DATING AND COURTSHIP? AND AT WHAT AGE?

What’s the purpose of dating? Courtship? How soon is too soon? Dr. Ray Guarendi just wrote an article about this, too.

What do YOU think?

I like what this lady had to say:

Why Christians Should be Appalled at the Dating System

I promised in a recent post that I would write again about why I think Christians should be appalled at the system of dating.  It’s a difficult post.  There are many points and rabbit trails I’m tempted to follow.  Here, though, I’ll try to stick to the one, over-arching problem I see with our current dating system.

What’s it for?

It’s not just that the practice is faulty, though it is, or that other practices don’t have flaws, because they do, it’s our fundamental understanding that is wrong.

Dating came from a practice whose purpose was to find a marriage partner.  That’s the whole point. How did we arrive, then, at encouraging our young people to date and then acting shocked if they talk of marrying before the age of 25?  We expect our 14 year old to become romantically involved with someone and fully expect that they will NOT get married.  We commit parental schizophrenia!

What’s really normal?

In this process we not only permit but encourage our children to commit adultery-like behavior that will follow them into marriage.  What I mean is that our daughter is somebody’s wife, even when she’s young.  Our son is someone’s husband. As Scripture clearly uses language in describing Christ and the church we get a picture of what is expected on the wedding day–a spotless bride.  That is, at the altar, for centuries, it was fully expected that the two getting married had never been romantically involved with anyone else.  This is normal.  What we have now is brand new, and certainly not normal; it’s just all we know in our short life spans.

Forget the fact that by embracing the dating system we submit our children to larger-than-life temptations, the likes of which we wouldn’t permit ourselves to endure, and waste enormous time and energy that should otherwise be spent preparing them for life and marriage.  They aren’t even supposed to be thinking in the direction of romance until they’re ready to get married.

If you are reading and haven’t given the concept of dating much thought, I challenge you to ask yourself a few questions:

1. What is the purpose for allowing my children to date?

2.  Is that purpose working to better prepare them to be a husband or wife?

3.  Can a mother and father present their daughter at the wedding altar and “give this woman” if they haven’t “kept” her throughout her preparations for becoming a wife?

4.  Does dating allow a person to come wholly to his or her spouse?