Hi Family!!!
Happy New Year!!!
Welcome back to our blog!We’re excited because this is our first new blog post on our very own website! Prior to this, we were depending on ewurabenawrites.com. We thank God for growth!
Today, we’ll be sharing some of our thoughts on the questions that we have received about dating, courtship and when the right time for that is. Barry’s contributions will be written in Bold,and Rabby’s will be in Italics.
Let’s talk about dating – what is it?
I believe dating/courtship is when two people have a progressive friendship and have agreed to build that friendship enough to a point where they are convicted that they can pursue the institution of marriage with each other. Usually, this is done by spending time with each other, and each other’s families. What seems to be the general understanding is: dating is the more informal stage, whereas courting is a more serious period in time where the couple are actively preparing for the institution of marriage.
When you google it, you find something like this:
“Dating is a stage of romantic relationships in humans whereby two people meet socially with the aim of each assessing the other’s suitability as a prospective partner in an intimate relationship or marriage. It is a form of courtship, consisting of social activities done by the couple, either alone or with others.”
To my surprise, there is a difference between dating and being in a relationship! (Did you know?!) Here’s what google said as well:
“The main difference between dating and being in a relationship is that people in a relationship are connected by a mutual commitment to each other. You and the person you’re with have agreed, either officially or unofficially, that you are seeing each other exclusively and are in a partnership together.”
Clearly, some of us were clueless to this!
I think it is safe to say that the culture of life in the days of the Bible are VERY different from the culture of life now. What hasn’t changed, though – is God’s standard. We see in the Bible that some marriages were arranged, some were birthed from random meet ups. I always wondered how they handled that – not going through a period of dating or courtship before getting married. I realized that even now, after the period of courtship, men and women still discover new things about themselves in the institution of marriage. So things may not have been as weird in Bible days as it may seem now.
The issue with dating these days is, (especially as propagated by popular culture / the media/ movies) sex has been reduced to a random act of “affection”. You watch a movie and two teenagers who have a crush on each other haveto kiss each other to prove it, or something as perverted as that. That is really not okay and there is actually a Bible story that shows this. The sons of Isaac killed an entire town because a man disrespected their sister by sleeping with her before marrying her or paying her bride price.
So just to be clear, we do not fully agree with the concept of dating as we see in popular culture and google seems to be a little off with this – because dating someone does mean you are in a relationship with the person – otherwise, why are you dating?
Someone once asked if every Christian couple is expected to get married. Honestly, I don’t have an answer to that. However, I once learnt from one of our councilors that every situation in a relationship can be resolved. Initially, it seemed a little generic to be true – but I later saw a different angle to it. On the other hand, if a courtship or relationship cannot progress into marriage, breaking off a courtship should not be difficult as it is intended to be a progressive friendship. Once your courtship had all sorts of complexities to it, then, you may be walking away with more damage than necessary.
Now that we’ve covered what it is, let’s talk about why it is.
For us, that period of friendship built us and helped get us ready for this more permanent season. This season of friendship will affirm or disprove your desire and conviction to build a life with someone. A lot of people take dating or courtship lightly, but we’ve noticed that the pain and scars people leave unfruitful relationships with are sometimes the hardest to heal. It is for this reason that we believe anyone who is thinking about dating or has the desire to date needs to ask themselves some pertinent questions;
Why do I want to get into a relationship?
Do I believe this is the person I want to spend the rest of my life with?
Have I figured out myself in a slight portion, at least?
No one should rush into a relationship – first of all, you need to know the baggage you carry and assess whether you believe you could handle another person with that kind of baggage. Knowing what we know now, and seeing as we have grown and improved each other since our relationship started, we do not expect that people get into relationships when they are perfect. We expect that people get into relationship with a mature mindset and an open heart for change and sacrifice. Courting involves a lot – handling yourself ANDadding the other person. At that particular season in your life, are you well equipped for that kind of progressive friendship?
So… ask yourself, ‘should I be dating’? Well, yes – if you have a conviction that you and the person in question are ready to work towards ‘till death do us part’. If you are ready to pursue a friendship that is pleasing to God and developmental to your life and destiny.
That will be all for today! We’ll see you on our next blog post!!! God bless you and have a great weekend!
Love,
Barry&Rabby!
