Making Great Conversationalists: Chapter 10 - Part Three

Subbing for a few middle school classrooms last week brought back memories of how new, wonderful and completely exasperating the waves of adolescent emotion are.  Watching and dealing with pre-teens and young teenagers was rather tiring for me - but that's nothing compared to the exhaustion that comes from managing the sudden thirst for independence that hits right around the time that young people first look at another person in their age group and think, "I really want to kiss them!"  One of my strongest memories was of a substitute teacher we often had.  Most of the other students didn't like her because she was rather strict, but I liked her because she generally brought a knitting or crocheting project to keep her hands busy.  In other words, pre-teen Mel saw a kindred spirit.   One of my compatriots asked her if she missed being in junior high.  Without missing a stitch, she laughed and said "Never.  No one could pay me enough to be a junior high school student again. I know well meaning people are always telling you that you have it made - no job, free schooling, no worries - but I found junior high to be one of the most frustrating and least enjoyable experiences of my life.  High school was better.  College was much better - but being an employed adult was far better than any of those times."   Hearing that was such a relief to me!  I wanted to do more, to know more, to be more - but I didn't know if I was ever going to feel less haphazard, lost and angst-ridden.  What if the rest of my life I kept feeling like I did at 11 or 12 or 13 - but picked up more responsibilities?  Would I ever be able to talk to a boy without turning beet-red and alternating between awkward silence and a torrent of words?  Would a boy ever like me?  Would I find a boy that I liked - and who liked me?

Everything felt completely overwhelming at the time - but looking back 25 years later I have to admit that the substitute teacher's statement that junior high sucks was dead-on.  Academics got harder as time went on, but I also became much more skilled in logic, mathematics, critical thinking, research, writing and speaking so the overall process was easier.   Working at a job did bring different demands, but even being a bagger-utility-worker-janitor brought a feeling of satisfaction and spending cash.   As I became more skilled at communicating with boys I was attracted to, I realized in hindsight that I probably could have gone on "dates" - such as they were - with 4-5 of my classmates in junior high if I had recognized the fact they were attracted to me.  The biggest breakthrough I made in my life was realizing that if I avoided romantic relationships to prevent the pain of a broken heart, I'd end up suffering more pain by closing down otherwise healthy, happy relationships.  I'd be paying interest on a debt that never came due.   Equally important was the realization that broken hearts heal.  I've had more crushes than I can remember, more first dates than I can remember easily, and a handful of long-term relationships.  Obviously, all of those except one ended.   Sometimes I was crushed, but the pain does fade over time.

Presumably if you ask Steven and Teri Maxwell or Geoffrey and Victoria Botkin to honestly recount their romantic experiences prior to marrying their spouse, you'd get a story not dissimilar to mine.  Lots of crushes, some dating experience, dating your future spouse and eventually marrying your spouse is a pretty standard trope.   And yet, they state that the dating process has ruined marriages beyond repair.  They've created an alternate, non-standard form of romantic pairing known as "courtship" that is supposed to protect the hearts and bodies of their kids prior to marriage - but the track record on protecting hearts, protecting bodies and finding suitable marriage partners is shaky at best.  The Maxwells have married off four of their sons, leaving one son and three daughters unmarried.  The Botkins have fared worse with three married sons along with two unmarried sons and two unmarried daughters.  Sons have a better chance at marrying for a few reasons.  Males are allowed to earn a living which takes them out of the family enclave into the wider world where they can meet eligible women.  Males are allowed to initiate courtships without the involvement of their families of origin.  The reproductive penalty of age is much weaker for men than women so that a CP/QF man who decides to marry at age 35 could still have a very large family if he marries a woman in her early twenties.  For example, Sarah Maxwell's brother Christopher married a woman nearly 10 years younger than him when he was 32 and they currently have 5 children.   Meanwhile, Sarah is unmarried at 36.

I bring this up because the Maxwells use the end of Chapter 10 to harp on the importance of deciding in advance how unmarried children should deal with conversations with people of the opposite gender.  The Maxwells try to seem impartial, but based on the stories they chose to share, they show a tendency towards preventing communication between girls and boys.  Let's move into the quotes:

We encourage families to discuss and to set guidelines for boy/ girl conversations. Some think nothing of girls initiating conversations with boys or vice versa. Other say that they shouldn't be allowed until the young people are ready for courtship. Some families only want their children involved in conversations with the opposite gender once a courtship is started. (pg. 170)

The first memorable fact in this quote for me was the fact that the guidelines that my husband, myself, and everyone I know from our generation who is happily married was completely skipped over.  My parents didn't worry about me talking to boys.  I could initiate the conversation or the guy could.  They trusted that my crushes of my tween and early teen years wouldn't kill me - and emotional purity wasn't on their radar.  Actually, it was barely on anyone's radar since "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" wasn't written until 1997 when I was a 9th or 10th grader.

The second interesting idea for me was how absolutely silent our junior high years would have been if only guys were allowed to initiate conversations with girls.  Looking back, there were two...perhaps three.... guys in my class of 34 6th graders who might have been brave enough to start a conversation with a girl.  Not letting girls start conversations with boys is crazily archaic - and I'm pretty sure it would make a church youth group an ice-cold war zone with all of the girls staring wistfully at boys who are mostly oblivious to the romantic longings of the boys.  Since the girls can't talk to the boys to realize that the boys are just not that into them yet, the girls would end up jockeying for position with other girls to catch the boy of their dreams.

CP/QF land has a truism - no matter how crazy one idea is, there is someone who holds a more extreme idea that make the first crazy idea seem sane.  Teaching daughters to let guys lead a conversation seems surprisingly sane compared to making them wait to talk to boys until the teens are courtship age....or actively in a courtship.   I'm assuming most families put off courtship until a teen is of marriageable age so I'm thinking there are families that instruct their teenagers to avoid conversations with the opposite sex until age 18-20.  For the Maxwell males, courtship age is based mainly on their ability to own a home outright which means they can't court until they are in their early 20's.   Many people put off dating seriously until at least their early twenties - but I've never met anyone who avoided conversations with the opposite sex before then.  I'm sure people of certain groups who prefer extremely structured arranged or semi-arranged marriages do that, but I've never known someone from one of those groups well. 

Putting off any conversation with the opposite sex until a young adult is in a courtship sounds like a recipe for disaster for fundamentalist Christians.   The leaders creating the courtship models are trying to force the most extreme form of parental involvement available in arranged marriages along with highly chaperoned interactions with the opposite sex without changing the US narrative that people fall in love first and get married second.  Let's write out what that looks like in the ideal outcome: two extremely sheltered young people who have had very little experience outside of their own family system are talking to each other trying to decide if they should get married.  That would be insanely awkward at best - and a total train wreck at worst.

For any poor deluded souls who think like I do, the Maxwells spell out the possible consequences:

Please realize that there can be dangers with boy / girl conversations. While it starts innocently, heart attachments can easily grow. That is a total unknown when of the first conversations occur. Many grieving parents have come to us when a child has become emotionally and then sometimes physically involved. That could have been avoided if the family had boy/girl conversation policies in place and adhered to. (pg. 171)

The Maxwells must have much looser standards for physical intimacy than I do.  I can safely say that I've talked to a few hundred thousand men in my life between school, church and, oh yeah, working as a cashier/bagger/pharmacy clerk/ men's department clerk for eight years.  Of all of those men, I probably went on dates with 15 of them total and have had sex with one of them.   In other words, talking with a guy - even an attractive, funny, smart, kind guy - is not even associated with sexual activity in my life let alone a causal effect. 

The emotional purity component is even stupider.  Why are romantic attachment the only form of relationships that "give pieces of your heart away"?  The only time I've felt like I lost a chunk of my heart is when I had my younger brother die and when my best friend died.   I have fallen deeply in love with men other than my husband and the break-up of those relationships hurt - but even that pain paled in comparison to losing a sibling and a friend who was like a sister to me.   

I love my husband in a way that is similar to and yet completely different than the ways I loved other men.  We had that whole infatuated-walking-on-air-he's-the-bestest-person-ever phase that I've had with other men - but my husband is the only person I've built a life with.   We own a home together.  We've weathered career changes together.  We've cared for elderly relatives together.  We produced an amazing child whom we are raising together.   None of those life-giving activities have been undermined by the fact that we had kissed other people (and each other) before we married. 

Our last vacation together before our son was born was a trip up to Mackinac Island.  We had both been there previously with other people we were dating - and our trip together was phenomenal!  Being up their gave us a chance to share all of our previous memories with each other and create new ones.  Awesome new memories like trying to help a guy in a rented surrey get his understandably confused horse to turn left.  See, the guy was reining his horse in and holding the reins out to the left which made the horse stop while failing to signal the horse to go left.  We explained that he needed to release the reins so the horse could move its head, then gently pull the left rein back so the horse could move her head to the left and her body would follow.   My husband and I started encouraging the horse to move left by talking calmly, but firmly to her like "Hey, now, boss* now.  Let's go left, girlie.  There you go.  Goooood, boss. Gooood, boss" while pointing left.  The horse looked relieved like "Oh, Thank you, Horse God for sending these nice people to help the weird stranger to stop pulling my head back."  The horse was easing into a nice left turn when the driver decided to pull back on the reins again causing the horse to prop to a stop.   We wished him a nice day and wandered off since we only had so many times we were willing to help someone who wasn't listening to directions :-).   

Guess what?  That's a unique memory that I share with my husband that is completely different from my memories of other trips to Mackinac.  Corollary: If I am widowed or divorced someday, I may well remarry.  Visiting Mackinac with my second spouse would be equally awesome because we'd create our own memories separate from our previous relationships. 

I'm so over this EmoPure crap. 

In case there was any question about where the Maxwells fall on the spectrum, they included this lovely guideline from some other family shared with them.

Here's an example one family shared with us on the boundaries they place on the boy / girl conversations for their family. " When we hand out tracts or do any ministry, we always pair the children. Even in business, we try to have Isaac talk with a male customers and Morgan with the female customers. We know there could be danger with lengthy conversations with those of the opposite gender." (pg. 171)

*blinks*

Here's a conversation that's never happened to me in 8 years of customer service:

Me: "Hello!  Did you find everything you needed today?"

Customer: "I sure did!  You are so great!"

Me: "That's great.  Can I interest you in a fountain pop?"

Customer: "I love you so much!  I want to spend my life with you!"

Me: "......so that's a "no" on the pop, I guess."

Customer: "Ha, ha, ha!  No pop - just a lifelong romance with you!"

Me: "Huh.  I could do worse, I guess.  Let's have sex.  I'm scheduled for a break in 20 minutes."

Yeah, that's palpably absurd - but it's the type of situation that the Maxwells and Maxwellite followers imply will happen if Morgan is allowed to give out tracts to men or Isaac answers a woman's questions at his family's business.    I'm starting to believe that the CP/QF folk have much lower boundaries for sexual activity to occur since they live in dread fear that their kids will have sex with random business customers if left to their own devices.

Good news: The end of this book is rapidly approaching!

*I'm really not a horse person, but I'm aware the term "boss" is supposed to be used for cows, not horses.  Since I spend most of my time around cows, "boss" just slipped out.  Ironically, most of the people who staff stables during the busy season on Mackinac Island are ex-Amish or Mennonites who speak Pennsylvania Dutch so the horse visibly relaxed when I said "boss" because the professional teamsters pronounce "horse" as "hoss"....so from the horse's point of view I must know what I was doing.