Know, please please please know, that greater things are yet to come. God has great things in store for you, and yes, you will cry a lot until then. And yes, it truly and magnificently sucks.

This novella which put Henry James on the map, author of The Turn of the Screw, presented America with either its greatest literary flirt or holy innocent...and debates on Daisy's character still get vicious in university classrooms.

The following excerpt is taken from David Bates's blog, Restless Pilgrim.  "Friends First" is a thoughtful blog post on why Bates believes it best to forgo this dating approach. I think the majority of us women will agree that it's easier to argue for this approach. It makes total sense. But Bates points out some fatal pitfalls.

The following excerpt is taken from David Bates's blog, Restless Pilgrim.  "True Love Waits...and waits..." is a thoughtful blog post on why dating seems to be on the back burner of many men's agenda.

Christopher Abel, a Protestant seminarian, attempts to answer the question that plague many of us: "When should we fight for what we want? And when should we wait for God to act? " This article, published on ze awesome Relevant.com, was released in September 2013.

63 Things to Do Before You Die

I fell in love with John Green this past summer when I listened to The Fault in Our Stars as I drove back and forth from New Jersey (a 3.5 hour drive), crying behind the wheel at what I’ve dubbed, ‘The New Walk to Remember.’

Love is a mystery that transforms everything it touches into things beautiful and pleasing to God.  The love of God makes a soul free.  She is like a queen; she knows no slavish compulsion; she sets about everything with great freedom of soul, because the love which dwells in her incites her to action. 

We all do it, too. We update our friends on new names we like, we contemplate themes for our big families (are flower names...Rose, Lilly...to hippie for middle names?), we scribble new ideas on napkins so we can add it to the list, and we are all in agreement that the future hubby will just have to deal with the names we chose five years in advance.

There's something about blogs that can never replace the beautiful and romantic art of journaling. An avid journaler since I was eight, I've filled twenty-two volumes with ridiculous episodes of my life.

The reason our skirts were shortened in the first place was for practicality. Skirts were difficult to manage when we started working in factories in the late 1800s, and a few years later we had to chase our downtown bus connections to work our secretary jobs in the city.

We tend to live with so many beautiful letdowns, and we wake up thinking how beautiful a possible ‘us’ could be.

As a woman, one of your gifts is your profound intuition. You sense, see, and feel things beyond the physical. You know things way in advance. People may call you crazy, unreasonable, even unrealistic, but know that nothing revolutionary was created by dreaming small and buying into limitations.

Perhaps the greatest temptation in singleness is to assume marriage will meet our unmet needs, solve our weaknesses, organize our lives, and unleash our gifts. Far from the solution, Paul makes marriage out to be a kind of problematic Plan B of Christian life and ministry. Marry if you must, but be warned, following Jesus is not easier when you join yourself to another sinner in a fallen world.

Traditional courtship — picking up the telephone and asking someone on a date — required courage, strategic planning and a considerable investment of ego (by telephone, rejection stings). Not so with texting, e-mail, Twitter or other forms of “asynchronous communication,” as techies call it. In the context of dating, it removes much of the need for charm; it’s more like dropping a line in the water and hoping for a nibble.       

For women, ability doesn’t always lead to confidence. Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D.  in The Science of Success, writes why 'bright girls believe that their abilities are innate and unchangeable, while bright boys believe that they can develop ability through effort and practice' in this article, published by Psychology Today.

I could be completely wrong, but I have to side with TSwift a bit: dreaming is beautiful, and there's nothing wrong with it until it takes over your heart and suddenly, you're wounded because you confused your dream with reality. This is where Swafford and I see eye-to-eye.

Dang, I hope writer Christina Mead didn't learn everything from TSwift, but I enjoyed this article because it combats another article on why women should fast from this dating diva (which I happen to disagree with). Writer Christina Mead says, "Essentially, her love gone right and love gone wrong songs are one of the ways God speaks to my heart and helps me."

You are more than that.  And the woman you are looking at is more than her clothes.  She is more than her body.  There is a lot of talk about how men objectify women, and largely, it is true.  Humans objectify the things they love in effort to control them.