15+ years later, finally working out how to organise this blog…

Since I started writing this blog, I have been trying to work out how best to organise it. I’ve tried so many different things, but I was not able to make myself persevere with any. Now, 15+ years later, I think I’ve finally figured something out.
This blog has at least a dual purpose. Firstly I am trying to work out what I need to do to maximise my chances of a successful marriage for my own sake. Secondly, I am also trying to communicate to other people what I am learning. Because I am doing it first and foremost for my own sake, I need to be completely honest with myself otherwise I would just be cheating myself and wasting my own time. (This is one reason why on this blog I am utterly candid and say exactly what I think, because I need to, for my own sake and for the sake of my future marriage.)
One big feature of this blog is that it is quite experimental in that I put out lots of ideas at different strengths. So some ideas are much stronger than other ideas, and I am a lot more committed to some ideas versus others.
This is because I am working all these things out in real time, and digesting all the information I can about this. So sometimes I sometimes put out ideas that have just occurred to me quite spontaneously. And then over time I have a chance to refine these thoughts, re-evaluate my thinking. So there are some ideas on this blog which I can and do confidently preach to anyone and everyone, because I have had a chance to refine them, evaluate them, rethink them endlessly over many years.
For instance the “Two year idea”. I am absolutely confident that the best way of assessing a future spouse is to evaluate them in a non-romantic context without the vulnerability of being physically alone with them or prematurely emotionally intimate. There might be questions about whether two years is the best length of time. Perhaps it is too long. Or perhaps in some cases it might even be too short. But overall I am confident that the overall principle holds. I am also confident that when assessing a spouse their longterm genuinely relentless pursuit of outstanding character is absolutely the pre-eminent consideration. I have written a post previously about outstanding character being like heavy-duty tools. And that is the analogy that occurs to me once again. When you are using something day in-day out, you need it to be good quality and reliable. You need a fork that is made of strong, solid stainless steel so that the thing will not snap one day in use. Every day wear and tear will put stress on the item. You need it to be made to last. Here is the thing: good quality tools, cutlery, whatever else are not made by accident. It is a deliberate process, and furthermore the person or company in question sets out with the deliberate and unshakeable intent to make top quality tools. The process is usually longer, using better quality raw materials, or more of them, and it is usually more expensive than when making cheaper quality tools. Each item is carefully evaluated and tested, and substandard items are rejected. Earlier this week I went to a party, which was lovely. (Yes it was a Monday, and since then I have been thinking of a way to brag on Facebook about the fact that we Nigerians love parties so much, that we would even turn out in force on a Monday!) And they gave us food to take away in those takeaway style plastic tubs. And I was a little excited as I am always happy to acquire more good quality tubs. But as I was opening and closing one of the tubs, I realised with a little disappointment that it had been designed for single use, as it was a little flimsy, and it was clear that it would break with just a little too much pressure. And yet there are some other “single use” takeaway tubs we have which are so well designed that we have used them for years. Yes I have a favourite brand of takeaway tubs! (Sanyo, off the top of my head) Thankfully we also received some of those! So now we have eaten the food, those have now been washed and added to our existing collection.

And so it is with character. It is not an accident that someone just magically ends up with outstanding character. Rather it is a deliberate intent. It might start with parents and upbringing, which is fair enough. But then to be truly reliable it has to be consciously, deliberately embraced by the person himself or herself. From experience, I think I can say that if someone has not deliberately, systematically set out to have outstanding character, then they won’t have it. And by the way this is true regardless of their professed commitment to faith. It is a bit like exercise. You need to work at it, make a plan, study your progress, constantly evaluate. If someone does not have an exercise or athletic regime (or a physically intensive job), it is just not going to happen that they will have strong legs and strong arms and be extremely flexible and have strong stamina and all the other things that contribute to physical strength. So it is with character. Practically speaking, from experience it is just not going to happen that someone will have strong integrity, that is doing the right thing for the right reasons, even when no-one is looking and be kind and gracious to everyone, regardless of their gender, ethnicity or other external features and be relentlessly truthful and maintain sexual purity and automatically pull their own weight in household chores without needing to be asked, and without complaining and everything else character-related that someone might complain about in marriage – without having a deliberate intent and making a concerted effort towards this. So it follows then that the best way to do yourself a huge favour in marriage is to insist on marrying only a spouse who does make such an effort, and carefully evaluate to make sure that your chosen spouse truly does live up to this standard. Unfortunately, character is one thing that people are always going to lie or pretend about. People always want to make it seem that they are better people than they actually are. Which is why you need to give the process enough time to let the true character reveal itself, while working intensively on your own character to make sure that you also represent an outstanding option for a careful and fussy person!

One difference with tools that has occurred to me is this: making good quality tools is always a deliberate process. But making inexpensive tools is often a deliberate decision and process too. Some items are made as single use, some items are deliberately marketed as inexpensive so they don’t have as elaborate or as intense a design process as a more expensive alternative. And then they will be marketed accordingly. I can’t resist giving another analogy. I own a kettle from the budget brand “Cookworks”. And whenever the thing pours, it spills a bit (a lot) from the spout. In every other way it is reliable and I think I bought it because of the high ratings online. It is hard to explain, but it is definitely not that I am inadequate in pouring the kettle. Rather it is clearly a design flaw, and one I find quite perplexing. When you have a brand of electrical items, whether it is budget or premium, when you are designing your kettles, you only need to work out the correct angle to position the spout just a single time, and then you can just consistently roll that out across your different models. Or you could simply just copy an existing successful spout from another brand. What I am saying is that it is not a matter of cheaper materials, or less of them, rather it a simple design issue which is free in that either their company or another has already worked it out. My cynical mind is tempted to think that they deliberately put a poor quality of spout there not because it was in any way necessary, not even necessarily because it it cheaper or easier, but rather to remind their customers with every use that this is a budget level brand and to differentiate between the premium brands. Or in other words, there is no real reason why in this day and age after generations and generations of electric kettles, a budget brand could not function just as reliably as a premium brand, and pour just as cleanly, but for the sake of profit targets on their unnecessarily expensive brands (which are often owned by the same parent companies as the cheaper brands) etc they need to artificially create some tangible differentiation on their cheaper brands. So they might then stick a decent spout on what is otherwise essentially the same kettle and then call it “premium”.

This is not the same with character. People might not deliberately set out to create poor character. They might not even realise that they represent poor character. They might even “market” themselves as a “premium character” model. However, whatever they might realise or not realise, reliably excellent character will come only from a concerted effort, and a genuine commitment to keep making that concerted effort for the longterm. So with otherwise sincere people, poor character will usually come not from a deliberate intent to have poor character, but rather from a failure to insist on truly outstanding character, or a failure to understand in some way what excellent character truly entails. With all that said, there are definitely some supposedly “premium” products which turn out to be cheaply made and poor quality, because the people who made them wanted to dishonestly make some quick money. Thankfully it is usually easy to find out about such falsely advertised products, because people tend to complain about them very loudly! (Like so many people are currently complaining about the false advertising of church, for instance.)

Anyway that was only supposed to be an example, but as usual I let myself get carried away as I often do when talking about character!

So these are two ideas that I can vouch for and confidently advise other people.
However I would not be so confident with other ideas that I have put forth here because honestly I shared them so soon after they first occurred to me, without having the chance to refine them, or think of nuances etc. So now the question is how to distinguish between solid ideas that I can confidently share, and other ideas…I have a strong idea about how to do this. I need to put it into effect though and hopefully it will finally stick this time.