The New Eve - Lewis Robert [63]
A man is paying you a big compliment when he invites you to dream with him. He is saying, “I trust you with my heart.”
3. A man needs a recreational companion. In his excellent book His Needs, Her Needs, Willard Harley comments that for a man, “spending recreational time with his wife is second only to sex.”3
So what does that mean? It means that the couple that plays together stays together. Like the retiring medical doctor and his wife I mentioned in chapter 8 who bought Harleys together, a man feels a deeper level of intimacy and friendship with his wife when she engages him in his recreational passions. Now relax, ladies, I'm not suggesting you have to go paint-balling, cliff climbing, or stalk and shoot deer in the mountains to satisfy this need, but there are ways to connect. For starters you can educate yourself on his favorite sport. Watch it on TV. Take a class on it—they are out there. Or do what my wife did. When we first married, Sherard was about as quick to grab the sports page as I was the fashion section, which was never. But before long she realized how important sports were to me. The next thing I knew, she was beating me to the sports page. It was a smart move on her part. Best of all, my wife has become an avid, educated sports fan, and we're both loving every minute of it … together!
4. A man needs physical responsiveness. A while back someone handed me a copy of a woman's magazine that had conducted a survey listing men's and women's favorite leisure activities. It reported that the number-one leisure activity for men is sex. No surprise there. No man needs a magazine survey to tell him that. But I broke out in a cold sweat when I read that the number one leisure activity for women was reading! Sex was buried way down the list next to sewing. Go figure.
Men are physical creatures. Extremely physical, as you know. And depending on who you are as a woman—single or married—you must approach this male need very carefully.
If you are single, you must draw physical boundaries with your man. In this sexually promiscuous world, that is hard to do. It may even seem prudish. Early Christians probably felt the same way because immorality was everywhere in the Roman Empire. Contemporary Roman commentators described adultery as a common, everyday behavior. “Pure women,” sang Ovid, “are only those who have not been asked.”4
For a New Eve, the core callings of God, not the moral conditions of a particular culture at a particular time, are what shape her choices. That's why a single New Eve draws physical boundaries with a man.
I have had singles press me on how tight these boundaries should be. Some cite Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 7:1 in which he said, “It is good for a man not to touch a woman.” Is that the boundary for Christian singles? Not even to touch one another?
I don't think so.
Paul's words were a response to some previous questions the Corinthians had written him, asking how they should conduct themselves in their sexually free city, where the temple of Aphrodite, the love goddess, towered two thousand feet above them from a nearby mountaintop. Given the context, it's clear that Paul's statement “not to touch” a woman is not a blanket prohibition against all forms of physical contact, including hugging, holding hands, and the like. Rather, he clearly had in mind a more serious touching. He is talking about sex. He used touch in 1 Corinthians 7 as a euphemism for sex much like the word lie is used for it elsewhere in the Bible. The NIV Bible