A Convenient Fiction: Pursuit and Happiness

Every year (or every month), it seems some author publishes yet another book for Christian singles. A Google Book Search turns up 637 titles. The popular "Wild At Heart" and "Captivating" titles were popular a few years ago; by now, there's probably some new pop psychotheology distracting young people.

Plenty of tripe is pushed as Christianity in these books, and the pendulum swings back and forth between various poles; the common fallacy is that there is some set of attitudes, actions, or principles that can demystify what Agur in his wisdom "did not understand". Among the most egregious of these myths is the pervasive idea that women want to be pursued.

The 'pursuit ideal' is seen in non-Christian culture as well - in chick flicks and novels - but it is especially popular in Christian pop culture, where pre-modern European culture is best preserved.

You read it here first: women don't want to be pursued. In fact, "pursue" is a word used almost exclusively in literature. In real life, it's called "stalking". Having friends at R.I.T. (where the awkward male is in his natural habitat), I get to hear plenty of amusing, and occasionally disturbing, stories of infatuated guys and their "pursuit" of young women. The young woman invariably calls this "stalking".

Most women, of course, do want to end up with a man, and they want to believe it's very romantic, etc., much as men do. They want to be "pursued" - but only by a guy they already like. In that context, it's not really pursuit anymore, since a guy doesn't have to pursue someone who's not running away from him. Instead, it's attention, a much less romantic-sounding and much more universal way of showing affection. People of both sexes want those to whom they are attracted to show them attention. But when they run away, they don't want to be followed.

This isn't to say pursuit never works. Harry Truman asked Elizabeth Wallace to marry him. She turned him down, but they continued to correspond. Nine years later, he asked again, and she accepted. That's pursuit - and outside the knightly context, it's a form of manipulation, getting a woman to change her mind. This does not strike me as a terribly godly thing to aim at, since it's founded on the notion that a woman is not sufficiently self-aware to know what she wants.

So throw away the pop-psychology books, cancel your Facebook account, give those flowers to your mother, and save the binoculars for birdwatching. That's not her playing "hard to get"; that's her saying, "get away from me".