.
So competition in this sense is creating a situation where you are measuring a man on 6-6-6 and social status rather than….being a good man and provider.
Simple as that.
So how do we get out of this trap?
- Decrease your exposure to social media.
- Decrease the social influences in your life who judge you
- Continue to improve yourself daily – physically, emotionally, and spiritually to better serve your SO
- Find other social circles who may judge you for who you are as a person, and not the toothpaste labels
I find the DESIRE to serve my spouse to be the top of my priorities every day. Often, I feel I let her down. I don’t measure up. I’m not good enough. I didn’t clean good enough. Every night, I go to bed feeling like a failure. Often, I don’t feel the love I give is reciprocated. She may feel the same way. I don’t know.
I know last week I sent her flowers for no reason at all. I was thinking about her, and wanted to just do something nice. She eventually got them. She posted it on social media. It was a really nice picture!
But I also realized we post things into our social media for status. Those who don’t post are more or less forgotten about. Maybe the flowers show her friends I love her. Maybe her friends then break the balls of their husbands over me doing this and they are mad at me because I now made them buy flowers for their wives. Maybe my writings about the universe are meant to get social acceptance of my intelligence. I love to write. But I do it for ME. I post on things because I am excited about ideas and love to talk about ideas. I want to influence others through spirited debate and exchange of ideas. But the level of toxicity I am dealing with on the other side – it’s the same evil I saw when I saw when Charlie Kirk was murdered. While I grew up in a Christian way of doing things – but became an atheist, the people I am debating have no sense of God or kindness in them. And I have to remove that to remove the same malaise I felt when I saw hundreds of thousands of people celebrate Charlie Kirk’s death. Many continue to ask why I support Trump because of his poor character. What I am seeing now, in a sense, is an avenging angel of sorts fighting this battel for Christians all of the world so they do not have to suffer what I have seen on the other side of these debates. He is not meant to play fair. He is there to win. I am now stepping back from this type of debate to cleanse myself of this. I will always be up to share idea with anyone. But I can’t get involved in the trenches with people anymore. It tears me apart on the inside to fight this. He is an imperfect man who is using any and all means necessary to him to fight the evil we are all seeing.
I don’t care who you vote for. I care how you treat me. If you come at me hard now, I will simply turn the other cheek. Someone is now fighting for me who has a higher calling.
But I have been mean to people hundreds of times over the years in arguments on social media. I am there because I want to keep in touch with people. I love to discuss ideas. But My OCD more than not has me reading something, or seeing someone’s comment to me as attacking my social status. I wish I had better control over this, and Proverbs seems to have enforced my thinking that I need to stop doing this.
Part of me feels sometimes like Thomas Paine and want to share ideas to influence others politically. I do this to try and provide a better life for my children, so I can advocate for a society they can grow up in that is good and decent.
The funny thing is, I am the parent of a 17 year old who I admire – in the sense that he got a good religious education. He is being raised by Godly people who have raised a good, decent, and honest young man who will do well in this world as long as he is not corrupted by the 6-6-6 plague that is taking over everything.
My wish for him is to stay with his church. Honorably date some nice young woman. Find ways to serve each other under God. Treat her as your soul mate. Provide for her and your children. Be able to look yourself in the mirror every night and take account for the good, and what you need to improve upon.
But he went through confirmation, and he is the one who told me about how the bible was constructed. Blew my mind. I am not a good Christian. By Christian measures, I’m a terrible human being who tried to do the best navigating this world – and tried to do right by everyone in his life. I struggle because I know how hard I try. And I struggle because I know I can’t change the world into this wonderful place for everyone’s children down the road.
I struggle with my ego. I struggle because I know that I am not a 6-6-6 and in this world today, I am not valued unless I promote my shiny brand of toothpaste.
Much of me longs to just be TOOTHPASTE and be ignored by everyone….
Except my wife and children. My close friends. My family.
While I cannot cleave everyone from my life on social media, when I retire someday – I wish to re-write the brand. I won’t NEED that identity to provide anymore. I won’t need to go on the hamster wheel of death to provide. I won’t need to spend hours a day inventing new income streams to pay child support and pay for college for kids and give them a good life.
I think I am very interested and invested in seeing how my 17 year old’s life turns out when he lives a path where he only cares about his church, his family, and his relationship with God.
For me?
I don’t think it’s too late for people. We have this competition we are in to get resources and social status. But a big part of me wants to soon transition from that identity to one where I can just not give a shit what people think because my social status will not affect my income. Maybe my wife and I are late comers to reading the bible and find different social circles where we are valued differently.
I don’t know what the future holds. I can tell you that a big part of why I am seeking spirituality is I have run to the end of the world on the hamster wheel and wish to have a different relationship with my wife than the 50/50 and yelling at each other and trying to be everything for her that I can’t be. I want her to know my vows to her to stay with her through everything were meant. And I wish to have a relationship where we serve each other – for no one else’s consumption than our own.
You talk to anyone who is married – and you will find issues. My grandparents, God bless them, had their own issues. But they loved and served each other, and that was how they got through things. It doesn’t mean you have to be perfect. It means you need to:
- Stop coveting. Be grateful every day for a roof over your head, food in your belly, and a wonderful family to come home to. When you covet, you create a thirst that can never be quenched.
- Hold your tongue (turn the other cheek)
- Serve each other
- Remove poor social influences on you
- Find better social influences – church? the bible?
- Define roles
- Have some form of leadership you decided on yourselves
- Try to improve yourself every day – not for you – for your spouse and children. Serve them
- Find ways you can look at yourself in the mirror every night.
- Find ways to help your neighbor. Not to ask for things in return, but to give to someone who needs your help
- Have children. As many as you can. Stop caring about money and start caring about love. “Be fruitful and multiple” is how you increase the birth rate and continue civilization.
I believe if all of us do not realize what our American culture has become, we risk the entire loss of the Christian-based society we have been built and operated on for 250 years.
None of this means you need to run out to church tomorrow. It means what I am writing here feels to be a dissection of how we may be blessed to have a 60 year marriage.
My grandparent’s legacy is not one of preaching to me. It was showing me how love is supposed to be. That Christmas tree. 6 of us grandchildren. 6 parents, grandparents. That is what love feels like. And I got a wood toy truck and a yarn blanket that are my prized possession today. My childhood fun wasn’t lavish trips around the world. It was running around in their back yard catching fireflies until it was dark and playing with my cousins. It was fishing with my father. Sitting on the deck with my mother drinking coffee. It was mozzarella sticks at Dennny’s with my brother.
Somehow, someway, we were convinced that all of the toothpaste brands in the world were the path to go on. I am starting to realize the comfort in just building a better product without any of the marketing. And maybe embrace those friends and family more who did try to point me on a good path. And maybe pull back more from social media/commentary. Or be kinder in my replies.
April 9, 2026 at 3:28 pm
spot on. Far too often, something better comes along and the woman bolts out of there.