Dating & Courtship by Stephen Picklesimer (reading rainbow books TXT) 📕

immature person. If you are immature, and refuse to grow and develop in emotional and mental maturity and stability, the only people you will be able to date will be the same—immature and unstable.
Second, and more important, as you grow older and begin dating one-on-one, it is essential to have already achieved a certain maturity level before becoming serious. Love and the proper perspective of the relationship are impossible without it! A person must be mature enough to understand the implications of a serious relationship. A lifetime of marriage and commitment may be just over the horizon!
Again, take heed lest you fall! Analyze where, in your personality and character, you need to grow and develop. Work on these areas! Set goals and move forward. Go to God and ask Him to show you other areas in which you need to grow:
Can you make right decisions? Do you take responsibility? Can you handle setbacks? Are you able to cope with crises, or do you “fly off the handle”? Can you acknowledge your faults? Can you differentiate between infatuation and real love? Are you addicted to wrong television? Similarly, are you addicted to wrong entertainment and wrong music?
Also ask yourself: Are you striving to become more well-rounded—in interest and culture? Do you have a strong work ethic? Are you most often happy, rarely allowing things to “get you down”? Are you patient with others? Would others describe you as composed—in control of your emotions? Are you generally thought by family and friends to be a responsible individual?
While maturity is crucial to every aspect of adulthood, it is an especially vital building block for dating, courting and, ultimately, marriage! To enjoy a thriving, successful marriage, one must be spiritually, emotionally and intellectually mature! There are no exceptions. While some may seem physically and mentally able to enter a relationship, they are often unable to maintain one. They lack too many essential qualities so necessary to endure the ups and downs that every relationship experiences.
Other Aspects of Love and Dating
Maturity and conversion are the most fundamental building blocks of proper dating. Maturity is directly related to responsibility. As children become teenagers, they begin to ask the bigger questions of life: “What will I do for a living?”—“How will I support myself and my family?”—among others.
Marriage is a God-plane relationship and, as a direct precursor to marriage, dating should not be a simple, animalistic pursuit of pleasure. Yet sadly, many young people never take time to plan their future. Instead, one night of succumbing to lustful impulse can bring disaster crashing down on foolish, unsuspecting minds—an unwanted pregnancy forcing couples to begin preparing for a family without the benefit of foresight and the joy of planning.
In contrast, God began planning to expand His Family long before even creating the earth. Notice: “According as He has chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love: having predestinated us unto the adoption [“sonship”] of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of His will” (Eph. 1:4-5).
Be willing to shed society’s influence over you. Admit that you may need to UNLEARN almost everything you have absorbed, and replace it with sound biblical principles. Once armed with this new set of values, you can firmly rely on God to bless you with the best possible prospective mate.
If you seek counsel, exercise foresight, and are willing to wait, God’s way will reap far greater rewards than you can imagine!
Chapter Six –THE PURPOSE OF DATING
Now that you have begun to unlearn the wrong way of thinking and understand how to build a solid foundation on God and His Way, you are ready to learn the right purpose of dating.
This chapter addresses why people date, coupling it with the practical realities that accompany this activity. If you ask several passersby on the street why people set dates to do things together, you will get a variety of responses. These might include: To have fun, get to know other people, have a girlfriend or boyfriend, have sex, peer pressure, find companionship, defeat loneliness, etc. Some of these reasons are fine, but obviously some are not!
There are other basic—and more important—reasons for dating.
Times Have Changed
Recognize how society has developed over the past century. Both the “dating scene” and dating practices have changed dramatically! A brief look at recent history shows that times and morals have undergone a drastic change.
Few customs have changed more than dress. There was once a time, in the mid-1800s, when women dressed modestly. They wore floor-length dresses, with long sleeves and high necks. Men wore shirts and ties, and such dress among men and women carried over to the workplace, and even to sporting activities.
Society followed the “old morality” concerning dating, marriage and sex. If a young man wanted to date a young woman, he would first ask her father for permission, and at some point ask if he could “court” her. Of course, the prevalent attitude then was that “sex is shameful,” making fornication and its tragic results much less frequent. Despite the pervasive inhibition ingrained by the widespread misconception (known as “Victorian prudery”) that all sex is inherently evil, ironically, at that time, happier, committed marriages were much more common than today. This is because people generally had much more character than those of the modern age. And this was true even though most people then also did not know how to select the right mate.
As the century turned, a new picture slowly emerged. The tradition of requiring a chaperone to accompany young couples vanished. Even yet, young people still understood clearly-defined limits. At this point in history, a couple might have shared a short kiss, but only after their interest was serious or they had become engaged. This is in sharp contrast to the widespread idea of “no limits” followed by couples today, where “fooling around”—“making out, necking” or “heavy petting”—and sexual relations are the norm, long before couples are inclined to consider, let alone entertain, the thought of lifelong commitment.
Society continued changing even more rapidly as the century developed. Many new books, magazines and other publications discussing and describing sex became available, and people began to throw off the restraints of prudery. By the 1950s, a “new morality” had arrived, and with it came the jump from the ditch of prudery to the opposite ditch of permissiveness.
Dating is now a practice that almost immediately involves sexual intimacy. Many today disdain—or, again, have not even heard of—the concept of courting. Teenage morality has dropped to its lowest point in history—with no apparent end in sight to the worsening trend.
Of course, society today flaunts sex in everything. The effects are so far-reaching that a return to modesty would almost instantly collapse the economy. Advertising would change overnight, as would the clothing industry. Thousands of Internet companies would declare bankruptcy, as would advertising agencies, now completely unequipped to offer a different way. The music industry would fold as we know it, and the change in movies and television would make the whole entertainment industry almost unrecognizable. Many could not make the shift fast enough.
To learn more about the right purposes of sex, read our vital book Sex – Its Unknown Dimension. That book is a companion to this one, and is necessary to understand the God-ordained purposes for sex.
What Is a Date?
The dictionary definition of what constitutes a date was briefly discussed in the INTRODUCTION. At this point, it is worth repeating. Recall that the most commonly understood definition of a date is “an appointment for a specified time; especially a social engagement between two persons of opposite sex” (Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary).
In the simplest terms, a “date” is merely a set time agreed upon by two people to engage in an activity—any activity. Another way of stating this is that it is merely social contact with a person or persons of the opposite sex, either one-on-one or in a group.
This leads to the next question, that of when dating may begin.
When Should Dating Begin?
During the teenage years, dating should only be within groups and with specific parental knowledge and permission. As one grows older, and closer to the age suitable for marriage, one-on-one dates may begin. The process begins with group dating and leads to one-on-one when the time is right, which, in turn, leads to the more intensive step of courtship if the couple becomes seriously interested. This, of course, then progresses to engagement and marriage, if continued.
(Conversion is another virtual prerequisite for dating one-on-one. This will be momentarily addressed and expounded upon in Chapter 7.)
Through group dating, you will overcome nervousness and learn to relax and naturally respond to those of the opposite sex. This will prove beneficial when moving on to courting. You will be able to evaluate situations more realistically.
Above all, try to date widely. Fifty years ago, this was referred to as “playing the field.” This meant dating as many different people as possible. This gives one exposure to a broad range of personalities, with the important side benefit of learning which kinds of personalities are compatible with yours and which are not.
This is most critical to recognize. You need to know which kinds of people make you comfortable, and which do not. You will probably find that one personality type makes you most comfortable. But this may not always be the case. (Remember, at the same time you are learning about yourself, you are also helping your “date” to do the same.)
Paul spoke of being able to be “all things to all people” (I Cor. 9:22), for the purpose of helping and benefiting more kinds of people. Dating widely helps you learn to interact with almost anyone in any kind of social setting.
In the earliest stages of dating, romance is never to be involved! As we have seen, teenagers are much too young for this more serious activity. This can only come later, when one is of sufficient age and maturity to contemplate marriage and its enormous implications. While modernists will howl in protest, only at this stage should one begin to date one-on-one, with the potential to progress to courting and romance. Though this approach may seem old-fashioned, it is absolutely essential to not get ahead of yourself, when you are too young to even know what kind of basic personality match would make for the most successful, long-lasting relationship.
Recognize that society is pushing you from every direction to begin romance long before it is appropriate. Romance too early carries a high price. I have counseled many who have had to pay this price—and my task was often to try to help rebuild shattered marriages, and shattered lives. Countless thousands of teenagers have grown up to sorely regret the daily pain and consequences they now face, because they thought that they were more mature—more ready for romance—than they actually were.
It would be helpful to summarize some important points here: Group dating can begin as early as age 16, where a small number—perhaps six to eight, or so—make an appointment to enjoy a wholesome activity together. Responsible adults or parents should stay close. (Of course, very large group activities can and should begin at an early age, and these would have a variety of parents or other adults present.) But it must be understood that we are talking about a group of people of both sexes participating in an activity together. Under no circumstances should this slip into “pairing off” within the activity. Parents must be particularly watchful of less responsible teenagers, because these will be the very ones who think they are the most responsible—those who think they can “handle” a relationship probably long before they are in fact ready.
Before one is baptized and