We Is the Reward for Doing God's Will – Part I

Me is retribution for doing Lucifer's will

This is the first of a two-part series on relationships that contrast cultural vs. Biblical worldviews.

To set the table for today's article, I need to share a personal story. I was 45 years old, one year sober, divorced and had just gained sole custody of my three children aged ten, twelve and fourteen years old. The tale of how a father in my circumstances navigated the most unholy industry complex known as the family court system to achieve this feat may never be shared in these pages because the pain was too great, and no one would believe that a legal system set up to protect children in the case of divorce can utterly suck so bad at protecting children in cases of divorce. For the purpose of this story, I was single, working full time, raising three children and on my knees every morning praying to God to give me the strength to make it through one more day.

I was indeed on a hamster wheel. Each day I awoke early, rousted three children out of bed, prepared breakfast, hand-packed school lunches, shuffled the darlings off to the bus, drove to my day job, worked 8-10 hours, shopped for supplies on my way home from work, prepared dinner, reviewed homework, cleaned the house and went to bed exhausted. This was my groundhog's day. To say I did it alone would be giving my bloated ego way too much credit. I had tremendous and incalculable help from friends and family. During those infinite loop days when I awoke promptly at 6:00 AM to the sound of Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe,” I was often asked by acquaintances if I was dating? My answer was always, "Are you nuts, I have no time for such nonsense."

The reality in my mind was, adding a mate to my crazy, overprogrammed daily grind would have meant adding just another being to be fed, cared for and cleaned up after. At that time, I could see no upside to having someone to share my life with - I only saw additional burdens and the potential for further emotional pain. Besides, society said that single parents can have it all. They can raise children on their own, have careers on their own and live happy and fulfilled lives on their own. Coupling up was for chumps, I concluded. I had walked that path once and it resulted in getting the crap kicked out of me. Why should I ever walk down that "Billy club" wielding alley once again?

After five years, in a bout of weakness, and in retrospect, loneliness, I had been convinced by a friend to try on-line dating. I was then a 50-year-old divorced father of three with a nanosecond of spare time each day, yet I apprehensively signed up for an on-line dating service. I proceeded to build my profile:

Age - 50

Gender - male

Height - 6" 1'

Weight - whatever lie I thought I could get away with

Occupation - CFO

Interests - sailing, skiing, golf & traveling

I then attached several recent, nondescript photos of myself and voila, I was an active on-line dater.

Next, I entered dating match preferences into the app.

Age - 40 to 60

Gender - female

Height - 5" 4" - 6" 0'

Weight - I am not that stupid to list

Occupation - no preference

Interests - outdoor activities & travel

At this point, the app instructed me to enter the geographic circumference from my home to search for active dating candidates meeting my very general preferences. After entering 25 miles, the app churned for about 5 seconds and produced a pop-up banner, "Congratulations, 14,789 individuals match your criteria." That list being far too daunting to tackle, I then reduced the circumference to ten miles and the magic app reduced my list of potential mates by 5,000. Again, too big a list to review, so I shrunk the circumference to five miles from my house. After churning through all candidates that meet that new search request, my dating app still produced over 4,900 potential matches. With far too many profiles to review and growing impatient with the search process of finding potential individuals to date, I returned to my dating preferences and entered two more search criteria:

Religion - Christian

Politics - Conservative

I then reran the search for five miles from my home. After what seemed an eternity, the magic dating app returned the new list of women that fit my refined dating search preferences. In my Midwest metro area, with a population of 2 million people, only nine women matched my search for being a Christian, conservative, age between 40-60 years old and living with 5 miles of my house!

Despondent and exhausted from the "window shopping" for a mate, I stopped using the app to search for a date. However, with an active profile, my app feed got multiple hits per day from women reaching out to me to chat. Time being near non-existent for me and with the stress of having one more electronic gadget consuming that precious time, I canceled my membership with two and a half months still left on my subscription. I concluded that, if on-line dating was the only way I was to meet a new partner, I was going to be alone for the rest of my life. After five years of being a single parent and building my career, that didn’t seem like such an awful conclusion.

I shared that pathetic on-line dating story, not because it is unique to me, but because I believe it is all too common, especially for post-baby boomers like me. Many of us Gen X'ers, who found themselves single in the middle years of life re-emerge from a dateless cocoon into a digital world where the rules of engagement changed, have had to navigate new methods of meeting people to date.

In an ever-growing secular society, meeting datable people at church certainly has declined. Additionally, ever-changing professional standards have all but eliminated the possibility of dating people from work. Who, after all, wants “the conversation” with the humorless and heartless folks that make up company's HR department, just for attempting to ask a co-worker out for a cup of coffee? Let's face it, the more we connect with each other electronically, the less opportunity we have to connect with them physically.

For people in my generation, modern dating places us in an unfamiliar space of having to do something that is completely unnatural. That is, modern dating requires us to build our brand. This is not a business brand like a LinkedIn profile, although that does not come natural to someone of my advanced years either. I am talking about the notion of creating a personal dating brand. My generation simply has no aptitude for marketing ourselves as datable material. That is why people put a ten-year prior photo of themselves drinking a mojito in Cancun with the saying, "single mother of two children and having the time of my life" in the caption in their dating profile. Reality tells us that being single, raising children alone, struggling to work and keep a home is no walk in the park. No person in this circumstance is "having the time of their life."

Yet, for the modern dating scene, we are expecting to ignore reality of a potential date’s life in favor of buying into the personal brand narrative they put forth on their crafted profile. Not being able to get past this “reality vs. branding” dichotomy was why I tapped out of the on-line dating scene.

Quite frankly, I thought this dating quagmire was exclusive to my generation. That is until I read Olivia Reingold’s recent article, The Dating Pool Dropouts, in The Free Press. In this article, she describes the dating scene outlook for a much younger generation.

Part two of my essay will address my take on Ms. Reingold’s article and what ii means in both cultural and Biblical worldviews.