Where is your teen in relation to dating? Not yet interested? Wants to? Just beginning to date? Can think of nothing else but being with their boyfriend or girlfriend? Thinks dating is passé?
What do you think about your teens dating? Are you concerned, do you just take dating for granted, or do you want to have some input as to when and where and what? Or are you totally opposed to dating?
What does the Bible say about dating? If we know what the Bible says, and if we take seriously what it says, how would “Christian” dating look? How would it differ from the usual boy-girl relationships we see among the young people we know?
So many questions. Let’s consider the thoughts of some authors with an intimate knowledge of youth culture.
First, should teens — any teens — date?
Maybe in your culture young men and young women are discouraged from seeing each other on a one-to-one basis. Maybe it is even against the law. Even in cultures where dating has been common until recently some adults are concerned that dating is now too risky a business for teens, considering how super-sexualized society has become. There is too much pressure to have sex; it’s now a normal part of a dating relationship. Some teens themselves recognize the potential for heartbreak and decide against one-on-one relationships.
What is “dating”? Jeramy Clark says that the way dictionaries define the word, “it’s totally simple: a date is ‘a prearranged social engagement’ or ‘an appointment to meet socially’. . . It seems to me that the basic definition of dating is much less complicated than we’ve made it. . . If it’s prearranged and social, it’s a date. . . By operating according to this simpler and broader definition — and accepting the responsibility that goes with it — you’ll face less pressure and stress in dating.” However, you need to make your intentions clear. “If you just want to hang out as friends, make it a group activity, because most people think one-on-one time means something more.”
Dating in the teen years is different (or should be) than dating when one is ready to consider marriage. “There is a spectrum of dating experience,” says Tim Keller. “At one end of the spectrum is dating that means going out to various entertaining events, but it is mainly an excuse for getting together with a particular person to spend time with him or her. At the other extreme, dating entails going to some desired event — a prom, a movie, or a concert — and needing an escort, someone to go along with you. Especially when we are younger, the latter kind is more appropriate, and it will have almost nothing to do with assessing the other person for a future marriage.”
The problem today, as Laura Sessions Stepp says, is that “the curfews and other conventions that we both resisted and relied upon are gone. . . But we put nothing in their place, and without them, today’s young [people] are having to write their own rules, which is a much harder task than we ever faced.”
Should Christian teens date?
After painful breakups with girlfriends, Joshua Harris and John Holzmann decided not to date until they were ready to marry when they met the right girl. John Holzmann was “not interested in being anyone’s boyfriend,” but treated every girl alike, as his “sister in the Lord.”
Clark says, “I wondered if I could date to God’s glory. I found I could. When you date, as with everything else in life, you’re following a set of rules and standards — although you may not be conscious of them. Whether deliberately chosen or not, your dating rules will reflect either the world’s values, God’s values, or a dangerous combination of both.” He believed that dating trained him for marriage: “The principles of love I learned from God while dating are now a solid foundation for my marriage. I found out how to communicate, how to control my desires, how to be committed, and above all, how to concentrate on being right with God.”
But Jeramy Clark, Tim Keller, Josh Harris, and John Holzmann would all say that in order for this to happen a teen has to consider carefully what makes Christian dating different, distinctive.
The purpose of Christian dating
In Christian dating you can get to know the God-ordained differences between males and females, to accept these differences and to appreciate them. In the beginning, as God created the world, he saw that everything he had made was good. But there was something that was “not good”; it was not good that man was alone, and so God made someone “suitable for” — complementary to — Adam (Genesis 2:18-23).
But sometimes it’s difficult to work through the differences between males and females. “When you see the problems in each other, do you want to run away,” asks Tim Keller, “or do you find a desire to work on them together?” Working out problems in male-female relationships as teens prepares them for marriage down the road. In Christian dating, as later on in marriage, each seeks to bless his or her “sexual other”: to be kind and compassionate to each other (Ephesians 4:32), to encourage each other and build each other up (1 Thessalonians 5:11), to call out each other’s gifts and abilities and stimulate each other to love and good deeds (Hebrews 10:24), to serve each other (Galatians 5:13).
In Christian dating you recognize and treat the other as a person of value, and you expect to be treated as a person of value.
Every individual is of inestimable value in the eyes of God, because we are made in his image (Genesis 1:26-27). Christ died for us; we are bought with a price (1 Corinthians 6:20). Therefore you never “use” the other for your own satisfaction but honor the other above yourself (Romans 12:10).
In Christian dating you choose carefully who you date, where you go, what you do, how much time you spend together.
“When it comes to godly dating,” says Jeramy Clark, “a strict formula simply doesn’t exist. Of course there are certain non-negotiables that a Christian must follow, such as focusing first on God and maintaining purity. But having rules doesn’t prevent you from sinning. Only a heart inclined to God can. Jesus said, “No good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit. . . The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good” (Luke 6:43-45).
Because of his commitment to think of all girls as “sisters in Christ,” John Holzmann treated all girls as if they were his “sisters in the flesh. Over the years I found not only that this commitment was right, but that it could help me distinguish biblically appropriate behavior from behavior that was inappropriate. It could help me distinguish friendly, upbuilding behavior from behavior that tends to stifle and destroy relationships. It enabled me to get to know them better, too — better than almost any of their boyfriends ever knew them.”
In Proverbs 7 in the Bible we read of a young man “lacking sense,” taking the road to the home of an adulteress, in the evening. The woman meets him and kisses him, “persuades him with seductive speech,” and he follows her. This young man was seeking out the wrong person, going where he shouldn’t have gone, at night — when one is more easily tempted. At any time he could have turned back, refused to go on.
Joseph, the young man sold by his brothers into Egypt, chose instead to flee when propositioned by his master’s wife: “How can I do this great wickedness and sin against God? (Genesis 39:6-12).
In Christian dating you set boundaries on intimacy, both emotional and physical.
“The intense emotions associated with dating can cause us to lose focus on God and what he is calling us to do,” says Risk. “From adolescence to middle age, our emotions are most keen, our passions are most fervent, and our desires are most insistent. And simultaneously, our perspective is most limited, our spiritual armor is most untried, and our convictions are most easily overridden by our longings. . . Our emotions and hormones send strong messages to our brains, and it is difficult to set those messages aside and make an intellectual decision . . . But the essence of becoming more Christlike is that we sort the conflicting inputs from intellect and emotion and choose that which is in accord with the Spirit of God.”
Jeramy Clark says, “When you let someone into your heart and soul, you become intimate. You give part of yourself to that person.” And when an emotionally charged relationship ends (as it almost always does in the teen years) there is heartbreak. John Holzmann knew this from his own experience and those of his friends: “When his girlfriend broke up with him, one of the guys at my high school bawled his eyes out in the middle of the school hallway; you could hear him crying from twenty yards away. Another girl I know was virtually paralyzed with grief for five weeks after her ‘one-and-only’ broke up with her.”
Physical intimacy can be even more devastating after a breakup, because sexual intercourse bonds two people, whether they want this bonding or not. We know this from the Apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 6:16) and now, too, from brain science that tells us about the bonding effects of the chemicals that pour into our brains not just during sexual intercourse but also from intimate touching.
God designed sexual intercourse to be part of making a covenant in marriage and therefore, says Keller, “it should not surprise us that sex makes us feel deeply connected to the other person, even when used wrongly.” But any physical intimacy intended to arouse in another desires that cannot legitimately be fulfilled outside marriage is equally wrong in God’s sight. Remember Jesus’ words, “Everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). When two persons touch intimately, “by touch and imagination they have invaded the inmost precincts of each other’s personal and sexual being,” writes Holzmann, quoting another author on marriage, and adds, “Every act is on the same level if it is engaged in with the same purpose and for the same ends.”
What are the limits of physical intimacy in Christian dating? For Jeramy Clark, “To be as pure as you can be, avoid anything that awakens inappropriate desires in your mind.” Job, the Bible tells us, said “I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a girl” (Job 31:1).
No teen should try to “awaken emotional and physical desires that can’t be fulfilled for years to come,” writes Keller.
In Christian dating you exercise self-control
You can, if Christ lives in you, because self-control is a fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:23), and the Holy Spirit lives within the believer. So the Apostle Paul can say, “Flee from sexual immorality” (1 Corinthians 6:18). Our emotions aren’t under our control, but our actions are.
“This is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness” (1 Thessalonians 4:3-8).
In Christian dating you don’t expect your date to fulfill all your needs for love and intimacy
Our first love relationship, and the only one that ultimately satisfies, is our relationship with God. Your teen needs to keep God first in his or her life. “When you’re full of the unfailing love of God, you’ll need and expect less of the imperfect love that comes from human beings,” says Clark.
The problem with hook-ups
In the past decade or so dating has been replaced by hookups — “sexual behaviors that are detached from love or commitment — and sometimes even from liking.” (Stepp) But this new social norm is having devastating effects on young people, many of whom would like to escape but don’t see a way out. Most of the hundreds of emails Stepp received after the publication of Unhooked “described, sometimes in pages of detail, a personal legacy of confusion, pain and even resignation.” For many adults, hookups engaged in years ago continue to affect their behavior and thought patterns.
Relationships, especially of the boy-girl variety, take time and emotional energy, as Keller has seen: “Teens found members of the opposite sex to be annoying and difficult, and dating involved you in the hard work of give-and-take, communication, and learning to deal with someone who was different. In other words, they rightly perceived that dating involved you, in a preliminary way, in the difficult but rewarding work of building a marriage relationship. To avoid all this, a new form of meeting partners was developed, one that went straight to sex. A hook-up is a simple sexual encounter, without the condition of conducting a relationship.”
Hookups don’t satisfy; they cause pain and loneliness, and often even the sex no longer satisfies. Teens don’t learn to know and appreciate each other. They keep on running away from relationships and never learn to commit and follow through. They never know how rewarding relationships, and marriage, can be.
What can you do?
You can listen, and talk.
Laura Sessions Stepp was so concerned about what she learned in a decade of interviewing young women about the hookup scene that she did what a journalist is never supposed to do: she gave advice — in “A Letter to Mothers and Daughters” at the end of her book. “Internal struggles around intimacy are so much a part of their stage in life,” she wrote. This is a time, as one mother realized, to “learn how to negotiate boy-girl relationships and learn about themselves. What happens if they miss this learning time and then are thrown directly into the fire in college with no supervision, no rules, no knowledge, and with expectations that are beyond their experience?. . . We have a responsibility to reach out and help other women improve their lives. This means especially the next generation: our daughters all, moving through adolescence into young adulthood. . . Our daughters are hungry for conversation with older women about sex, love and the relationship between the two.” Stepp was writing about young women, but it was clear to her that the same applies to young men.
And such conversations are not the responsibility only of parents. Stepp is convinced that “today’s parents cannot, by themselves, help young people navigate the shoals of sexuality safely. The best adult support, it seems to me, is a combination of parent and outside other” — teachers, counselors, youth workers. You need to “encourage introspection and give them, where needed, the courage either to change what they do according to what they know deep down they want, or continue to do what is making them feel healthy and strong” — and what God has commanded.
You will find much, much more in the books from which the above quotes are taken:
Jeramy Clark, pastor and youth ministry leader, I Gave Dating a Chance: A Biblical Perspective to Balance the Extremes
John Holzmann, pastor and counselor to young adults, Dating with Integrity: Honoring Christ in Your Relationships with the Opposite Sex
Laura Sessions Stepp, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both
And, for young adults:
William P. Risk, long-time leader of singles Bible studies, Dating & Waiting: Looking for Love in All the Right Places
Timothy Keller, founder and pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God, especially chapter 7, “Singleness and Marriage.”
