If only great men could be whipped up like a batch of brownies
This week, my friend and fellow blogger Jo – who writes the most side-splittingly honest blog on the internet, Slummy Single Mummy – tagged me in a post with the same title as this one.
Her ingredients for perfect man status included the ability to make her laugh, a way with grammar, mean cocktail mixing skills and a generally sociable personality.
Another friend and blogger Suzie, she of the well-crafted and poetically influenced No More Wriggling Out Of Writing Woman, include clothing preferences, an appreciation of poetry and a relaxed attitude to pet names.
For me, it’s a little more difficult than that. I’ve got dozens of frivolous and not-so-frivolous “would likes” but the “must haves” narrow my field of choice down so far it’s tempting to ditch the desire for height (six foot minimum) and an inability to write (well, I wouldn’t want to be in competition, you know?) for fear of ruling out every male specimen in existence.
See the thing is, as a Christian, I’m totally committed to finding someone of the same faith as me. I’ve tried being in a relationship with someone who didn’t believe in God. It didn’t work.
In 1 Corinthians 6 we are instructed not to be “unequally yoked ” with an unbeliever, so for starters marrying a non-Christian would be going against God’s Word, not a great idea at the best of times I’ve found.
But even if it weren’t for that, how can you build a life with someone with a fundamentally different basis for life to you? Someone who must essentially think you’re a loony for believing so deeply in something they don’t?
It would like marrying someone who was convinced aliens were roaming the planet disguised as humans. You couldn’t exactly respect them as your other half, as the person you needed to make key decisions with and raise children with and all the rest of it.
Anyway, so I’ve rather limited my list of options when it comes to finding the perfect man, particularly because the majority of Christian men my age are already married with a couple of kids.
But that’s the beauty of it. Just as my faith limits my choices, it also gives me the sure and certain knowledge of God and the Truth of what he says in Jeremiah 29:15: “I knows the plans I have for you… plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future”.
I’m sorry if you expected a fun list of requirements like “must like Simon & Garfunkel” and “should never cut his toenails in bed” (both of which would be nice, if I’m honest). But I wanted to share how I really feel.
The thing is, I know that whoever God has in store for me will have dozens of things which make me love him more every day, and it will take me a whole lifetime to discover them all.