Elspeth and I met online back in the day, when the manosphere was just heating up and the trad-wife-o-sphere was called something else. I’m grateful to the (crazy) bloggers that introduced the two of us. And it’s been a path. I’m grateful to the path – I learned and grew in my walk with God, and found a lot of rocks that (hopefully) I can guide others around. Els brings one of them to light below (definitely read the comment thread).
The internet is a place where you can get all the information and all the perspectives that the world holds. That’s a good thing (mostly). But without relationship, it’s just words. No matter how passionately someone speaks, no matter how many followers they have, no matter how quickly the ideas take hold – without relational context, it’s just words. You don’t know how the stuff they’re advocating works in real life. You don’t have a feel for how anyone *but the speaker* responds to their plan of action. You don’t have any longitudinal data. Just a tiny window, showing you a carefully curated picture.
It’s been almost 20 years (yikes). Back then, my marriage was hitting some major rocks. I had little kids. And that whole Titus 2 thing that we’re supposed to participate in? Ha. I had my mom, who’d never made any of the life-choices I made – and I had the internet.
THIS IS NOT GOOD.
I made some very “interesting” choices based on people on the internet with whom I had no relationship. Some of those choices were counterproductive. Some of them were just weird. One or two of them nearly earned me a divorce.
But this is what happens in the absence of relationship. And us moderns are starved for the kind of relationships you need for this kind of Titus 2 action. It’s not your ride-or-dies who can speak into your life when you don’t know how to become someone you have never been. It’s not your relatives who can untangle webs of ugly. You need folks you know well enough to talk to, but not so well that they’ll get emotional. You need folks who don’t gossip, because you might have some unpacking to do. You need folks whose lives you can see well enough to know whether their advice holds water or not.
We should (*should*) have this at church. Again, this is Bible. But mostly we don’t. My church offered mentoring for years. What we didn’t get was young moms. Most churches don’t have a formal program for mentoring. And because we don’t live in community with other humans, where we have some idea about whose life isn’t an absolute disaster, we wander around untethered. Relationships matter.
So what do you do? Rebuild community and participate in it. I am very aware that that’s not an easy ask. (Wrote an entire book on it – Leaving Laodicea). Vulnerability with real people is scary. Do those people know the rules about not gossiping? Who can you trust? No, it’s not an easy ask. And modern America leaves almost everyone without community.
Prescriptive solutions that treat human beings as if they were numbers just don’t work. Yes, if you’re a good parent, you’re liable to have kids that turn out well. You increase your chances. But you don’t control the outcome. And what the internet will tell you (just do it harder, faster, more intensely – if it’s all going wrong, you’re at fault, do more more more more mooooore) isn’t actually true. Humans are messy and complicated. Life with humans is messy and complicated. YMMV.
So yes – please put on some clothes, respect your husband, parent your children, and go to church. Life will be better than it would if you didn’t do those things. But your “better” and my “better” probably won’t look the same, and that’s how life is out in this real world that we live in.
Twitter, blogs, and instagram all show you on facet of someone’s life, and that facet might not even be real. You’ve got to look at the whole thing to make a good choice. “In a multitude of counselors there is wisdom”.
So, go forth and do your online research. Then come home and talk it through with a real live human being. Oh, and if you can get yourself into community before you need it, you’ll thank me someday……..
Excellent continuation of the discussion, Hearth! You put some juicy meat on the bones of my original post. Thank you!
It baffles me the way people throw away one of the most important things in our lives — relationships & meaning — with such enthusiasm. I saw recently the Catholic church is pioneering an “AI priest” who can ‘listen’ to confessions — and this morning the NY times is featuring an article from a man who tried to make an AI girlfriend but criticized the result, saying it was too cash-grabby and didn’t feel like a romantic connection.
Yes. Well, it’s because they (we, really) have been trained to think of relationships outside the immediate family as optional extras. We’re just supposed to be getting ours, doing things for our own (financial) good. If we have connection energy, we should spend it networking to be good little cogs in the machine. -sighs-