Babblin' Botkin: Daddy-led Dating

Howdy, folks!

Bacterial pink-eye has hit Spawn and I.  Honestly, my siblings and I seem to be missing some level of biochemical protection against bacterial pink-eye that most humans have; even as a real adult, I get a case every 3-4 years.   Spawn's a bit young for me to declare that he's a walking pink-eye magnet - but he does have our habit of going from a dry, white conjunctiva to running, oozing and bloodshot in less than two hours. 

Spawn has a great sense of timing as well.  His eyes had been a bit more gunky in the morning - but the humidity has been taking wild swings so I didn't think much of it but decided to keep a eye on it.   I looked closely at both eyes when I loaded him into his car seat on the way to physical therapy and they looked normal.   It takes about an hour to get to PT and Spawn had pulled off his glasses and was rubbing an eye when opened the van door to free him.   Between the relatively low light in the parking garage and a toddler who enjoys thwarting weird behaviors from his mother, I couldn't get a good look at the eye he was rubbing until I had him in the gym for PT.  I assumed he was a mobile biohazard site until proven otherwise which is why Robin found me sitting on the floor reading Spawn a board book on my lap.  Spawn couldn't reach anything of interest so the only thing that needed to be disinfected was the board book.   His eye was...gross.

Thankfully, his doctor got him in a few hours later.  Spawn hates eye drops - but getting them through his eyelids is a one person job compared to the eye ointment from a few months ago.

My diagnosis was even faster and easier since I showed up at an urgent care center when it opened today and said "My toddler has pink-eye that's responded well to antibiotics but my left eye is a hot mess."   After a few questions to make sure it was a superficial infection, I got my prescription for eye drops.

Normally, I'd figure out some kind transition between bacterial infections and Geoffrey Botkin, but my affected eye is weepy and itchy so I'm going to let you fill in whatever you want.

Let me just dive into a quote from the interview by Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin of their father Geoffrey Botkin:

GB: Deception 10: "Love and marriage is a 'Cupid' thing. Chemistry and all that. Dads have to stay out of the way and let Cupid get his shot."

Most dads are stuptified when it comes to a daughter's relationship with boys. This is one of the more blinding deceptions of our time. the time just prior to marriage is the time in a girl's life when she needs the protection, advice, guidance, blessing [sic] of her father more than at any other time. Marriage is one of the biggest practical decision [sic] she will make, and it is only cowardice that motivates fathers to excuse themselves from involvement.

Solution 10: Raise your daughter from a young age to have high standards of purity and high standards for suitors based on your own example in the home. When she is ready for marriage, thanks to your conscientious training, she will know how crucial is the choice of a man who will become her life's work. She will know about her own weaknesses and be as careful as she can be and lean on you heavily for your advice. If you are wise, you will want to do everything you can to help her meet a man of the caliber she would want, and deserve, and grow old with. (pg. 303)

Have I mentioned recently how grateful I am that my dad was not Geoffrey Botkin and handled my emerging adulthood with far more grace and understanding that Geoffrey Botkin was ever capable of? 

I've spent my whole life in the mainstream US culture where dating was the expected way for people to find a spouse.   I'm not a sociologist so I can't speak to the benefits and drawbacks of dating vs. arranged marriages for societies, families and the couple who marry - but I do have one important factoid that Botkin missed.   Single people have the most number of potential matches when using the dominant method of setting up marriages in a society.  A single man or woman who tries to find a partner through dating in a society where arranged marriages are the norm faces a much smaller pool of potential matches.  Conversely, Geoffrey Botkin eliminated over 99% of possible husbands for Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin simply by declaring that suitors would need to go through him rather than his daughters to decide if they were compatible. 

Most fathers and mothers in the US fade out the amount of direct supervision they place on their daughter's dating life as she becomes more mature and competent.  Parents provide a lot of supervision as pre-teens or young teens start dating.  As their child becomes an older teenager, the parents move to providing more emotional support because their teenager is capable of managing dating responsibly.   Geoffrey Botkin doesn't seem to differentiate between supervision and support.  I greatly appreciated my parents' support while I was dating.  Once I knew I was interested in a guy, I'd introduce him to my parents.  My parents got to know him and I learned more about him by the way he interacted with my parents.  Behind the scenes, my parents provided a lot of emotional support with the highs and lows of dating. 

On the flip side, if I was too immature to be able to date without parental supervision, I was too immature to get married.   I think that's one of the problems that people who promote supervised courtships miss; the obsession with having chaperones all the time makes the people in the relationship seem exceptionally immature. 

If you've missed the theme of Geoffrey Botkin's need for control, consider the implications of marriage as a huge decision that women must listen to their father's advice on.   The idea that a father should guide his daughter to the right marriage partner makes very little sense under Botkin's own worldview.   Daughters are essentially blank slates writ large; once married, a woman is supposed to instantly shape her thoughts, preferences, beliefs and actions to the desires of her husband regardless of how life worked in her family of origin.   In that system, a father needs to find a suitor who has similar religious beliefs, can support his daughter financially, and is reasonably attractive/suitable to his daughter.    That's it.  Heck, in the ideal emotional purity (EmoPure) courtship model, all of that can be done behind the scenes before the daughter has any inkling of the suitor's interest in her. 

Why hasn't Geoffrey Botkin found suitors for his two lovely, self-educated daughters who have some income of their own from their books and movies? 

Control.

 Once Anna Sofia and Elizabeth exchange vows with their husbands, Geoffrey Botkin loses all control over his daughters.   After all, his daughters have had all other major life decisions stripped from them.  They had no choice over their educational plan.  They have been told college and vocational training is unwomanly and worldly.  Because of that, the Botkin sisters have no real options for jobs, let alone careers in their early and mid-thirties.   No job or career translates to no money - and money is critical in making other adult choices around housing, transportation and entertainment.

One last point: Don't let CP/QF parents blame-shift when their daughters remain unmarried.
 
EmoPure and courtship-based relationships offer a very straightforward deal: unmarried women give their fathers a great deal of power in the romantic relationships of the daughter in exchange for a promise of an early, happy and fertile marriage. 

 The Maxwells have already started to blame-shift Sarah's unmarried status at 37 from Steven Maxwell to God. *rolls eyes*   I'm sure Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin have already started to get some pushback on how the two of them messed up their prospects by....I really dunno .... but someone will blame them instead of putting the blame squarely on the shoulders of Geoffrey Botkin.

The Botkin Sisters, the Maxwell Sisters, Jana Duggar - they're simply following the playbook that their families drilled into their heads as girls: wait patiently at home and Dad will find you a good husband. 

The fact their dads bought into a critically flawed system isn't the fault of the daughters - but the daughters are the ones paying the price.

I have one more post from the interview at the end of "So Much More".   Geoffrey Botkin demonstrates in a few chaotic paragraphs the dangers of self-education...and how it can endanger your daughters' marriage prospects.