So don't be afraid.
Edited to add that YHWH is still in the business of miracles....so faith and hope are still a very reasonable approach to take.
I'm certainly not peddling fear, Jolene, and I would never twist anyone's arm to abandon a chosen strategy of relying on hope, faith
or miracles -- in fact, I'm one of the most open promoters of polygyny you could find, and that tangentially includes pushing against defeatism and covert sabotage from within one's own family -- but I'm also not going to abandon
encouraging pragmatism. As I hope (there's that word again) I've adequately conveyed, I jumped for joy learning of your new sister wife. I know how you've yearned for this, and I so admire and respect your family that I can't help but feel like it couldn't have happened to a more deserving tribe.
And, yes, this means that y'all are indeed an
inspiration to the rest of us. However . . . you are one story among very many, and, while no one should abandon hope or faith or the potential for miracles, I would assert rather strongly that neither should anyone abandon cold hard facts. Statistics, when treated objectively rather than manipulated to suit a narrative, can be very useful guidestones. For example, you countered my suggestion that the length of time to accomplish everything necessary to start making babies would be closer to 10 years than 0 years. I could certainly be wrong about the process taking more than 5 years, but, again, you're not comparing apples to oranges, and you leave out two very relevant factors in the process, both of which relate to your gender, which changes the perspective from the vast majority of those who are truly seeking polygyny (men): (1) you therefore get to skip the step of ensuring that your wife won't sabotage the process; and (2) the issue of you getting older by the year isn't anywhere near as much in play, because your increasing age is irrelevant in the realm of attracting women who are still within the reasonable bounds of being able to produce offspring, which is the concern of the men
I've been addressing in this thread. Your husband can entirely skip the whole sections of the how-long-will-it-take-from-meeting-the-potential-wife-to-impregnation (or even just marriage), because he doesn't have to either obtain your acceptance/approval or work through any sabotage efforts on your part -- and I will continue to assert that those are even bigger obstacles for most of the men in Biblical Families than are those associated with persuading women to be 2nd wives, so therefore that's a not-insignificant chunk of that timeline from meeting to conceiving.
What you're also leaving out is the length of time prior to what you experienced as a 2-year process from meet to heat. Even for you, with your eagerness, it was
many years between when desire to have a plural family and meeting your sister wife occurred.
That is an integral part of the calculus in regard to whether one relies on hope or becomes more pragmatic and faces up to things like the Pareto Principle. For you, the wait is over. For the men open to being plural husbands but who haven't found a reasonable prospective 2nd wife, my guess is that the average time they've been available for this is easily in excess of 5 years without success -- and probably closer to ten years. In addition, waiting will
continue,
and the length of that future waiting cannot be predicted, so, at, for example, 45 years of age, with 5 or 10 years of already yearning for polygyny behind him, hoping for a miracle is perfectly fine,
as long as he is entirely comfortable with living the rest of his life with the interpretation that the only approach required is to rely on Yah dropping a woman in his lap (as He obviously does from time to time), coupled with, in the inevitable-in-most cases, considering himself entirely blessed by Yah's choice not to do so in his case, but if he isn't oriented toward that kind of passive approach (and either frequenting dating sites or chatting up women with the hope of sparking a flame is evidence that he isn't content to rely on passivity), then hoping for another wife and more children is a very high-risk strategy: extremely low likelihood of success and therefore extremely high likelihood of failure.
I'm going to continue to
encourage men to take full stock of their approaches, because what I want for them is success. I want for them, if they also truly want it, to experience plural marriage and/or additional children, and I want for them to experience those things for longer rather than shorter. We all applaud and rejoice and heap blessings on you and yours for what you're experiencing -- you've stood tall for what you wanted, what you wanted was righteous, and you are now blessed with that righteousness and joy -- but all we have to do is look around to see that it's very rare -- a true miracle -- and, by definition, unlikely to happen to most of the rest of us. Therefore, I'll risk being thought pessimistic to promote the likelihood that we'll have an increase in more optimistic outcomes.
Here's my parting thought for the moment: men, if, down the line you're inevitably going to either mourn ultimate defeat or cry uncle and settle for less than the ideal you've been shooting for all along, wouldn't it make more sense to settle (to make necessary compromises)
now rather than
later? Wouldn't it bless both your life and the life of the woman you will ultimately
settle for to settle
now and thus have far more years together? What if the lesson most of us are meant to learn is that it won't even really be settling after all, when it comes down to it?