Ben Crowder

But fear itself, right? Lately I’ve had my own fair share of anxieties, with the inevitable result that this has been bubbling around in my mind a lot. Is fear necessary? Backing up a step or two, is fear the same thing as anxiety and being nervous? What about insecurities? How does it all fit in?

Having just written that first paragraph, I’m asking myself, “Yeah, how does it all fit in? You have no idea, do you.” And I wonder what on earth I’m going to say. This is one of the reasons why I write, by the way: to discover what I think.

So, embarking on this journey of exploration, I hear my first instinct telling me that fear isn’t necessarily the same as being nervous or worrying. But then another voice says it really is, fundamentally. According to the OED, fear is “the emotion of pain or uneasiness caused by the sense of impending danger, or by the prospect of some possible evil.” I don’t want to turn this into a mere listing of definitions for all of fear’s synonyms and related words, though. For the purposes of this discussion, fear = anxiety = nervousness = worry.

I’m glad I don’t get nervous all the time, but there are certainly times when I do. Speaking or singing in front of large groups. Talking to and (especially) asking out girls I’m interested in. Job interviews. Introducing myself in a group of more than three or four. Finishing a test first. (Weird, I know. :)) There are undoubtedly more that I can’t think of at the moment.

Does everyone get nervous? I assume they do, but maybe there are people who don’t. Whether or not they exist, being nervous isn’t any fun, and I have a hard time seeing it as really helping me on the road to perfection. (Other than through smoothing this rough stone rolling.) Couldn’t I still learn everything I need to learn without fear? There are plenty of other trials in life — it seems like fear just makes things harder to deal with. It’s almost paralyzing sometimes.

All of this leads me to wonder whether or not we’re meant to squelch the fear in our lives, or at least allow God to do so. “Doubt not, fear not.” And “if ye are prepared, ye shall not fear.” And from Joshua, “Be not afraid.” Not to mention that every time an angel appears, he inevitably begins with, “Fear not.” (I guess we don’t have many female angels attested in scripture.) I’m sensing a common theme here. Fear is not of God. If that’s the case, then I don’t think being nervous is of God either. Unless we act with a fierce strength of will, nervousness covers our light so we can’t shine. It turns us inward so we can’t serve. It puts us on the bench in the game of life, until we do something about it.

And now I wonder, is that the point? Is it a lesson in willpower? Is it a natural obstacle built in to this course, something we’re meant to adapt to? Would it be wrong to get rid of it? (Opposition in all things, perhaps?)

Part of me says, “Hang it all, I hate being nervous, let’s just remove that from the universe already.” And life would be much smoother and I would sing musical numbers in sacrament meeting and what have you. The other part of me (I don’t think I’m schizophrenic, I promise! :P) counters with, “Sure, being nervous isn’t any fun. But you can overcome it, and you’ll relish it far more by conquering than by eliminating it from the universe. Fight it! This is how you become like Christ — by facing your obstacles and dealing with them, not by praying that they didn’t exist.” You can tell by how much space I’ve devoted to each part which one I’m siding with. :)

Case in point: when I am interested in a girl, I know I have to ask her out, but I’m often terrified to do so. (This in spite of my intellectual knowledge that if she were in fact to say no, I would get over it and life would go on pretty much as normal.) My stomach will go butterfly as I contemplate the inevitable occurrence, scripting out dialogue for both her and me, with a few different choose-your-own-adventure paths based on what I expect her responses to be. And then I swallow (a lot), tell myself that I’ve done this dozens of times and can do it again, and pull out my phone. And then pace around the room with the number ready to dial, for at least ten minutes and sometimes up to an hour, trying to get to the point where I actually press the button. The light on the phone often goes off and I hit the down arrow and then the up arrow again to bring back the light. “What on earth am I thinking?” I ask myself. But I know I need to go through with it, so I press “Send” and listen to the phone ring as my stomach disappears into the inner core of the earth.

And usually it ends up fine. While I would prefer not to get all nervous like that (and shouldn’t there be some law that says if you’ve asked people out more than a few times, the anxiety should go away? Life’s not fair :)), there is a delicious feeling that comes from exerting my will and coming off conqueror. It almost doesn’t even matter if the girl says yes or not — the important thing is that I didn’t let fear rule me.

One last thing. In reading Dean Hughes’ novel Far from Home, I came across one part where a Hawaiian woman tells Bobbi that it’s pointless to worry, since worrying doesn’t actually accomplish anything. Too true! If only I could stop… ~sigh~

I don’t go on many dates. It’s not that I’m afraid of dating, nor do I fear rejection (case in point: I once asked the same girl out seven times and got rejected five of those times (and if you’re wondering why I kept asking, it’s because she said yes in between, and she wasn’t giving any direct refusal signs (she was really nice (and nesting parentheses can be addicting)))). I could say I don’t have enough time, but who am I joking? Making time isn’t that hard.

So, with that foundation in place, I was listening to an Education Week talk this afternoon on choosing a marriage partner. “The Lord can’t steer a parked car,” the speaker said. It reverberated in my head and heart. All along I’ve been set in my ways, thinking I was of course right in my attitudes toward dating, yadda yadda yadda. With those words, however, the walls I’d been building all crumbled to pieces.

And with that we now arrive at the point of this article: isn’t it wonderful to have been wrong all along?

Notice the tense — “have been,” not “be.” It’s only when you realize you’ve been on the wrong path that you can make a course correction and get on the right one. And that realization, the proverbial light bulb, is so beautiful it can make your heart want to burst with light and smiles. (At least that’s the way I feel.)

Now, in this particular matter I don’t yet know if I have indeed been wrong all along, but I’m secretly hoping I have. Why? Because I’m stuck on a stagnant plateau, and being wrong means there’s an opportunity to change my viewpoint and make some progress.

I don’t think the sparsity of dates in my past has been a sin, but isn’t this recognition of wronghood what repentance is all about? If we don’t acknowledge our faults, we can’t shed them, and as long as we remain in our fake skins of pride and everything else, we can’t become the true, solid, real people God intends us to be.

Lately I’ve been thinking about hope. We’re taught to hope, to dream big, to believe, and yet on the other hand we’re warned against getting our hopes up. (I’m not talking about religious matters here, but rather hope in the everyday sense.)

An example will help. Every few months I’ll encounter a girl who I think could be perfect for me. Each time I hope beyond hope that she’ll be “the one” (and by that I don’t mean the only girl I could ever marry, but the one who I’m actually going to marry), that this time things will work out, that this barren wasteland of solitude will flourish and blossom into a lush, verdant meadow. Or something like that. :) And every time, so far without fail, it’s failed to go very far. Virtually zero success. And yet each time I keep getting my hopes up.

Now, I’m a dreamer, and I believe very firmly in optimism and grand plans and keeping one’s hope alive. When things like this happen, though, people tell me (or I tell myself) that I oughtn’t get my hopes up, or count my chickens before they hatch, or whatever. On the one hand, life is dreadfully dull when we don’t have dreams and aspirations and ambitions. On the other, it hurts to watch your heart shatter, often in slow-motion instant replay over and over and over again. What’s a man to do?

As for me (and my house :P), I’ve found that to hope is better than not to hope. Not that I particularly like these round-trip tickets to square one, of course, but I’d rather go out with a bang because I opened my heart and dared to hope than with a silent muffle because I was too afraid to believe that it might work out. There’s a Teddy Roosevelt quote on my wall which comes to mind often: “Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checked by failure…than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.” It’s become the motto of my life, not just in dating but in every aspect. Would that every man and every woman catapult themselves out of that gray twilight! The world would be a much better place for it.

Granted, mustering up the courage to ask out a girl I rather like is still like summiting Everest, but I can always remind myself to dare mighty things, to dream the impossible dream. “There can be miracles when you believe.”

I’m tired and don’t feel much like writing, but letting a day go by without writing feels worse. :) So, I’ve been thinking about the oft-quoted phrase, “opposites attract.” I think it’s hogwash.

In my experience, at least, I’m attracted the most to girls uncannily like myself. I’ll save myself the embarrassment of listing out which traits I have in mind, but y’all have imaginations. :) Girls who aren’t very much like me usually don’t attract me much at all. There are occasionally exceptions, where chemistry throws a curve ball, but that’s rare.

For example (just one, though!), if I find that a girl likes books, her attractability goes up a lot. If, on the other hand, she’s really into sports, I’m just slightly less interested (mainly because a really athletic girl is unlikely to be a good fit for me, nor I for her).

I need to clarify what I mean by “attractive” here. There are two types: there’s the basic chemistry of personalities, when things just “click,” and there’s a deeper attraction that comes from common interests, dreams, and standards. One would hope that the latter would include the former. In my case, I’ve found a number of girls who I find attractive at the first level, but who have markedly different standards or interests, and it’s painfully clear that it would be shaky ground on which to build a relationship, in spite of the chemistry. And there are others who have similar interests and dreams and even standards, but there’s sadly no chemistry. C’est la vie.

And now comes the clamor of the crowd crying out that you have to try relationships out before deeming them impossible. I think not. It only takes a few minutes of talking with a girl (in real life) before I know whether there’s even a remote possibility. If there’s chemistry, it’ll be apparent by then; if there are similar interests and such, they too will make themselves clear before too long.

I don’t mean that you’ll always know immediately if a relationship will indeed work out, but you can narrow it down to the 1% or 2% where there’s actually a chance of it. And perhaps for most people that 1-2% window is actually 20-30%. I suppose it depends on how odd you are. :) (Meaning, the more eclectic you are, the smaller the window.) Having run some quick calculations, I’ve come to the conclusion that there have been about five girls on earth who I could really marry, and three of those died in the 1800s. :P Just kidding.

I don’t know why I’m blogging about this… ~sigh~ :)

And now, the long-promised post about A Return to Modesty. (Lesson learned: if you start hyping a post in advance, then you feel more obligated to do a good job of it, which can easily lead to stress. It’s better to go with Apple’s secrecy-before-release mentality, methinks.)

The book, written by Wendy Shalit, is amazing. I can’t recommend it enough. I’m going to start buying up copies to give as gifts. It’s that good. And it’s definitely earned a place on my must-read list (which I’ll be adding to the sidebar one of these days).

Where to begin? The cover, I suppose. :) Yes, it’s a bit embarrassing, and I’ll admit that I covered it up as I was walking around with it at the book sale. Wendy talked about it at her blog a couple of weeks ago.

But back to the book. It’s about modesty, of course — more particularly, how our let-it-all-hang-out culture of sexual “freedom” has caused more problems than it solved. Violent sex crimes are more prevalent than they were in the modest days of yore, and the perpetrators are becoming younger and younger. (She mentions several cases of sodomy in the playground, with nine-year-olds. Nine! What is the world coming to?!?)

Now, being a Mormon, I’ve made vows of chastity, promising God that I’ll only have sex with my wife, after we’re married. No premarital or extramarital sex. And I will of course keep those vows.

Granted, I knew that our society was pretty darn sex-saturated, but it hadn’t really struck me just how much the rest of the world has embraced casual sex and free love and all that jazz — or how early on (twelve- and thirteen-year-olds? Holy smokes!). I suppose I live in a bubble. :) (And yes, I think that’s fine.)

The part that really spoke to me, though, was the bit about gentlemanly behavior. Having watched my fair share of Jane Austen movies, I’m enamored of courtesy and chivalry and the old-fashioned etiquette, and I think it’s a good thing that really ought to be brought back. I open doors for girls, and I’m starting to stand up when they enter the room and help them with their coats and such. But the feminists (and others) have labeled such behavior as sexist, propagated by male chauvinist pigs who think women are too weak to do these things for themselves. Bah, humbug. (And a big sigh.)

Anyway, the book’s great. It’s very well-written, and Wendy says it all a lot better than I ever could. I really haven’t done it justice here — not even close.

If you’re interested, you can also check out her website, ModestyZone.net, and her blog, Modestly Yours.

[tags]A Return to Modesty, Wendy Shalit, modesty, Mormon, Jane Austen[/tags]

What shall I write about today? I accidentally left my index card at home (not my index finger, thank heavens!), the one on which I’d written what I wanted to write about. And unfortunately I can’t remember what it was.

Well, I’ve been talking to myself in a British accent ever since yesterday’s Pride and Prejudice adventure. It makes what I say to myself seem more important somehow. :)

One of my friends lent me The Inheritance, a Feature Films for Families movie based on a Louisa May Alcott book. It came highly recommended, and knowing her I think it’s going to live up to it. So I’ll watch that sometime this week, probably when the stress level gets so high that I have to take a break lest I fizzle out and die.

Ah, I know what I want to write about. I want to write about this girl that I had a crush on for a while, who I momentarily ran into today, and who is causing me all sorts of anguish because she’s the most adorable and lovely woman who ever lived and I’m apparently not over her after all, but she’s quite uninterested. Very nice girl, but not attracted to me. I can’t help but hope that there’ll be a Darcy/Lizzie reversal and she’ll come to me having had a change of heart. Nah, that only happens in the movies.

But I’ve said too much. Should I delete that paragraph? Writing about love and romance and all of that is always a little awkward, at least intellectually, but I suppose there’s no harm in it. (And considering that my last post was about watching Pride and Prejudice, maybe it’s good to reassure y’all that I do like girls an awful lot and no, I don’t feel particularly in tune with my feminine side, and yes, I’m quite pleased with my gender, thank you very much. :P) Well, it’s not like I’m writing about the girl by name, nor am I divulging anything I wouldn’t feel uncomfortable telling any of you in person.

Anyway, the calm and rational thing to do is wait till morning, when the waves and storm will have ceased and my infatuation has disappeared on a morning beam of sunlight. I trust that the Lord will take care of me, that at the right time and in the right way I’ll find a girl who I can love with all my heart who (unbelievably) loves me back, and we’ll get married and live happily ever after. The wait is frustrating, but there’s no point in rushing into something so important — especially when it’s pretty clear that Heavenly Father thinks this isn’t the right time for me. I must be patient. Argh! (I need to learn patience some other way, and quickly, so that I don’t have to be taught it this way. :))

“We are all fools in love.” And until the right time comes for me, I’ll have to live my romance vicariously, I suppose. (Did I mention that I checked out Emma from the library? I saw the movie several months ago but haven’t read the book yet.)

Looking back, this is one of those posts where I wonder why on earth I’m actually clicking the “Publish” button. Better to discard it and write something else. Oh well.

[tags]Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott[/tags]

I’ve never kissed a girl. (In Utah parlance, that means I’m “VL” — virgin lips.) Until last night, I expected that when I do find the girl of my dreams, we’d go on a few dates and then we’d hold hands and then, after five or six or seven dates, we’d kiss. That would be the sign that we were “together,” that we were boyfriend and girlfriend. After all, that’s how everyone else does it.

But as I was reading I Kissed Dating Goodbye last night, I came to the quiet realization that I want my first kiss with the girl I marry to be at the altar, not before.

Quaint and old-fashioned? Perhaps. (You do have to remember that for me, “old-fashioned” is a very good thing.)

And now you turn to me with a concerned look and ask, “But why, Ben, why?”

Because it feels right.

I’m not saying kissing is a sin. But for me, I’ve decided that it’s something so special that I want to save it for my wedding day. I’m not in any hurry to get into a physical relationship with a girl. After all, I’ll have all eternity for that. I’d rather avoid temptation entirely, showing my affection in other ways (and there are many of them). And when that day does come, it’ll mean so much more, to both of us. Besides, if the relationship doesn’t work out, do I really want to have gotten intimate to any degree?

I’m noticing that relationships are often defined by physical mile markers. Hand-holding comes first, and the first kiss means ice cream for the roommates. (I suspect this may be a guy thing. :)) But do I want my relationship to be measured by how physically intimate we are? No. What matters far more to me — so much so that I’m willing to give up the physical until I’m married — is the relationship of the soul, of the mind and spirit.

Pretend, for example, that your boyfriend/girlfriend was horribly burned in a house fire, losing all their hair and much of their face. Would you still love them? What is it that you love — is it their body or is it their soul?

So, to stay pure for my future wife, I’m going to kiss kissing goodbye.

Update: I changed my mind in October 2007. :)