Just for the record, I’ve never seen a shotgun wedding. I’m sure such things exist somewhere, perhaps in our recent past in the backwoods somewhere. It’s also quite possible that men somewhere have felt pressured, shamed into marriage. I don’t wish to completely dismiss that as if it isn’t a valid concern in someone’s life, it’s just not my world at all.

So within internet culture there’s quite a movement of men against marriage and this narrative that suggests there’s a marriage strike going on, that men are revolting against marriage because it’s a rigged game or something. MGTOW’s, men going their own way, that’s a real thing in the world.

It’s somewhat amusing because there’s this huge culture clash going, a contrast between what I read sometimes versus what I actually see all around me. There’s also an obvious economic culture clash, so like, “don’t get married, she’ll take all you stuff,” totally baffled me at first. What stuff? “Stuff” is like all the things husbands haul home that become lawn ornaments. Why would I even want his stuff? I’ve been trying to get rid of his stuff since he brought it home!

Duh IB, they’re talking about gold diggers, divorce settlements, resources. Very funny misunderstanding, wait….you have resources?

So where I live a lot of tradition is just out the window. People tend to live together, not get married, and many men are often, well poets, guitar players…..jugglers.

I’m serous about the juggler thing, not long ago I offended a woman who wanted to start a family, have a baby by saying, “But how, your boyfriend doesn’t have a job?” Yes he does, he’s a juggler! Oh, sorry. Well than…

I’m being a bit tongue in cheek and making fun of people, but I was the exact same way. My mother eventually got married a few times, but it wasn’t her idea. She didn’t really care about marriage. Neither did I, neither do most women all around me. I did not do the traditional and Godly thing, and get married because the bible values it. It was actually my husband who valued marriage, it was he who held those values. I believe when he said we should get married my answer was actually, “Why?” It didn’t even compute.

That’s the world I come from, one so disconnected from values of any sort that it really took a miraculous movement of the Holy Spirit and my husband’s persistence for me to even consider the possibility. “Why,” really was my mindset, as in I totally don’t get this. I often say, I got married because God said, because He did, because to me marriage was counter cultural, counter intuitive, just not done, and I wasn’t really feeling it either. God kept whispering in my ear, “but didn’t I say…?” And my husband kept whispering in my ear, “because it’s the right thing to do.”

As you can see, I’ve since become quite a marriage advocate and part of that is because I come from this time and place where the value and worth of marriage was nearly lost, where I myself could not even see it, where culture became separated from tradition of any sort, and the losses there are profound. So, Jesus Christ equates His own relationship with His church, to a marriage. If you think about it, marriage is one of the first things God creates and in the end it is His bride He returns for. So marriage is not just this casual thing to be tossed aside, forgotten, or redesigned. It matters.

So it is with some despair that I occasionally bump into Christian men promoting this idea that men are being shamed into marriage or that women must fix all these things that are wrong with the world or else men will just stop getting married. Despair, because I know it just doesn’t work that way in real life. Women are such followers, if men devalue marriage, women will just happily follow suit and begin to devalue it ourselves.

Also, it’s actually a message of feminism that suggests marriage is a patriarchal, oppressive, out-dated institution. They have launched a war against marriage. Actually in many places they have won a war against marriage. The LGBT lobby has a war against marriage going on, too. Some red pills and MGTOW’s have a war going on, too. When Christian men also step into the fray and begin attacking marriage, there just isn’t much else to hold it up.

God doesn’t say, once everything is to your liking and going exactly as you want, than and only than can you stand up for the values and traditions that I designed. Just saying.