How many times have you gone to a restaurant and let the stranger
at the next table order for you?
Confession: I contacted a MatchMaker earlier this year…and even though I decided not to engage her services (to the tune of 12 matches for $11,000!), now she won’t leave me alone.
While considering this week’s content, after 3 more texts from said MatchMaker, it struck me how much dating is like a game of darts. In developing that idea, I started to compare the concept of “dating” to that of “courting”. Not everyone understands how very different these concepts are and why we all need to get clear on just what they mean.
Listening to a friends Facebook Live post provided further clarity when I heard him say, “when you don’t know what you want people will tell you what you want. If you let other people order for you, most times they’ll order some stuff you don’t want to eat, and they’ll end up eating because they ordered what they like”.
That got me thinking! Where I was planning to write about the difference between courtship and dating, it seems far more important to address the issue of intention and church-forced relationships.
We all know people who have been forced together by the church either by family ties because their parents/grandparents decided they should marry, or because somebody got pregnant and they needed to “correct their mistake”. Unfortunately, pregnancy isn’t the type of mistake that you can “correct”, and the last thing you should do is compound that mistake by making an even bigger one.
I would have never guessed that I would be old enough to know people (in my age group) who have been married 2 and 3 times. The institution of marriage isn’t the issue, because I also know people, in my age group, who have been married more than 15 years; people who have spent more than half their lives together. The problem isn’t the table where you sit, the problem is how your order is being placed. Courtship is not the same thing as dating without the sex. Dating is a buffet of appetizers to be sampled until you grow tired of the selection. Courtship is the slow roasted pig at a luau – it takes time to perfect, and without it, the luau wouldn’t be a luau.
Darts are a silly little game we play, usually in the same space as where alcohol is being served, poor choices are made, and other games are being played at the same time. Dating is the exact same way. We make poor decisions based on chemical, biological, and emotional impairments, leading us to play games that not everyone signed up for.
There is no required investment. Neither requires any real skill or dedication and there is no specified, anticipated outcome. It’s just a bunch of impaired people taking aim at what someone else decided should be the target, assuming that the bullseye is the same for everyone.
There’s no real competition, because there are no stakes. You’re just throwing at a wall to see what you can hit. It doesn’t even require any real level of focus. Think about how many times you’ve seen someone hit the bullseye when they weren’t even paying attention. This is the same way that people end up married to someone new every few years. It might look like they won, but the world is full of fake winners, lost in the game because they spent all their time focused on the wrong target.
Every holiday season our social media is flooded with photos and videos of marriage proposals between couples who will never make it down the aisle. For those who actually do, spring and summer brings hashtags like #SheGotChose #LuckiestManAlive, or #TogetherForever. They make this big elaborate show of the where, when and guest list just to flood your timeline with a completely different person five years later.
The problem is that they never agreed on the bullseye. People who are interested in dating believe the bullseye to be marriage, when those who believe in courtship know the true victory is in staying married. That victory requires skill.
Proverbs 12:27 states that “the lazy hunter does not roast his game, but the diligent feed on the riches of the hunt”. Plainly stated, you only place value upon that which you work hard to obtain. If all you want to do is date, understand that there’s nothing wrong with that. Not everyone desires to be married, but those who lack that desire should focus their attention on others who share their thinking.
With so much emphasis placed on courtship and marriage, Christians seldom admit that there is a value upon every season of life – being single, being engaged, being married, and even being divorced. The problem is that when you don’t know what you want, somebody in your life is going to tell you. It’s up to you to decide – how many times are you going to sit down to a meal that you have no desire to eat?
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