She continues: “I think a big part of what attracted me to my current boyfriend is that he actually had the guts to ask me on a date, to make his interest known and to pursue me. After over five years in a church young adult group, he's one of the only ones who have actually asked me out. … I think guys need to buck up and ask girls out and not just rely on maybe seeing a girl at some church group event or whatever. ...”

Pursuit—ah, that’s it really, when it all boils down to the essence. As I scanned the responses from real women in my survey, I heard a repeated longing to be pursued, to be wooed, to be won, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. My own mother’s generation had another phrase for this courtship dance:  “I chased him till he caught me.” Is there a hint of coy flirtation in that phrase? You bet. Is there perhaps an implicit understanding that women have an active role to play in the chasing-and-catching dance? Absolutely. But at its core this archaic statement speaks of what I simply call the longing.

What is it that feeds this longing within women? The source is as ancient as the dawn of time, and the setting is the Garden of Eden. Listen to God’s own words in Genesis:

To the woman [God] said:
“I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception;
In pain you shall bring forth children;
Your desire shall be for your husband…”

For me, this spells out—and makes sense of—the deep emotional need within woman that longs for the love of a man, particularly the love of one special man. In essence, woman is afflicted with this desire. Indeed, most women prefer the love of one good man over the attentions of many men.
 
The world may have moved on, become hip and high-tech and politically correct, but the old-fashioned values persist in our very makeup. We can’t get away from who we are as women—created with a longing that goes deep. Some men may enjoy the season of “sowing their wild oats” and jockeying from one woman to the next, but it’s rare to find a woman who actually prefers multiple men to one good one. So it’s all the more frustrating when we see men we like, send signals that we’re interested (eye contact, lively conversation, hair-flipping, flirting, etc.), and they do nothing. The frustration can even send well-meaning and sincerely searching Christian women to other wading pools beyond the one marked “Christian” only.

All this talk about longing to be pursued begs the question:  What does pursuit look like in the modern-day world, the real world we inhabit, not the one Jane Austen lived in?

The Dating Dance

What does pursuit look like in a world where formal pronouncements and calling cards have given way to text messages and MySpace referrals? Though many women long for the old-fashioned protocols, most don’t honestly expect a man to show up on her doorstep in a cold-call appeal for love, bouquet in hand. In fact, it might be a little creepy. From talking to other women, I got the feeling that pursuit of any kind is preferable to a man sending “interested” signals and then never acting on them (excluding stalker tactics).