- What are the guidelines around
Don’t look for guidelines. Apply moral principles. You’re more than mature enough to!
Calling each other pet names up until marriage?
Not a moral issue at all. It’s perfectly okay to be a Sourthern lady and consider everybody to be a honey, darling or sweetie.
Going out to dinner alone together or is spending time together during the day better?
Unless we’re back in the middle ages in a more collectivist society, imposing rules on you like you can’t eat alone together or it must be daylight hours, not after dark, etc., well, that sort of thing would be incompatible with your status as adult citizens in a free country. You aren’t children, you aren’t domestic service, you aren’t serfs, there’s no reason to subject the two of you to that kind of degrading, humiliating discipline.
how often to see, call, and text each other etc?
Not a moral issue. Don’t obsess over it. Allow yourself to
love instead of trying to find rules to follow. Don’t confuse societal rules with moral and religious principles. Victorian mores of the bourgeoisie along with its concepts of propriety is not Catholic morality.
being alone in the car together (driving)
Again, you’re adults.
is kissing/hugging ok or best to avoid completely?
It’s okay for affection, it’s not okay for sexual stimulation or release.
Nothing is okay for sexual stimulation or release before marriage.
But what is not sexual is not sexual.
- How exactly is courtship usually initiated between two individuals (without family or parents in my case) or is it automatically assumed?
However you want. For example you can go down on one knee and propose, or he can. Whatever floats your boat.
There is no need for ‘courtship’ as a word or concept, and I don’t even think the word appears in the Catechism. We aren’t fundamentalist Protestants.
Nor are we SCA.
How long should courtship and engagement period last for two consenting adults in the thirty age range?
Preferably not till after menopause if you’re 30.
Marrying over the weekend would probably be a bit too hasty, though.
Men are like used cars when you aren’t even allowed a test ride — you need to do your research, make sure the seller is trustworthy, check the criminal record, put him through some gruelling test routine to make him prove his worth (killing large animals bare-handed is a bit controversial these days, though, so use something more ecological).
Basically, how should courtship look like for two adults around the thirty age mark?
No more stressful and no more regulated and unspontaneous than it has to be.
