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Marriage will bring out the worst in you.

This weekend, I finished the book The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God, which issues this reminder: marriage will bring out the worst in you.

Which, to be clear, is a good thing. So is the book, which is by Protestant pastor Timothy Keller. It isn’t short but it’s easy to read and I actually implore you to read it if you intend to get married (or if you already are).

The book defines marriage as God designed it.

It equips readers to do marriage right in a culture that does it wrong. To pick a spouse wisely. To stick to our commitments. To create of our marriages occasions “for God’s presence on earth,” as St. Josemaria Escriva called it. Continue reading “Marriage will bring out the worst in you.”

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Dating, love, and sex.

As 2015 nears its end, I took a few minutes today to check my blog’s stats — I wondered which of the posts I wrote this year struck the most chords (or nerves, let’s face it).

Below you’ll find links to my most-read posts of 2015, which I encourage you to read (or re-read?) and to share via social media — your help means so much to me while, as a writer and speaker, I introduce (a small part of) the world to the virtue of chastity.

The fifth most-read post on my site in 2015:

What Tim Tebow’s breakup can teach us.

Click here to read the post.

[shareable]You are not meant to bind yourself to a person who decides to “deal with” chastity.[/shareable]

Continue reading “Dating, love, and sex.”

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What’s better than fleeting pleasure?

I am in Manhattan until Friday and had lunch at Chef’s Street at Macy’s a couple of days ago. I shared a table with a stranger who suggested gelato from a restaurant on the store’s sixth floor.

I do enjoy gelato but told her I’d pass, that I’m cutting back on sugar (that day’s breakfast — Nutella Packed Jacks — had enough of it!). But she urged me: “Get the gelato; enjoy your life.”

I smiled and didn’t say what I was thinking: that I do enjoy my life, when I make food choices that don’t end in sugar comas or bad moods or food babies.

But how often we pick fleeting pleasure without discerning first whether fleeting pleasure is worth enduring what may follow, which is likely to last longer than what caused it in the first place.

And this isn’t just in dessert. It’s not just gelato and sugar coma versus no gelato and having a body that functions. It’s in relationships. It’s in who we pick and how we spend our time with each other.

So today, I urge you:

Think ahead a little; enjoy your life, not just brief encounters with fleeting pleasures between longer periods of having to undo what didn’t have to be done.

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What Tim Tebow’s breakup can teach us.

Tim Tebow got dumped. Again. This time, the girl is Olivia Culpo, a former Miss USA who allegedly called it quits after a couple of months because she “can’t handle” Tebow’s sexual abstinence.

So last week, a New York Daily News gossip blog mocked the famous football player for his inability to “find the endzone,” and wrote that it isn’t the first time that his decision to save sex has caused him to fumble in his love life.

Which is ludicrous.

It’s not ludicrous because Tebow didn’t fumble. He absolutely fumbled. We all do. But he didn’t fumble because he decided to save sex. He fumbled because he decided to date a girl who thinks saving sex is a bad idea.

And I wonder why — why a person who intends to live life like God designed it decided to date a person who isn’t into that. Maybe for the same reason I did? Continue reading “What Tim Tebow’s breakup can teach us.”

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The divine insanity of attraction.

[callout]This is a guest post by my good friend Mark LaBelle, a seminarian for the Diocese of Orlando.[/callout]

Attraction is a funny thing. It can come out of nowhere and leave us totally dumbfounded. Consider, for example, one of the most iconic bossa nova songs of all time: “The Girl from Ipanema.”

It’s by Tom Jobim, originally written in Portuguese and famously performed in English by Astrud Gilberto with jazz saxophonist Stan Getz.

It’s a beautiful little tune, but the English lyrics are a bit… creepy. Consider the 1967 recording, in which a then-52-year-old Frank Sinatra croons, “Tall and tan and young and lovely / The girl from Ipanema goes walking / And as she passes, each one she passes goes, Ahhh!” Continue reading “The divine insanity of attraction.”