I am 28 years old. In the last year, I have admitted to myself both that I was an atheist and that my wife and I were no longer in love. We have been separated for about seven months now with a divorce in process. There have been many new things for me to get used to. We married young, so I’ve never really lived alone, and I’ve never been single as an adult. Any emotional issues I may have had were met with lots of prayer and scripture, and convincing myself that God was taking care of everything. Obviously I no longer have those options available to me, and in hindsight I realize that they only masked the problems and didn’t solve them.
So that’s the background, and here is my problem: Over the last three months or so, I have slowly come to realize that I am in love with a woman who has been my friend since 2006. We have more things in common than anyone else I know, and the things she doesn’t have in common with me absolutely fascinate me, and I want to learn everything I can about her. She is every bit as fascinating to me as nature, and even the thought of holding her hand makes me too happy to sleep at night. Unfortunately, she does not have any romantic feelings for me. We are very good friends. She is one of my best friends, and she loves me, just not in that way. She allows for the possibility that her feelings for me may change in the future, and we remain good friends. She does not want me to pursue her romantically, though, and we both agree that doing this would destroy our friendship.
But I can’t stop thinking about her and how much I want to be with her. I don’t think I ever felt this way about my ex-wife. I want her so much it hurts me, and knowing that she doesn’t reciprocate my feelings hurts even more. I am deeply concerned that I will do or say something to damage our friendship (which, sadly, may have already started to happen), and that is the last thing I want. I am hoping to be her friend for the rest of my life, and she hopes the same for me.
There are three possibilities that I can think of that would resolve this, ranked in order of what I want most (at the moment, anyway):
She falls in love with me, and we live happily ever after, or for a few months or years, but at least we gave it a shot.
She doesn’t fall in love with me right away, but my feelings become manageable and I’m able to concentrate on other things, like work and music, and she eventually realizes that I’m the guy for her.
I stop having these feelings and things go on as they were before.
I really do not know how I should proceed. I don’t know how to stop feeling these things, or how to stop feeling them so strongly.
This is the short version. I hope you can help me.
Sad and A Little Pathetic in Seattle
Dear Sad,
I won’t call you “and A Little Pathetic” because you deserve more respect than that. You are in love. As painful or confusing as that can sometimes be, it is not something to be sneered at. Being in love is the beautiful, awful, tragic and splendid specialty of our species. It is the central part of what makes us human. We admire lovers, we feel sorry for them, we cheer them on to go forward, and we warn them to go back. They are the subject of comedies and tragedies. But we should never, ever look down our noses in scorn and contempt at those who are at the same moment lucky enough and unlucky enough to be in love.
You have never lived alone, you are new to your atheism, and up until recently, you have relied on prayer, scripture and God to deal with your emotional issues.
So inside, you are very young.
Not for all but for many people, living alone for an extended period, free from the distractions of an intimate relationship is necessary for them to come to understand themselves. I think this may be so in your case. You have only recently had the opportunity to begin to know yourself on levels deeper than those you reached while living with your parents and immediately later with your wife. In the months since separating from your wife you have begun to get glimpses of insight, such as seeing that your problems had only been masked and left unsolved. But now you have started another powerfully distracting love relationship, and your growing insight may once again be slowed.
Until recently, your main way of coping with emotional challenges was to rely on something intangible outside of yourself. Being convinced that God was taking care of everything hindered your developing self-reliance, self confidence and the skill of using friends for advice and support. Building these will take time, patience and work. If you don’t have friends with whom you can confide, find some. These must be friendships that you will not begin to romanticize or sexualize.
I agree with you that if you continue to pursue your friend romantically you will probably destroy the friendship, especially since she has specifically asked you to cease.
Your friend sounds like she is very level-headed, but even so, she may be experiencing a dilemma:
When a friend learns that their friend loves them romantically, but they don’t have that kind of love to return, they often feel a tension because of an odd quirk in our culture.
The healthiest response for the friend would be to feel sad about their love-struck friend, knowing that they are frustrated in their love. Unfortunately, in our culture people often take upon themselves the responsibility for other people’s feelings, thinking that they are supposed to somehow do something about or fix the other’s feelings. They confuse caring about someone’s feelings with taking care of someone’s feelings. So, being unable to return their friend’s romantic love, they might feel guilty. It is not rational or fair to themselves to take on that responsibility and the resultant guilt, but unfortunately it is all too common.
Also unfortunately, guilt is almost always accompanied by resentment. They don’t want this responsibility, but they don’t realize that it isn’t really theirs to take on. So they gradually begin to resent the source of their guilt. They think, “Oh why did my friend have to fall in love with me, making my life so complicated? Now I have to do something about it.” They cannot imagine themselves saying to their smitten friend, “I care about you, and I’m sad that you’re so frustrated, but there’s nothing I can do about it. My feelings are just not the same as yours. I hope that you can resolve your feelings.” They might consider such a response to be cold and uncaring, but it is not. It is the healthy, reasonable response of a caring friend who can only care, but who cannot be the manager of someone else’s emotions.
This is why your friend may at first have wished that your feelings would go away, and later may start wishing that you will go away. If she’s caught to any extent in that cultural false responsibility, the discomfort of guilt and resentment will take its toll on her friendship for you.
Sad, I suggest that you assume that possibility number three in your list is the correct one. That is the only one that is supported by any evidence. Your friend has told you that she doesn’t love you that way. That’s very strong evidence. The other two possibilities are merely wishful thinking on your part, perhaps similar to the kind of wishful thinking that propped up your belief in God. You have seen through that clearly, now see through this clearly.
If you jump right into another love relationship, you will continue to delay becoming familiar and comfortable with yourself, and will continue to impede your emotional maturing. Sometimes people use such relationships in a similar way to alcohol or drugs to avoid encountering uncomfortable things inside themselves. You need much more time by yourself to confront your insecurities, and to see through them to the confident, self-esteeming man you can become who can then offer a mature love to someone who can love you in return.
Richard
You may send your questions for Richard to . All questions will eventually be answered, but not all can be published. There is a large number of requests; please be patient.
My girlfriend recently asked me to come to church with her. She’s from Korea, and she doesn’t speak first-rate English, so she doesn’t know how to phrase things sometimes. She’s a very open person and she’s not interested in converting me or anything like that. She knows I’m an atheist, but she asked if I could come with her to church as just another place to go. I tried explaining to her how asking me to come to church is a very offensive question because it doesn’t respect my beliefs. Is there a better way I could explain to her why it is offensive to ask me to come to a church to attend a preaching session?
Thanks!
Brad
Dear Brad,
“I really don’t like it“ doesn’t seem like too complex an idea. That can be communicated even with pantomime, like the face you’d make when biting into food that should have been thrown out a long time ago. Your girlfriend sounds like a nice person and she’s probably not dense, so I wondered if there was some other issue going on here.
Just to see if your girlfriend being a Korean might have relevance to this, I consulted a good friend of mine, who is a member of an elite group of experts known as the Ask Richard International Research Team. She was born in Korea and has experienced being a member of more than one Korean Christian church in the U.S. She offered these insights that might help you understand what your girlfriend may be going through. She said:
“Of course, I could be wrong about this particular woman, and we should be careful not to make generalizations about nationalities too broadly. But I’ve never met a Korean who attends church regularly and asks someone else to go to church, but has no intention of trying to convert them. Although there are many Koreans in the U.S. whose spouses and partners are not as religious, the church-going Koreans are always, ALWAYS praying about them.”
“They do religion very well. It’s mixed up with the old Confucian teachings and the Christian thought, which means they are extremely affected by the pressure of duty and indebtedness. There are many Koreans who are Buddhists or even atheists, but even the atheist Koreans have the cultural Confucian upbringing. The mindset is very patriarchal and respectful of the elders and the ancestors. When you add Christianity on top of that and the belief that Jesus gave his life for yours, the sense of obligation to spread the word is very powerful. I attended a Korean church a while back, and they used to pressure the churchgoers to bring others there. ‘Just get them here, and we’ll do the rest.’ was the idea.”
My friend continued…
“It is possible that she may just want him to share in her life for another reason. If it is a specifically Korean church, rather than one with a general population, it could be as simple as wanting to introduce him to the food, since eating Korean meals after church is very common. Some people come to church just for the food, but if his girlfriend attends any church regularly, as in being a member of the church, I think chances are that she’s hoping that she can somehow change his mind about Christ.”
“If he does end up visiting her church, he would have to make himself very clear to her that he has no intention of changing his beliefs, although that will probably fall upon deaf ears. Whether Korean or American, so many Christians think, ‘If only you had the chance to hear the gospel message in the right way…’”
“Korean church people don’t push Americans too hard, just the other Koreans. They wouldn’t pressure him as much as his girlfriend to keep him coming. If he shows up once, that pressure on her will get worse. In fact, it may already be happening.”
“Since her English is not first rate, it’s likely that she goes to a Korean language church. They may have an English translation, but it’s not likely to be a good translation. It will sound like Greek to him.”
So Brad, if my friend’s experiences are relevant, this may indicate that this is not about a language barrier making it hard to explain yourself to your girlfriend. It could be that she understands you well enough, but she intends to get you there one way or another. To her, it may be much more than “just another place to go.”
Regardless of any underlying issue, it’s time to get the message across. Rather than further trying to explain why this is not your cup of tea, or why her persistently asking you is offensive, a simple, gentle and repeated “No, thank you, I’m not going” will probably cut through any barrier, whether it’s about language, culture or intention. “No thank you, I’m not going” repeated without anger or impatience, said warmly with no variation in the words. Tell her that you have no objection to her going all she wants, but “No thank you, I’m not going.” Forget explanations about why. That just keeps the subject open for discussion.
Do some research and suggest some specific things that you and she can share and enjoy about her background, such as Korean restaurants, cultural expositions and art exhibitions. She may be very pleased that you put forth the effort to explore her unique culture with her. But if you go within a thousand feet of that church, be prepared for whatever insistence, cajoling, wheedling, enticement and urging you’ve already experienced, to amplify.
Richard
You may send your questions for Richard to . All questions will eventually be answered, but not all can be published. There is a large number of requests; please be patient.
… Remember how I went to TAM7 awhile back? Well, I roomed with this guy, right? I know some of you were suspicious at the time that something might have been going on behind your backs, but look. At the time we were just friends. I swear. Nothing more. Yeah, but then, you see … then we hooked up a little after that and now we’re married. Hey, no, listen. Listen! There’s good news and you won’t very well hear it while you’re yammering on about fidelity and trust issues, will you? Okay, fine. I’ll let you vent, then. I’m sure this is a very difficult time for you…
That is *so* unfair. I’ve been to 3294823 conferences. Never once have I come back with a spouse.
Never again. Next time, I’m bringing home a haremfull of spouses and a quiverfull of babies.
Here’s an interesting twist on a common question. I’ve been asked several times whether I could date a religious girl. I can speak from experience (though with a sample size of one) that it didn’t work out well. She told me that her faith was a big part of who she was, and asked that if I didn’t respect her faith how could I respect her? (For the record, an uncomfortable silence ensued before I asked “Is it really that big a part of you?” We didn’t date long.)
Fortunately for me, it’s not an issue with Lisa, my current girlfriend. She’s a member of the Secular Student Alliance, helped found two secular clubs in college, and is generally amazing. Here’s an illustrative picture of her at the Maryland Renaissance Festival:
Lisa rocking the heresy sign in the stocks
But today my sister, Julia, posed a slightly different version of the question: “Could you date someone who coulddate someone who is religious?”
The question isn’t whether I could have a religious girlfriend, it’s whether I could date someone who has no problem dating religious guys.
I don’t think that I would immediately reject such a girl, but I don’t know if the relationship would last in my case. I consider certain traits central to my identity – my skepticism, my rationality, my willingness to accept what I think is true rather than what I wish were true. If a girl has no problem dating a religious person, how much could she value those traits in me?
I’m not talking about a girl who might take issue with religion but is willing to overlook it for other reasons. There’s a difference between a girl who is willing to date a religious person and a girl who has no problem with it. It becomes a matter of degree: how much does she value rationality?
What do you think? Of the question, not of Lisa, who I already know is great.
Posted in Dating, General at 8:00 pm by Hemant Mehta
A reader — let’s call her Jane — is part of a message board where members discuss marriage and family.
Jane recently posted that she and her husband needed marriage counseling because of communication problems. Some of the forum members suggested church counseling and Jane declined. She said she was an atheist and faith-based counseling wasn’t for her.
That led to this unbelievable response from one woman:
I respect your religious views. Don’t get it wrong but Girlfriend if you don’t believe in the God who formed you how the heck do you think two individuals with two different personalities (A man and woman) can make it without God. Oh, and not to be wrong Jesus created marriage. So why the heck are you even married if you don’t believe in God. Shacking up is the normal way that people that don’t believe in God go. I know this was more fact than help but I’m a counselor for my church and this is a regular thing now a day. You know what it would be even more educational for me if you could respond and let me know WHY DO ATHEIST GET MARRIED?
Can a Christian please decipher and provide answers to this collection of “fact”?
The atheists here would do it, but apparently, we’re too busy sodomizing each other to type out a response.
I’ve been dating my girlfriend for a year and, even though she is not religious now, she has said she wants to return to the Christian faith she had as a child. Her strong connection to her religious family is a large part of that. Within the last two years, I’ve become a non-believer and have no desire to return to my Christian roots. I told her about being a non-believer early in our relationship. She has said that she would not date someone who didn’t believe in a higher power but has made an exception with me. To compound the issue, I’ve had to dodge religious questions or tell half-truths (at her request) when confronted by her family. We also plan to attend a week-long outdoor camp put on by her family’s church soon, something that I agreed to going to because of how important the annual event is to them.
My problem is that, frankly, I don’t want that much religion in my life. I grew up with it but have abandoned it for various reasons. I feel like she and I are at a point where we should start looking at the future. I’ve not told her this, but I don’t see religion in our future. I wouldn’t want to convert to her religion if her church requires it for marriage. Nor would I want to take any future children only to a Christian church and put them in a Sunday school program. I worry about whether I should tell her, because I believe it might end the relationship. If you remove the religious issue, we are just a typical (but good) couple with typical (but not huge) problems.
Am I being unreasonable? Where do I go from here?
Sincerely,
Sans Belief
Dear Sans,
You are struggling with the basic foundation of love relationships: honesty. The issue of honesty is why they succeed or why they fail. It is why they are filled with joy or filled with pain.
Early on, you honestly told your girlfriend of your lack of belief. She was honest with you about her growing connections to her religion and her preference of only dating someone who believes in a higher power.
She made an exception to this for dating you. Such exceptions often have conditions or are reconsidered later, after some amount of time. You may have discovered that she will tolerate some ways that you express your unbelief, but not other ways of expressing it.
Looking at the possibility of a permanent relationship, things get even more conditional. For instance, your not accompanying her to church might be acceptable to her, but you wanting to limit prospective children of yours from going to church or Sunday school might be unacceptable to her.
Over time, her conditions and boundaries will likely change, but it is difficult to predict which way. She might become more relaxed and accepting, or she might become more demanding of having things her way. Your conditions and boundaries also will probably change, but it is also difficult to predict how they will change.
Even minor dissimilarities in religious beliefs can be extremely divisive, and yours are major. While the two of you may find ways to adjust to your differences, you will both have to continuously put effort into keeping the wedge from working its way deeper between you. It will be constant work. Some couples can keep it up, while others eventually cannot.
But the main problem is that both of you are straying away from being honest.
She has asked you to be less than honest, less than frank, less than genuine, less than real, less than you when around her family, being secretive, evasive and telling half-truths. Let’s clear away the euphemisms. She wants you to lie to them. You have agreed to do so.
The implication is that such lying to her family will spread to lying to her as well. You’re already keeping secrets from her about your preferences for future children’s religious upbringing. Secrets are unspoken truths. Couples living together require a standard of honesty that is higher than we use in most other relationships, so unspoken truths between a couple are… lies. Lies beget more lies. The rationalizations that we use to justify keeping one truth from our lovers can be used to justify keeping other truths from them. Untruthfulness grows like a tumor, and it kills love.
I can empathize with your quandary. You love her, you like her, and you want to be with her. But you’re afraid that being fully truthful will end the relationship.
That might end it, but being untruthful will definitely end it. I have never seen a relationship that required secrets and lying to each other that lasted. The truth will out, and if you are not two people who are well practiced with facing the truth, you will break up.
If you really care about her, then you must honor her and honor your relationship with your fully spoken truths, holding nothing back, and letting whatever must happen, happen. Really caring about her, you would not want her to be in a relationship built on secrets, falsehoods and illusions. Really caring about her, you would want her to be in a relationship that deeply supports and nurtures her with authenticity, even if that would have to be with another man. Really caring about her, your being with her would not be as important to you as seeing her happy and completely fulfilled. How deeply do you care about her?
Just as importantly, really caring about yourself, you would want the same good things for yourself, and would expect the same authenticity from your partner. You can try to be a pretend person with a pretend partner, or you can be a real person with a real partner.
Sans, you asked, “Am I being unreasonable? Where do I go from here?” You’re only being unreasonable if you think that being less than forthright will continue to work. Where you should go is straight to your girlfriend with all these religious concerns and anything else that you are tempted to hold back. Lay them all out in respectful but completely honest terms.
After all that full disclosure, it will not be a matter of you waiting passively for her to choose to stay or to go. You will both have your own decisions to make. Then, whether it is with her or not, you should continue walking the path of proactive, scrupulous honesty.
If turns out that it is not with her, I don’t think you will be alone for long.
Richard
You may send your questions for Richard to . All questions will eventually be answered, but not all can be published. There is a large number of requests; please be patient.
The last time dating website OKCupid released data about its users, we discovered that saying you’re an atheist can help you get a date!
Recently, they released a few more charts that are revealing both for what they tell us and don’t tell us.
For example, a lot of people put their astrological sign on their dating profile. You would assume that some of them take it seriously enough to actively seek out people with whom they’re “compatible.”
So what happens when you take a random sampling of 500,000 users and check out the “match percentages” between users with different signs?
Just for some background:
A match percentage between two people is a condensed, yet statistically valid, expression of how well they might get along. 75% is very high, 45% is very low, and 60.2% is the site-wide average.
So people whose stars are “correctly” aligned should see a higher-than-average match percentage, right?
Let’s find out:
I know what you’re thinking: two Aquarians should never date.
But let’s be clear: there’s no statistical difference when it comes to compatibility regardless of your zodiac sign!
If people ask you for your sign, tell them you’re not interested in breeding and move on. You’ll be doing us all a favor.
Another interesting chart is the one below, regarding how adamantly you take your belief system. Are you very serious about whatever you believe? Or are you laughing about it because you don’t take it that seriously at all?
The summary explains it well:
As it turns out, people who hold their beliefs lightly are much better liked, even by people who are themselves serious. Weird huh? While it’s true that the most serious women believers slightly prefer their men to not be “laughing about it”, every other slice of this data indicates that the less serious (or more flexible?) you are about your religious beliefs, the better you get along.
This applies to atheism, too. The more serious you are about it, the less people are interested in you. You’re just not as fun to be around as someone who simply brushes religion aside like it’s a whim of the masses.
I was also amused by the stat that Jewish guys get along with people from all religious faiths — in fact, they have higher compatibility with Muslim woman than Muslim men! (There’s irony for you.)
Have these trends played out in your personal life at all?
Would you prefer dating someone who took their belief system super-seriously?
Posted in Dating, General at 6:00 am by Hemant Mehta
A few months ago, I heard a story about a woman working at a Christian summer camp who needed a ride back to her cabin. Her co-worker (a male) was there and also needed a ride. Her boss (a male) had a car with one seat available.
The co-worker suggested (rightly, I believe) that he could walk back by himself and the woman should take the safer option and be driven back by the boss.
The boss refused to drive her.
His response included the phrase, “… it would be inappropriate for me to take you back since I am married and you are a female, so I am going to have to take [co-worker] Joel instead.”
A few weeks ago I spoke at a conference that required me to fly. In arranging rides to and from the airport with the conference staff, I realized they had me scheduled to be driven back to the airport for my flight home by a lady.
…
… I decided to request that a guy drive me to the airport. I just wasn’t comfortable with the idea of spending an hour in LA traffic alone with a girl. That just didn’t seem smart to me and the conference was completely cool with that request. They found a guy, everything was good.
To me, that sounds ridiculous.
Acuff makes it sound like this type of scenario is often the beginning of a slippery slope that will ultimately lead to an affair.
… But of the two camps, “Jeez you’re such a Puritan, loosen up” and “Better safe than sorry, can a dude drive me to the airport,” I know which one I want to fall into. Because no one ever wakes up and says, “Today I’m having an affair.” Affairs are slow burn decisions, with a wick a mile long made of little steps and little compromises.
His last line makes sense, but it seems very possible to me that you can have close platonic friendships with the opposite sex (or whatever sex you’re attracted to). To say otherwise sounds like you can’t control your own emotions or feelings or sex drive. Are some people that weak? Isn’t it possible to be around other people and not think about jumping them? Should we give up possible friendships because other people might think there’s something going on between you two?
There’s a difference between spending time behind closed doors during a business meeting with someone of the gender you’re attracted to and staying in a hotel room with that same person. (Hell, I’ve done the hotel room thing with female friends, too, and it’s never been an issue.)
There’s also a difference between catching a ride with someone and working on a project together in isolated areas.
Acuff’s situation is different from my own, of course, because he’s married. But I would hope there’s enough communication between the couple that, if such a situation arose, his partner would just trust him to make the right decision.
I would hope if you just explain the situation to your partner and not try to hide it, most of the hypothetical problems he discusses could be worked out before they escalate into anything bad.
Am I being completely naïve when I say all this?
Or is Acuff right and we’re better off playing it safe and keeping a distance at all times from people we could theoretically have an affair with?
Reading through many of the comments on his thread, it seems like a lot of people are overly cautious about everything. (e.g. If I get into a car with another woman, I text my wife and let her know.)
As one friend said to me, “If you can’t control yourself, maybe you shouldn’t be in a relationship.”
Posted in Dating, General at 9:00 am by Hemant Mehta
Dating website OKCupid ran an analysis of emails sent by people making first-contact with someone else. They wanted to know which words/phrases were more or less likely to generate a response from the other person. (They compared all results to the overall average response rate of 32%.)
We analyzed over 500,000 first contacts on our dating site, OkCupid. Our program looked at keywords and phrases, how they affected reply rates, and what trends were statistically significant. The result: a set of rules for what you should and shouldn’t say when introducing yourself online.
There are some obvious results. Don’t spell like a teenage moron. Don’t use the word “sexy” or “beautiful” in your first email (I assume it makes the recipient uncomfortable). It helps to point out a shared, possibly-unique interest (e.g. Vegetarianism, tattoos, grad school, etc).
But this is the bit that stood out:
Mentioning your religion helps you, but, paradoxically, it helps you most if you have no religion. We know that’s going to piss a lot of people off, and we’re more or less tongue-in-cheek with this advice, but it’s what the numbers say.
In other words, if you bring up your atheism, you have a better-than-average chance of getting a reply! Mention god and your response rate goes down.
There are unanswered questions: We don’t know how “atheist” and “god” are used in the emails (perhaps they say, “I hate atheists” or “I hate god”). Perhaps atheists are more likely to be drawn to OKCupid than theists. (It’s not like you’ll meet a ton of atheists on eHarmony.)
But it’s encouraging to know that, at least on one dating site, being an atheist may not be such a liability.
Dan Barker is the co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, along with his wife Annie Laurie Gaylor. Even if you’ve read Dan’s book, the story of how he met Annie Laurie is unique and hilarious
It involves an almost-lost letter and Oprah Winfrey:
My favorite bit comes at the 5:20 mark (but it makes more sense in context, so no skipping to it).
Can you even imagine Oprah doing an episode on atheism these days?
Secular Student Alliance Member Todd Stiefel has agreed to match all donations to us by 12/21/2009 up to a total of $50,000. Double the value of your support and help us get the whole match by donating now.
. All questions will eventually be answered, but not all can be published. There is a large number of requests; please be patient.
