Dating, Courtship, Engagement, and Marriage: An Alternative Approach

 Hey everyone! It's been a while since I've written one of these. I missed a week so I guess that means I have a lot I can talk about. These past few weeks we've really focused on dating, courtship, and engagement. 

This topic is a pretty interesting one for me, since I'm at about that age where these things are (hopefully) right around the corner. Most people my age (at least those around me) are concerned with this topic. Our discussions these past few weeks have proven to be very enlightening for me, since it helped me realize my previous assumptions about dating, courtship and engagement were wrong and that is a better way. I always think that things that encourage me to flip my way of thinking on its head are very interesting, especially when those around me typically have the same ideas as I do. 

In recent times, we have strayed from a more intentional approach to dating, courtship, engagement and marriage to a more casual, sliding approach, where the boundaries between these steps are blurred into insignificance. I think as someone who wants to date with the hope of creating a special and cherished relationship, the latter style of dating makes things difficult to know what I can do to make that happen. When we aren't intentional with our relationships, we kind of just leave ourselves open to whatever happens and it puts our relationships outside of our locus of control. It's almost like we just put ourselves out there and it either works and we slide right along through dating, courtship, engagement, and all the way to marriage, or it doesn't work out and we end up with broken hearts. Not just that, but over time those in relationships that do last until marriage have a harder time maintaining those relationships when things get hard in their marriage.

I don't think anyone wants to deal with the heartbreak or the increased divorce rate that comes with today's standard of dating and courtship, but when we don't know any better, it tends to become the default. The alternative approach to dating seems so much better. When we start by dating different people with the sole purpose of seeing what you do or don't like in other people and seeing if you could work together, we keep ourselves from obsessing over others until it either kind of works or the relationship falls apart. We can choose to be intentional about who (and why) we date, when we decide to move on to courtship and how we move on to engagement and marriage, and I think that's a great thing considering the alternative and what I've seen it do to others.

I've learned a lot of useful things from my Family Relations class this semester, but this is probably the first thing I've learned that has been directly related to my life currently and I think that made this knowledge more valuable. I mentioned earlier that most of the people around me have the same idea I used to have about dating. I talked with some of my friends about what I had learned and all of them were rather excited (and relieved) to hear of an alternative to the pressure and stress of today's standard of dating (if we can even really call it that). It's kind of sad how this knowledge isn't shared as common knowledge outside of lectures and classes of marriage and family studies majors or related fields, and it doesn't help that media tends to push for the alternative approach to dating. I think we could all benefit from more accurate representations of healthy dating, courtship, engagement, and marriage in media, as well as research that helps us see what is possible if we date differently.