Young single women in the Orthodox Church don’t stay single for long. Since the ratio of young men to women is so high, it doesn’t take long for single women to be taken off the market. As Orthodox men calculate their prospects, a common question is asked: “How can I attract a woman?”

In the past, I developed a lifestyle around answering this question. It inevitably involved transforming myself into a man I thought women would be attracted to. I exaggerated my strengths, concealed my weaknesses, lied without ceasing, uprooted myself to locations where it was easier to meet women, and engaged in numerous sins to win over a woman’s fleeting affections. I can’t help but chafe when a man asks me how to attract a woman because—without spiritual considerations—the answer that “works” is to deceive and manipulate.

To attract a woman, one can mimic the approach of the Protestant Churches and be “seeker sensitive.” You could identify your target (the woman), find out her desires, and then mold yourself to satisfy them, even if that’s not who you are. You become a phony to, at the minimum, lie by omission so that she becomes attracted to the “best version of yourself.” You toss overboard the useful but socially mundane gifts that God has given you and instead summon qualities you don’t possess so that the women of this evil age lust after you. If they like a muscular man and you are puny, you hit the gym with urgent zeal. If they like a funny man and you are not, you practice comedy. If they like a “bad boy” but you are not, you must insinuate that you are a great sinner (if you served time in jail, that would be a plus in their eyes!). The whole idea of wanting to attract a woman presupposes that your current state is not attractive, and that you must transform both your physique and personality into that which pleases a woman to satisfy her in a carnal manner while using the flimsy pretext that it is all being doing for “spiritual” reasons.

Can you not already see how seeking to attract women makes an idol out of them? We are supposed to transform ourselves into children of God through prayer, obedience, and worship, and we attempt that with hardly any vigor, but when it comes to being liked by a woman, we are ready to change ourselves wholesale to be with a female creature who was made in our image. Indeed, wanting to attract a woman inverts the natural order, because we were made in the image of God and women were made in the image of man. Before you even meet her, by possessing a desire to win her over, you’ve already stepped foot into the pit. Without even knowing it, and in the most subtle of ways, she will control you as long as the ensuing relationship lasts, directly or indirectly.

Attempting to attract a woman through techniques or tactics is secular behavior, and I know this because I did it for nearly two decades, and learned exclusively how to do so from secular sources. There is nothing Christian about modifying your essence and nature to be more pleasing to women than God while they are busy modifying their essence and nature to be more pleasing to men than God. There is nothing Christian about becoming handsome or socially astute through effort in order to excite a woman, to be vainglorious to attract the vainglorious. No, you do those things not to please God but to please yourself through the female flesh. I wholeheartedly condemn all efforts at “self-improvement” or “transformation” where the aim of your effort is to attract a woman instead of serve God. Men who are desperate to find a wife think they must attract a woman to please God when really they must please God so that He sends them a suitable woman. Surely it is better to evaluate a woman that God sends you versus one you met using sales tactics while talking to dozens of women on internet apps so that maybe one desires the result of your false transformation enough to get into a relationship with you.

The correct question to ask is this: How can I identify a woman who recognizes my love for Lord Jesus Christ? Instead of manually attracting a woman through superficial changes that clash with your God-given qualities and gifts, you instead use your eyes and ears to identify the one woman who wants you to lead her with faith. Notice the word “one.” You don’t need to attract a lot of women: you only need to find one woman who sees your own attraction for Christ. This means you can come across thousands of women who discard you as if you were trash, who do not see your love for God and call you all sorts of insulting names, and you will be tempted to fall into despair to think that no woman will ever love you, and be tempted to inject yourself with testosterone and wear cool skinny jeans like they do in Sweden, but you should deny that instinct, stay true to the faith, and wait for God to enlighten a woman that you are her match, and to enlighten you that she is your match, because an Orthodox marriage is not a sales drive or a numbers game, but a game of patience and faith where we put our full trust in God to deliver what we need for our salvation and the salvation of others.

It is infinitely better for you to do a prostration to please God than a rep at the bench press to please a woman. It is better to make a spontaneous prayer glorifying God when you behold a beautiful mountain or vista than to make a worldly joke that you hope will make a woman laugh. It is better to shed tears of repentance at your sins than to puff out your chest to make a woman think you are an alpha male. I did all the latter and have nothing to show for it but darkness and sin. If you don’t think that you can get married using God alone, without tips and advice from the secular world of which I once preached, then you have not a woman problem but a spiritual problem.

Allow me to predict your future if you go on trying to attract a woman outside of the clean waters of the Church. In order to transform yourself into an “attractive” man, you will create a fantasy persona and wade into the sewage of the world, of dating apps and the like, and get the attention of a lukewarm woman who likes your personality, your skin-deep transformation, who transformed herself to attract a man and uses no less deception than you. You may enter a relationship with her, a pseudo-courtship infused with secular behaviors, because she was on the app after all and demands physical and emotional pleasure like all other women on the app, but you will rationalize to yourself that you’re doing God’s will and all will be fine. After some time passes, you become tired of wearing the mask, of being someone you’re not, but she is attracted to the mask, the false persona, the man full of self-pride and self-will, and you are scared to take it off because the pleasure and validation her affections give you will be withdrawn. Soon her secular flaws become more glaring as your attempt to flirt-to-convert her into the Church reveals that she’s only converting because she wants to receive the secular benefits of being a married woman, not because she wants to worship God in his True Church. You’re overly committed and don’t want to lose her. You fall for the false despairing notion that no other woman will love you due to your impatience and lack of trust in God. You decide to marry her before she flees into the arms of another man. How many good years will you have until the expensive bill comes due? I’ve seen this bill with my own eyes concerning other men, and let me tell you, this is a bill that is so expensive that no man can pay it in full. The payment plan lasts for the rest of your life, and if that’s God’s will for you then so be it, but I fail to see how using deception to hunt for secular women who were never serious about the faith in the first place is what God ordains for Orthodox men.

My advice for men essentially boils down to “be yourself,” but with a huge caveat: you are like Christ. Be yourself where yourself is Christ, who the Church teaches us to be like, and identify a woman who wants to cleave into one flesh with an icon of Christ, of which you will be upon marriage as you establish a “little church” in your family home. What additional advice do you need in this case? You need to be a man with basic strength, courage, and communication ability. You need to notice when a woman stares at you for more than two seconds or when she asks around about you, and petition God to help you meet this woman and get to know her and discern if she could be your wife. That’s it! If you think I’m exaggerating, this is all I’m using in my own life, for anything else will kindle my passions and undoubtedly lead to sin. While I have reams of secular experience with women, and can analyze their behavior on the most minute level, it’s only useful when giving advice to other men in various stages of relationship difficulty, usually with women enflamed with worldly desires. For myself, however, I use my senses to identify which woman is interested in me and then my brain to discern her level of faith and then my heart to lean on God for help, because no matter how much experience you have with women, you will never see inside her soul and know for sure if she’s the one. It is effortless for her to pretend to be someone she’s not, whether subconsciously or otherwise, and since women are more socially advanced than men, you will be tricked and end up marrying a stranger, but know that God can see into her soul, and He knows who she really is, so don’t listen to me or other men when evaluating a particular woman: lean on God instead.

If you make googly eyes with a pretty woman and think to yourself how you can attract her, you’ve already lost. You’ve made her a false idol and have decided to trust your eyes and fallen flesh more than God. I pity you because you remind me of myself! You’re already in the pit and don’t know it. Through your weak faith and self-trust, you are about to make this woman into your god, and your inevitable fall may shatter you. I wish I can relay to you all the horror stories I’ve seen and heard that sum up thusly: the more desperate a man is to cleave to a secular woman, the more painful the outcome will be. It’s possible you may get an adorable child or two from it, but there will never be peace for them if the home is broken, and there is a high chance they will grow up to be broken themselves, and every day will be full of regret. Wake up, Christian man! A woman is not your God! Do not attempt to attract anything besides the grace of God within His Orthodox Church, because you will be surely chastised, as I have been chastised, of wasting most of your life with secular women who keep your eyes away from God and onto the pleasures of your body and the feeding of your will and pride. Love God and simply wait for a woman who sees your love and wants to love God the way you do, and then you’ll have a good chance, and God will be with you. Whatever cross we have to bear in this life, whether it be a painful marriage, divorce, singledom, or something else we can’t foresee, may God give us the strength to bear it so that we retain our Orthodox faith until the end.

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Excellent article again. Thank you Roosh! Much appreciated. Hopefully you will continu writing for many more years to come.

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Dude in the gym photo is obviously skipping leg day in favor of more arm work./humor

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Brother, thank you for this effort to guide each other towards Christ.

The truth is that in the Kingdom of Heaven we do not have wives or husbands. It is that which the Lord said, if I am not mistaken. There is no fornication in Heaven either.

This is of this world alone. Yet we remain human. And human, mammal nature requires reproducing ourselves. Of course it is no sin to have a family. But it isn't ours. It is God's. Everything is God's. This is the only way to have a family. To always know it is not mine, but it belongs to Christ, who allows me to rejoice in it, before Judgement.

Nothing is ours in this world. We were born into it. Life was given to us. Wife or husband too. And children as well. Loaned is a better word. Loaned for free. We will all disappear from this world in the end and only the love we leave behind will exist, for He died and resurrected as we will in Him. Love never dies. Names of those who surrendered all their identity for the love of God are remembered here. All else is vanity.

Before wanting a wife, my advice would be to forgive and apologise.
To apologise to all the women we have been bad with, in our vain quest for "love".
And to forgive those who were vain towards us.
We are not faceted beings. All is one. Sin in one area of life infects other areas. Forgiveness heals everything. Start with the parents. They showed us what a marriage is like. Not all of us had a humanly loving image from our parents of what a human marriage is.

Apologise and forgive and the Lord will take care of the rest.

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The trading of a man's security (resources) for a women's chastity (fertility) is for pair bonding and having children. Stay away from the subjective and focus on objective virtuous femininity, NOT hyper manipulative caricatures of it. Unfortunately, social media is imitating and replicating hyper femininity, a pampering vampire fetish, the exploitation of resources for female sexuality. A virtuous women will be a custodian over her resources, that pass through her, onto her children. Again, know your spiritual leadership so NOT to make an idol out of a women who will lead you astray with her agreeableness, rather then your leadership. The female nature is beautiful when it's isolated within a structure of family, faith, and lots of children.
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Allegory of Chastity

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This is a good concluding paragraph, Roosh. I'm curious, do you think there will be a reset of some aspects of the culture, or is modernity "baked into the cake" even if the monetary/financial systems break down? Another way of asking is, and I know it is speculation, are we closer to the end because of these signs of family (formation) disintegrating, in general?

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This is a good concluding paragraph, Roosh. I'm curious, do you think there will be a reset of some aspects of the culture, or is modernity "baked into the cake" even if the monetary/financial systems break down? Another way of asking is, and I know it is speculation, are we closer to the end because of these signs of family (formation) disintegrating, in general?

I think we're too close to the end. I wouldn't look for a general reset but instead discern on individual women you are considering for marriage.

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I think we're too close to the end. I wouldn't look for a general reset but instead discern on individual women you are considering for marriage.

Given that is your inkling, did you ever think that it was a mercy of God perhaps that if things get as bad as we think they might, you may in fact be spared from the anguish of how hard family formation could be and what may become of your children in the [upcoming] trying times?

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Given that is your inkling, did you ever think that it was a mercy of God perhaps that if things get as bad as we think they might, you may in fact be spared from the anguish of how hard family formation could be and what may become of your children in the [upcoming] trying times?

If I spared myself from anguish and suffering then I also "spared" myself a potential crown and greater rewards from God. It's mercy if God knew I couldn't handle that sort of suffering and instead gave me a different Cross.

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This is a good concluding paragraph, Roosh. I'm curious, do you think there will be a reset of some aspects of the culture, or is modernity "baked into the cake" even if the monetary/financial systems break down? Another way of asking is, and I know it is speculation, are we closer to the end because of these signs of family (formation) disintegrating, in general?

I personally still see a ways to go before we hit the bottom as a culture. Of course there's a chance we never hit the bottom and these are the End Times.

My evidence for this is the growing political divide between men and women, and although there is some evidence of men in particular repenting (seen through increasing church attendance for young men), there is no evidence of society changing in a way to be more amenable to men or traditional family structures. When that starts happening, it would be the generation being born at that time who will be young enough to see material benefit from it in time to raise normal, healthy families themselves.

If we were to plot virtue in society along the Y axis, X axis being time, I'd say we're at this point on the graph.
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If I spared myself from anguish and suffering then I also "spared" myself a potential crown and greater rewards from God. It's mercy if God knew I couldn't handle that sort of suffering and instead gave me a different Cross.

That's what I'm getting at, the cross will be different.

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My evidence for this is the growing political divide between men and women

Growing? I'm sure things can get worse, but what's the worst part of the divide currently in your eyes? How could it get worse (just guess if you can)?

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Growing? I'm sure things can get worse, but what's the worst part of the divide currently in your eyes? How could it get worse (just guess if you can)?

There have been surveys recently that show men becoming more conservative and women becoming more liberal, primarily as a result of college education. It takes a husband and wife to raise functional children. Both sides are becoming more ideological, and even the best ideologies separated from God are bad. Women vote more than men and have some positions antithetical to raising good children.

As practical advice, the most conservative profession in the country is “homemaker,” so I think the best chance for men to overcome this political divide between the sexes is to advertise that you are looking for someone to fulfill that position in your family. Many women want to do this either right out of high school or after years of hating a job. Something about being a homemaker makes them conservative politically, which likely correlates with virtue in a religious aspect assuming the husband is a good leader.
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Having just one income earner presents a lot of challenges of course, compromises need to be made. My wife and I are currently doing this without me having saved up a huge nest egg before our marriage. It's doable, but not easy. We've had to budget for the first time in our lives. I think in the end we will look back and say it was worth it.

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Very relevant article. Even in this board, marriage and family are made into idols.
If you are unmarried, stay that way. Being single is God's gift, enjoy it while it lasts.

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If your trying to attract a Godly woman look no further than your Church. It helps if you attend a very big Church as I do where there are many ways to get involved with Church functions and activities. Church on Sunday probably won't cut it. Look your best and prayerfully put yourself out there. God will bless you but he expects you to put the work in.

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If your trying to attract a Godly woman look no further than your Church. It helps if you attend a very big Church as I do where there are many ways to get involved with Church functions and activities. Church on Sunday probably won't cut it. Look your best and prayerfully put yourself out there. God will bless you but he expects you to put the work in.

Unfortunately this does not work for most of us guys who are Orthodox.

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How can you love a woman if you want her? Wanting her makes her belong to you. So you see yourself in her own face, proudly.

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Unfortunately this does not work for most of us guys who are Orthodox.

I keep thinking of how I met my partners. And truly, the guys at church were always involved in a sporting league that we all shared or some outside missions with the church. Habitat for humanity, we had very large international human trafficking mission, soap and vitamins for Haitians, bookbags and school supplies for the needy and the congregation. Also, tutors!!

My favorite, though, is Meals on Wheels for the congregation!

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There have been surveys recently that show men becoming more conservative and women becoming more liberal, primarily as a result of college education. It takes a husband and wife to raise functional children. Both sides are becoming more ideological, and even the best ideologies separated from God are bad. Women vote more than men and have some positions antithetical to raising good children.

As practical advice, the most conservative profession in the country is “homemaker,” so I think the best chance for men to overcome this political divide between the sexes is to advertise that you are looking for someone to fulfill that position in your family. Many women want to do this either right out of high school or after years of hating a job. Something about being a homemaker makes them conservative politically, which likely correlates with virtue in a religious aspect assuming the husband is a good leader.
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Having just one income earner presents a lot of challenges of course, compromises need to be made. My wife and I are currently doing this without me having saved up a huge nest egg before our marriage. It's doable, but not easy. We've had to budget for the first time in our lives. I think in the end we will look back and say it was worth it.

It's worth it! Be a good advocate for those behind you!!

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Unfortunately this does not work for most of us guys who are Orthodox.

Yeah, I would imagine it works better for big Protestant inter-denominational Churches. Like PineTreeFarmer said, maybe find some overlap with other Christian activities or groups. I've had Ethiopian Orthodox women attend my Church with me so I would imagine women from other denominations wouldn't have a problem joining an Orthodox Church with you.

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