This is an archived copy of a post written by Conflict Of Justice (conflictofjustice.com). Used with permission: Conflict Of Justice may not agree with any alterations made.
Where do we learn how to date? There’s no guidebook and no Sunday School lesson. Typically, the advice we get is to live a chaste life and quickly find a good husband or wife. That is important advice, but it seems like getting married is becoming harder to do. We need a basic understanding of what the opposite sex wants, and how to improve our behavior to fulfill those needs and let them fulfill us. How can we train our basic social behavior?
Importance Of Dating As Young Adult
The transition from family ward to single’s ward is very abrupt. One day you are sitting with your family in church, and the next you sit on the pew alone. One day you walk through a scripted itinerary of daily classes, and the next your schedule is up to you to figure out. One day you are exhorted to bridle your passions and the next you are supposed to get married. Most people figure out their daily routine and long-term goals before they try to tackle the issue of marriage. They don’t even try to date until they can make some kind of sense of college, church, and adult life. I don’t think this is a healthy approach, because the result is a cold, silent single’s ward where everyone stays isolated or in tiny cliques. The suppression of romantic interests becomes literal self-torture, and the integration of romance into life goals later down the road becomes even harder. It is better to fit romance into its rightful place immediately upon entering adult life.
Of course, this is the harder road to take. Dating is hard. The popular thing to do in our culture is to go on a mission, then go to college (and accrue a nice amount of debt), start a career, and then start to think about family–one thing at a time. But for many, the real issue is they just don’t think they are good enough to date. They don’t think they have the discipline, the skill, or the traits that a suitable mate desires. It’s too much work and they are stressed with schoolwork as it is. But what ends up happening is you finish school and then you have to integrate a career, and then you have a career and you have to integrate a family. It’s much easier if you start with a plan that has everything integrated before you even depart on your mission and tweak it as time goes on. In the 1950’s, people could graduate, get a good job, and find a husband or wife and have kids by the time they turned 22 years old. Today, these things do not easily fall into place. Each part requires more demands and the timetable gets stretched out. We can’t afford to not take dating seriously from the start.
People certainly rush things as well. I’ve known friends who married young and then realized they hadn’t actually thought things through, or they weren’t financially stable enough, or decided they actually wanted to have a few years of singlehood like their friends before they settled down. It is tough to know what kind of person we will be in ten years because what we want is always changing. It’s safer to wait. But we don’t need to complete school and start long-term paths before we figure this out. We can take control of our identity by investigating emotional resources, our environment, and our relationships that lead to our vision. It is smart to be safe and try not to rush things. Take the time you need to figure your plan out, definitely. But the important thing is to not let your motivation be materialism. American culture is saturated with material values where money, status, and comfort are more important than anything else, and these material values saturate church culture as well. The mistake is thinking we can’t fulfill our relationships until we have first fulfilled material goals. Stop relying on materialism. We can at any time take stock of everything we need for our long-term plans and develop our strategy. Start dating now to take control of this important part of your life and envision yourself as a happily married person.
Importance Of Dating As Older Adult
| See also: | Transform How You Learn |
I like the bible story of Jacob who worked 14 years to gain the right to marry Rachel. The scriptures tell us it felt like 14 days to him because of his love for Rachel. I apply this story to mean we should jump into the effort to create a relationship no matter how long it takes or where we are at. It becomes much easier if you actually enjoy the pursuit… so enjoy the pursuit. In cases of singles who never found the right one or were widowed or divorced, this could become difficult because the chances of success appear tiny and past experience drags us down. Maybe we had the plan worked out but everything fell to pieces and we don’t know why. Perhaps Jacob felt this way when he worked hard 7 years and then married a different woman. Was that fair to him? So what did he do? He reevaluated and made a new plan where he worked another 7 years. We have to accept what our resources and circumstances are and plan accordingly. There is always a way.
Forget About Contradictions – For older adults, it can be harder to adopt the required mindset to be successful because our circumstances appear to contradict what we need to succeed. But so what? Why consider contradictions at all? Popular culture has trained us to purge anything that contradicts our ideal. But this is a strategy that was invented by Marxists. Why would you follow a strategy for dating that was invented by Karl Marx? Stop thinking about contradictions. They don’t matter. A gospel-centered strategy instead considers inner Christlike virtues that lead us on a straight and narrow path to eternal life. This is as true for dating as it is for anything else. The important thing is to walk on the right path.
Resources can be very difficult to see because of popular misconceptions. We paint ourselves into corners where we can’t see the multitude of prospects available to us or a false abundance makes it so we can’t settle on one good choice. Maybe being realistic isn’t so bad. Maybe the answer would involve a drastic life change like moving to a new country and we aren’t willing to do that. We’ve simply got to decide that this is something very important to us and we are going to do whatever it takes to facilitate it happening. That is virtue. Instead of considering dismal chances, poor circumstances, or any other ‘contradiction’, and instead of trying to remove roadblocks, we should instead facilitate a strategy to make it happen, with an eye of faith that is confident it will happen. You can adopt that mindset and see the value in yourself because the value is there. It can happen.
Confidence In Your Vision
For both men and women, it is essential to figure this life plan out (while leaving the plan open for reevaluation) because that gives us confidence which makes us attractive. Confidence in one’s life pursuit makes one attractive. Well, it just makes sense to date someone who has their vision figured out, doesn’t it? You don’t want to come home one day and find a note on the counter saying your husband or wife decided to move to Las Vegas to strike it big. You want to dedicate yourself to someone who is confident in their decisions. But confidence is also worn on the face. The head is held higher and the voice is firmer. Confidence is the number one thing for dating. It’s all about confidence, and you can’t really fake it. You have to be confident that you have the resources you need, that you have your environment figured out, and that you have healthy relationships.
We all beat ourselves up over lack of virtue and lack of relationships, but that is a large part of the point of dating: to develop those things. It’s really a positive feedback loop where the more you date the more virtue and healthy relationships you develop, so you just need to start on the right path. You need to take that great leap into the unknown to pursue your life-long ambitions–real actions that turn your plan into reality. This means eagerly dating lots of people as you are figuring it all out.
Confidence informs all behavior with dating and courtship. A successful man who girls want to date bursts into the room, shaking hands and greeting warmly everyone he passes, complimenting people and making their day brighter, and then sitting at the front with his arms stretched on either side, head high. He doesn’t slink into the back corner silently and count the minutes until he can go home. A smart man understands that an important part of his life goal is finding a wife, so he scopes the room and schemes about how to meet girls. That’s what a smart man does, but a confident man sits at the front where the girls can study him and scheme about how to meet him. It is a matter of faith in yourself. The confident man has found his ship and made himself captain, sailing into the exciting blue. Again, it is important that this not just be in your head, but proven through real tangible actions that are more significant than signing up for some dating site or uploading some nice pictures to Facebook. And it is alright if you are only at the point where you are preparing the ship and it hasn’t actually set sail yet. It is a matter of life vision. And of course, don’t take sail on your own thinking you don’t need that person with you.
This is a lot to ask for. Most sit alone and wonder where could they meet the opposite sex? Internet dating sites are fruitless. Members in single’s wards stick to their cliques. People walking down the street are glued to their phones. How could we be confident in our relationships if there are no relationships? The answer is to take a first step, the smallest step. Look for any kind of resource you can and figure out how to make it lead to a next step in your plan. There are lots of people all around. There must be a way to meet them. It reminds me of the first time on my mission I stood on a street corner and wondered how I could approach complete strangers in a strange country in a language I didn’t know and talk to them about their personal beliefs. It seemed like there was no way, and with each rejection I lost motivation. But I found that through persistent study, creative strategy, and an eye single to faith I could make it happen. And I eventually enjoyed it. Dating likewise can be enjoyable even if it involves lots of rejection, and each date can be great even if they don’t lead to something long-term. Each step leads to a another step that builds your confidence.