October 24th, 2020
I had lunch with my pastor recently and we got talking about some of the things I’ve been working on and why I’m working on them when it came to my reading of the Bible. It was a good conversation that I very much appreciated and I wanted to take the time to summarize my thoughts as it related to what we talked about. He was curious about why I had decided to do all this reading and exploration of the Bible and other related books. My response was that it was sparked by a desire to have a healthy marital relationship. My counselor and I have discussed 5 things or “compatibilities” that make or break a relationship: money, in-laws, friends, politics, and religion. It is certainly simplistic but makes sense to me as I have seen and experienced these things being an issue when it comes to some of my family’s marital endeavors. I asked if he could send me where these come from and he sent the following links: The Gottman Method, Why do People Divorce?, Reasons for Divorce and Recollections of Premarital Intervention: Implications for Improving Relationship Education. I haven’t read these resources yet, but skimming them I can tell that it is a bit more complicated than what we have outlined. I’m sure I will get into it more at some point in the future though. The way I’ve used the 5 “compatibilities” has been as a sort of compatibility check: is the other person concerned about personal finance and making good decisions? Do they lean too far right or too far left politically for me to be comfortable with? Are they an overzealously religious person that just takes what their pastor says at face value? I’ve only just started thinking about these things. In the past, not really thinking about these things has led to missing certain red flags in people or getting too excited about someone too quickly. The main goal of keeping these things in mind and exploring them is to identify incompatibilities early on so that I don’t fall down the rabbit hole of pining over someone who is unavailable and potentially incompatible. This all may be misguided (as I’m sure I will find out upon reading the above resources), but I’ve found it to be a useful way to avoid pursuing detrimental relationships, plus it has allowed me to identify specific red flags for me and to focus on myself more to understand why those are red flags and to also improve myself and make myself into the best partner I can be. I will be diving into the resources above and compiling my thoughts on them once I’m finished with the New Testament and am reading some of the dating books that I have. Sticking with the 5 “compatibilities” for the time being, I’ve figured out, for the most part, some of my money concerns from my parents and feel that I have a pretty good grasp on it. In-laws and friends wouldn’t be too much of a concern from my side since there isn’t much interference from my family and friends in my everyday life and I feel the issues that crop up can be abated by establishing appropriate boundaries with the help of counseling if necessary. While I’ve skirted around the circumference of politics and religion for a while, I haven’t really explored my beliefs in detail though. As a result, when I was talking to a potential partner who was fairly religious, I was at a bit of a loss. I seemed to be seeing red flags but I didn’t understand why. We seemed to be compatible and had a lot of the same values, but we seemed to be disconnecting on the religious aspect. This is is what sparked my desire to actually read and understand the Bible. I wanted to understand where this other person was coming from because we seemed to be in tune elsewhere. For the longest time though, I have been avoidant when it came to overly religious people as that is not what I grew up with. I grew up in a Methodist church which was pretty lowkey and when I went to college most of the Christian organizations were too “extra” for me. I ended up not getting involved with a church community until I graduated with my master’s 7 years later (and I joined a Methodist church again, why I didn’t join one in college, I have no idea). I want to understand things now though so that I can be articulate when I speak, understand where others come from, and help other people understand where I’m coming from (and also to keep myself from falling into the trap of feeling shame because I don’t believe what someone else believes specifically). Another thing that has piqued my curiosity is the current state of politics. I don’t have a full picture of this, but it seems that there is a lot of religion that finds its way into politics. The pandemic has also allowed me to spend some time reflecting as well, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to dive into things. In summary, though, I think it’s important to have certain compatibilities in a relationship, one of the compatibilities is religion-specific, therefore I should figure out what role religion plays in my life. The question remains, why do I think it’s important to identify these compatibilities and do this deep dive into the Bible. My pastor had asked me a teleological question, “to what end?”. I’m doing all of this stuff to get into a marital relationship, but what do I do when I get into that relationship? I’ve long had the desire to raise my children in a church community (albeit the right church community or the least damaging) as I feel it is good to socialize them with people who have the same values that I want to instill. This ultimately stems back to a desire to raise my children the best way I possibly can. There are countless books and resources available to parents on how to raise children and me being studious and having the disposition to trust expert opinions makes me what to read and absorb them so I can in fact raise my children optimally (at the very least I would like to avoid making obvious mistakes). I feel that it is hard work to raise children and we can easily fall into habits that make things easier in the short term but end up being damaging in the long run. One example I can think of is scolding children for having negative emotions and telling them that they need to “change their attitude”. I can see this leading to the child suppressing their emotions later in life rather than learning how to manage them. By working on making an appropriate response habitual to something like this, I would hope that when a difficult situation arises I would be able to respond in a positive way that leads to growth and development within the child (Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity). This all stems back to my desire to live the best life that I possibly can. Essentially I want to win at life, but for me, that doesn’t mean accumulating wealth or power. One of the habits from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey is to “begin with the end in mind”. I wasn’t able to find it again, but I remember Stephen asking “when you are on your death bed what sort of legacy do you want to leave behind?”. This has in a sense reframed my thought processes so that I picture myself at the end of my life asking if I can honestly say that I made a positive impact in the world. I feel that having a family around my deathbed with the knowledge and confirmation that I treated them well would be a good indicator of that. The answer to the question of “to what end?” is the end of my life. I want to have a family that I love and cherish that I hope would love and cherish me back. The first step to this is to find someone compatible enough to build this family, but before I can know if someone is compatible, I need to figure out who I am and what I believe in. A side effect of the connected world we live in is that we come in contact with many people with many differing beliefs. This is a problem that our ancestors never had because they were confined to their particular communities and didn’t comingle with those who had differing beliefs. Their beliefs were the beliefs of the community and it was a good way to keep the social cohesion strong. Being social animals, we humans want that social cohesion, but with the advent of the internet and social media, it’s becoming apparent that our old tribalistic tendencies are not the best way to operate in the world. I just finished watching The Social Dilemma on Netflix and it illuminated these issues in detail. One of the take-aways I got from it was the amount of damage it does not only to society but to children in particular. This is something that I see as being something that would cause harm to the development of my children and something I would want to actively counter. One of the people they interviewed mentioned three simple rules that make life easier and are justified by the research. The first rule is all devices out of the bedroom at a fixed time every night, whatever the time is half an hour before bedtime, all devices out. The second rule is no social media until high school/16 years of age, middle school is hard enough without adding social media into the mix. The third rule is to work out a time budget with your kids, ask “how many hours a day do you want to spend on your device, what do you think is a good amount?”, they usually say something pretty reasonable. These are the kinds of rules that I would want to implement to promote the development of my children in a healthy way. I think I can say at the moment that my parenting philosophy is to raise my children in a way that promotes long term wellbeing based on cultivating good parental habits that make life easier and are justified by the research. I will be exploring parenting at some point in the future and I hope that I may be able to expand on this philosophy and provide more detail and justification for it. Concluding this post I wanted to list the books that were mentioned in the documentary so that I may remember them and dive into them later: Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O’Neil, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt, and The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff.