8 Simple Rules for dating a Duggar Daughter

[Ms_Manners]

“Avoid as much as possible being alone with one another and speaking confidentially with one another or looking at one another”

For future spouses? Horrible advice, when lack of communication leads to so many divorces.

 

[Luvz2travel]

It will be interesting to see how this works out with sons dating – the girl having to approach Dad for permission to date his son, chaperones on dates, cc’ing parents on texts, etc.

I would say that young people who need this level of supervision are not ready to be engaged – they’re being treated as if they are in middle school.

I agree with you there. There is such a thing as too much control. A couple need a certain amount of privacy. Have a parent cc’d on texts and chaparoning every date is something you do with twelve to 14 years hold maybe but an adult …that’s beyond overkill. It’s kind of voyeristic to me.

 

[ToeInTheWater]

I agree with you there. There is such a thing as too much control. A couple need a certain amount of privacy. Have a parent cc’d on texts and chaparoning every date is something you do with twelve to 14 years hold maybe but an adult …that’s beyond overkill. It’s kind of voyeristic to me.

It also struck me that the control the Duggars exert over the “courting” process is more appropriate for a 12 or 14 year old than grown adults. Jessa and Ben’s interactions with each other, both during the filmed sequences and their commentary sequences, certainly seemed quite immature and shallow to me. To the point that, in the main “19 kids” topic in Popular Media, posters were questioning if Jessa loved Ben at all.

And that’s the problem, to me. A 22 year old woman acting like a 14 year old barely pubescent girl, and a 19 year old boy/man expected not only to marry, but to take on a traditional patriarchal husbandly role in which he has authority over the wife, strikes me as, well, not exactly a recipe for a happy (or even valid, per Catholic standards) marriage.

It’s also interesting how it’s the man who’s supposed to ask the father’s permission to court the woman, but AFAIK, the woman is NOT expected ask anyone’s permission to court the man. Neither Jessa or Jill were expected to ask their would-be husbands’ parents for permission to start courting or to get married. While the Duggars don’t seem to have sexual double standards when it comes to actual physical contact, their model of courting really does seem to imply that women cannot be trusted to choose their own suitors.

Also note that most courtship cultures hold up as an ideal, that a person have only ONE romantic relationship, ever, that anything else merely trains the person to see relationships as temporary and increases the risk of divorce and/or adultery; courtship cultures tend to see the break-up of a courtship, to be almost as scandalous as the break-up of an actual marriage.

So, in a culture in which there is a strong expectation to marry the first person one courts, a father picking a suitor for a woman, is really not that far removed from the father actually choosing a husband, even though technically, the woman still has a say in whether to say “yes” to the actual marriage proposal.