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What is good exhies? It's your boy Jacob Gooden. We are back for part three of
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the I Kiss Dating Goodbye series. If you missed parts one and two, go back check
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those out. But we are talking about probably the worst Christian dating book on the market. Uh thank God it's no
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longer on the market, but uh yeah, I Kiss Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris. This is a terrible, terrible book. And
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today we're going to be covering part three of the book. So chapters 8 through
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11. And uh yeah, it's going to be all kind of like his practical tools for how
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we keep pure and uh live a a godly lifestyle in our romantic relationships. So yeah, without further ado, let's get
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into it. [Music] So chapter 8 is titled Starting with a Clean Slate: The Four Important Steps
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for Getting on Track with God's Plan. And like most of Josh's chapters, it
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starts off with a story and Josh tells a story of going to a birthday party for one of his buddies and uh as a part of
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his birthday. So it's all boys invited to this party and their dads are asked
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to come along with them. And they're their dads are also asked to bring along
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a tool that they use on the regular and a life lesson that goes along with it. And so they sit around and these dads
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bring these different tools. One of them brings him a really nice pen and talks about the significance of the pen.
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Another dad brings him a nail puller and talks about the significance of the nail
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puller and how in life sometimes, you know, you got to pull a couple nails uh and kind of restart uh so to speak
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instead of just like continually hammering nails into, you know, the two pieces of wood you're trying to connect
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or something like that. And so anyway, kind of an interesting thing. It's setting up this whole like life lessons,
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building a godly lifestyle, the tools you're going to need for that segment of
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this book. And there was a couple things I just found so interesting about this.
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One was that it's a gender specific birthday party. Uh no girls were invited. Um no moms were invited to
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impart their wisdom. And two, the thing that struck me was I went to a birthday party like this and it kind of unlocked
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this memory for me of going to my friend's party and I think he was turning 12 or 13, but kind of early
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manhood adolescence was taking place, right? And it was a little bit different in that I don't remember all the dads
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bringing a tool to give to their sons. But I do remember the the kid being given like a sword
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like Lord of the Rings style like broads sword kind of a thing. And there was a whole nighting ceremony. There was
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prayer that was involved with it. all these kind of things. The dad gave this longass speech um talking about what it
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means to be a man and stand up and and all all these different things. And then it went around the room and all of these
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fathers uh shared a piece of life advice with my friend. And on surface level, I
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don't want to say that this is like bad, okay? Like I'm not trying to sit here
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and say like, oh, I don't think dads should give advice because that's that's
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not true. It just felt like weird timing. You know, a birthday party is meant to be fun. Games, cake, presents,
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like that kind of a thing. We sat there for probably 2 hours listening to these dudes spew off stuff. And if you know
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anything about dudes and you know anything about dads specifically, a lot of times they have a lot of trouble
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getting right to the point and saying exactly what they mean. And so there's
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just a lot of rambling. And I remember as a kid just being like, "How long do
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we have to sit through this?" And even asking my dad, "This is not something
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we're going to do when I turn 12 or 13, right?" Um, and uh, I hope I didn't hurt
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his feelings when I said that. And I hope I didn't make him feel bad cuz maybe he didn't want to do that, but uh,
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I wasn't into it. So anyway, just kind of a weird story to kick things off. So
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right after this, we get right into the four steps for getting on track with God's plan. And those four steps are
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start with a clean slate, make your parents your teammates, establish protective boundaries, and check who's
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whispering in your ears. So, right off the rip, we're getting right into it.
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Start with a clean slate. Josh says this in the book. If I want to live a godly lifestyle, we must first repent of
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sinful attitudes and behaviors in our relationships. The Bible uses the word repent to describe turning from what's
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wrong and pursuing what's right. Repentance is a change of direction based on a change of heart. Have you
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practiced selfishness in your relationships? If so, consider admitting your selfishness and correcting it. Have
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you played loose and careless in the area of purity? Then maybe you need to ask God to forgive you and seek ways to
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reverse your course. Are you currently involved in a relationship that you know is wrong for whatever reason? Then ask
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God to give you the courage to do his will, which might include breaking off the relationship.
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Right off the rip, Josh is playing this sinful card. Again, if you didn't grow
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up in the Christian environment, this is something that is taught right from the
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beginning. I remember as a kid being single digits being told this like we are sinful, we are evil, without God, we
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can't do anything good and we need him uh to be perfect, right? And I think it's kind of a it's it's a very
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difficult thing now unpacking where I'm just kind of like it it sets in your mind this like well
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I'm just evil. I'm wicked. And so when sinful things happen it's just my nature
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being my nature. And it never allows for the fact of like looking at how does the
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human body react to things, right? Especially when we come to those teenage years, those hormone years, right? where
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where things are changing, uh, adolescence has kicked in, right? And we are finding things sexually attractive,
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we are turned on unexplicably. Um, that kind of a thing. And so Josh goes on to tell a story of a guy Danny
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who's like 18 and him and his girlfriend have been together for a couple months
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and their relationship is almost purely physical. And Danny feels like he needs to break it off because even though they
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set up they set up rules with each other and roadblocks and all of these things,
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their relationship inevitably turns back to being physical. And I find this really strange because I think, you
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know, I can sit here and say I think this needs to be a lesson of self-control. And that's coming from me now thinking
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that as humans we're not inherently evil or wicked. But Christians, we use that
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as a copout to basically be like, well, I have no control over my body. And specifically, guys get told this a lot.
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We have no control over our bodies. And that's why the physicality uh of stuff
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kind of escalates a lot of times. That's why guys tend to be the ones who push
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the physical uh side of romantic relationships, right? And so, but instead of just like running away from
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it and being like, I need to break up with this girl and I need to break her heart and all of these things, like why
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not actually like learn to have some self-control and learn to set up the correct kind of boundaries and get help
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where you need help, right? Maybe you need to have an older couple kind of walk you through some of the things you
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do or maybe maybe you do need to take a break, you know? And I do want to say this too, like if it's the physicality
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that made him uncomfortable and his partner was the one who was kind of pushing that on him, that's a totally
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different boundaries conversation. Uh that's a totally different scenario. But
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like that's not what really what we're being given. We're just being told like
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they're physical and in their relationship and they can't control themselves but be physical so they
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should break up because obviously they're not ready to get married. Okay. And I just think that that's that's
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kind of bullshitty. Jumping on to the next step along the path. We are looking at making parents your teammates. Here's
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what Josh has to say. You'll need two things as you live out a new attitude towards relationships. Wisdom and
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accountability. Ideally, both of these should come from your parents. You need your mom and dad. I realize that's not
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uh that not everyone has the opportunity to benefit from relationships with both
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their parents, but even so, I believe that you can gain valuable insights from whichever parent or guardian uh you most
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trust. Why do I say we need to gain wisdom and accountability from our parents? Because
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I can see how I shot myself in the foot by not trusting my parents in the past. When I was in high school, I hid my
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relationships from my parents. If I liked someone, I wouldn't let my parents
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know. I feared that if they got involved, they'd mess things up. What a mistake. By hiding my romantic life from
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my parents, I cut myself off from the God-given source of wisdom that could have saved me from making so many
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mistakes. I agree that I think having your parents or having trusted uh mentors, older figures in your life,
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being involved in your relationship, I think that can be really good. Okay? But one, I don't think it needs to
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happen immediately. Okay? I also think that there is this over um it can fall into this overprotective
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parent scenario, right? Where you have this kind of like helicopter parent scenario and they're with you on all the
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dates and they have to be at everything and they have to know everything that's
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going on in your love life at all times. Uh and nothing can be secret. And we'll
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see that more as we unpack more in the book. Uh Josh talks more about privacy or what he labels as privacy and um
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it's just an area that I think can get really muddy really quickly. And so he
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also goes on to talk about what qualifies someone to be like a proper mentor and the things that disqualify.
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He discounts divorced parents, non-Christian parents. Um, and I think that that also is a dangerous thing to
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play. Now, I know that Christians like to do this thing of like don't really
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get wisdom from people who are not Christian because who knows? It could be bad advice. It
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could be from Satan. It could be whatever. But I think when you discount that, especially like a divorced parent
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scenario, like they've learned a lesson. there's a reason they're divorced. They
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weren't compatible. Um, and there's something to be learned there, right?
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There's also something to be said for the fact that there's a lot of parents
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who stick together even though they probably shouldn't. So, there's a lot of
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toxic traits to be learned from that where you're putting up with things that
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you probably shouldn't be putting up with to be quite honest. And so Josh's
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kind of solution to that, he talks about introducing other mentors from inside the church, right? Maybe it's a youth
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leader, maybe it's a pastor. Um, you know, it's some other mentor that can
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give wisdom, accountability regarding your relationships from a godly perspective.
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Here's again where I'm going to take some issue with that. How many youth leaders and youth pastors
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have groomed young girls and told them to wait uh to wait to find the right guy and as soon as that girl turns 18, they
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snap them up, right? And they love bomb them and right convince them that God has given them this message that they're
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supposed to be together, right? It's kind of weird. And in the same way, I also know some pastors who, you know,
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would would kind of they would mentor relationships that were broken or or young people who were single or
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whatever, and then they would inevitably have an affair with that person, which would dissolve their marriage and create
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like a gigantic church scandal. Like, and I understand there's going to be the
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argument of like, well, that's just human behavior. That's just, you know,
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sinful human behavior. I get that. But why are we still continuing to push this idea that that's what you need in order
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to have a godly relationship, right? You need these mentor figures who are involved in your romantic relationship,
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who are speaking into it, who are telling you when to break up, who are giving you the the playbook, so to
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speak. uh when we have this history inside of the church of that not working out.
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Okay, maybe we shake shake things up a little bit. Maybe we try a different pattern. Okay, let's jump into step
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three, which is establish protective boundaries. Josh says this, after you've
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formed your team, you need to establish boundaries and guidelines for your relationship with the opposite sex. Sit
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down with your mom, your dad, your mentor. Ask them questions such as, what constitutes a romantic setting? What is
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going out with someone when not what when is going out with someone appropriate and when should it lead and
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when would it lead to pre-mature intimacy? Think about some of the situations that
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might arise. What do you do when someone feels attracted to you or vice versa? How much time should you spend on the
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phone with someone of the opposite sex? How much time should you have spent together even in group settings? Setting
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boundaries like these will allow you to respond with confidence in differenti situations. Uh yeah, and okay, a few
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things here. Again, I don't think that every piece of Josh's advice is completely god- aful. I
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think that it veers off into being really disgusting. But the overall idea of like establish
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protective boundaries around what you want a relationship to look like is valid, right? We all need that. What am
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I looking for in a relationship? What do I not want to do? How quickly do I want
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to move? All those things are okay, right? We can do those things. It's when we start getting into this
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like what constitutes a romantic scenario and especially when we're talking about the purity culture realm
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where and we get into this in I I think it's in section four but he kind of has
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the the ev not not the evolution but the step by step of here's the phases you go
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through in a relationship casual friends to uh more serious friends to like a courting scenario and then marriage. He
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really emphasizes this like your friends, your friends, your friends and then you know that that's the person you
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want to marry and so you marry them and then like the intimacy begins, the romance begins like almost
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at marriage. But like when you're limiting what romance is and you're limiting the time you can spend with
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somebody and and not trusting yourself around the opposite sex, that's another
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issue. Not trusting yourself around the opposite sex. Okay, I can't tell you the
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number of times I hung out with somebody of the opposite sex. It's literally just
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a friendship thing. It's literally just us getting coffee, going to the movies,
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having fun, doing something that's just friends, okay? And there's no stipulation of like this is a date or
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this isn't a date or this isn't romance. We read the we read the room and we
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figured out what was going on. And what was going on was we were just being friends with each other. Okay? We didn't
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need a third party there. Nothing bad was happening. We had self-control over our own bodies. We weren't jumping each
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other's bones in the car. Like, we just inherently understood what was going on. And I think, again, this goes
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back, and I'm going to continue to put this on the guys specifically. We as men are not taught
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that like where those lines lie, right? We just anytime we get horny, we view everything as this like sexual
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experience and this like we have this just utter desire for everything to be sexual almost. And it's it's really
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pathetic and disgusting. And we need to get out of that mindset and understand that there is a time and a place for
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that and there's a way to communicate that that's what we're interested in
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pursuing with somebody. It's not all the time. It's not every place, okay? And it's not something that
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we should just expect that everybody is anticipating that we are romantically interested in them. I also wrote this
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down in my notes and I wanted to share this. I said, I have come to the realization that I believe Josh left
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sexual sin ambiguous in this book to sell more copies. I think if he had truly spelled out exactly what he
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believed was right and wrong, this book would have been met with a ton of criticism.
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I mean, throughout the book and his follow-up book, Boy Meets Girl, he talks about what is appropriate for him and he
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places himself on a pedestal above everyone else who chooses differently. Right? We just read it in the book. What
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is right? What is wrong? How much time should you be spending with the opposite sex? He then goes on, for example, and
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he says, I have committed to avoiding situations that could lead to temptation. Being alone with a girl in
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an empty house is one such situation. So, I've created a boundary about this
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issue. I will not go to a girl's house if no one else is there. If a girl calls
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me, invites me to come over, and me mentions in passing that her parents aren't home, I don't have to weigh the
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situation or pray about it. I already know that I won't accept the invitation.
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Rules by themselves won't change our hearts, but once we've taken on a new
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attitude, protective boundaries can help keep the course. Again, boundaries are important. I understand he doesn't want
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to go over to a girl's house. This is also written, like I said, from a 21-year-old man who at 21, most people
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are in college or starting to move out. They don't live with their parents anymore. And so that gave it away to me
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that he wrote this for high school kids. He wrote this so that high school kids would feel this need to not be alone
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with the opposite sex. I have had experiences in my life. I also set boundaries like these things in my life
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for periods where I didn't always feel comfortable being alone with the opposite sex alone at a house. Uh I
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didn't maybe always feel comfortable. It was it was easier for me to be in public
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with them. We talked about last week the the Billy Graham kind of mindset of like, you know, never let the door close
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if you're in an office with someone of the opposite sex because, you know, you
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just want there to be no question about it. And I think it kind of comes down to
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the fact that like if guys were actually taught self-control, if we were taught about
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understanding the appropriate time and place for things, that would never be an issue.
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There would never be a question. Bad stuff's still going to happen, of course, but like it would become less
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and less of an issue that those things would happen. Moving on, last step. Step four, checking who's whispering in your
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ear. This is what Josh has to say about that. He says, "Finally, keep an eye on
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your influences. Who and what you listen to, listen to, read, and watch will encourage or conflict with our
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commitment to pursue God's best in relationships." He goes on to talk about some girls in
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his church who always feel like dissatisfied um after watching romantic movies. It
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makes me wonder uh why doesn't that happen to me? Does anything in your life
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cause that kind of discontentment? If so, then maybe you need to consider cutting out some things. Maybe you need
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to stop reading romance novels, watching soap opers because they encourage ungodly longings within you. Perhaps you
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need to turn off the radio because much of today's music exalts a false definition of love. You might need to
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tune out some of your favorite TV shows because they mock your beliefs about purity. Whatever e whatever uh tempts
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you towards discontentment or compromise, don't put up with it. Tune it out. Turn it off. Here we go again.
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Josh criticizing the media. He's criticizing pop culture and the things that people consume. He's claiming that
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again it paints this unrealistic picture, expectations of love and romance. And he's doing the classic
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Christian culture war argument uh that they love so much, right? The media is bad. They are promoting bad things and
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we should steer clear of that. That's why we have people who argue today that
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like Disney's gone woke, right? Or they don't allow them their kids to watch
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like the Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon, things like that. Uh I'm going to get
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into that in a new in a soon to come episode about the things we weren't allowed to do as homeschoolers. that
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like that's part of the reason that certain things are are hindered from people. And it's not always the reason,
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but a lot of it is. Something that I learned, I want to say maybe around 18ish, was learning to to
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differentiate between reality and fantasy. And this came about a couple different
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ways. one. I mean, I grew up reading a lot of fantasy novels, a lot of fiction, and that's pretty cut and dry. That's
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make believe, right? We don't believe these things actually happened, but it
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makes for a good story, right? Doesn't leave me discontented because I know I'm
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not I don't have the magical powers of somebody in the Chronicles of Narnia.
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Uh, right? I don't believe that, you know, I can travel across the galaxy in
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a spaceship and, you know, go a million par sex and go to visit this new planet with all these new aliens and, you know,
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whatever. I just don't believe that's fantasy. That's made up. And and then we
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have the stuff that maybe is a fiction book, but it's written in a way that can
00:22:15
convey some more seriousness to it. And I talk a lot about the Da Vinci Code and reading that
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book with my dad. And one of the reasons I always go back to that example was the
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fact that for a lot of people that book was an instant no because they heard someone talk about it and how it was bad
00:22:35
and how it uh portrayed Christianity in this negative light and it told lies and
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it was coming for your faith. When you open the book, the first little synopsis thing in the book literally
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says, "This is a work of fiction, historical fiction." And while a lot of
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the elements are pulled from real stories, real historical uh like evidenced things.
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It's makeelieve. They've been twisted. They've been altered, right? It's like
00:23:08
national treasure. No one thinks that there's a treasure map on the back of the Declaration of Independence, right?
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We pretty much all know that's fake. And so learning to differentiate between the
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reality and the fantasy has helped me a lot because it's helped me in consuming
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a lot of media because I know when I can turn that on and turn that off. And that's a skill that I think a lot of
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people need to start working on in in their lives of where do those lines where does that line lie um for you and
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what is you know convincing you of something that is not actually happening uh but you're taking it to be real and
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again I see that in Josh's argument here who's whispering in your ear goes after
00:24:00
media right he goes after the movies you watch the books you're consuming Right?
00:24:04
Especially like the romance genre of stuff. Romance is super spicy right now. I just read my first spicy book this
00:24:11
summer and spoiler alert, it wasn't that spicy. But there was elements to it that
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I was like, "Okay, yeah, this is a fun fantasy. This is a fun fake reality, you know, but that's what
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it is. I can't do everything that's in that book. A partner can't do everything
00:24:29
that's in that book. It's fantasy. It's makeelieve." That's okay. But it's a lot
00:24:34
of fun still. And that's I think where Christians get it wrong is they act like
00:24:41
the media is portraying everything as reality when it's not. A lot of it is just fantasy. Okay, let's move on.
00:24:49
Chapter nine. It's called Just Friends in a Just Do It World. Uh it's keeping
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relationships out of the romance zone. I'm going to read this first section of
00:25:01
this chapter again. He kind of tells a story or it's a a scenario and I think
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it just it just helps kind of paint the picture for what this chapter is going to be about. So, he says this. He says,
00:25:13
"You meet someone of the opposite sex. He or she really catches your eye. Uh-oh." Then you get to know this person
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and you find out he or she has a great personality as well. Double uh oh. To top it all off, this person sends you
00:25:26
that I'd like to get to know you better vibe. Major uh oh, if you've decided to
00:25:32
put romance on hold until you're ready for marriage, what do you do in a situation like this? If you're not going
00:25:39
to play the dating game, what's the plan? The simple answer is to just be friends. Easy, right? Not quite. Maybe
00:25:48
we wouldn't struggle with the scenario if God created us without hearts, devoid
00:25:53
of emotions and immune to attraction. But he didn't. Most of us have to deal
00:25:58
with all three as we stumble through the confusing process of finding balance between two extreme options. Jumping
00:26:05
headlong into romance with everyone who catches our eye or running in fear from all members of the opposite sex. Finding
00:26:12
that balance is anything but easy. The middle ground can often feel more like a tight rope stretched over a gaping
00:26:20
chasm. I put down in my notes, I said, "Uh oh, I found you attractive and now I'm
00:26:25
sinning." I said, "Good Lord, Josh." He just doesn't want people to feel any type of
00:26:31
way. He's denying the reality that the human body creates hormones and has emotional responses to people we find
00:26:38
attractive. I'm going to take back a little bit of that statement and say I think he does
00:26:43
recognize that. Uh but again, I think he's pushing people to kind of the wording of his books
00:26:54
lends themsself to needing to be this perfect thing. this person who's kind of
00:27:00
devoid of romantic feelings and romantic attraction and all of those things until
00:27:05
they're ready to get married. Flip a switch, turn those things on, find a partner, get married very quickly, and
00:27:13
then in marriage flip the switch of sex is good. And that's just not how things
00:27:20
work, unfortunately. That's just not how the human body operates. It's not how
00:27:25
our minds work. All that kind of stuff. Hey, I went on to say, "Even with my
00:27:30
friends, I sometimes find myself thinking about them and wanting to spend time with them, fantasizing about the
00:27:36
next time we're together. That's normal for humans to do. We're allowed to feel.
00:27:40
It's chemical." And now, I don't mean that I find my friends romantically
00:27:44
attractive, although I do have some attractive friends, much more attractive than me. But
00:27:50
what I mean is it's very normal as a human being to get to know somebody, to
00:27:55
meet somebody and want to spend time with them. That's what we do. We're
00:27:58
we're creatures of connection, right? We need that. We long for that. That's
00:28:04
something that is just part of our DNA is community. We need that. When we live in isolations,
00:28:11
uh we don't we can't be our truest, fullest, most fulfilled person, right?
00:28:17
uh co should have taught us that uh at this point the next kind of bulleted section in this chapter is called just
00:28:24
plain confusing and he goes on kind of this statement of being just friends is plain
00:28:31
confusing in all honesty I haven't completely figured it out okay and he goes on and he talks about the Tootsie
00:28:39
Pop ad right everyone knows this right how many licks it's the kid with the owl
00:28:44
how many licks does it take to get to the center of the Tootsie Pop Right? He licks once, he counts one, right? He
00:28:49
licks again, two, licks again, three, looks a fourth time, he crunches down on it, skips the whole line. We never know
00:28:57
how many licks it actually takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. So, he goes on to say this after that. When I
00:29:03
consider my friendship with girls, I feel like that boy, the one from the ad, right, who wants to know how many licks
00:29:07
to get to the center. I don't want to reach the chewy center of romance. I just want to be friends, but I don't
00:29:13
know how much attention a friendship between a guy and a girl can handle before crunch. We've crossed the line
00:29:20
from friendship into more than friendship. I put this in my notes. I said Josh seems to turn every interaction with
00:29:29
girls into a sexual situation. We just talked about this. I think that's a him
00:29:34
problem. Like, dude, chill out. And again, every time he talks about someone of the opposite sex, because
00:29:43
again, we're talking in a very heterosexual space, right? Christianity, heterosexual space, one man, one woman,
00:29:51
no room for anything else. Every interaction that Josh has with a girl has this grain of sexual tension to it,
00:29:59
right? Will they, won't they? I find them attractive, you know, should we kiss? All those
00:30:06
types of things. is this the person I meant to to be with? And you see later on even like the way he views his quote
00:30:13
unquote friendships with girls when they start to pair off, there's jealousy
00:30:17
involved for him. And again, we talked about it. It's okay to be friends with someone of
00:30:25
the opposite sex. It just is. I have plenty of friends. You've met a lot of them on the show. Friends of mine
00:30:32
who are of the opposite sex. They're beautiful young women and like I love them dearly. But am I romantically
00:30:39
attracted to them? No. They're just my friends. We have a great time when we're
00:30:44
together. We go get a beer. We go to the movies. We go mini golfing. We go rollerblading. We have fun. We do fun
00:30:52
adult friend things, but there's nothing sexual there because you can have that. Not every
00:31:00
scenario with someone of the opposite sex has to be sexual. And that's something we need to start teaching our
00:31:06
young people. Not every interaction with someone of the opposite sex is sexual. And we need to not be sitting there
00:31:13
wondering, "Do they like me? Do they not like me? Is this a romantic thing? Is
00:31:17
this not a romantic thing?" Okay? We have to get over that. We have to get over that hump. I'm going to jump
00:31:24
forward just a little bit. There's a lot of things I could continue to unpack in
00:31:28
that last section, but I feel like I'd be going in circles, right? It's kind of all pointing back to
00:31:34
the same thing of guys and girls can have friendships. It's okay. But let's jump into this next section,
00:31:41
which is understanding the difference between friendship and intimacy. Okay, Josh has this to say about this. He
00:31:46
goes, "We can more clearly see the elusive line between friendship and more
00:31:51
than friendship when we understand the difference between friendship and intimacy. Friendship is about something
00:31:57
other than two people in the relationship. Intimacy is about each other. In a true friendship, something
00:32:04
outside the two friends brings them together." CS Lewis wrote this. "We
00:32:09
picture lovers face to face, but friends side by side. Their eyes look ahead. The
00:32:15
key to friendship is a common goal or objective on which both companions focus. It can be an athletic pursuit, a
00:32:22
hobby, faith, music, but it's something outside of themselves. As soon as those
00:32:27
two people involve focus on their relationship, it has moved beyond friendship. I think it's really weird. I
00:32:35
think Josh's definition of intimacy is wrong because if you look up the Webster
00:32:40
definition of intimacy, intimacy is a close familiarity or friendship. It's a
00:32:45
closeness with somebody. Okay? And so my understanding of intimacy has always been that there are different types of
00:32:53
intimacy. There's friendship, there's romantic, there's uh there's a a
00:32:58
parental uh intimacy, there's all these different things. And and so I think
00:33:05
it's I I I think we need to reexamine what Josh is trying to say here, right?
00:33:12
Of friendship has this component of you guys looking to something else, right? Whether it's a hobby, whatever it is,
00:33:20
you can also have friendships that are about each other like and that you don't share passions
00:33:28
that you don't like you can just be friends. You know what I mean? Um, and so, but I think about like
00:33:37
my my relationships with people, right? And I think about my dear friends and how I would tell them anything,
00:33:47
anything they want to know, my deepest, darkest secrets, they ask, they're theirs to have. And like that is a very
00:33:55
deep level of intimacy. It's a closeness with that person where I feel comfortable, right? It's a comfort thing
00:34:02
with them. With my parents, there's a lot of things that I'll share with them.
00:34:05
There's a lot of we we have this bond because they've been there my entire
00:34:11
life, right? They've seen me grow up. They know me probably better than most
00:34:16
people know me. Um, and you know, so we have this this closeness. We have an intimacy. Now, my
00:34:25
wife and I, we also have an intimacy, not only as friends and the closeness that comes with that, but also romantic,
00:34:32
right, in nature. And so, there's different ways to look about it. But I think just lumping the word intimacy
00:34:40
into sex and into romance is a bad it's a bad game to play because again we talked about or I mentioned how
00:34:54
purity culture and the Christian culture I grew up in, there was a lot of things
00:34:59
there was a lot of media and a lot of books that were kind of these like instant nos. And
00:35:06
it it's interesting because even still I'll pick up a book and I'll read the
00:35:10
back, right? Or I'll flip through a couple pages of it and I'll see buzzwords that I go that's associated
00:35:16
with this, right? And I remember picking up this book, I'm totally spacing on
00:35:21
what the book was titled, but it was about um building intimate relationships. And I picked it up being
00:35:27
like, "Okay, interesting romance book. Here we go. relationship, you know, we're going to talk about sex, we're
00:35:34
going to talk about romance. That's what this book's about. No, this book had
00:35:37
nothing to do with that. This book had everything to do with building closeness with people, right? Setting correct
00:35:43
boundaries, understanding, you know, this person kind of fulfills this need in my life and I share this with them.
00:35:50
The levels of intimacy and how you get to that, right? How you build that trust with people, all those types of things.
00:35:57
And and so as I flipped through that, I was like, this is really interesting. this is a different way to view this.
00:36:02
And so again, I think we just need to take certain words and redefine them uh or look at maybe actually define them
00:36:11
and take out the Christian definition that people like Josh continuing to put on these things, right? That maybe we
00:36:19
don't agree with uh and and actually look at what they truly do mean. Okay, I
00:36:26
had this in my notes too that I wanted to share was that I have not always been uber close with every friend, even the
00:36:36
people that sometimes I would label my best friends. And I was thinking, as I've been prepping and rereading this
00:36:43
book and because even though I read it and I took all these notes, like it's
00:36:47
been a little while, so I'm kind of rereading it as we're going through it.
00:36:50
But I had this thought and I was thinking about holding certain people at arms length
00:36:59
growing up. And as I've unpacked my religion, I've really started to realize that a
00:37:07
lot of my youth leaders and a lot of my friends who were Christians, I held them
00:37:13
at this arms length because I didn't have the closeness with them to always share
00:37:23
all of the maybe the the things that I believed were sinful in my life, right? or the degree to which I was struggling
00:37:30
with them. And the reason I didn't do that was because especially with the leaders, I was
00:37:36
looking for someone who was going to help guide me and point me in kind of a direction of like here's
00:37:45
the steps to take to get better. So, I'm going to use porn as an example, okay? I
00:37:51
grew up believing porn was sinful. It was wrong. It was evil. And but I never wanted to talk about it with
00:38:00
my youth leaders because at youth group whenever it would come up of course every teenage boy for the most part was
00:38:06
struggling with looking at porn. We were struggling with that. And or we were quote unquote struggling with it. But
00:38:16
if I went to them and said, "I have this problem where I'm looking at it four
00:38:20
times a day. I can't turn it off. It's all I think about. that I close my eyes
00:38:24
and I see it, right? I do believe personally I probably had a low degree of addiction to this at
00:38:32
different points in my life. But I was looking for steps to get out of that. Okay. And so even when I would bring it
00:38:40
up kind of subtly to test the waters of like, oh yeah, like I've just been kind
00:38:43
of wrestling with this or I I essentially I was being like I want to get clean, right? I want to get sober uh
00:38:51
from that. It was always met with pray more, worship more, serve more. Now, those are definitely things that
00:38:59
you can do. However, they're not steps to actually break the addiction, right?
00:39:05
And I was maybe looking for something that was like, here's the seven steps,
00:39:09
right? Here's what we're going to do. We're going to put this protection on
00:39:12
your computer. We're going to have you text so and so at this time. And so because I didn't get when I would test
00:39:18
the waters, I didn't get maybe the steps I felt like necessary to take a to take
00:39:25
some some movement forward in my struggle. I wouldn't trust him with anymore because I was like, you gave me
00:39:32
bad advice. You gave me advice that's not working. I can pray a whole bunch,
00:39:36
but then I just feel really guilty. I I can serve in church and feel like, okay,
00:39:41
I'm paying penance for what I'm doing, but like I needed actual practical advice and
00:39:48
step-by-step things that were going to get me to where I wanted to be, and I wasn't getting that. So, I didn't build
00:39:54
an intimate connection with any of those people because they weren't there wasn't we couldn't
00:40:02
have that closeness because there wasn't a trust there because I was continually
00:40:07
worried that if I did tell them, I was going to just again be told here's what
00:40:11
you do and then I was going to be watched like a hawk and constantly told like, "Hey, did you look at porn today?
00:40:17
Hey, did you do this today? Hey, did you do that today?" You know, and but I was
00:40:21
never going to be given the tools. So, I was going to continue to fail, but then
00:40:24
I was going to be made to feel bad about it the entire time. Okay, does that make
00:40:29
sense? Moving on. Next section. Being inclusive, not exclusive. So, we're jumping to page 130.
00:40:41
And this is what Josh has to say. The second step in being just friends with the opposite sex is to include others
00:40:49
instead of isolating ourselves with just one person. We don't want dating's
00:40:52
mindset of being alone to carry into our friendships. We can avoid this by going
00:40:58
out of our way to involve friends, family, and maybe even strangers in our lives. Kind of a weird take, but okay.
00:41:06
This is again so weird. We kind of talked about this already. This whole idea of like just don't be alone with
00:41:11
someone of the opposite sex. And what does even alone mean, right? Like if I go out with a friend of the opposite sex
00:41:17
and we go to dinner, we're not technically alone. there's other people there, right? In the Christian
00:41:23
worldview, that would be like a date, right? Um, I don't know if I've told
00:41:28
this story on the show before. I know I've brought it up with friends before,
00:41:32
but when I was in high school, um, I was friends with a lot of people. And one of
00:41:38
there was a couple of girls that lived uh in this one part of town and I would go hang out with them and we would
00:41:45
inevitably end up at Starbucks. And usually I would hang out with them solo. We would just go do something fun and it
00:41:53
wasn't a big deal. My parents were cool with it. Their parents were cool with
00:41:56
it. And for whatever reason, we would end up at this Starbucks. And there was a homeschool mom who continually ran
00:42:02
into me at this Starbucks with all of these different girls and made comments about the fact that she thought that I
00:42:10
was seeing all of them and being a player. Now, like I get it. Like, actually, no,
00:42:19
I don't get it. I was wanting to feel bad there for a second for this person.
00:42:25
Without asking us anything about what we're doing, why we're hanging out,
00:42:29
nothing, she assumed that I was romantically entangled with all of these people, and that I was like basically
00:42:38
going behind every one of their backs to date somebody else, right? And so I had
00:42:43
all of these girls all at my fingertips to my play things so to speak. And like that was hurtful when that came out that
00:42:53
like she was accusing me of that because that's not how my friends felt. That's
00:42:57
not how I felt about the situation. And it made me really self-conscious about where I go and how I go and how I
00:43:03
conduct myself and all of these things. And I didn't feel like I could be around
00:43:06
her daughters at all. And I didn't feel like I could be around those girls for a
00:43:11
little while. uh without having a conversation and setting setting this expectation, right, of like
00:43:19
we're just friends, right? Like we're just this. I think that's what's so
00:43:24
harmful about like this book and this idea of like we can be nothing more than friends until we're certain that we are
00:43:32
meant to be together. And it played into this like idea that like we're like siblings. we are. That's
00:43:42
like, you know, romance is like a no no. And it never let anything evolve naturally because even if one of us was
00:43:50
feeling a romantic inkling towards the other person, why would you ever say it? Because the other person's probably
00:43:57
going to say, "No, but like we're just friends, right? They're going to shoot
00:44:00
you down." And so it led to a lot of the homeschool group just not dating, right?
00:44:06
We didn't date each other. We didn't we for sure didn't have sex but like there
00:44:12
was no romantic anything amongst any of us even though maybe internally we felt that way but we couldn't because it
00:44:21
would be crossing this line and sinning right and that was a big no no. So, I just think
00:44:30
I don't know. I just hated this idea and it got continually pushed by if anyone
00:44:35
ever watched like the Duggar family. I don't remember what their show was called. It was like 18 and counting or
00:44:41
something like that, but like their kids would go on dates and they would have chaperones which were usually the
00:44:46
siblings and they would, you know, do all these different It's just weird. It
00:44:50
was just weird. And that was the reality of what I grew up inside of, of these people who even if my parents had said,
00:44:57
"Well, dating looks like this and this is acceptable and this is okay and you
00:45:01
can do these things." There were other people in the homeschool group who would
00:45:05
have frowned upon that, right? So, I want to move on. I got a lot to cover. We're only like halfway done. Let's look
00:45:13
at this next part, which is seek opportunities to serve, not to be entertained. And he goes on, he says,
00:45:20
"The late Kirk Cobain captured the attitude of today's culture with the
00:45:25
line," here we are now. Entertain us. I believe that unfortunately many Christians have made Cobain's line the
00:45:32
refrain um for of their friendships. In my opinion, our cultural obsession with entertainment is really just an
00:45:40
expression of selfishness. The focus of entertainment is not producing something
00:45:44
useful for the benefit of others, but consuming something for the pleasure of self of self. Number one thing, just got
00:45:52
to point. It's not in the book. They spelled Kirk Cobain's name wrong. Spelled it with a C instead of a K. So,
00:45:58
it's Kurt with a C. Um, yeah. So, whoever also edited this book, um, you messed up. Obviously, they were not
00:46:06
enjoying today's entertainment. But here's what I wrote down about this.
00:46:10
Christians really get caught up in the servant attitude and forget about the self. Even Jesus took time for himself,
00:46:18
right? He went out in the wilderness for 40 days, but we're not allowed. We must
00:46:23
always be giving, be serving, be stacking chairs, be worshiping, uh be serving on the worship team, uh teaching
00:46:29
Bible study or Sunday school. I understand that we can get to know people better by doing something
00:46:35
constructive, but I was never taught the part about being selfish for a second. As I got older and I burned out in
00:46:45
college or church, it was because of this reason. I was always looking for opportunities
00:46:51
to serve other people, right? I worked at other church where I would get up at [ __ ] 5:00 a.m. in the morning on
00:46:56
Sundays. I go set this thing up and stack chairs and be on the worship team and run sound and do all of these things
00:47:04
um that were just like insane behavior for a college kid to be doing. Um and I did that every week for like 6 months.
00:47:12
And in addition to that, I was part of Bible studies. I went to other chapel services. I did all these other things.
00:47:19
I looked for any opportunity to serve to serve to serve to give of myself. And I
00:47:23
burned out because you have to take time for yourself regardless of if you're
00:47:28
Christian or not. Like regardless of if you want I still love to serve people. I
00:47:32
do. Like that's what I love to do. That's what I do for the clients I work
00:47:37
with. That's what I do with some of you guys even like of like the connections
00:47:41
that I can build with people and connecting the dots and putting you guys in scenarios with other people hopefully
00:47:47
or helping you with something or whatever. Like I love to do those things because that's a part of who I am. I
00:47:53
love the opportunity to serve. Um, that's what this podcast is meant to do. It's meant to be of service to you guys,
00:48:00
right? To talk about things, to share stories. Um, there's a selfish component
00:48:06
to it, but it's selfish in the sense that I also really like to do that. I just do, right? And so, I get a kick out
00:48:13
of it. But I've learned as time has gone on to be selfish. that it's okay to take
00:48:19
a day where I just do what I want, where I just chill, where I relax, where I eat
00:48:24
the thing I want to eat, and I play the video game I want to play and I read the
00:48:28
book I want to read and I don't worry about anybody else because I've already
00:48:31
given so much of myself to other people and I just need a minute to refuel, right?
00:48:38
We're not taught that in church. I wasn't taught that at church. If you were, congratulations. Awesome. But if
00:48:44
you weren't taught that in church, please remember to do that, okay? Because otherwise, you become a shell of
00:48:51
the person who you really are. We need time to fill the tank back up. We need that time. Take that time. It's okay.
00:48:59
Call it selfish, but you need it. It's okay to be selfish sometimes. The last
00:49:04
piece of this chapter that I want to talk on is this section called brotherly love. He has this quote in here and he
00:49:11
says, "What's our relationship with each other? We're brothers and sisters in
00:49:14
Christ. How do we view and cheat treat each other with honor? Um, and what's
00:49:20
the secret of our zeal service side by side for God's glory? I wrote this in my
00:49:25
notes. I said the brother sister thing really threw me off for a really long time. Okay, again, I talked about
00:49:32
growing up in the homeschool community. We were all told for so long, these are like your brothers and your sisters. and
00:49:38
we would go to each other's houses all the time and we would, you know, sleepovers and we were with these people
00:49:43
a lot and so they became those things to us. It's also really weird to have romantic feelings about your brothers
00:49:49
and sisters. Just going to put that out there. And so we were primed not to be romantic
00:49:56
with each other, right? Because that's weird. That's like incest, right? It's
00:50:01
just weird. And so if you look at the homeschool group I grew up in, there's
00:50:05
not that many homeschoolers who married homeschoolers that we knew. There's just
00:50:10
not. So even if you did marry a homeschooler, a lot of times it's from some other group or some other, you
00:50:16
know, scenario where we weren't there wasn't the closeness, there wasn't the
00:50:21
sibling uh attitude. But for the rest of us, we all still look at each other. I mean, maybe I I'm going to speak for
00:50:27
myself, but we look at each other and it's like that's my sibling, right? We
00:50:31
went on vacation together, we did this thing together, we, you know, whatever. And so there was never space for there
00:50:37
be anything of romance. And so if you had a crush, no. And I think about the experiences I
00:50:47
had with prom and this constant needing. I mean, the first prom I went to, I was
00:50:53
the one invited, uh, but was very clear on the phone, but we're just going as
00:50:57
friends. It's like, well, yeah, for sure. Um, the next year when it was my senior prom and I invited my date, uh, I
00:51:06
called Julia and I remember being like, "But just friends and there needing to
00:51:10
be this stipulation of us just being friends." Uh, because we're we're not
00:51:16
romantic. And again, the media playing a role in when you go to prom with somebody, there's this expectation of
00:51:22
you're going to you're going to kiss or you're going to hook up or something
00:51:25
like that is playing this role. again, fantasy reality, right? Um, type of thing. And one of the things about this
00:51:34
whole scenario of the brother, sister, love fiasco, I'm just going to call it. But
00:51:41
this kind of not allowing us to have romantic feelings towards each other is that when
00:51:47
I got to college, it made me really awkward at dating because I had never done it before. It was my first time.
00:51:52
And not that there's anything wrong with that, but it would have been nice to go
00:51:57
into it having had my heart broken a few times, right? Having just maybe a little
00:52:03
experience under my belt, you know, of of anything, of knowing what the pain felt like when it didn't work out. Um, I
00:52:10
think that those little pieces like that would have been helpful. And so I wanted
00:52:16
to to also put this in here that said, "Stop teaching kids that their bodies
00:52:21
are being s are um are being sinful by having natural reactions to things. Uh penis habers get boners. Vagina owners
00:52:30
get wet. It's normal. Your body is reacting." And I wrote that because as I
00:52:36
thought about this these feelings that we had growing up and how we were siblings,
00:52:44
we were denied our natural reactions to things, right? We were never it was never put in the correct context of what
00:52:51
we were feeling. And so there was lack of sex. There was lack of us talking about these things. And if your parents
00:52:58
talk to you about these things, kudos to your parents. But like it felt awkward and weird. Again,
00:53:06
all of these buzzwords, intimacy, romance, kissing, all of these things were bad. They were they were negatives
00:53:12
in our life because you were not supposed to do them. They are saved for marriage. That is what Josh Harris is
00:53:18
telling you throughout this whole book. All these things are saved until marriage. They're saved until marriage.
00:53:22
They're saved until marriage. And when you're telling a kid that, you're
00:53:26
telling them to go against the natural urges that their bodies are having. And I'm not saying that's not to say that we
00:53:32
should just let high schoolers and young adults just do whatever they want. And you know that's also a recipe for
00:53:38
disaster. But what I'm saying is that we have to start having these conversations. We have to start talking
00:53:43
about these things. Why is your body reacting this way? Why are you feeling this way when you see that person? Why?
00:53:49
Why? Why? Asking those questions and being okay with the awkward conversations, right? Being okay with
00:53:56
talking about these things. being okay saying it is perfectly normal for your body to be reacting that way. Now, what
00:54:04
are we going to do with that? Right? That's where again we it all connects to
00:54:08
each other, right? I talked about guys not understanding the correct the correct con um context for sexual
00:54:15
situations. We need to be having those conversations with people. What is the context of this scenario? Do we need to
00:54:22
be doing that? No. Okay. When is the appropriate time to do that? here's the
00:54:26
appropriate time. Those types of things. And so we set these young adults, we set
00:54:32
these young people up for success when it comes to their body and understanding and listening to their body as opposed
00:54:38
to continually denying themselves and ending up like somebody like me who still wrestles with understanding that
00:54:45
my body tells me things, right? My body tells me when it's tired and I need to
00:54:50
listen. It tells me when something feels good and I need to not feel ashamed for
00:54:54
that. It tells me when I'm hungry. It tells me all of the things I need to live. I have denied myself that for so
00:55:02
long. I'm 28 [ __ ] years old. I'm about to be 29 by the time this comes
00:55:06
out. I'm probably 29. Okay, 29 years old. I still don't get it always. Okay, these
00:55:16
things have lasting impacts. these things that Josh are talking is talking about the the concepts and the way that
00:55:22
he he words it and it's it's um ambiguous and it's it's not clear,
00:55:28
right? It creates this distrust in your body. It creates this like icky feeling that we're dealing with a decade out, a
00:55:40
decade away from learning these things, from having these things implanted in our minds. Okay, this is not just a flip
00:55:46
the switch kind of scenario. These are things that go that last for a long, long time and take a lot of work, a lot
00:55:53
of effort to get over them. All right, we got to move on because I've been rolling for way too long.
00:56:02
Chapter 10, guard your heart. Okay, main theme of this one, fighting off lust, infatuation, self-pity. Here's how this
00:56:10
chapter starts. Emily sprawled lazily on the bed as she watched Jessica pack. I bet I know what'll happen when you get
00:56:16
to school, she said suddenly. Oh, really? Jessica replied distractedly. She was more concerned now with how to
00:56:23
organize the mess of clothing, shoes, and makeup that covered her bedroom floor. "Yeah, really," Emily said as she
00:56:29
threw a pair of socks at Jessica. "You uh" she could tell when she wasn't being
00:56:35
taken seriously. "You're going to get there, meet some guy, and fall in love.
00:56:40
Then you'll have to crawl back on your knees and beg me to forgive you for all
00:56:44
the hassle you've given me about dating. Oh, I can't wait until you have a
00:56:48
boyfriend. If anyone besides Emily had said this to Jessica, she would have been angry. But coming from her best
00:56:55
friend, infuriating though it was, uh, Jessica had to smile. Emily, I've told
00:57:01
you before that it's not a matter of not wanting to fall in love, Jessica said as
00:57:06
she crammed another pair of jeans in the suitcase. I'm just not interested in
00:57:09
playing games and chasing after pointless relationships like some people I know. Wink.
00:57:16
That was a terrible wink on my part. If you're listening to audio, be thankful
00:57:19
you didn't see that. So, again, this chapter, we're talking we're talking
00:57:24
lust. We're talking infatuation. Right off the rip, we're still with this
00:57:31
rhetoric of pointless dating, pointless relationships, right? Like there is no value in dating, right? There is no
00:57:40
value in it because it's just setting you up for failure after failure after
00:57:44
failure. There is value in friendship. There is value in building relationships with people, romantic and not. Okay,
00:57:53
there's value in that. They might not all pan out, but saying that they're pointless is just kind of
00:58:01
dumb. And you know, I think I would hope that at this point Josh Harris kind of understands that. He talks about in
00:58:09
these books multiple times how he had a lot of girlfriends before he swore off dating and he kissed it goodbye. Uh and
00:58:16
then he had one more uh relationship that he married and unfortunately they're no longer together. But
00:58:25
I I find it really interesting and I would love to ask him personally, what did you gain out of the relationships
00:58:32
that you had before um the woman that you married? Because I'm sure that there's life lessons that he learned.
00:58:39
Now, I understand there's an imparting of wisdom, right? That's where we go
00:58:44
back to the mentor thing. We go back to having parents involved. We go back to older siblings being involved in our
00:58:50
romantic relationships. Of course, they can help steer us in the right direction
00:58:54
and tell us this is worth it. This is not worth it. They're they're not a good
00:58:58
for you, right? We need those things in our life sometimes. However, it's also very human nature that we just
00:59:06
sometimes have to learn it on our own, right? We got to break some eggshells to make an omelette kind of a thing. So,
00:59:13
let's keep moving on right into the next section of this book. When the rules
00:59:17
don't fit the game. Okay, now we're still talking about Jessica and not so
00:59:22
much Emily cuz Emily was the friend, but Jessica is now at college and she gets there and has what she calls her rules
00:59:30
of romance. Like modern-day Moses descending from Mount Si with the Ten Commandments, she felt sure that her
00:59:36
list of dos and don'ts would solve the world's relational problems or at least
00:59:40
keep her from experiencing them. First, Jessica wouldn't allow herself to get
00:59:44
bogged down in short-term relationships until she felt she could pursue marriage. Dating was out. She would only
00:59:50
go out with guys in groups. Um, at that point, at the point when romance was appropriate, a guy who showed interest
00:59:57
in her would first talk with her parents. From this point, Jessica had a very deta every detail of the courtship
01:00:04
process planned, like a carefully written screenplay. After checking out the prospective suitor, mom and dad
01:00:10
would give the young man permission to woo her, and the two of them would fall hopelessly in love, and the sun would
01:00:15
shine on their outdoor wedding. So, Jessica wants to wait until she's ready for marriage before dating and
01:00:23
sets all these rules in place. Okay, setting up rules for your relationship might not seem like the worst idea, but
01:00:33
it puts a lot of pressure and a timeline on stuff. And if you've ever watched
01:00:38
Summer House, we know that timelines are bad and they fall through. Okay, if you
01:00:44
don't get that reference, watch Summer House. Okay. Um, the second thing that I find
01:00:53
so interesting about this, and this is going to come up again and again, asking for parents' permission to date
01:01:00
the daughter. I've always found this kind of stupid and I don't know, this is kind of a debate.
01:01:09
I mean, tell me in the comments, I guess. Like, let me know. Like, if you're
01:01:15
do you want your parents approval to date somebody? Do you want them to go I don't know. But here here's why I find
01:01:21
it personally stupid. I knew a girl in college who that was one of her one of her deals. You wanted to date her. You
01:01:28
had to call her dad. You had to convince him why you were a good guy to date his
01:01:33
daughter. I straight up to her face was like, "That's stupid. and if I ever
01:01:37
asked you out, I would not be asking your dad." And she was like really taken aback by
01:01:44
that. And she's like, "Why?" And I was like, "Well, I think you should be
01:01:47
trusted to make your own decisions." And I told her, I was like, "I understand maybe asking parents
01:01:55
permission when it comes to marriage. Even that I still kind of find weird. I did that technically. U my mother-in-law
01:02:01
was like, why are you even asking me?" Um, but like this kind of like sheltering again of
01:02:13
specifically women, but that sheltering is kind of again reinforcing this idea of like we can't
01:02:20
trust ourselves. We can't trust our body. We can't trust, you know, what
01:02:24
what it's telling us, right? And so I just find that such like a it's it's
01:02:30
just a really it's a bad rule in my opinion. Like again, you are your own person. You have
01:02:37
agency over your body. Make your own decisions. If you want to go out with me, great. If you don't, that's fine,
01:02:43
too. Like, I'm not going to be butt hurt over it. You know what I mean? But me
01:02:48
having to jump through hoop after hoop after hoop after hoop to like get you to go out with me is like not attractive,
01:02:55
right? It makes you th this is going to come off sounding like just pathetic manosphere [ __ ] but like it makes you
01:03:03
unattractive to me as a man because I don't see you as somebody who is independent and can think for themselves
01:03:10
and that's attractive to me. And so it's my own opinion, that's my own what I'm
01:03:15
attracted to, but you know, it is what it is. Okay, let's move on. Next up, the deceitful heart is this
01:03:23
next section. Oof. God. Josh says this. The human heart doesn't like taking orders from the mind. The time will come
01:03:31
for all of us when we don't feel like doing the godly responsible thing we're
01:03:35
we've resolved to do. The question is, how will we respond when our hearts lead
01:03:39
a full-scale rebellion? If we don't prepare ourselves for an uprising, you'll feel tempted to abandon our
01:03:45
principles and standards. Okay, here we go again with the wicked, deceitful, ugly, reprehensible heart.
01:03:56
Right? The core of any good Christian argument. We are so inherently wicked that we need Jesus because we can't be
01:04:04
trusted to do anything right because our own evilness gets in the way. We must wait. I was a little heated when
01:04:12
I wrote this, but this is what I wrote in my doubts. We must wait for Daddy God to show us the way. like grow up people.
01:04:18
We can make decisions on our own. Um, and it all ties back to purity culture because how can we be trusted to
01:04:25
date when we can't even be trusted to be a good person. That again ties back into daughters
01:04:33
being like, "You have to get my dad's permission." They don't trust
01:04:36
themselves, right? And uh but never have I ever heard a guy tell a girl, "Well,
01:04:44
you have to call my parents and ask if you can ask me out." Never. Never have
01:04:48
we seen that. I have this additional note that I kind of put in asterisk because it pertains to everything we're
01:04:56
talking about, but it says this. I genuinely think the peer culture was pushed solely as a way to control kids
01:05:02
from dating. uh relieving parents from having to have the sex talk or relationship talks with their kids. It
01:05:08
set such a high expectation that it was impossible to accomplish, right? We lived in shame and doubt and fear
01:05:17
that we were going to get it wrong, so we would never participate in it. That's the reality of what it felt like.
01:05:27
All of us were being pushed to to not do this thing because if we messed it up, it would be not only detrimental to
01:05:35
ourselves, but detrimental to another person or other people. Like crazy. Okay, we got to keep going.
01:05:44
We got to keep moving. The cheating boss. Oh my god, this story was insane. So, he tells this story in the book of
01:05:52
Julie, who's a 19-year-old. She gets a job as a receptionist and she finds her
01:05:57
boss attractive. She's attracted to him. He also shows some attraction to her and
01:06:04
he is married. Um I believe it says he has kids or whatever, but um yeah, he's
01:06:11
in a fully committed relationship and he puts the moves on her and so she is like
01:06:17
convicted, leaves her job kind of a thing. What I find crazy is he goes on in the
01:06:24
story to to talk about Jessica confessing her sins uh for finding a married man attractive. And I was like,
01:06:35
is that a sin? Like is it? I I had I would never have thought of it that way, right? Like I
01:06:44
look at people all the time and I go, that's an attractive person. I don't act
01:06:48
on it, but it but I can see somebody and go that's an attractive person. I don't
01:06:52
think that that's wrong, right? I don't think that that's sinful behavior. Even
01:06:56
when I was a Christian, I didn't think that that was sinful behavior to just
01:06:59
find somebody attractive. So, I find it crazy that he's talking about this girl
01:07:02
needing to confess her sin of finding her boss attractive when she did nothing wrong. Her boss is the one who
01:07:08
instigated an inappropriate relationship with her. And so, her reaction is to say no. She
01:07:16
says no, she leaves. She quits her job. Who's in the wrong here? It's not her.
01:07:22
She has nothing to apologize for. Like, what are we talking about? Yeah. Crazy crazy [ __ ] Okay. It this all plays into
01:07:32
this narrative again that like women carry so much more of the burden of purity than men do or men ever will, I
01:07:40
guess. Like it's this just kind of like uh like I I don't like I'm sure we're
01:07:47
going to get into clothes at some point in here. Um but like it it again is this
01:07:52
like why is it only their responsibility and the men have no responsibility right
01:07:59
we are continually told uncontrollable hormone monsters sex drives crazy all of these things do
01:08:06
nothing about it it's the woman's job to dress modestly uh to you know to
01:08:12
basically put us in our place [ __ ] [ __ ] people it's [ __ ] [ __ ] All right, got to keep moving.
01:08:20
Got to got to keep moving. All right, here we go. The pure springs. So Josh then goes on to tell this proverb and he
01:08:27
talks about this story of a quiet forest dweller who once lived high above an Austrian village um along the eastern
01:08:38
slopes of the Alps. Wow. And this guy had one job and it was to come down into this village and into the surrounding
01:08:47
area and he would clean these pools. He would clean these, you know, just natural springs kind of a deal and that
01:08:53
was his one job and he was paid to do that. Now city council gets together and they decide that hey there's this guy he
01:09:02
just comes down and his job is to maintain the springs. Why is he doing that? It's a waste of
01:09:08
our money. Right? And so they do away with it. And uh a few days later the water's like
01:09:14
all nasty, right? It's got like foam on it. It's like disgusting. And uh he says in the end, right, they
01:09:21
like, you know, they had they enjoyed this thing and then they basically like voted against their own interest in
01:09:29
getting rid of this guy. And um he said we make the same mistake in our own lives. Like the keeper of the spring who
01:09:36
maintained the purity of the water, you and I are the keepers of our hearts. We need to constantly evaluate the purity
01:09:41
of our hearts in prayer, asking God to reveal the little things that contaminate us. As God reveals our wrong
01:09:48
attitudes, longings, and desires, we must remove them from our hearts. The constant evaluation
01:09:56
of like our hearts and needing to check the purity is like exhausting. Okay. It it's part of what like led to me burning
01:10:05
out. Like in addition to the servitude, it's this constant like am I sitting? It's just this constant
01:10:13
checking of like am I doing wrong? Am I doing wrong? Am I doing wrong? Am I doing wrong? And living in this
01:10:18
perpetual fear of like I am doing something wrong and that God is going to be angry at me for it.
01:10:26
I can't tell you the number of times I've like cried on the mats at church.
01:10:30
like we had these carpets in the front and you could go kneel before God and I've cried and I've sobbed and I've been
01:10:37
like I'm just a wicked evil person because like I did this thing and if you believe in Christianity I
01:10:45
understand there is going there sometimes needs to be repentance of sin uh within
01:10:52
that religion but what I don't understand is that Christianity teaches that we are given
01:11:00
this gift of forgiveness, right? Man fell short. We couldn't cut it. God had to send his one and only son to come
01:11:11
and pay the ultimate price, which was death on a cross. And if we believe that and we ask him to come live inside of
01:11:17
us, uh, you know, we're forgiven and the Holy Spirit comes and lives inside of us
01:11:23
and makes us better people. and statements and stories like this, right, that end with this kind of telling of
01:11:30
this like you have to constantly be evaluating your heart and are you doing something wrong, I think it diminishes
01:11:36
the power of what Christians believe God is, what God did for them because if he
01:11:41
forgives you, he forgives you. That's it, right? He knows that you're going to
01:11:47
mess up. And I don't know that there's a necessity to constantly be living in
01:11:51
this state of I am wicked. I am evil. I'm all these things. When you accept that gift,
01:11:58
doesn't that transform you then into a new person? Just something to think about. Next up
01:12:05
in this book is the pollutants of the heart. Okay? And there's three of them.
01:12:08
There's infatuation, there's lust, and there's self-pity. Okay? We're going to
01:12:12
rip through them real quickly. Anytime we allow someone to displace God as the focus of our affection, we've moved from
01:12:17
innocent appreciation of someone's beauty or personality to the dangerous realm of infatuation. Instead of making
01:12:23
God the object of our longing, we wrongly direct those feelings towards another human. We become idoltors,
01:12:29
bowing to someone other than God, hoping that this person will meet our needs and
01:12:33
bring fulfillment. Here's what I wrote again with the possibility of knocking
01:12:39
God off their pedestal for infatuation with a person. Like, is it not normal to think about someone we find attractive?
01:12:46
Is it not normal for our minds to flash to positive memories of that person? This book seems to indicate that God
01:12:52
must always be top of mind. Earlier in the book, Josh talked about the couples that only wanted to spend time with each
01:12:58
other. Um, and they wanted to sherk the responsibilities of their lives. It seems like he wants to sherk the
01:13:04
responsibilities of his life to only hang out with God. I know that some people are going to be like, "But
01:13:09
there's nothing better than God. Like, there's nothing better. If I could just
01:13:13
spend all my time with God, I just would." That's not the reality of life,
01:13:16
right? But also, if you believe that God put us here for a reason and purpose, look at what that purpose should be.
01:13:27
Okay? As someone who for a long time was a Christian, I I kind of believed my purpose was to do what what Jesus did,
01:13:40
right? It was to to live in community with people, to have fun, to mourn together, to live life together. That
01:13:48
was like my purpose on this earth. Uh and and I felt like through doing those things with people, I would exhibit
01:13:56
god-like behavior and it would open possibilities to have conversion talks with people.
01:14:04
But I'll tell you what's not attractive to a lot of people who aren't
01:14:07
Christians. somebody who only ever [ __ ] talks about God. It's boring. It's not interesting. It's
01:14:15
like, and if you have any preconceived notion about Christianity, it's not going to be attractive. It feels very
01:14:22
much like when you have the Jehovah's Witnesses come knock on your door and everybody groans and they go, "Oh, these
01:14:28
guys again. Like, I don't want to listen to this spiel." That's how it feels when
01:14:31
somebody makes their whole entire personality about God and it's just that's all they want to talk about. It's
01:14:38
all they want to do. It's all their Instagram is good for is these weird like messages, prophesizing, preaching
01:14:48
tidbits. Like be a normal human being for once in a while. Get a hobby that's
01:14:53
not God related and like be interesting. It's not that hard. We all have things
01:14:59
we like to do. I like to read books. I like to play with Lego. I play video games. I really enjoy sci-fi movies and
01:15:07
sci-fi books and all this kind of stuff. Those are things I'm interested in. I
01:15:11
have interest in old cars. I have interest. I have a ton of interest. It's crazy. Probably way too many. But
01:15:19
there are things that give me opportunity to start conversation with people, right? I know about certain
01:15:24
things. I know about music. I know about this, right? and we can have a conversation about those things
01:15:31
and it maybe gets us to a point in our friendship where we can actually then have a conversation about our belief
01:15:37
system and God and all of these things, right? And so I just I just get so frustrated with this
01:15:45
constant talk of like God is always number one. Okay. Yeah, if you're a Christian, I believe that he can still
01:15:52
be number one and you can actually be an interesting person who does other things. That's my
01:15:58
point that I'm gonna make there. Moving on, let's talk about lust. Okay. Lust.
01:16:03
Lust. Lust. Lust. The second poison that often threatens the purity of our hearts is lust. To
01:16:09
lust is to crave something sexually that God uh has forbidden. For example, when
01:16:14
I, as a single man, look on a woman who is not my wife, which right now means every woman, and immorally fantasize
01:16:21
about her, I'm lusting. I'm setting my heart on something God has placed off
01:16:25
limits. Sexual desire within marriage is natural and appropriate and an appropriate expression of sexuality.
01:16:31
After all, God gave us sex drives. But God also gives us specific commands forbidding us to indulge in those
01:16:36
desires before we marry. This is my issue with that last little bit. Sexual desire inside of marriage is normal, but
01:16:44
sexual desire outside of marriage is not. Again, it's this light switch idea,
01:16:50
right, of you flip it on and off. Okay, so so when you're not married, it's
01:16:54
flipped off. Sex equal bad. And some people will say it's not. You can't
01:16:59
generalize it quite like that. I I'm going to Okay, I'm going to Sex equal
01:17:03
bad, right? We don't do sex because we're not married. Get married, put a
01:17:08
ring on it, sign a piece of paper legally saying we're married. light switch turns on, we're good to go. Brain
01:17:14
doesn't work that way. Humanity doesn't work that way. He's ignoring again what
01:17:19
our bodies are saying. He's shoving those things deep down, right? He's saying we don't touch them. Like those
01:17:27
are, you know, those are the nos, right? He's telling us to ignore the things
01:17:32
that our body is telling us. And in addition to that, we have to repent of feeling that way. We have to repent of
01:17:40
having sexual attraction towards somebody, right? Because it's sinful. It's wrong. Here's what else I want to
01:17:45
talk about with the with the lust thing. He attributes lust specifically to being
01:17:50
like a sexual thing, right? As being this like uber strong like desire, right, to crave something. And
01:18:00
you know, but people could also say like, I lust after ice cream. Like, right, I'm craving ice cream like so
01:18:05
bad. And so my question really is like, is lust really all that bad or is it what we do with
01:18:18
lust that is bad? And maybe as I'm as I'm talking about this, I'm thinking to
01:18:24
myself like maybe lust is bad because maybe lust is a bigger version or a stronger version of just attraction or
01:18:34
wanting, right? I can want somebody sexually. I can find somebody sexually attractive, right? I can want a bowl of
01:18:40
ice cream. How do I act on that? Right? And maybe lust is more of the like I fantasize
01:18:47
about it. I can't get them out of my mind, right? And it it leads itself into
01:18:51
infatuation, which can be a negative uh type of thing. I don't know. You let me
01:18:56
know. Is lust good, bad? Let me know. Okay. Lastly, we're going to talk about
01:19:01
self-pity. So, this is the last pollutant of the heart. In a sense, self-pity is the worship of
01:19:09
our circumstances. When we indulge in feeling sorry for ourselves, we turn our focus from God, his goodness, his
01:19:15
justice, his ability to save in any circumstance. And we when we turn away from God, we cut ourselves off from our
01:19:21
only source of hope. We can easily allow self-pity to se uh to seep into our hearts when we feel
01:19:28
lonely or crave someone to love and be loved by. It seems we have every reason in the world to complain, to sulk
01:19:35
angrily because we've received a bum deal. I just put this in my notes. I said, "Quit feeling bad about yourself,
01:19:41
man. Don't you know that God died on the cross for you and that should be enough?"
01:19:49
Self-pity is it's an interesting one because I think that it's one thing to wallow in it for a
01:19:58
long period of time, right? And to be like, oh, wo is me and I never get a boyfriend or I never have a girlfriend
01:20:03
or I never d right wo is me, right? To exist in that is probably detrimental. I would I would agree with that.
01:20:14
But I would also argue that like there is a level to which it's like okay to
01:20:20
sometimes feel sad, right? It's okay to sometimes be like, "Man, I really just
01:20:24
wish I had somebody to hug. I really wish I had someone to cuddle with at night. I really wish I had somebody to
01:20:30
go to the movies with, to go to date night with, to take to this restaurant that I really love, to do all these
01:20:34
things that I I enjoy, right? It's okay to feel that way because that's normal,
01:20:40
right? We crave connection. We're human. So, I'm going to leave it at that. We
01:20:47
have one more chapter to get through. We are now on to chapter 11. So, our final
01:20:53
chapter. It's called You Don't Date. What are you nuts? And uh subtitle is
01:21:00
what do you do when people ask why you don't play the dating game? Now, I'm
01:21:04
going to jump pretty much into the middle of this chapter because he kind of says the same thing over and over and
01:21:10
over again. And so, I'm going to jump to what he's calling what he labels the
01:21:16
Sunday afternoon dilemma. And it's basically this story that after church, um, this boy named Paul is hanging out
01:21:23
with his friends and they all are like, "Hey, we're going to go do this thing,
01:21:27
you know, we can give you a ride." And this girl at church is like, "Yeah, like
01:21:30
I can give you a ride. We'll go back to my house, get changed, we can, you know,
01:21:34
eat something quick and then we'll go do whatever kind of a thing." And Paul's
01:21:38
really uncomfortable because he knows that this girl, um, her mom works on Sunday, so nobody's going to be at the
01:21:44
house. and he also knows that this girl is kind of into him and rather than communicate that he's just like, "Oh,
01:21:51
like no, like or figure out a ride with somebody else, like he just kind of runs
01:21:55
away from the situation." He uses his parents scapegoat to kind of be like,
01:22:00
"Oh, well, like my parents really like when I'm at home on Sundays and like all
01:22:03
this stuff." And so he denies himself the fun of like going out with his friends because he doesn't want to deal
01:22:09
with this awkward situation with this girl that he doesn't have romantic feelings for. Uh but he knows she does
01:22:15
and also puts him in a compromising position. And I wrote in my notes I was like I really wish that he would have
01:22:25
talked. I wish that Josh would have said, "No, it's okay to communicate."
01:22:28
And I understand not wanting to hurt someone's feelings, but it's also okay
01:22:30
to communicate that you're not very comfortable in that situation, right? Or
01:22:34
you don't want to do that or you want to figure out a different ride situation or
01:22:38
maybe you meet up with them later or whatever, he just encourages them to run away. And so even if that is your
01:22:45
boundary, right, we talked about like listening to your body and what your body is telling you and like if your
01:22:49
body is telling you you don't want to do this, like you don't want to do it,
01:22:51
right? Or you want to figure out a different path. I'm guilty of this too. Like my my parents let told me that I
01:22:58
could use them always as the scapegoat. If I didn't want to do something at a
01:23:00
friend's house, I could always be like, oh well my parents need me at home, you
01:23:03
know, because sometimes it was easier to say that than to say like I just don't
01:23:07
want to hang out with you cuz that was sometimes the reality too or I don't want to do this thing. I had one
01:23:12
particular set of friends where their parents made us do chores at their house which I thought was kind of [ __ ] So
01:23:19
I hated going to their house um for that reason. And so I would always figure out
01:23:24
a way to show up late and not have to do anything. Um, and I could use my parents
01:23:28
as a scapegoat for that. But like looking back on it, I'm like I do wish that there were circumstances in which I
01:23:34
had been more forced to kind of be honest about the way I felt about things, right? And be able to say like
01:23:41
in this circumstance, be able to tell this girl, "Hey, I don't really feel
01:23:44
comfortable like going to your house. You know, maybe a couple more people could come with us." That kind of a
01:23:50
thing. turn it turn the scenario into something else or just say, "Hey, look,
01:23:54
I'm not really comfortable with that. I'll just catch up with you guys next
01:23:57
week or something like that, but stick up for yourself as opposed to kind of using your parent as a scapegoat." I
01:24:03
think it's just it would have been a cool learning opportunity. This last section of this chapter is called
01:24:11
running out of excuses, right? And so he's talking about there's only so many
01:24:15
times you can kind of like basically lie about like not going on a date or all these things, right? Because this
01:24:23
whole chapter is about these awkward situations, right? Of you've decided not
01:24:27
to date at this point. And you know, people are going to ask you, why don't you date somebody? Why don't you have,
01:24:34
you know, for me it would have been why why don't you have a girlfriend already?
01:24:38
And all these things, right? And it's like, oh well, I've decided not to. Uh,
01:24:41
I always just said I just haven't met the right person yet. But one of the things that Josh kind of advocates for
01:24:48
here at the end of the book is sometimes communicating our beliefs on dating or his beliefs on dating to
01:24:57
somebody, right? And he says this, our primary purpose for communicating with others should be their uh encouragement
01:25:03
and their growth. And so throughout this chapter, he kind of he he gave all these
01:25:08
scenarios and he talked about, you know, sometimes you need to explain to the this person like I don't date for these
01:25:14
reasons, XYZ. Other times you just kind of come up with more of an excuse of, you know, I don't do this or I don't do
01:25:21
that, you know, or I just like I said, I haven't met the right person kind of a
01:25:25
thing. He then goes on later in this to talk about an example from his from his own
01:25:32
life where he said, "I once made plans to go to a movie with a group of friends. At the last minute, everyone
01:25:37
backed out except for one girl, but because she knew me and that I avoided one-on-one dates with girls, uh, she
01:25:44
called to say we needed to reschedule. Her feelings weren't hurt and I didn't
01:25:48
have to go uh into major explanation. She respected and worked with my beliefs."
01:25:54
So, at this point, he's advocating for my friends all know I don't date. They
01:25:58
know my structure. They know my boundaries. All these types of things. Well, I think it's kind of stupid in
01:26:04
that Josh canceled plans with a group. Uh, you know, because like he just doesn't do
01:26:11
one-on-one dates. Like, I do think it is important that if you do decide like your dating rules that your friends
01:26:19
understand what those are, right? They're not encouraging you to go down a path that you're not comfortable with,
01:26:26
right? They're not telling you to hook up with somebody. They're not telling
01:26:28
you to make up make out with somebody. They're not telling you to do this, that, or the other with somebody if
01:26:32
that's not within like your group. But again, this is just movies. This is just
01:26:37
hanging out. It goes back to Josh can't handle a situation in which like someone
01:26:43
of the opposite sex and himself are alone, even though they're not alone. They're at a movie theater where other
01:26:50
people exist. And I know they don't know that, you know, these other people in
01:26:54
this scenario don't necessarily know them. And so if they did start making out or they did, people wouldn't
01:26:58
probably bat an eye at it. They'd think it's normal. But I again find it so
01:27:03
weird in this book that Josh throughout this whole last segment of this book, he
01:27:08
keeps talking about you can be friends with the opposite sex, you can do all these things with the opposite sex, but
01:27:12
then anytime that there's an opportunity to do that, he like shuts it down and
01:27:18
runs away from it. Like I just I just don't get it. The last little bit of this book, he talks about
01:27:27
the key motivation for communicating our beliefs about dating should be to serve
01:27:30
others. We want to promote peace, love, and righteousness that will bring glory to God. I put in my notes like it's kind
01:27:36
of like the invitation to the cult. And I think one of the things that I think Josh is guilty of a lot in this book and
01:27:44
in his own life is probably this better than thou situation of like creating all these
01:27:51
rules that he follows and makes himself the golden boy by being like I'm doing
01:27:55
all these things and this is the godly way to be and like if you don't do it
01:27:59
this way like you know he'll kind of argue that like oh well you know maybe it's okay maybe that's okay between you
01:28:06
and God but that's not how I interpret God, right? And so it's like we have
01:28:10
been set up to believe that Josh Harris is an anointed person by God to deliver this message about dating. And if we
01:28:19
don't follow his rules to a tea, we are dishonoring uh and going against God's
01:28:23
plan. That's how this book is painted out to be because even though he won't
01:28:28
say you're doing it wrong, he's going to heavily heavily imply it. It's no wonder
01:28:33
that this book caused so much pain in in the [ __ ] Christian dating world because like
01:28:44
imagine being 14 and reading this book, being given this book, okay? Being told,
01:28:49
"Hey, read this book on dating." And you open it up and you read it and
01:28:54
it reads as if this man is the authority on this subject, as if he has years and
01:28:58
years and years of training and knowledge and experience among these things. And so, you know, he's the guy.
01:29:04
He's the guy we trust. You know, all these things. And so, you set yourself up to do exactly what this book says, to
01:29:11
follow all of the rules, right? To remove the pollutants of your heart, to follow the the the standards, right? And
01:29:17
all these things. And like, and then it's just not fun. It's just not good because you end up
01:29:28
hating yourself. You end up feeling shame and guilt for anytime you get it wrong. You feel uh you feel disconnected
01:29:37
from your body, right? Because you've been taught to not listen to your body.
01:29:41
This book is brutal. I have to say this book has been brutal to read and to relive and to think through some of
01:29:47
these things. And I'm so happy that I'm a healthier person, but I know that I'm
01:29:51
not a perfectly healthy person. But I look at this and I read this and I just I'm like blown away that so many parents
01:29:59
just willingly handed this over to their child and said here and those kids read
01:30:04
this book and they implemented these things and these parents walked away, you know, wiping their hands of having
01:30:10
to have the sex talk of having to have any conversations about relationships with their kids and thinking I did the
01:30:16
right thing. When in reality you set your kids up to fail. You set your kids up to be ashamed of themselves, to be
01:30:23
ashamed of their bodies, to not know what actual healthy relationships look like. And so
01:30:31
it's it's just brutal. Like it's it's it just is. And the fact that it's still
01:30:36
even happening to this day, I know this book doesn't isn't in current uh print,
01:30:41
but like these teachings are things that continually play out in the home school
01:30:47
world, in the Christian world. like we are seeing them with young people today and we need to push back. We need to we
01:30:55
need to help change the trajectory of what that is. So that's what I'm going
01:31:00
to say on this section of the book. I I hope you stuck with me. I know it was long. I know I went all over the place
01:31:09
with this one, but we're almost there. We got one more section left to go. The
01:31:12
next part of this book, I think, is the marriage section. It's called Now What?
01:31:17
and it's going to talk on those final steps, right? Knowing that it's time, you're ready to get married.
01:31:24
And so, yeah, I hope this this series I don't know, it's some it's my opinions.
01:31:30
It's some dude on the internet's opinions on this book uh with having my
01:31:34
own life experience now and exiting purity culture and exiting religion. And so, I don't know. I hope it was helpful.
01:31:41
Uh, if you've got questions, if you got comments, if you got concerns, if you
01:31:45
got push back on any of this stuff, you can comment it down below or shoot me an
01:31:49
email. [email protected]. Shoot me a DM. Exhub on Tik Tok, Instagram. Threads now has a DM feature.
01:31:58
So, those are the places I'm most active uh for this. But yeah, all that's going
01:32:02
to be linked down in the show notes as well. The stuff that is in this book, the brainwashing that took place,
01:32:10
it doesn't just go away overnight, okay? It takes years and years and years of
01:32:14
working really hard to get rid of it. I hope we can change that in the future. I
01:32:18
hope we can open up the conversation around these topics around dating to be more inclusive and less rule follow,
01:32:29
you know, less of like this is the perfect way to do it and more of we're humans. we're going to mess up, right?
01:32:35
We're going to do things wrong. We're going to get hurt along the way. We're
01:32:38
going to hurt people along the way. It's what we do with all of that. Um, and how
01:32:42
we move forward from that that defines who we are as people. So, with that, I'm
01:32:46
going to let you go. I hope you enjoyed. Like, subscribe, do all the internet things you know how to do. Uh, and I'll
01:32:52
see you next time. All right. Peace. [Music] [Music]