Dear Young Man,
Let me start by apologizing that it has taken me so long to respond to the voice mail message you left this Monday. It took a good deal of courage for you to make that call and lay out your intentions like that and you have earned my respect for doing so. The reason for my delayed reply is that I felt such openness on your part deserved an equally candid and complete response. I’m sure that in some respects this will feel like overkill, however, in my experience people too often leave things unsaid either out of laziness or fear and inevitably it leads to conflict and misunderstanding. It is with that in mind that I write this letter.
On Dating
I think the best place to start is from the very beginning. When it comes to the relationship between a man and a woman, the beginning is Genesis.
So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place. The LORD God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man. The man said,
“This is now bone of my bones,
And flesh of my flesh;
She shall be called Woman,
Because she was taken out of Man.”
For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh. –Genesis 2:21-24 (NASB)Now, you may be saying, “Whoa, hold on! I only wanted permission to date your daughter, not marry her!” And that is exactly my point.
What is dating? To most, dating is just two people of the opposite sex getting together to have fun and learn more about each other. This seems innocent enough. Unfortunately, the whole concept of dating along with the terms “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” are rife with implied pseudo-commitments. This becomes more obvious when you examine the language surrounding dating. Words like “going steady,” “cheating” or “breaking up”. The ideas expressed by these words are the same as those in Genesis 2, i.e., the notion of an exclusive relationship between a man and a woman. Only in the case of dating it is not marriage as intended, but rather something closer to “marriage light”.
There is no biblical context for this type of relationship. In fact, the whole notion of a pseudo-commitment, an easily dissolved bond with another human being, flies in the face of God’s design for human relationships. Faithfulness, love, loyalty, long-suffering, these are words that defined Godly relationships.
“But I say to you, make no oath at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is the footstool of His feet, or by Jerusalem, for it is THE CITY OF THE GREAT KING. Nor shall you make an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. But let your statement be, ‘Yes, yes’ or ‘No, no’; anything beyond these is of evil.” – Matthew 5:34-36 (NASB)In reality, there are usually only two conclusions to a dating relationship. Either it ends badly, with hurt feelings and the loss of a friendship, or marriage. For those people who are too young to entertain the latter of these options the result is, more often than not, the former. For these reasons, we have encouraged all of our children to avoid the exclusive relationships with members of the opposite sex that are part-and-parcel to the concept of dating. Instead, we encourage them to make friendships, pursue group activities and not to give in to the popular pressures to “play house” at an age when marriage is not even an option.
On Touching
Touching another human being is packed with meaning and emotion. We even speak of people “violating” our personal space when they merely get too close to us. The feelings and emotions communicated by touching are extremely potent, but they can also be easily misinterpreted. The message one person intended to communicate through a touch may be worlds apart from the message that is recieved.
When we allow another person to touch us, we are often expressing a social bond with that person. Outside of marriage, this implied and usually unarticulated commitment clouds and confuses the relationship between a man and woman, often causing it persist longer than it might otherwise have. By engaging in hand-holding, kissing or other forms of touching we achieve a fleeting thrill at the cost of long-term relationship complications.
This is especially true for men because we are much more easily excited sexually. The endorphins released by our brains because of sexual titillation elicit cravings for more. Instead of just being a friend to a girl or woman, we become a junkie looking to score a fix and our “girlfriend” gets to be our drug dealer. This is an unnecessary difficulty in the already complicated arena of relationships.
Because of these things, we have encouraged our children to avoid all forms touching the opposite sex until marriage.
On the Future
Someday you may meet a girl about whom you will think, “I’m going to marry her!” That will be an exciting moment. I know, because I’ve been there. Unfortunately, I used the strength of my confidence to justify doing all the things I’ve talked about in this letter. I told myself, “It’s okay, because I am definitely going to marry this girl. Marriage is just a ceremony anyway.” Unfortunately you can’t predict the future. In my case, the girl decided she wasn’t going to marry me. The break-up was heart-wrenching and lonely. I had spent the two years of our relationship almost exclusively with this girl, sacrificing other relationships including my most important one: Jesus.
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.” Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.” But as it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil. Therefore, to one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin. – James 4:13-17 (NASB)You can’t predict the future. Using future intentions to justify the present actions is both arrogant and foolish. I have exhorted my children not to fall into this trap.
In Summary
The bottom line is pretty simple. My wife and I discourage our children from getting involved in exclusive relationships. Dating, as it is commonly practiced, doesn’t fit into this philosophy. Neither does any kind of touching. This is our wish for our kids until they are old enough to pursue a relationship to its God ordained conclusion. I believe that the “marriage light” concept that is inherent in dating cheapens a person’s approach to relational commitments and has weakened our society’s concept of marriage.
Some Pharisees came to Jesus, testing Him and asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all?” And He answered and said, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning MADE THEM MALE AND FEMALE, and said, ‘FOR THIS REASON A MAN SHALL LEAVE HIS FATHER AND MOTHER AND BE JOINED TO HIS WIFE, AND THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.” They said to Him, “Why then did Moses command to GIVE HER A CERTIFICATE OF DIVORCE AND SEND her AWAY?” He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way. And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.” – Matthew 19:3-9 (NASB)I realize that this may not be the answer you wanted to hear, and you may not even agree with everything I’ve written. As you can see, this has not always been my thinking on the subject. My views have been forged over many years of coming to grips with my own youthful mistakes. Mistakes I wish my own children to avoid. Someday they will be old enough to decide whether marriage is for them. In the mean-time we promote their involvement in group activities and in maintaining multiple healthy friendships with members of both sexes. In short, my answer is, “No, you may not date my daughter, but you can be her friend and brother.”
Yours in Christ,
Randall Doser
