Our recent culture and especially the feminist movement of the 70's and 80's wish to make men and women equal. What is confused here is the difference between equality of opportunity and "sameness."
Men and women are fundamentally different and that fact particularly affects motivation.
We learn in the Bible that as a result of the fall, women look to men for love and respect and men seek pleasure and respect mainly from their work. This is essentially the message in the 1980's best seller "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus." Many others have acknowledged the difference in men and women mainly through what we call the needs/drive motivation model. That is to say men and women are fundamentally motivated differently. Men seek pleasure from women and want to fix them when they are broken, while women just want men to listen, to care, and not see them as an object.
A recent research article in applied psychology found men typically seek status based careers while women seek "socio-emotional" satisfiers in their career choices. In Etheridge's book "Wild at Heart" men are described as desirous of fighting battles, living an adventure, and rescuing beauty while women seek to be fought for, to share the adventure, and to unveil her beauty. James Dobson often claimed that "men give love to get sex and women give sex to get love" as the exchange that draws and holds couples together on a human plane (social exchange).
Now if you believe in God or at least in some higher being that created us, why would a divine creator design men and women so differently and then say "become one and enjoy the greatest intimacy known to human kind"? I don't think God is a masochist. What's His plan or purpose for heterosexual relationships? (note: I know it is not His plan but wouldn't golfing buddies (or garden club members) get along better if they were married to each other?) See, ultimately social exchange breaks down as an adequate force to hold a relationship together. At some point there fails to be equilibrium in meeting each other's needs.
If men and women could reach high level of intimacy through social exchange, then we would not need God. Unless Jesus is the "tuning fork" in the relationship between men and women, the relationship cannot gain and maintain intimacy (the ultimate source of joy). The chromosome difference is God's plan for us to seek Him in our relationship with each other, to depend on His power to give us the grace to really love unconditionally. Agape love (grace) is the only way the chromosome difference leads to joy and not disappointment. Think about it ....
No comments:
Post a Comment