Well, yesterday I made a big step (for me) by closing out my facebook and myspace accounts... I only wish I'd thought to transfer over all my written blogs on myspace before I closed the account... Ah well. Big steps are often very similar to ripping a band-aid off and if it's done all at once without giving yourself too much time to think about it, sometimes it's a lot easier to follow through with it.

I guess I should explain a little about my decision. I have a lot of freinds, of both sexes. I used to believe that having friends of the opposite sex was natural, even a good thing. While I don't believe that having acquaintences of the opposite sex can even be avoided, my thoughts towards having/maintaining friendships with them have altered. I still don't believe it's exactly inherrantly EVIL to have friendships with boys, but I think it opens the door to a whole bunch of things better avoided.

What really turned the tide for me was when I was reading a book by Debi Pearl with a friend, titled, "Preparing to be a Helpmeet." One of the verses she quotes several times, rather as a theme, throughout the book, is that one from Proverbs 31, "...She does him good and not evil all the days of her life." As Debi talked about what a godly girl looks like as she's preparing to be a good wife to a husband one day, I couldn't help but think about things in my life that might not make me such a good candidate for the type of husband I want to marry.

I started thinking about my future husband and what I'd want for my wife if I were him. I thought about how I'd want my husband to interact with other women. I guess God really hit me on the head with my "friendships" with other guys. I had been pondering the question even before reading the book, but just felt like there was nothing I could do about it. How can you tell someone who you've been treating as a good friend for a long time, "sorry, I just can't be friends with you anymore, see you never!"???

Well if you have a personality like mine, you almost can't. So I just felt stuck. I almost felt like I'd have to settle for less in a husband so that he would be fine with all my "friend" relationships. As I was reading the book, it just kept coming back to me that I didn't want to have to settle. But how could I possibly fix my situation? I finally decided that I HAD to do SOMETHING.

All I could think about was my facebook account. How easy it made private conversations with just anyone who came along. I didn't want to go to each and every individual and tell them pointblank goodbye. However, closing out my account was fairly easy. It was universal - I wasn't singling anyone out.

Why is having friendships with guys such a big deal to me? Think about any guy you've ever liked. How did it feel knowing that he had tons of friends that happened to be women? It's even worse for women, I think, to have friends with guys because women are programmed by God to be responders. Think about Eve, in the garden. It wasn't Adam who bought the snake's charm and grabbed the apple. It was tender-hearted, compulsive Eve. We girls are all a lot like her. Generally, we have a more understanding, trusting nature.

While this doesn't make it evil to be freinds with a guy, it makes it dangerous territory. We tend to give our hearts away long before men do. We may not even realize that's what we're doing. But if we want a guy who belongs to nobody but us, we must likewise belong to nobody but him. Maintaining friendships with guys before and after marrying my husband will probably make him feel like he's just a piece of my life, fitting in with all the other pieces that are just as, or more, important than him.

God says that my husband will be my head. That's a very important thing to understand. It doesn't mean I'm going to marry some tyrant who will lord over me all the days of our lives together. It means that I will need to submit to him as the leader of our family, it means that I should defer my absolute will to his, knowing that he is following God and leading our family toward godliness.

And if I'm supposed to do good and not evil ALL THE DAYS OF MY LIFE, that means before marriage. It means I should act as though I have a husband right now. In fact, I do. I will almost certainly get married some day. That means that I have a husband right now! I'm just not married to him yet. But that doesn't mean I can't act just as circumspectly now as if he were courting me.

I don't want there to be anything in my life to make my future husband wary of committing to me. I don't want ANYTHING to cause him to wonder if I'm really his or not. I want my husband to admire my life, previously and presently. I don't want anything to make him think I'm not circumspect. I don't want him to think I'm a worldly girl who comports herself in such a way as to make herself attractive, or seem available, to ungodly men.