It’s been more than a week since my last post. I apologize sincerely and I ask you to please bear with me. I hope you’ve been blessed so far. Today, we shall be looking at the next topic.
There has been this long standing debate about which method is the better one for believers to adopt before marriage. While some believe dating is the more realistic method to be sure of who to marry, others believe you dive straight into courtship once you are convinced. So, which is the better option to be adopted and why? What are their pros and their cons? I would be iterating them below. Please read carefully and you would see which option is the best for the believer to follow.
I did a bit of study on dating and courtship a while back, and I found out that both are quite similar yet different. In dating, you are simply meeting people (usually based on attraction) with the aim of assessing their personalities so as to consider them for a more stable relationship hoping it ends in. On the other hand, in courtship, your relationship is clearly defined from the start. In assessing each other’s personalities, your approach is from a commitment based perspective whereby the focus of your relationship is to prepare for marriage and most especially consolidate your convictions regarding marriage. Hence, you can date so many people and still not find anyone to marry among them. But usually, when a relationship starts from courtship, the chances of it ending in marriage is much higher. So what makes the difference?
As a believer, one thing that shows you are indeed God’s child is when you are led by the spirit of God (Romans 8:14). The motive behind dating seems to eliminate this fundamental characteristic of the believer. It hinges more on your own emotions, personal preferences, judgments and opinions than on what God would have you do. This is not to say dating is a sin, at all; it’s simply an act whereby you let your senses lead you. It reminds me of what Paul said in Galatians 3:3 (AMPC) – Are you so foolish and so senseless and so silly? Having begun [your new life spiritually] with the [Holy] Spirit, are you now reaching perfection [by dependence] on the flesh? This is how I view it. If as a believer, you have allowed God lead you thus far, why then should you at the point of choosing something as important as a spouse depend on your flesh? Do you think that is wise?
Typically, people enter the dating scene with the mind set of either having fun/testing the waters or simply finding that one person they intend to spend the rest of their life with. So you meet this lovely guy or lady and decide to date them by “going out” a few times. Usually, both parties are on their best behaviour while assessing each other. You rarely discuss deep/serious issues because you don’t want to come off as a desperate person; although a few have been bold enough to break this norm. After a while, you become “exclusive”, a marriage proposal comes up months/years later, and then you get married or worse still break off the “relationship”/”date” because it just did not work out. Now if you decide to get married to that person, the time between the proposal and when you eventually get married is mostly spent planning for the wedding day and not deeply for the marriage itself. Cumulatively, more time would have been spent having fun and building romance (romantic love) while dating than seriously looking into the marital journey they are soon to embark on. As a result, many people find themselves in situations where they realize they didn’t really know their spouses as much as they thought they did. In fact, they experience so much turbulence in marriage that if not managed properly end up as the “irreconcilable differences” that eventually leads to divorce.
If you’ve been following this series (I’ll advice that you do), you would have seen how we’ve looked into people’s characters regarding romantic relationships and marriage. I’ve touched on how to recognize a good partner and how to choose rightly. In this light, courtship among the Christian folk works very differently from what the world has defined it to be. The world and even a lot of believers view this route to marriage as “old school” and unrealistic in this times. They have even bastardized the whole idea due to their lack of understanding on how it works. I’ve heard people question how on earth you would get engaged to someone from the start of a relationship. The very idea sounds preposterous! My answer to them usually is that the step towards marriage is a step of faith.
As a believer who claims to trust God, you should be ready to walk through it. If you consider this deeply, you would realize that you actually don’t need to date someone to know them. You are a believer who has the Holy Spirit as your greatest advantage. With Him, your senses (physical and spiritual) would be fully opened to note various things that you would otherwise not have noticed ordinarily. You get to know who someone truly is by their interaction with people around them when they are not aware of your feelings and/or intentions towards them. At this stage, there would be no pretense or the need to cover up yourself because the moment one or both parties are aware of the feelings and intentions of the other, a mask is usually put up to cover those imperfections and pretend to be who they are not. To then unmask and get to know the real person takes a whole new process entirely. By that time, your decisions would have be marred by sentiments or romantic entanglements. To know what God is leading you to do becomes hard.
The reason why a lot of people view courtship (as a route to marriage) as an arduous task is perhaps because they don’t have a vibrant fellowship with God. If you are in the habit of telling God everything and letting Him lead you, you’ll find this process easy. The only thing you might find challenging is being patient through the conviction process. This phase of waiting and solely depending on God’s leading as you observe the other party can be daunting especially since what comes naturally to you is to be as close as possible to that person. You want others to notice that you have that person marked down for a potential romantic relationship. At this stage, just be patient and seek God concerning that person. You would definitely receive a word that would convince you to pursue or to let go. The moment both parties are convinced, and you agree to kick off the relationship, you are now in a courtship!
I must emphasize here that the process of conviction does not negate all I have discussed so far in this series. This is usually the mistake most people make. They assume spirituality is all there is to conviction; no, it is not! The process of conviction involves you seeing the person’s character strengths, weaknesses, behavioral flaws, bad habits, awesome traits and so on in its raw form/state. You get to see if you can cope and live with these things. Where God’s leading comes to play is usually in the aspect of spirituality, motives, ministry, purpose and most importantly, your future together. It is God who sees the innermost parts of man, and if you are patient enough to ask Him, He would reveal to you who that person really is. Besides, since every good person is not meant to be your spouse, God (who knows the end from the beginning) would lead you and convince you through His word to choose the right person and you start courting. Your natural response to whatever issues that arises in courtship would not be to call it quits, it would be to resolve it and build a solid foundation for marriage. This can only happen because the basis of courtship comes from a mindset of commitment, tolerance, forgiveness, patience, hope and God’s kind of love. Here, you both learn and choose to truly love each other. By love, I don’t mean the romantic kind of love alone, I mean the kind of love that remains when all that mushy, butterfly-in-your-belly feelings are gone. That is the kind of love that endures when you marry.
Therefore, to begin courtship as a believer, you must be led and convinced. You also need to wait for the other party to get convinced too. Both the man and the woman is expected to get their convictions from God separately. One party should not use his/her conviction to bamboozle the other. If you are not convinced, please learn to say “NO”. Remember Abraham’s servant? He told God how he wanted to be sure that whoever he chose for Isaac was the right choice, and when he picked Rebecca, she also decided to follow him based on her own convictions. If she had refused, I am so sure he would either have waited for a while or moved on to another person.
Getting that conviction should be done objectively, where emotions and sentiments do not play any major roles. Being simple friends or acquaintances is usually the best way to get this done. You get to know the person in a safe and friendly environment i.e. among others, without any pressure and with no strings attached. You also get to notice how that person interacts with friends, foes, colleagues, older people, younger people and perhaps family members. As you observe, table your feelings and observations before God. Ask Him questions and pray for clarity on knotty issues. There is a way God unravels issues that would make it easier to reach a decision. You can go back and read How to choose rightly to follow the process to being convinced.
I hope you’ve been able to clearly differentiate between dating and courtship from the believer’s point of view. To further explain how this works in reality, I would be interviewing a very special couple in my next post. They have been married for over 30 years, are both seasoned marriage counselors and would shed more light on this topic based on their experiences.
Thanks for reading and see you next time!