Northern Lights

I thought I’d post here an edited version of an email I sent to a friend. He’s single right now and desperately wants to get married, but he’s not sure how to start. He has very little experience with girls romantically. He was looking for hope and assurance that he could find a woman to be happy with.

My friend, these aren’t questions that words alone can answer. They come through experiences you are blessed to have (with women and men) that give you confidence going forward. Day by day. Week by week. Month by month. You’ll have experiences where you see a slice of the divine and they will convince you that this is all worth it. Like Joseph Smith said, you could stare into heaven for 1 second and know more than you learned in an entire lifetime. For agonizingly brief moments, the Lord will give you a glimpse of what can be, but if you have faith in that vision it can carry you very far.

The plan of happiness, for you, might not mean that you EVER get married in this life. I don’t say that to you specifically. From what I can tell, there’s nothing about you that means it would be impossible for you someday to marry some choice female spirit during your life. But I just say that because some people don’t seem to have the ability or opportunity for that during this life. And that’s not just people with SSA. So let’s just divorce (sorry, bad choice of words! ;)) getting married and being happy in this life. They are not, I believe, inextricably linked.

We can still have joy and happiness in this life, even being unmarried.

But still, I think you’re asking, are there things you can be doing that would help you get closer to the goal of marriage? The good news is, the things you should be doing to advance along the plan of happiness are the same things, in my opinion, that will make you more appealing to the quality members of the opposite sex and make you more capable of a relationship with a woman. There is a lot of inner work we can do that moves us forward. Those things are things like self-esteem, self-respect, confidence, integrity, a generous and giving spirit, trust in sharing our feelings with others. In the end, this list is about trust/trustworthiness and giving (i.e. charity). And all these qualities, as you develop them, become obvious to people around you, and the people who respond to that will be attracted to you. They’ll come to you, almost mysteriously. But they pick up on it, almost like the scent emitted by an emotional perfume.

The opposite also happens. There are people who are needy, fearful, greedy, who feel like they deserve to be with someone, that the world owes them a relationship with someone so that they can be complete, so they don’t have to be lonely. They want the other person to give them confidence and happiness. The results are often a catastrophe. (You can be grateful that your SSA gives you armor against falling into a relationship with a woman like that! This is a common disease among women.)

Because this kind of emotional life attracts someone just as needy, greedy, and helpless. In the best case, a relationship like this blows up, with each person blaming the other one for being the devil himself. When you talk to people like this, they bemoan their fate, curse their “bad luck” with men/women, and complain about how awful most people are. Even worse is if they stay together and each partner reinforces the worst aspects of the other, sapping their confidence so that they are miserable in the relationship, but don’t have the emotional wherewithal to leave it either. True, there are awful people out there and you can blame it 100% on that one person. But my own theory is that the person attracted just such a person to them by advertising their weakness. It’s like you have a sign hanging on you saying, “Doormat. Seeking someone to wipe her feet on me repeatedly.” And then complaining when women keep doing that.

Anyway, there is a lot more to say and do, but I would say, don’t focus so much on “finding” a daughter of God as being the person that a choice daughter of God would love. And don’t make your happiness dependent on finding her this month, or even this year. Just doing that work will make you more happy, I think, no matter what happens with marriage. There’s a lot already there with you my friend. And if you want to date girls, then do it. “Date” can mean whatever you want. From hanging out, to a low-key lunch somewhere, to a movie (movies are good if you’re nervous cuz you don’t have to talk too much, but you also don’t get to know her), to playing games with a group or as couple. But it’s okay to start small. And you can tell the girl that you are coming out of some difficult relationships (she doesn’t have to know the gender) and so not to take it personal if you want to take things a little slow. This will help set her expectations appropriately that this is going to go little differently than she may be used to. But you don’t have to tell her the whole story on the first date, but just that little hint will mean that she won’t be constantly blaming herself when she thinks you’re going “slow”. (All along, you’ll probably be going as fast as your feet can carry you, but the fact is, we’ve got to have time to do things our way. And that’s not a bad thing for the girl, either, it’s just her expectations and experience will be different. Our way isn’t bad, in many ways it’s better. But it is different.)

Well, there’s a lot more, but hopefully this is a start. Best of luck, and the Lord’s blessings be upon you!