While I had a blast sharing my opinions about what I consider to the be foundation of every LA girl’s wardrobe, perhaps the best part of the night was the discovery of 4-way stretch. Yeah, you heard me right. FOUR. WAY. STRETCH. As in, however you’re moving, your jeans are moving with you! Even you sit or bend down, no booty cleavage! Not that I don’t feel super classy holding my back belt loop when I bend over to keep my tush covered in all my other jeans…

Each of the panelists got to take home a pair of DL1961 jeans featuring this miraculous new 4-way stretch. My fabulous light gray skinny jeans are so comfy that they feel like a pair of leggings and, so far, have completely held their shape. I also love that, even on a tall girl like me, there’s still enough length on the jean for it to bunch a bit at the ankle over the top of my shoe. I never want to be the tall girl whose jeans are too short, so I adore a skinny jean that gives me more length than the classic 50s pencil.

I suppose all that really needs to be said about my new DLs is that, out dancing on Saturday night, I was the only girl in the group not constantly grabbing her belt loops to shimmy her jeans back into place! I am tough to please in the denim department, but I just may have a new favorite.

The jeans pictured above are the DL1961 Kate

I am an achiever.  I like results.  Accomplishments.  Checking things off my to-do list. Sometimes I think it would be nice to be called to something with an obvious spiritual impact.  But I haven’t been.  I have been called to a profession that, in so many ways, reflects nothing of God’s kingdom, often being accurately stereotyped as selfish, cutthroat, and vain.  

And the obvious answer is that Christians are called into these circles to live within them in a different way.  But I just can’t believe that God has asked me to act simply so that I can minister to other actors with my pleasant rehearsal manner.  I have to believe that He has called me to act because He plans to use that gift.  

How?  I don’t know.  But I’m trying to trust. Trust that I’m on the right path. Trust that God gave me talent and passion because he wanted to use them. Trust that my gifts are valuable even when they can’t be fit into any cookie-cutter definition of service.

I received affirmation of this recently from a production of Phantom in which the role of Christine was played by a beautiful Christian actress. Watching her onstage, I understood in a way I hadn’t before that it is possible to give testimony when you’re not saying a thing about God.  This young actress opened her mouth to sing and it was alarmingly clear that the Lord was working both in and through her.

My pastor gave a message at church yesterday in which he proposed that if we believe that God is in control and also that all people are made in His image, reflecting a piece of His character, then we must also agree that every interaction we have in life is a sort of “divine appointment.”  When people are brought across our path, we are called to look for that piece of God in them and treat them accordingly.

Meditating on this idea, and admitting to myself and to God that this is something that I am often too caught up in myself and my own busy life to do, it dawned on me all over again that, as an actress, this is what I have been blessed to have the Lord ask me to do with my life.  I get paid (or, most of the time, don’t get paid) to explore and reflect all of the facets of the human character.  And if you believe that we are all made in His image, you could go as far as to say that I am not just exploring the human character, but God’s character and how it is reflected in people.  And that, I have to say, is a pretty exciting calling!

So I’ve been challenged not only to see the character of God in every “divine appointment” with someone He brings across my path, but also in every role I am ever cast in, audition for, or even read. And by seeking to honestly embody these women who are made in the image of our Creator, maybe just maybe, someone sitting in the audience will see herself or the person she’s sitting next to just a little more fully than she did before. And then it matters. It matters a lot.

I don’t have it all that bad in the looks department, so I kept asking myself, where the hell is this coming from, this childish insecurity I thought I had conquered?

And then it dawned on me that, in the midst of reading Wild at Heart, I have been praying that God would reveal to me what author John Eldredge would refer to as my “wound.” 

Trying to make sense of all the times over the past few weeks that I have wanted to cry when a pretty girl walked in the room or tuned completely out of conversations with friends and tuned in to the voice telling me I’m worthless because my breasts are smaller than the girl’s at the end of the bar, it is painfully clear that God is revealing my wound as one of tremendous unhappiness with my appearance.

I also wrestled with the buried but unhealed hatred of my body while reading Sex God, in which Rob Bell points out that, if we are made in God’s image, hating the physical form He has given us is essentially hating a piece of our Creator. I prayed that God would let me love and respect Him more deeply by granting me an acceptance of the way He chose to create me.

But it looks like I didn’t pray hard enough because here I am brimming with enough insecurity to make an eighth grader seem well-adjusted.

I felt the Lord telling me to ask for prayer from my Bible study group in this area recently, but I shied away because it has been my experience that when thin, attractive young women admit to struggling with insecurity, we are often met with intense hostility and accused of fishing for compliments and/or being emotionally deranged. 

But who is anyone else to say whether or not my struggles are valid?  And who am I to say “no” when the Lord tells me ask for help?

In Captivating, Stasi and John Eldredge link what seems to be an almost universal struggle that women have with appearance to Satan jealously attacking us for reflecting so much of the beauty of God’s character. If that is true, and what seems to be otherwise irrational insecurity is actually the effect of the enemy attempting to punish us for what caused his own fall, then doesn’t it seem possible that a woman labeled “attractive” by society could just as easily be plagued by self-doubt as anyone else?

There are a hundred reasons why I am uncomfortable writing this and a hundred more why feel I need to.  Admitting weakness is not something that I do easily, but God has shown me that I need to give this struggle to Him before I can appreciate the beauty that He has given me, rather than continuing to ask those around me to prove something that they can’t.

And I trust that, just as God answered my prayers to show the wound to me, He will also answer my prayers to heal it, but until then if you wouldn’t mind praying for me too, the wound f-ing hurts.

This is a question I have been asking myself a lot lately, along with ones like: What is love? What does it mean? How do we find and preserve it? Can love look completely different but be equally true in different relationships?

I am radically rethinking the idea of love. 

I am beginning to doubt my motives for loving in the past, and am consequently having to restructure what I am looking for now.

A little over a year ago, I fell in love with a man for opening my eyes to my own potential by seeing me as the person I was trying so hard to become, rather than the person I was; a relationship that I have always very much seen as falling in line with Richard’s description of a soul mate in Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love:

People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants.  But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.  A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake.  But to live with a soul mate forever?  Nah.  Too painful.  Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you and then they leave.  And thank God for it.

And, while I don’t think the aforementioned heartbreaker was my soul mate, this passage still rings true because I did find a lot of comfort when I was able to accept that the reason God put this man in my life at a time when I was so discouraged and broken was not so that this poor guy could spend every day for the rest of my life making me feel smart and funny and interesting, but so that I would remember that I actually was those things and begin to heal. 

He trusted me, respected me, challenged me, believed in me.

And while those are all beautiful things, it never struck me until a few days ago that all of the reasons I was so head over heels in love with this man had to do with me, how he treated me, how he made me feel.  Realizing this made me wonder if I was actually in love, not so much with him, but with the feeling that he gave me about myself…in essence, not in love with him, but in love with me!  Ouch!

I think this is one of many dangers in treating love purely as a feeling and not as a choice, something my friend Katie wrote a really great blog about. If we love someone merely because of the feeling that being with them gives us, what happens when we don’t feel it anymore? What happens when the butterflies evolve into more profound feelings that we might not recognize?  With the beautiful range of emotions that our Creator gave us, how can we expect ourselves to experience one feeling every day of our lives and have that alone sustain us and our relationships? If we don’t choose to value and respect the relationship even on the days when we don’t feel mushy and loving, we risk becoming the kind of people who let their marriages dissolve because “the feeling is gone.”

I was mulling over the question of how the heck we are supposed to know we are in love if it isn’t by some sort of magical feeling, and I was taken back to a conversation I had recently with an uncle of mine who asked me, What are three things you love and respect about your boyfriend?  Without even taking a beat to think about my answer, I rattled off:

How deeply he is searching to find the right balance between his life, his work, and his spirituality.

His relationships with his family and friends.

His work ethic.

My list could have included:

He always opens the car door for me.

He calls when he says he will.

He notices my shoes.

He challenges me to be a better version of myself.

He tells me I’m beautiful.

But it didn’t.  And even though that last handful are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to things he does to make me feel treasured and insipired, when asked for three things I loved about my man, my immedate responses all had to do with his character.  Holy heck!  Could it be that I have found a man so wonderful that the way he makes me feel is merely a byproduct of a great relationship, as opposed to the entire foundation for it?  Is it possible that I am in a relationship with this man because he is incredible and not just because he makes me feel incredible about myself? 

A dear girlfriend of mine from college wrote a blog a few days ago that really hit home with all of these ideas I have been trying to sort out in my own head, talking about loving someone for who they are as opposed to what they do for you.  I may be putting words in her mouth now, but in addition to discussing what are often our very selfish motives for loving others, I think she also touches on the idea that we can’t truly love someone else until we accept the responsibility for our own development and our own strength rather than waiting around for someone else to show up and nudge us along on the path of self-actualization and then falling in love with them for it.

But what about the other side, the aspect of love that undeniably does help us grow and develop?  How do we make love about the other person and not about what the other person does for us without discrediting the invaluable work taking place within us because of that love?  How do we appreciate the ways that our partner challenges and encourages us without making our love contingent upon their undying devotion to our own maturation process?  How do we love wholly and unselfishly? 

I hate admitting that I am an actress.

Do I hate being an actress? Of course not! I love it! But I hate that silence in the moment before I have to answer what do you do? with I’m an actress.

Los Angeles is a city that is obsessed with labels and I have real problems with the associations that come along with labeling myself an actress. I don’t like being perceived as a young girl hoping to escape ever having to “work” by riding my good looks all the way to fame and fortune. I don’t like the assumption that I am self-absorbed, fake, and not very smart. And I particularly dislike the popular notion that actresses love to create drama in our own lives.

I am not an actress because I want to see my face on the cover of a magazine or because I want to fill some sort of void in real-life drama.

I am an actress because I am absolutely fascinated by the human condition and God gave me a unique gift for exploring it.

I am an actress because I believe that we can only grow by truly examining ourselves and our world, and as an artist, I am given countless opportunities to ask people to do just that.

I am an actress because I think there is so much beauty in all of us and, while I wasn’t given the abilities to capture that beauty with a paintbrush or a camera, I was given the heart and the tools to fully inhabit these people and their experiences.

I am an actress because I believe that art has the power to remind us of how much we share, regardless of what separates us.

So why, if I am blessed to be living out this wonderful gift I have been given, am I humiliated by the look in the eyes of the stranger who takes me just a little less seriously now that he knows what I do? Why do I deflect “the question” by responding with I work in theatre or, my real favorite, ohh…I do a lot of things? Why can’t I embrace my work with a passion and determination that will make people rethink their stereotypes rather than giving them reason to discredit what I do by being ashamed of it myself?

In his exploration of how the family dynamics of birth order shape how we develop as individuals in The Birth Order Book, author Dr. Kevin Leman mentions that he always asks his therapy patients to list between five and ten of their earliest memories. Leman believes that, though sometimes seemingly random, there is always a reason behind why these are the memories that have stayed with us and that they tend to be quite revealing.

So what are mine? In the order that they come to me:

1. Taking my baby brother for show-and-tell in kindergarten.

2. Having to wear the kindergarten “emergency underwear” after peeing my pants at my desk when my teacher wouldn’t let me get up during a “test” to use the bathroom. Later that afternoon, we had to play Duck-Duck-Goose on the playground, and I remember being so terrified that my skirt was going to kick up while I was running and everyone would see that I was wearing boy’s Scooby Doo briefs.

3. Passing a note during third grade from the boy I liked to his friend who sat across the aisle from me.

4. My sister running laps around the public pool shouting “Betsy loves boy-I-had-a-third-grade-crush-on” while I cried and ran to the pay phone to call my mom.

5. Breaking my ankle playing Monkey-in-the-Middle in the second grade and having the yard duty call me a “cry baby” when he had to carry me to the nurse’s office in tears.

It is surprising, as I let these come to me and I write them down, that only one of these is a happy memory. I wonder if this is normal. Perhaps it is. Perhaps we remember the things that really shake us, where the pleasant moments all blend in together. If so, that seems unfortunate.

Happy or sad, it is, however, interesting how revealing these memories are. It is possible that I could have fashioned an even more telling list if I had asked myself the question, what are the experiences that shaped me as a child? but I very much wanted to follow Dr. Leman’s exercise of simply spouting off the first memories that came to me and then looking for the reasons why those were the ones most readily remembered.

Interestingly enough, if I had searched my mind to answer the question posed in the last paragraph, I don’t think I would have come up with any of the same experiences. I probably would have said things like Mary and Sam being born and appearing in my first play. Why weren’t these the first things I remembered? Why did those five moments jump into my mind before anything else?

Well, let me explore…

1. Taking Sam for show-and-tell. This being my first memory is almost laughably obvious. At the time, I am sure that taking my new “toy” in to share with the class was more about how cute and fun he was, but I don’t think the reason this moment sticks out in my mind is because of what an adorable baby my brother was. I have always tried so hard to nurture my younger siblings that, I suppose, it is to be expected that my first memory would be one of being proud of little Sam. I think this is also telling because, in this experience, the thing that made me special was my brother. And much of my life has been this way, trying to collect excess coolness from Mary and Sam. There have been countless times when people have openly embraced me who wouldn’t have given me the time of day if the introduction hadn’t begun with the words this is my sister.

2. Playing Duck-Duck-Goose in Scooby Doo undies. Apparently this was pretty traumatic considering that, the same year this happened, a tumor ate through my skull and I am only remembering that now, while the horrors of schoolyard humiliation leapt to the surface second on my list. Like bringing Sam for show-and-tell, this seems almost too obvious to delve into. As long as I can remember, I have always been extremely insecure, and I am sure that experiences like this one didn’t do much to help. At twenty-five, I am only just beginning to be able to embrace who I am without the constant concern of whether or not others will accept or reject me based on my choice of panties.

3. Passing a note for my third grade crush. This is where things get random. Much of the impact of this seemingly forgettable moment probably comes from the rush of doing something I wasn’t supposed to — a rare occurrence in those days! A lot of it, though, I think is an elementary school representation of what, as adults, we might refer to as being always the bridesmaid, never the bride, always busting my butt to further someone else’s agenda. Something that I have to really watch in myself is a tendency to make ridiculous sacrifices (like moving to Ohio) for people I care about, even if it means letting go of what I really want. And, don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to paint a picture of myself as some sort of selfless saint. Quite the opposite, really. I go above and beyond, often, out of insecurity, to make sure that the people I am sacrificing for really need me. Now that I think about it, there is probably also an element of doing something I would not normally do to impress a boy, something that I’m pretty sure we ladies all know about.

4. My sister exposing my secret crush at the public pool. Another memory of total humiliation. No wonder I’m so freaking insecure!

5. Being called a “cry baby” when I broke my ankle. Aside from being memorable just because of how shitty this was, I can see traces of this in the real need I have for my emotions to be met with understanding and acceptance. I struggle a lot with fears that others will perceive my feelings as somehow unreasonable or invalid and, though I in no way attribute that solely to this event, I would imagine that there is probably some relationship there.

It’s time for me to shower up before Bible study, so that’s all the self-analysis I’ll do for today, but I would challenge you to ask yourself the same question. As I was, you will probably be surprised both by the things you remember and by how much they reveal about who you are today.

My good friend Katie suggested in a recent blog that they do, that we allow ourselves to be labeled because it saves us from the pressure of having to exist outside our comfort zone. And I think I agree with that to an extent; the “hot girl” knows that she is not being invited into The Privacy that Encourages Love-Making to, as Samuel and Esther Kling so brilliantly put it, “air her views on the international situation.” If she knows that her worth rests in her appearance, she can let herself off the hook in a lot of other areas…like being smart, funny, and/or interesting.

And I know that I have done it. Because I know that I will never be the “hot girl,” I have tried to ensure that I am labeled in enough other ways that no one expects hotness from me. That way, if, on a good day, hotness happens, it will simply be a bonus, and on all the other days, no one will be surprised or disappointed. I have tried to make sure that I excel enough in certain areas that people are willing to overlook the others where I fall short. If I am “the Shakespeare girl,” no one is going to expect my improv to be mind-blowing. If I am “the back-up singer,” the success or failure of the band doesn’t rest on my shoulders.

So maybe having a handy-dandy personal descriptor simplifies life by giving us an “out” when we are faced with a situation or a decision that asks us to be bigger than that label but, in the long run, I would venture to say that living by labels makes our lives harder because it makes it difficult, if not impossible to grow.

In our relationships, the labels we create become the lens through which we see all of the other person’s behavior. Too often, we see only what we want to see, what the label tells us to expect. If I label my best friend “a flake,” I run the risk of being more upset with her when she has to change plans than I would if “my most reliable friend” made the same request. If I label my boyfriend as “emotionally unavailable,” I will gloss right over the times when he dares to open himself up, in the same way that he will never see my strength if he paints me with the “uber-emotional female” brush.

Labels can simplify things by making sure we always know what is expected of us but, like many of life’s shortcuts, are likely to do more damage than good.

Though only loosely related, typing this keeps making me think of a conversation at my Bible study a few months ago. My friend who was leading the group that week used 1 John 1 as a reassurance that God’s light protects us from darkness.

This is the message that we have heard from Him and declare to you: God is light; in Him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with Him yet walk in darkness, we lie and do not live by truth. But if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, His Son, purifies us from all sin.

1 John 1:5-7 (NIV)

In what is apparently my fashion, I argued the opposite. To me, this passage isn’t saying that if you have a relationship with Christ, He will bring you out of the scary darkness and into the safe light, but rather, if you have a relationship with Christ, it is your obligation to drag yourself out of the comfortable darkness, where you can live in ignorance of your sin, and into the blinding light where all of your flaws are exposed.

The safety of living within a label, in my mind, somehow touches this same idea. Not that labels are sinful or un-Christian, but that they are something within which we shroud ourselves to disguise the things that we couldn’t bear to have labeled.

While Katie is right that venturing outside of others’ perceptions of us may be difficult, I would argue that the struggle of shedding the label is more easily conquered than the challenge of living a life within boundaries that forbid you from growing into the full, complete human being that God created you to be.

And so, as my college roomie said in a much-quoted freshman year acting exercise:

Let’s not put a label on it.

You have to play Gwendolen.

This, of course, sparked a debate about (from my side) why I am a good enough actress to play the role that I wouldn’t be the automatic choice for and (from his side) why it would be a waste of my time. I argued that Cecily was more interesting to me because she is farther from my “type” and that her openness would be an interesting challenge, to which he replied, If I could go back to being a young actor, I would spend less time trying to challenge myself and more time making sure that I was better than everyone else at what I was already good at.

Hmmm. Point taken.

As an actor, I agree that it is essential to know your “type” and to be great at it, and I have always credited this self-awareness with how often I am cast. I know my money-maker and those are the roles I audition for. But does that mean that that is all I am allowed to do? Is my chance to challenge myself is over? Is that what college was for and now that I am a “professional” actress, my lot is to flip through scripts, find the most dominant female character and never consider what I could learn from the others?

I kind of think it does…but I don’t know what to make of that.

I think that a part of my resistance to over-shake the money-maker is that I am afraid it will become stale. I love playing these strong, educated, independent women, but I worry that, if I never play the woman who’s out of control, power will be a lot less interesting to me (and a lot less interesting to the audience the way I am likely to play it if I don’t know anything else.)

I largely attribute the depth I am beginning to find as an actress in the strong women that I inevitably play to my experiences playing roles that were outside of my type. Playing women who were powerless has shown me a new dimension to strength, and playing characters who unashamedly open their hearts has colored the women who choose to guard those same feelings. These experiences have kept me fresh and prevented my type from becoming a hat-trick, and I guess I fear that, without them, I won’t be able to create the same fullness.

So the burden is on me, I suppose, to find a way to do what I’m best at without painting each of these women with the same brush, to find the variety in my own life that I have relied on acting challenges to reveal to me.

But how do I do it? How do I give up on these women that are so fascinating to me because they are so far outside myself? And when do I stop trying to prove that I am a good enough actress to tackle any role and just learn to shake my money-maker?

This afternoon, I pulled out the stack of papers and came across one piece that I would really like to share. Promise that you won’t think less of me after you read what I am about to divulge: my musings on online dating.

Could the solution to the monotonous trial and error system that we have established called “dating” really be as simple as receiving an email in your inbox telling you that your match has been found?

This was the question that I found myself asking more and more as I saw friends and relatives slowly sucked into the world of online dating. After all, these weren’t just freaks who were too void of personality or too physically disfigured to have a chance of meeting someone live in the flesh, but people that I actually knew and respected.

Was it possible that cyberspace was just one more place where Mr. Right could be waiting?

Curiosity is not something that I have ever coped well with, so I decided that I had no choice but to check out the online dating scene — despite the fact that I was already juggling three flesh-and-blood men — and I bought myself a six pack and sat down at the computer to fill out the extensive personality profile on EHarmony.com. I wanted to know how an online survey could probe so deeply into my soul that it could be sufficient for finding me a lifelong love, a soulmate. Was it like a quiz in Cosmopolitan that told you, based on whether you answered A, B, or C, what kind of girlfriend you were or why your relationships never lasted? At the end of my personality profile, would they have some sort of formula with which to find my one true love? Would my answers reveal me to be (A) a trophy-wife-in-training, (B) a sultry siren, or (C) a domestic diva, and then tell the matchmaker in the modem to pair me with either (A) a child molestor, (B) a man in ladies panties, (C) a mama’s boy who will never get his own place, or (D) an internet porn addict who weighs three hundred pounds more than the picture of Brad Pitt posted on his profile?

Obviously, I was a little skeptical about the kind of men one could meet on the internet.

To my dismay, at the end of my grueling personality profile, there was no magic formula, no handy little label to describe me — just a detailed recap of my answers that I couldn’t possibly fathom being used by a computer program to find my true love.

Online dating was a sham!

Then, the next morning, a terrifying yet exhilarating thing happened. I was checking my email, which usually only consists of unsolicited porn and computer viruses, when there it was, sitting in my inbox: EHarmony Match Found. I stared at it for a while, unsure of what to do next. Perhaps a person who functions at a higher mental level than I do might assume that, after filling out a personality profile on a dating website, they would then be matched with other lonely web surfers, but I was not expecting this! I felt completely violated…yet somehow tempted beyond belief. Opening this email would go against everything I stood for; it would, on some level, be admitting that I was not capable of meeting a man on my own.

But I couldn’t resist. I quickly locked the door to my room so no one would discover what I was about to do next, and then I opened the email, overwhelmed by a more profound sense of guilt and nausea than would have resulted if I hadn’t immediately double-clicked the online porn into the trash.

Day after day, the matches kept coming — and I have to say, in an exponentially higher volume than my friends who also belonged to EHarmony, making me think that I must either be the kind of girl that every man out there is looking for, or that my personality is so nondescript that the mastermind behind the matching process was just arbitrarily assigning me to members who were overdue for matches. I began to look forward to waking up and seeing what new men my internet connection would deliver that day.

The beautiful thing about selecting or rejecting a mate based simply on a brief personality profile is how easy it is to weed out losers that you might date indefinitely if you were faced with them in real life. When all you see is black and white, the decision to reject a man who measures in a 5’6″ or has a job that sounds kind of lame can be made without hesitation or remorse. When the person that you are rejecting doesn’t seem real, it is easy to be ruthless. I was only disappointed that my options for why I wanted to close a match didn’t include poor grammar, incorrect punctuation, or atrocious spelling because those guys were the first to go, even when they were 6’2″ investment bankers. Any man who can’t speak and write the English language is just not the man for me. Period.

Sadly, because I refused to pay a cent of my hard earned money to an online dating service, I was barred from communicating with my matches. Some would send me questions, but I could never answer, only leave them waiting out there in cyberspace, hoping for a response that I would never send. There were certainly guys who sounded promising, but a woman has to know her boundaries, and shelling over cash to have a computer program find true love for me was just not something that I could do and still be able to look myself in the mirror.

So, because I would never communicate with any of these potential Prince Charmings, the game became to find the characteristic in each one that made him deserve to be dumped. As I have already discussed, the format of this online meat market (or meet market, for the more polite) is conducive to rejecting without guilt, and the fact that I couldn’t see any of my matches’ photos without paying the membership fee that I was morally opposed to helped me escape the judgment-clouding effect that handsome men tend to have. It gave me a tremendous sense of power to be able to click my mouse and deny men access to the delightful doll that I consider myself to be.

Didn’t go to college? Click.

Can’t remember the last book he read? Reject.

Clearly didn’t understand the question? Goodbye.

Loves board games even more than I do? Scary.

Despite the freedom that I felt to reject my matches with no remorse, my blood would boil in my veins when I signed onto my account to find that a match had rejected me first. How dare he?! I would think to myself. He has no idea what a catch I am! He doesn’t even know anything about me! It hadn’t occurred to me that my new guilty pleasure would have this side effect of chipping away at my self-esteem. In a way, being rejected by a stranger somewhere out in cyberspace seemed worse than being turned down by an actual human being. If there wasn’t enough chemistry on a real, live date to warrant a second, chances are, I felt that too. But being rejected by someone who had never even met me was both insulting and infuriating. It made me question every time, what one — or more than one! — red flag did this person see in my brief personality profile that made it so easy for him to throw it all away? What was so glaringly terrible that it just couldn’t be ignored?

Obviously, all of the men who rejected me must have been short.

The idea of submission has been on my mind and on my heart lately. The more I delve into this hot button by reading what the Bible and an assortment of great Christian authors have to say about it, the more I realize that submitting isn’t about sacrificing your desires for the sake of keeping peace in your relationship. It isn’t about acknowledging that the man “knows better” or has more of a right to make decisions than the woman.

At its essence, I think submission is a symbol of trust. Submission does not say I’m sure your way is better than mine or even I would rather do it this way, but you’re the head of the house. Submission says I trust that you love me enough to make my well-being a priority in your decision making.

Michelle McKinney Hammond’s book In Search of the Proverbs 31 Man talks a lot about how important it is for a man to be able to step up and be the kind of leader that a woman wants to submit to. Reading her thoughts on what kind of man deserves the seemingly perfect woman described in Proverbs 31 has made me aware of how thankful I need to be that I am in a relationship with someone who is such a natural leader, someone whose strength and ability to make good decisions makes him an easy man to trust with regard to life’s “big decisions.”

But what about the man who is not a natural leader? Can he still be the kind of man a woman trusts with her life?

This is the question that has been running through my mind since Sunday.

A friend of mine is in the early stages of quasi-dating another friend who I have a total crush on for her (or any other woman smart enough to date this guy.) Being in a relationship with someone who is very much an alpha-male — not my usual M.O. — my girlfriends were surprised to hear how enthusiastically I supported my gal pal’s exploration of a potential relationship with this guy who they described as an underdog.

I’m not sure that I have witnessed this underdog step up as a leader in social situations, but I have, so many times, seen him step up and confront his own emotional struggles with an incredible fearlessness which I think is an amazing — and almost essential — quality in a spiritual leader.

This unapologetic openness has made me wonder if there are men who may not naturally take charge, but who, if given the trust and support of a good woman would be able to grow into that role.

Another thing that Hammond discusses in the aforementioned book is the idea of a man being changed, not by the woman, but by his love for her. I absolutely love this concept. As a natural-born “fixer,” I have learned the hard way that you cannot change a man, but I do believe that a good relationship leads both parties to grow and develop. So what’s to say that the right relationship can’t help a man discover his potential as a leader?

I am a big believer in the idea of the self-fulfilling prophecy, and my girlfriend’s budding relationship has made me think that there are men out there who don’t yet know how strong they are but who, if they were given the trust of a woman like I know my girlfriend to be, have the potential to grow into incredible leaders.

This idea brings me back to why Philippians 3 is one of my favorite passages in the Bible: the idea that, while we are not yet all that God created us to be, if we put our faith in Christ (and have the help of a good woman) we might just get there yet.