By Michael Dyer
Are you making a crucial mistake about sin? Learn why this small distinction is holding you back from dating success. If you want to change your behavior, you've got to know how, and this idea was one of the biggest ones in western Christendom for centuries for a reason, from Augustine to Aquinas to Chemnitz to the modern day. And yes, it applies to your relationships with women in some pretty neat ways.
A little explanation of the terms, mortal and venial sin splits sin into two categories with useful applications for each. It's not just "big" sin and "little" sin, but an excellent key for distinguishing what you personally are responsible for. A mortal sin is something that you choose to do that is wrong, with three conditions, free will, sufficient reflection, and deliberate consent. It's wrong and you know it's wrong while you're doing it, you know exactly what you're doing.
Venial sin is anything wrong that we do that has a defect in one of the three conditions, and is more in the nature of a mistake than deliberately choosing wrong. In other words, a venial sin is like aiming at a target and missing. Mortal sin is aiming directly at the ground and knowing that you are doing it.
Mortal sin is far more serious, because you have have far more control, and therefore responsibility. This is a freeing concept however because it helps make clear what you already know on some level, a lot of the mistakes and stupid stuff we do doesn't justify the level of fear or guilt that we associate with it, we are not fully, only partially, responsible. So, every time you make a mistake, as long as you didn't deliberately choose something you knew was wrong, there's no reason to view the mistake as a terrible set back.
In many ways being a better man is bound up more in not screwing yourself up than in "doing" certain things (although that is necessary). If it's not intentional, there's no real reason to be afraid of screwing up. When dealing with ourselves and the opposite sex it's normal to have little flashes of cowardice or neediness or any number of harmful things. As long as you're not deliberately and consciously indulging them, it's just part of the growth process.
If you avoid the deliberate decision to be cowardly or needy (more commonly this takes the form of focusing on these ideas), your true, and best self, can start to come out. You see, "sin" is, among other things, anything you do that is harmful to you and your relationship to God. Cowardice is certainly harmful, and is, as CS Lewis says, the only sin that is entirely painful, painful to contemplate, painful to experience, and painful to remember.
Bravery is, in some ways, your natural state. I think you'll also find that when you stop deliberately choosing something that you know, at least confusedly, shows cowardice, the "little flashes" will have less frequency and intensity. You still can't control them, but you can influence them.
Michael Dyer teaches Christian men about dating and relationships. He writes regularly on Christian dating advice
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