Every time I get online I tell myself I am going to write, but I just haven't the time. It frustrates me to have this much space to just spill and hopefully spark thoughts to the few people I know read, and not be able to use it. Writing is one of my passions, regardless of whether or not i'm good at it, and here I am not writing at all this summer!

I was directed to my good friend Adam's site tonight (Adam's blog) to read that post about relationships, and there was some great great stuff said there. I just wanted to comment on a few things, and I didn't want to take up a ton of space on his comment area.

He says, "One thing women really hate is being the center of attention. What I mean by this is that no girl wants to be a man’s whole living universe. This is horribly confusing for men, because they think this is what should please the girl. After all, don’t women want to be made a high priority? Good godly women will not allow you to love them more than you love God. They will become righteously insecure with you and dump you on your ass. What these women want is a man to have a vision bigger than yourself, bigger than herself, and bigger than the temporal pleasantries that surround us. They want a man to have a God-sized vision for life, which they play a special, significant role in. " How true this is. I affirm it with every fiber of my being. The second the relationship begins to become an idol, the minute I am put on a pedestal, that is the minute where some intense evaluation needs to be done.
But one thing I have definitely learned over the last couple of months that I wasn't aware of before, is that just because one member of the relationship is finding that they might be idolizing the other member a bit much (of course, any amount is too much), does not mean that the relationship is absolutely unhealthy and must be terminated. Not in the least, because if I am correct in my theory that marriage is meant to reflect God's relationships with us as being the perfect Marriage, then by that model, we should be separated from God forever every time we fall. And... while we deserve to be separated from God forever every time we put our own selfish idolatrous way above Him and His way, that is not the way grace and love and mercy and unity with the other member of the relationship work (be that our relationship with God or our relationship with the opposite sex).

Adam also says, "Everyone loves a discussion about the opposite sex because they get filled with so much competitive bantering." While I agree with this statement, I also am reminded of a very popular reason we love to discuss this stuff... we just don't get it!!! I don't think I will ever fully understand men, and I don't think men will ever fully understand me... but we can come a whole lot closer to knowing how to work around our differences by placing them in the open. There are two aspects of knowing people, I think: 1) Understanding how they work, and 2) Being able to completely relate to them. I don't think either of these are 100% possible between members of the opposite sex, but I think there are some people who do better at them than other people. I also think that you can be great at number one and terrible at number two, but not the other way around. If you can truly relate to someone, you probably understand them to a greater degree than otherwise.

Last, but surely not least, he says, "If there was ever to be an eternal question of frustration it would be trying to pinpoint the exact nature of what men desire. The reason why it is so eternal is because the motives behind the question defeat the answer. The question is asked so that men will be put in a box, thus their behavior can be predicted and understood. It’s like wanting to find out what the perfect bait is that is most effective for the purpose of getting a man to bite into a hook so he can caught and reeled in. Okay, that’s a little cynical, but for the most part men want to be their own." If I am reading this correctly, it seems that one of men's greatest desires is *not* to be figured out... not to have people (themselves maybe even included) know exactly what they want, because that would put them into a mold and subtract some of the adventure from life. And that is almost in a nutshell what women want in a man. (to make a sweeping generalization... it's not true of all men and women). And this is why guys hate the feminized version of love that is presented all over the media and in chick-flicks~ it puts men in this box of what they are to be like when they are "in love." They forego their adventurous side and show us just the soft and romantic side, which is exactly NOT what men want at all.

So all in all, I just had to commend the great thoughts flowing from the brain and fingers of my brother in the Lord and add my couple cents here and there.