Dating on an Empty Stomach

I stumbled out of class, swaying and staggering my way to the bookstore to purchase some sort of food. After struggling to complete my transaction, I returned to class and ate my snack. Why did I embarrass myself in front of my professor and my classmates? Why was I flailing around, like a drunk driver trying his or her best to walk in a straight line while reciting the alphabet backwards, when all they were asked to do was take a breathalyzer test? Earlier that week, I had decided to ask a girl out on a date. And earlier that week I had decided that this meant that I needed to go on a fast.

I have a rather specific and rare medical condition that makes fasting a difficult endeavor for me and which, highly contributed to my mid-class bumbling. Since I was about eleven, I have suffered from Havetoeat3mealsaday disorder. Initially it was a tough transition for me and for my family, but over the years, we have been able to acclimate well. This relatively incurable condition brought my one day fast to a sudden halt, as I was beginning to feel delirious and had started shaking. Perhaps this inability to finish the fast, strips the following self-critique of some of its insight or veracity. However, I most definitely engaged in the over-spiritualization of dating.

While I am by no means absolved of responsibility, I was simply following the course I had been set on. This was the first time I had asked a girl on a date. The whole process was totally foreign to me. Remember, prior to this, I had been waiting to be married before I would start dating. Not only did I not know how to go about asking/what to say, I had no idea what the spiritual implications of this date would be. While I had, no intention of committing any notable sins, like: (extra-marital?)sex, drugs, murder, coveting, cheating on my taxes, or gluttony (obviously not gluttony, hence the no eating thing), I was quite uncertain of how my asking this girl on a date, would affect my spiritual trajectory. Was I following God's will? If I was following God's will, was I following God's plan? What if we started a relationship that eventually ended, would I be pushing God's plan for my life back by a few years? Fueled by over spiritualized rhetoric, embedded in a subculture which was inundating me with marriage talk, I was “destined” to make asking a girl out, a highly spiritualized endeavor.

Both spirituality in general and more specifically spiritual disciplines do have a place in daily life and in dating life.  However, I often see the “spiritual life” displayed in two extremes.  Either, spiritual disciplines (with the exception of prayer, study, and worship) are neglected, or every minute of the day is spent attempting to sense the spirit (strictly for sensing’s sake) and every sentence is prefaced with, “If it’s God’s will.”  While I do not think either of these lifestyles are constructive or healthy, I also think these both can easily lead to an over spiritualized approach to dating.  For me, spiritual disciplines, such as fasting, were relegated to the quiet corner of life where important decisions were made or significant events were about to take place.  I do think that fasting, solitude, celebration, meditation, confession ext. should be more prominently featured in our lives.  However, that does not mean that people (men or women) should fast or significant time of solitude every time they ask someone on a date.  For me, fasting added a great degree of severity to the date (primarily in my perception of it though).  

Unfortunately, I was not rudely awakened to the fact that fasting before asking a girl out and asking all of my questions related to God's sovereignty was an abnormal, ridiculous, and frankly, harmful way go about things. Instead, I was ushered into a subculture, where this seemed decently normal. To make matters worse, my preparation ritual actually seemed “casual” compared to the weeks of prayers, journaling, and relational defining that made up the “girl’s” response.  Although I had fasted before popping the “date” question, even I was not prepared to accept the “mandatory” three relational mapping conversations prior to going on the date, as normal.  I do not wish that experience on anyone, but unfortunately my experience is no isolated incident.  If I had a dollar for every time I heard the story of Gideon setting out the fleece for God to speak to him with, as a justification for extended preparation before asking a girl on a date, I would only have about three dollars.  But still, that is way too many dollars!   Adding unnecessary pressure to dating almost seems like it is a required class in most Christian colleges and I would suspect that many Christian “young professionals” who went to these schools failed to escape with their dating philosophies unscathed.  

One of the greatest contributors to the hyper-spiritualized Christian dating scene is the internalized goals Christians have for dating or even just one date.  For “non-Christians,” it would seem that the goal of a date is fairly simple: get laid.  However, dating goals aren't as simple for Christians.  The goal of a date, for a Christian, definitely isn't to get laid.  But does that require the goal to then be to find someone to marry?  While this has never been an explicitly articulated goal of mine, it had most definitely made itself at home deep in my subconscious.  Even if I did not want to maintain this dating goal, I was ill-equipped to escape the decades of marriage pressure within the (American) Church, the years of courtship talk, and the constant pressure to in a reactionary manner pit myself in binary opposition to the “world’s” dating goals.  What would a healthier goal for dating (mostly casual dating/first dates) be?  

While I do think that maintaining a goal of finding a husband or wife puts a considerable amount of unnecessary pressure and severity on a first date, I do think that marriage should have a place in our conscious thoughts or goals for dating.  However, I think the natural stages of development of a relationship require a bit more attention than is often given to them.  If I may be so bold (not really that bold), I would say that discussion or thoughts of marriage have no place on a first date.  Perhaps, a more appropriate goal would be something like: going on a date to possibly find someone that you could possibly, maybe, one day, potentially think about thinking about whether or you could marry them.  Or maybe that is as crazy and convoluted as it sounds, and we should all go on fasts before we go on dates.  

When You Assume, You Make an Ass Out of You and Me and My Wife

As my dad sat at the foot of my bed, praying with me before I went to sleep, he whispered, “God would please watch over the young lady you have chosen for Corban, help her to come to know you. Grow her into the woman of God, you would have her be.”  For some reason, this prayer always tended to leave my eight year old mind feeling a bit more at ease and secure, even more so than my dad’s nightly prayers for safety and protection.  I don’t quite remember when these prayers started, perhaps they have been imprinting themselves and their ideological underpinnings on my mind since before I was cognisant of their existence.  

            While I am quite grateful for a dad who cares for me, my future happiness and my future well being and while I remember these prayers as some of the sweetest of my childhood and may at some point, even pray them for children of my own (if that is in God’s plan for my life), I do wonder what sort of ideological course these prayers have helped set me on.  These prayers definitely helped smuggle certain assumptions into my subconscious.  These assumptions were only recently uncovered a few years ago.  Probably the most significant of these, is that marriage is in my future.  I know that many parents strongly desire, maybe even long, for their children to be able to share in the happiness they have found in the institution of marriage and the many blessings that come with it.  As Christians, when we want something, we pray for it.  And when we want something for someone else, we pray for that too.  Sometimes in this process of wanting and praying, the lines between God’s will and our desires are blurred, in our minds and in our speech.  Sometimes this is because our desires begin to reflect God’s communicated will, other times, it is because we voice our desires as God’s will.  Now I don’t pretend to know how much, if any of this was/is at play in my father’s prayers for me and “my future wife,” but I would not be surprised if this has happened within the prayers of some parent somewhere for their child and their child’s future spouse.  Regardless, the point is, I might never get married.  There is a chance that it’s not God’s will for my life.  
            Even, I get a little depressed writing those words.  The truth is, I am a “hopeless romantic” and the love and mutual understanding of, arguably ,the most intimate of human relationships (marriage) is definitely one of the desires of my heart.  However, I do not want this desire to limit the infinite possibilities of God’s plan for my life.  This assumption of impending marriage was not only perpetuated by the prayers of my father, I was exposed to its indoctrinating grasp (that might be too harsh of a term) many times throughout my seventeen conscious years in the western Church.  I have heard it spoken at youth groups, preached from the pulpit (or beat up music stand, depending on the church), and snuck into conversations by mentors or old ladies at church who fashion themselves as non-Jewish Yentas (more on these Church-matchmakers in the near future).  I probably faced it the most,during my four years of “inter-denominational,” evangelical college education.  At least once a year, we had a speaker come to chapel and talk about marriage.  The closest anyone ever came to talking about the value of singleness was when a female speaker said, “My thirty-five plus years of singleness was such a blessed time of preparation for marriage.”  She then encouraged all the students to, likewise, use their “time” of singleness to prepare themselves for their eventual marriage.  I don’t mean to turn a deaf ear to the value within the words of this particular speaker or anyone who has perpetuated the assumption of marriage, but I do want to expose this assumption.  
            I don’t know how large a role my dad’s “wife prayers” played in the formation of the romantic relational ideology of my youth.  However, I do know that I definitely believed in the romanticized idea of “The One*,” for a loooong time.  (*The One, referring to there being only one person destined to be my life partner, not referring to the Jet Li movie where he kills all of his alternative universe alter-egos with the help of Jason Statham).  While I do not want to generalize that this belief pervades American Christian culture, it was undeniably ever-present in the cultural media I was exposed to as a child (and as an adult).  From Disney movies, to fairy tales, to the Princess Bride, I was enculturated to believe that there was only one perfect match for me, waiting to be found.  My greater theological journey as of late, has led me to place more emphasis on free will within the mysterious interplay of determinism and free will in our universe.  Thus, I find it more difficult to articulate my understanding of God’s foreknowledge, sovereignty, and (sometimes) providential hand and their respective interplay with my free will and active agency in my romantic journey.  
            What is God’s active role in my dating life?  I certainly am no longer waiting around for God to part the skies, come “down” (yes, as if heaven is physically above earth) and tell me when to ask a girl out.  Nor, have I ever used the “God is telling me not to date you,” cop-out line.  However, I do think God plays an active role in our world and thus, in my dating life.  Does that look like God, ordaining a beautiful woman to run into me at a 7/11?  Does that mean that the Holy Spirit will push me to ask a woman out at a bar (or some other non-alcoholic watering hole)? Does that mean God might push a woman to take an active role in the pursuit of a relationship with me, equal to my own active role?  Does that mean my natural attraction to someone (not to their “Character” or their “Spirit”) might be part of God’s hand in my dating life? I don’t know.  

Don't Date Til You're Married!

When I was in seventh grade, my mom had a pretty clear rule about dating, "Don't."  When my brother and I asked about it again a year later, her answer changed, "You can date, once you're married."  Now do not be confused, my mom was not advocating any sort of extra-marital dating. My parents have a great relationship and my family is as conservative as they come (not super conservative, but decently).  When I was sixteen, there was a girl who was pretty openly attracted to me.  We got as close to dating as any kid, embedded in a fairly conservative, evangelical, anti-dating culture, could get.  We would talk on the phone at night.  Sometimes we would talk about music (that wasn't played on the local Christian music station).  I'll be honest, it was a scandalous tryst.   As this "Nothing-Close-To-A-Semblance-Of-A-Relationship" was developing, my mom decided that it was time my parents stepped in and educated me about dating.

My dad sat me down at our kitchen table, telling me that mom said it was time for him to talk to me about dating.  He had two of his year books with him, one from high school and one from college.  He proceeded to pour through his year books showing me every girl he dating during these stages in his life.  This lasted about five minutes, until my mom stepped in, shut his year books, handed me a copy of I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris, and pulled my dad away from the table to start chastising him for his unsanctioned teaching methods.  This sort of sums up my education on dating, as influenced by the previously mentioned sub-culture I was raised in.  Our community had a few dads whose pro-dating (even some pro-casual dating) voices were periodically silenced, while the pro-courtship voices bellowed over the hum of the confused conservative adolescents timidly navigating their romantic identities through uninformed, sexually-suppressed, pseudo-conversations about their perceived roads to marriage.

Today I am 22 years old, living in Southern California.  I spent the last four years at one of North America's top Christian Liberal Arts schools.  While my college community would not have been characterized as hyper-conservative, Joshua-Harris-loving, future-home-school-student-breeding-ground, it had its fair share of ideological peculiarities when it came to dating.  Like most evangelical institutions, we had speakers stand in front of us and tell us that singleness is a great time to prepare for marriage, and otherwise diminish any sort of role singles play in the Church.  Due to the nature of the small student population, everyone knew who everyone was dating.  In fact, everyone knew who everyone went on one date with...just that one time.  Everyone knew whoever everyone talked about dating...even just once.  Everyone even knew who everyone thought about having a crush on...even if it was just once!  Although it was quite the pressurized environment, people did date.  As senior year approached it became clear that there seemed to be a systemically mandated choice for couples, between two options: get married or break up.  While many couples chose the path of marriage, quite a took the alternative route.  Six of the guys I lived with, senior year ended their romantic relationships, three within the same week.  Yes, I was one of the six...and one of the three.  Thus, I managed to make it out of college unattached.

I am at a crossroads.  My life is transitioning out of college and the college community and into the world of the young professional.  And my dating life is just finishing up the third grade.  This new found life station, raises some interesting questions for me.  Where do I meet girls? Has my dating education adequately prepared me for dating in this stage in life?  What are the intricacies of dating in a Christian subculture as opposed to a "secular" culture?  Why am I still single? Will I always be single?  Will I ever not want to be single?  How do I live as a fully functioning, single, contributing member of a healthy faith community?  Is there a way to glorify God while dating, yet not be trapped by the confines of uninformed, culturally insensitive, patriarchal, social script following, conservative-Utopian dating ideologies/models?  Will singles ever be accepted as necessary members of the Body of Christ?

By no means do I commit to answering any of these questions.  However, I will commit to asking them.  No this lack of commitment does not prove any sort of irrational fear of commitment on my part!

Love (in the communal/phileo sense of the word),
Corban Redding