Like and Marriage

I picked up a book that I’m hot-potato-ing right away. The last time I had a dating book laying around the hottest date I ever had came over while it was on my coffee table. Mortification only fully set in once he’d left! Lori Gottlieb’s book “Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough” would probably end up mortifying a date, but I found it downright fascinating.

Gottlieb, nearing 40, finally discovers her main hang-ups as to why she hasn’t married. She hasn’t been dating marriageable men. She has impossible standards. She isn’t attracted to what in a man is most valuable in marriage. She’s been holding out for ‘better’ than the present. She’s looking for romance over friendship and partnership.

Truthfully, I think I understand. She doesn’t like men with bow ties and names like ‘Sheldon’; I don’t enjoy men with poor grammar who chew with their mouth open. These peripherals shouldn’t be non-negotiable, yet are highly distracting when trying to establish a relationship.

The real kicker is that there is a mathematics to relationships. I figured that my living abroad during the majority of my 20’s meant that I have an interesting resume, not that I’d come back to find all the men I ever knew married! Well, except the ones who don’t plan to marry. Still plenty of those.

But I have to admit it was the writing style, organization and story-telling of Gottlieb that mainly interested me. Her sentences were unsentimental (phew) and her examples true. I could read a book on bird-watching if it were so well-written.

Overall, Gottlieb expresses the need to be open-minded in dating, which, when paired with realism and a sense of what is necessary in a relationship, not merely dreamy, convinces me it’s probably possible to find Mr. Good Enough, even in Seattle.

Oh, and her section quotes are good. Three Germans and a Frenchman’s words are used to set the stage.

“It is not lack of love but lack of friendship that makes for unhappy marriages.” Friedrich Nietzche

“Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.” Goethe

“Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.” Sigmund Freud

“The perfect is the enemy of the good.” Voltaire

Prayer

I’ve often admitted that holding onto a book awhile before reading it only intensifies my curiosity. Checking books out of the library is easy. Getting them read within a couple weeks and returned is not. After renewing my hold on The Greatest Prayer: Rediscovering the Revolutionary Message of THE LORD’s PRAYER the maximum amount, I finally read it this week, past due.

Surely something that John Dominic Crossan writes was bound to be as revolutionary as the prayer itself. Having only really prayed the Lord’s Prayer in earnest in recent years, I knew there was more to it than I ever heard in Sunday school. To say that it was given as little credence as possible in my ‘the only rule is no rule’ childhood church is light. But, I knew it was important. I knew I didn’t know why.

Although I never opened the book, I carried it around enough for my brother-in-law to comment on the author, mentioning that he didn’t think I’d appreciate the theology. Of all the things I’ve discussed with my brother-in-law, it’s seldom theology, so I thought Crossan must be a process theologian. However, in just about his opening lines, he decisively rejects that theology. Hmm, my interest is more greatly piqued.

Crossan instead dives into the historical and biblical relevance of the poetic phrasing and wording of this universal, great prayer. Although some aspects of this prayer have always been more difficult than others to understand (a modern Americans’ understanding of kingdom, for example), I found that on every single level I had much to learn.

My primary question of God is will. I understand the elements: love, kindness, peace, humility. I never understood Jesus’ acceptance of ‘God’s will’ and praying for the same will, always having naturally combined the Lord’s Prayer and Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane. I never could align how Jesus dying could possibly be God’s will. (Jesus acting out righteousness causing him to be killed I get.) I can understand immediately how Jesus resurrecting is God’s will. In the discussion of this prayer, Crossan gave me a new viewpoint by which to consider God’s will.

Through the reading of the Lord’s Prayer in historical context and theological detail my future praying will be infused with greater enthusiasm, and hopefully inspiration for my part in this household of God’s.