Matt Walsh on Falling In Love

Matt Walsh gets a lot right a lot of the time. Overall, he makes a good point about romantic love in this column provocatively titled "I Didn't Fall In Love With My Wife". He says:

We’re bad at it because we don’t understand it, and we don’t understand it because we don’t understand love. You can’t forge a lasting marriage if all you know about love is what you learned from an Ed Sheeran song.

OK.

But here’s the reality: these were our choices, every step of the way, and that state which we’ve found ourselves falling in and out of is not real love. Real love is an act of will. A decision. A conscious activity. It is something you do and live. Love is chosen, and if it is protected and nurtured, it grows. Love is sacrifice. Love is effort.

Emphasis mine, to point out that marriage sellers themselves say these things over and over again.

He says it again:

Love is dying to the self.

If you don't want to die to yourself, don't marry! I know he says "love" but you can bet your donkey that Walsh would say that requires you marry your romantic interest.

Christian Research Institute President Hank Hanegraaff Goes Eastern Orthodox

It's time to revisit a topic I only write about once every few years. So if unless you're interested in the inside politics of Christian ministries, this entry probably won't interest you. However, I'm getting hits for some of the old entries dealing with the Christian Research Institute (CRI) and the President thereof, Hank Hanegraaff, because of some recent events.

Prom Season

Every year now, I note this ritual, which has become another day, along with "Sweet Sixteen" (or other birthdays for certain cultures, at 13, 15, etc.) and wedding days (the the related events) that are all about feeding the narcissism and sense of entitlement of attention-whores and attention-whores-in-training.

Refer back to my "Beware the Prom", and this look at a Dear Abby column, and this look at a different Dear Abby column and now this more recent entry on increasingly showy proposals for dates.

It a nutshell, here are my problems with the prom as it is these days:

1) Boys wasting money.

2) Another event where females are princess-ized, which is a problem as long as males are prevented, culturally/socially and often legally, from events that cater to them and are focused on them in a similar way. Go ahead and tell me... what event gives boys the equivalent of the prom, where the activities are all about things he wants to do, with the boys dressing the way they want to dress, the girls dressing the way the boys want them to dress, the girls paying for it and escorting the boys, and where the boys will go hang out with their friends during the event?