Why Courtship Fails: A Male’s Perspective

by The Graduate

As a young man in my early twenties who grew up in conservative homeschool circles, I was excited to return home after spending four years in a Christian college. I had very little experience in dating and hadn’t been in a relationship in college, but I had a good degree and a solid career lined up in front of me. My parents were excited too, because they hoped that I would be able to easily find a bride among the many single homeschool girls my family knew. I was a willing participant to their plans, but I soon found out that even with the right credentials, it was still impossible for me to come against homeschool patriarchy and perfectionism.

According to Bill Gothard and Doug Phillips, a girl who has spent her entire life preparing for marriage under unquestioning submission to her father should expect to have almost too many young men seeking to win her hand. Eventually, her father would choose the right one for her. Her future husband would be a paradox: ambitious and hard-working and able to support a family, yet fully under his parents’ authority and living in their house without going to college. He would be an intelligent, independent critical thinker, yet he would agree unquestioningly with every belief of his parents and church.

Most of my family’s friends subscribed to these philosophies. But as their daughters approached their late teens, these families began to realize, either consciously or subconsciously, that many of the required attributes of a “godly young man” are mutually exclusive. An ambitious, hard-working young man is going to want to go to college, or at least live at a level of independence from his parents unacceptable to Gothard and Phillips’ teachings. And any truly intelligent and critical-thinking suitor is not going to agree with his parents on everything – especially if his parents are die-hard ATI-followers.

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Debunking the Fourteen Basic Needs of a Marriage: Part 1a

by Incongruous Circumspection

In the Introduction, we looked into the general idea that Bill Gothard is trying to get across in this series. He attempts to list seven basic needs of a husband and seven, also, of the wife. We discuss the flaw in this logic, which is, Bill treats life as if all men and women are exactly the same. Worse yet, Bill positions this series, as well as all of his “truth” in all of his materials, as the non-optional, unquestioned, standard for finding favor with God.

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Justice is No Lady: Chapter 10 My Right to Be Heard

By Tess Willoughby

Nate got another partner almost immediately. He found her on a Christian dating site. Patty had money from her millionaire father and a big house paid for by the government salary of her estranged husband. Nate had told me that remarriage for me was unbiblical, but he found a loophole in Scripture and told the children that he and Patty were already married in God’s eyes. God having spoken, Nate moved into Patty’s house and put our marital home up for rent.

Nate wrote me a letter warning that if I did not “come to terms” (give him full custody of the children), he would hold a big yard sale and sell off everything in the house that belonged to me and the kids. He had the right to do this, having been awarded the entire contents of the house by the courts. The letter specifically mentioned a silver tray that my grandparents had given us as a wedding present. The toys, costly and old-fashioned and ordered from catalogs, had been my parents’ birthday and Christmas gifts to the children. The kids had left behind probably two thousand dollars’ worth of toys–$300 in large hand-carved wooden blocks alone. Nate sold them all, except for a few that he informed us he would keep at Patty’s house for “when the children come home.” Nate sold or gave to Goodwill the 150 books in my personal library and the children’s library.

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The 14 Basic Needs of Jim-Bob and Michelle Duggar

 

by Hopewell

Recently  on “19 Kids and Counting,” Michelle Duggar was seen giving women a handout on the “7 Basic Needs of a Husband,” a document produced and distributed by the Advanced Training Institute –the Duggar’s “homeschool group.” She also gave out the group’s “Character Qualities” chart, which I discussed in an earlier post, The 49 Character Qualities of the Duggars.

The 14 Basic Needs of Jim-Bob and Michelle Duggar: How they meet each other’s 7 Basic Needs:

7 Basic Needs of a Husband:

  • A man needs a wife who is loyal and supportive: Obviously, Jim-Bob picked the right wife! Michelle has been there with him, supportive to the max, thru years of small businesses, scrimping and buying used and saving the difference to achieve his (well, their) dream for their family. She’s put up with a two bedroom house on a car lot keeping 4 or 5 small children quiet while Daddy made a car sale. She’s sold cars herself with babies underfoot, gone out to tow cars on her own and kept all the family fed, clothed and healthy throughout it all. That was the early years.

Today Michelle is beside Jim-Bob at every possible moment—even on the Santorum Campaign trail when possible. While she has Grandma Duggar and the big girls to take up much of the day-to-day running of the family, caring for Jim-Bob is her responsibility and she obviously takes it seriously. Her rapt attention when he is speaking shows her love for him.

  • A man needs a wife who honors his leadership: Michelle honors her husband by taking any opportunity to praise him as a father, speaking lovingly of love of family fun, of making a careful response to problems and of modeling the behavior he wants to see in his children. She openly admires his vision for the family and his business acumen. When he is speaking she is completely focused on him.
  • A man needs a wife who develops inward and outward beauty Michelle has kept herself in very good shape considering all the years of pregnancy she’s endured. She honors her husband’s preference for long hair at an age when most wives have long since cut theirs for convenience. She maintains her composure in difficult situations and tries always to speak in a loving voice. She laughs easily and her smile at that time is lovely. She is a very outgoing lady.
  • A man needs a wife who will make appeals, not demands.  While we cannot know what goes on when the cameras are off, it does not appear that Michelle is a very demanding of her husband.  She does not complain about him dragging home an antique harp or buying a new bus—she’s used to his whims and trusts his business sense. She knows him well and lives easily and happily with him.

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Atlantic Wire:’19 Kids and Counting’ Gets Stranger, Sadder

General public not impressed by Duggar family “witness”

by Vyckie Garrison
During my Quiverfull days, I honestly believed that Michelle Duggar’s TLC show – which began as “14 Children and Pregnant Again!” and is currently titled, “19 Kids & Counting” – was an awesome witness to “the world.” I was in awe of the Duggar family, and it thrilled me that such a wholesome, godly family was given a national stage on which to exemplify for America what a truly biblical family looks like.

I’m sure every detail of the Duggars’ television show, numerous talk show interviews and guest appearances at political rallies is calculated to paint their “traditional family” and their “pro-life values” in the best possible light. However, as a former Quiverfull believer-turned-outsider-looking-in, it now seems plain that non-fundamentalist Americans are not particularly impressed by this mega-family, nor is the general public overwhelmed with the conviction that all families ought to live similarly.

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