Yes, you read the title right. I am making the assertion that the problem with modern marriage is the allowance of dating. We found a way to have sex outside of the covenant of marriage; the agreement between a man and woman to become one entity until death called dibs. The distortion starts young. We think if we call each other boyfriend/girlfriend, it requires some level of commitment so the guilt of being sexually reckless is non-existent or so we think. Nothing prepares us for divorce more than dating. The moment you start dating someone, it is understood you will be having sex but you do not necessarily have to marry them. The noble people try to bring it up a year into the relationship. After you have done your best to avoid making babies, going to parties together, playing house, shopping with different cards at the checkout line, you go “maybe we just admit to each other that we want to continue doing this for the rest of our lives.” Psych! We rarely marry the first person we dated nowadays. In fact, most people are advised against it. We are sold the idea of learning to cope with heartbreak as a very routine part of adulthood and that we should never allow such disruption to affect our commitment to pursuing pleasure and self-actualization because no one should have the power to cut us off from our destiny even the ones we share the foundations of our destiny with; INTIMACY.
Truth be told, dating is the original “friends with benefits” scheme. I can’t say how long it has been around but I do remember growing up in the 80s and it being common knowledge that dating was marriage practice. However by the late 90s, all I could hear from school mates and music was that the next metric was upping my body count. Don’t focus on liking any women. Get girls. Sleep with girls. Get them to like you then move onto the next. When I got to college in the early 2000s it was worse because women seemed to be aware of these and seemed to be on a similar quest. If most of us knew how slippery of a slope sex without consequences was going to be, I think a lot of us would rethink our first partners. It is hard to admit this because dating is now a culture. We try to mask it as this selection process but to be honest, most of it our best attempt at guiltless sex. Guys get who they can. Women get when they want. That’s all we get with the dating apps. Now you are wondering, “what’s wrong with guiltless sex?”
Well, a lot actually. Because most of us learn too late that we were never supposed to get guilt with sex in the first place. We were supposed to get responsibility. Now I don’t mean you were supposed to be having kids right away but that the person you went to for sex would usually be the person who probably cared about you about as close as your parents did (or should have). Not your siblings! A man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife. That’s biblical for cling as in hook. Tight. So ladies and gentlemen that clingy feeling you get about that person you like having sex with, is pretty natural by biblical standards. But modern culture would tell you, “Oh no how can you ever understand adulthood if you don’t survive heartbreak?” True. But it’s not your job to seek it out. Certain aspects of your life are not for you to make more painful. Here’s what I mean, you don’t strengthen your legs by busting your knee caps. I believe the design for marriage as biblically intended was meant to be an opportunity to have the perfect continuity established by our loving parents into our relationship with a loving spouse. In that scenario, you need the bond with your spouse to fight off the dangers of the world in the way that your parents used to. With dating, we relaxed that responsibility and allowed ourselves subpar bonds with primary partners that end up fulfilling our primary desires without being our primary responsibility. Thus you end up building a bond you are subconsciously preparing to dissipate as opposed to a bond you know will procreate. By procreate, it does not have to be children right away but just the commitment to a life project of setting each other up for thriving goes a long way.
It was a previous misconception of mine that following biblical instruction meant carnal obliteration instead of carnal direction. I have to admit that the way of God is actually meant to address aspects of the spiritual which a lot of times end up affecting the carnal as well. The laws of carnality are pretty consistent. Arousal always precedes consummation. Rather than regulate our carnality through consummation or lack thereof, there are instructions on setting our social and environmental systems such that when our carnality is engaged we are giving away a significant part of our overall life force. Thus the pleasure of sex was meant to be accompanied with responsibilty so that we would not be at the mercy of its frequency or lack thereof. Because as carnal creatures we are prone to habit. Thus when we are dating, what exactly are we practising?
- Sex that veers towards hedonistic aims than procreative. Even the religious daters fall into this habit and sooner rather than later fall out with their partners if marriage is not on the horizon.
- Having a partner while under your parents roof. This applies mostly to the younger daters. One of the worst habits towards developing responsibility is having sex while still living under your parents’ roof or being dependent on them in a major way. The sexual drive is meant to incline us toward responsibility and when we practice indulging in it without the mission of building a family it gets harder to separate from that tendency.
- Tolerating bad/subpotimal behavior – This one is the kicker. You practise allowing suboptimal or bad behavior. This usually done in the phase of subsequently dating people or dating one person in which we have surrendered to them exclusive intimacy while knowing they do not fulfill a major requirement in order for us to marry them. It is often referred to as “just having fun”. The biggest lie of all is “Friends with Benefits”. Nothing lowers the standards in a person than subscribing to a scenario of “no strings attached”. Not saying it does not happen but it is meant to be a regressive dynamic not a subterfuge. Too many adults have lost themselves in this dynamic.
There are other elements that we practise in dating that deter our drive to marry but the above three and geared toward self-reflection. They are often reflective of the level of self-respect we allow ourselves as we get sexually-active through dating. However, this is quite hard to overcome in an environment of peer pressure – not from your actual peers – but mostly the programming on television, social media and advertising. Most people are encouraged to take the less respecting view of themselves in order to obtain more engagement. Thus, we tolerate, accommodate and sometimes enable some of the least compatible relationships in our dating lives by retracting our standards. Some people refer to that as openness. Openness when it comes to self-respect is most often a Faustian bargain.
To be fair, tolerance is a virtue. However, tolerance must accompanied by devotion. In dating there is no true devotion because there is still an out. So much of what we tolerate while we date often only amounts to residue for the subsequent partner to either help us heal from or in turn tolerate. This creates a cycle which either requires us to seek forgiveness or healing without which future covenants are doomed to fail. Thus in tolerance, we ought to bear only that which is healing or seeking to be forgiven.
So how then do we know we are fit for covenant when many of us are walking around so broken. Truth be told, I am broken in my own ways too but the most important step is recognizing that regardless of what my current state of heart is, an optimal standard for courtship and marriage still exists and we are meant to do what we can to abide by it or suffer the consequences of eschewing it. For starters, forgive yourself.
by Julian Michael Yong
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