Everywhere we turn, the media and the world around us are constantly feeding us a message about dating and relationships. That message shows up around every corner; it's in almost every song on the radio, in every movie in theaters, it's on your Facebook and Instagram feeds, and in the magazines you read. The message tells you that who you date is the most important thing about who you are; that having a relationship and what you do in that relationship makes you more grown up and mature; that dating will make you happy and give you a better public image; that feelings are the most important thing about who you choose to be in a relationship with; and that you shouldn't risk a good friendship with someone by dating them (so, only date your enemies). We get this message all the time.
Is all of this really true, or are these just plastic Hollywood movie messages, as fake as all the CGI and makeup and broken celebrity marriages that they’re surrounded by? For that we have to look at how we got here:
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
To start with, while it says a lot about relationships and marriage, dating doesn’t show up in the Bible. That’s because dating wasn't normal until 50 or 60 years ago. It’s new. We think the way we do relationships is normal because it's all we've ever known, but many of us know someone who has been alive longer than dating has existed! When I was getting ready to teach this at youth group, I went and talked with some of the seniors who meet at our church for prayer during the afternoons, and I asked them about dating -- about getting picked up and going on dates away from your home without the involvement of your family. Their response? It never happened. Except maybe for a few people with cars in the cities. It would have been considered crazy. In the Bible, there are some examples of single people 'liking' each other and getting married, like the book of Ruth where Boaz (a single man) and Ruth (a widowed woman) get to know each other over time before getting married. But that still isn't really dating. They skip the dating step. They just extend the ‘liking each other’ friendship step and get their other friends and family involved, and then they eventually get engaged. Their dating process was friendship, surrounded by family, followed by engagement, and then marriage.
So how was it done before? Mostly we see arranged marriage, often involving the man and the woman’s decision, as well as the decision of each set of parents. Now that I'm a father of a little girl this option makes a lot of sense to me. Instead of making a decision alone based on their own feelings and their love-fogged brains, young people had some outside help built in. Because a nice smile and guitar skills won't do anything for a girl's dad, and a guy's mom doesn't care how great a girl's wardrobe or makeup are. Parents could be a little more objective. Then there was courtship, which is what some seniors at our church would have been more familiar with: men came over to 'call' on a woman at her parents' home, spending supervised time with them, presumably while the father spent time nearby cleaning a shotgun or polishing a personal collection of medieval weapons. But it provided a safe environment for two people who were interested in each other to get to know each other, with clear boundaries and accountability. Then dating came along really recently as an alternative, based on removing as much of the mystery about another person as possible before marrying them: so it starts with going out to places alone and knowing someone by doing activities with them; then there’s the idea of keeping it exclusive, so you’re ‘play married’ where you’re ‘together’ and you go out and do activities as an exclusive romantic couple like the married people do; then there’s the idea of kissing or hand holding so that there’s some physical things (but not too physical things, whatever that means) that you do like married couples, all for the purpose of testing out to the furthest limit you can this idea of what married life would be like with someone until you know for sure, without having to propose until the mystery is completely gone. Which seems like it should make sense, but there are some serious problems.
WHAT ARE THE LIES WE'VE BEEN TOLD?
The downside of dating is that more and more things have been added to it. Now people date because it’s just what people do instead of being a path to marriage. Nine year olds date. And we're left to figure it out on our own -- there’s no real involvement from older and wiser people who have already had successful marriages and raised good families who know what we should be looking for. In the absence of that experience, and with the 'wisdom' on relationships that we get from celebrities who are on their fourth or fifth 18-month marriages, some lies have crept in that we've believed.
Lie #1 - “Dating and Relationships Make You More Mature"
Not every experience leads to maturity. Sometimes the wisdom not to get involved in certain experiences is what makes us mature. Look around. I bet you know very mature single people who aren’t dating anyone, as well as very immature dating (or married) people in relationships. Whether or not we're dating someone doesn't reflect on our maturity.
Lie #2 - “Dating Shows Your Value and Makes You Happy”
Dating actually does make you happy. So does ice cream and bubble wrap. A relationship is an experience like any other, and it won't always make you happy: it can be adventurous and fun and exciting or exhausting and boring and crushing and hard, just like being single. If you are looking to get into relationships to make you feel better then you're probably going about it the wrong way. As far as showing value, that’s only if you play the dating game to begin with. If you say that you don’t date, and you don’t, the fact that you’re not dating anyone doesn’t need to reflect on you.
Lie #3 - “You Need to Follow Your Feelings”
This isn't true either. Jeremiah 17:9 says that our hearts are deceitful and Proverbs 4:23 says that we need to guard our hearts, which means directing our hearts and leading them, not following them wherever they lead us. Think of feelings in a relationship as the spices in a nice steak dinner: you want them there (otherwise it would be a really boring steak) but you probably don't want them to be the biggest part of the meal. Romance and feeling in love and physical attraction aren’t always there in a relationship, they're more like the spice, so the foundation has to be something else: friendship.
Lie #4 - “Don't Risk a Friendship”
A friendship (with God in the center) is the best foundation for a relationship. The only risk is if there’s shame and regret when the relationship ends. That’s how you lose a friend: by bringing things emotionally and physically into a relationship that shouldn’t be there without a lifelong commitment. The issue isn’t whether or not you should date someone you’re really good friends with. The issue is what goes on while you're dating. If there's no regret, then there's no issues if it doesn't work out. The goal of dating is marriage, a long-term marriage is based on a great friendship, and an existing friendship is absolutely a great place to start. Plus, dating your friend is also better than dating random strangers and your enemies.
WHAT ARE SOME GOOD THINGS TO DO?
We could go for a long time talking about all of the great tips that the Bible gives about relationships. But in general, here are a couple of things that I want to share. You might talk to your parents or go through other resources (some are listed below) that point out things, and that’s great. But these are great things to consider as well. Involve other people in your relationships. Especially older and happily successful married people like parents if you can. That’s something that arranged marriage and courtship got right. We need some help from people who've already done this well. It also pops up in the huge majority of relationship stories in the Bible from Genesis to Revelation: pick up a Bible, start at the left and work your way to the right looking for all the relationships; they almost always involve family and wise counsel. Make friendship important. You will get to know a person better as a long-term friend than you will through dating, and that friendship is what is really going to make a marriage work some day when romantic feelings aren’t there and a physical relationship isn’t always possible. I know at least one guy who was best friends with a girl for years, and randomly proposed to her over coffee one day. She accepted. They've been happily married for ten years. Going on dates doesn’t have to mean you are dating. If you and a friend go out to supper together or ask each other to the prom, or one asks the other out to a concert, you don’t need to start sizing out your wedding dress or changing your Facebook relationship status or writing love notes to each other or taking couple selfies on Instagram. You’re just two friends who like each other and enjoy spending intentional time getting to know each other, like Boaz and Ruth. Don’t skip ahead - “do not awaken love until the time is right” (Song of Songs 3:5) and until you have involved wise older counsel (Proverbs 15:22). Finally, make any relationship about seeking God first. Don’t proceed with any relationship until you’re sure that it would fulfill God’s purposes for your life and what he has called you to.
WHAT KIND OF DIFFERENCE DOES THIS MAKE?
Maybe you've heard that 50% of all marriages end in divorce. And you've heard that Christians are just as likely to get divorced as non-Christians. But there's good news for us here: our faith makes a huge difference. A few years ago, Ipsos-Reid and Barna Group (both research and polling firms) dug in to those numbers, and asked some follow-up questions to people who claimed to be Christians. Some of those 'Christians' who were polled didn't even believe in the existence of God; some of them never attended any church; some hadn't ever read the Bible. When it came to couples who were both Christians who attended church weekly, read the Bible at least three times a week, regularly gave money and volunteered at their church, and believed the Bible, the divorce rate dropped down dramatically from 50 per cent to somewhere below 9 per cent. All the way from half of all marriages to just single digits. That isn't 0 per cent -- but it is pretty amazing, compared to the rest of the culture around us and to Hollywood where a lot of our messages about dating come from. From a 50 per cent divorce rate down to single digits: our faith and God's wisdom about dating makes a huge difference.
See you around,
-Sean
