hey, mr. harris made twice as much money as if he had gotten it right the first time!

isn't brain attraction just another way of saying someone is shallow? also, on your point about books about singleness written by married people, i guess you are referring to books that discuss how to have relationships and all that jazz. well i'd find such a book generally useless, they'd just tell you how they got married and say that should generally apply. ahh...anecdotes, the foundation of christian literature!

my take on dating is this:

Keep your expectations low, you will never find the perfect person
Overlook the small stuff becuase you are just as annoying
If you laugh and have fun count yourselves lucky
Get married young and work through all the hard stuff since you have a vested interest in making it work

Just my take and I married well above myself. I guess she followed those rules ;)

a-fresh:
i least enjoy books that basically say (as mr. harris does), "do things my way! after all, it worked for me!"
and i agree, brain attraction is almost the same thing as shallowness. of course, i suffer from it myself. both of them, actually.

supercodepoet:
you say that we should keep our expectations low, yet you also say you married well above yourself. which is it?

well one of you have to keep you expectations low I am not saying which one :)

my favorite relationship book is "i kissed 'i kissed dating goodbye' goodbye."

seriously, a really good one for married or single, title notwithstanding, is Marriage Builder. dumb name. good concepts. no anecdotes.

bc: and i hear chapter 5 isn't all that intense, either. :)

So, you want someone to get married, and write a book on why its better to be single and how to do it? Hmm.... Isn't that like a communist writing a book on democracy?

ah..well JV, we'll always have Ayn Rand for that. And by the way, communism and democracy are not opposites; I guess you mean democracy versus fascism or national socialism.

No, I don't want a book by marrieds saying that being single was better. It was just an observation that it seems that very little is written on dating by married people. All we get is Joshua Harris.

I think A-fresh betrays a linear understanding of attraction by leveling accusation at the "brain-attracted." Wanting to have a conversation with an intelligent member of the opposite sex should not necessitate a commitment. After all, would you want your wife to accuse you of adultery when enjoying a technical exchange with a respected female colleague? Furthermore, while I've heard those I admire use their minds to limit their romantic choices, seldom do they fan flames of attraction with intellect alone. We are spiritual, physical, and intellectual beings; an image of a triune God. It is, therefore, the natural order of things that a marriage partner be thus holistically suited to us. Your very own blogger-extraordinaire agrees. In fact, any Christian from MIT could have found a brainiac mate according to your model, but has obviously not. We are not calculators!

well ah...a-nonymous, the desire to engage in a conversation with someone and actually have something that could be called an attraction is a wide, wide gap. In one instance the object of desire is the conversation itself, the ideas being presented and discussed and the joy of attaining the knowledge in and of itself. The other instance is having a desire for that person's intellect, and not just at the moment, but in the future as well. At the end of the conversation am I saying to myself, "why, that was quite the intellectual exchange," or "wow, suzie q. poindexter is wickidly smart, that's attractive in a geeky-chess club kind of way." I also find placing this much emphasis on "intellect" is quite the "college graduate" idea. How much of the general society really searches for someone who is smart. Have you been to a frat party? How many in the common world see a difference between intellect and just plain charm? I think the better way of dividing us up into three categories is physical, emotional, and spiritual. And the model for attraction can not be done on a calculater as you suggest, the linear is betrayed, so it's closer to being a non-linear equation. With an e, and a pi. And brown eyes.

jason and joann yung gave a good talk about marriage and being single last spring at ccfc. it was pretty good 'cause they talked about both the upshots of being single and being married and it wasn't like they were saying one was better than the other