Dating Scene and soulmate

[TheSeraphim]

I need some advice on dating and being Catholic.*

I have been raised Catholic all my life and my parents said to always pray and your soulmate and she will come to you. I took life step by step but yet I didn’t have a girlfriend for years. Out of impatience I decided to start dating girls who liked me. It backfired.*

My heart has been broken three times already. I took the concept of “I love you” a little too far. I thought I was going to marry these girls. They basically dumped me for another guy. Because I was too nice. I poured out my feelings. My three girls were Catholics but were very secular. They wore Catholic like a jersey. In my mind I thought they were cheating on me. How come it took them only a month to get over me and I’m crying for years? They went out with their guy friends who they were mentioning to me whom I thought was just their friends.*

So now I’m put on the flipside. I’ve entered the dating scene and now dating Catholic women who are innocent like I am. Except there is a time where I date multiple women and my conscience tells me I’m cheating. My secular friends says I’m not. A girl thinks she really loves me and I’m
the one but then I start liking another girl.

I would crush her soul if I told her that. Am I bound to stay and be patient with her? I don’t want to be like the girls who dumped me. But now it’s different. I now feel and understand what they feel. If I can’t stand this girl now how else am
I going to stand her for the rest of my life?

You see if I dump her then go out with one of my ‘friends’ that I mentioned that there is nothing more than friendship. She would panic and be crushed.*

I do not want to hurt anyone as I’ve been hurt. So I am stuck in the middle.*

As a righteous Catholic man. What rules of dating should I apply? Should I limit myself to date one girl at a time? Should I complete close contact with girls during a relationship?

I tell you this because recently my girlfriend broke up with me. She thought I was cheating on her since I hung out with this girl a lot. She even ranted to her friends that I was going for this girl. It wasn’t even my intention.*

Now it turns out that I am going with this girl. We were just friends before. But I poured my soul to her about my ex gf. I cried. And she listened and comforted me.*

I feel guilty now. It’s as if I have to restrict myself from dating my potential soul mate because of a jealous ex girlfriend. And I fear continuing through because of what her friends might think of me. See! He’s the culprit.*

Thoughts and feedback?

 

[E_7]

I’m sorry for all you’re going through, and for the girls.

I highly recommend two books for you, both from the same author, Joshua Harris:

• I Kissed Dating Goodbye
• Boy Meets Girl: Say Hello to Courtship

check them out, you can read the first pages in Amazon.

I say don’t date if you’re not seriously seeking a nice catholic lady to get married.
If you don’t see yourself with this girl as your wife and the future mother of your kids, stop dating her and wasting her’s and your time.

 

[chevalier]

This is only my opinion but my opinion is that non-exclusive dating sucks. At least so far as an actual romantic relationship with more than one person, or rather, having multiple romantic relationships at the same time but with different people is concerned.

As long as you’re having coffee and conversations, even perhaps flirting a little (after all, you’re discerning), it’s fine. But when it’s sitting in the tree kissing, Jane on Monday, Joan on Tuesday, Ann on Wednesday, Jane on Thursday again, that’s wrong.

Just my opinion.

However, it must be noted that you’re not responsible if someone misinterprets friendly behaviour or, without your fault, interprets your openness to discernment as already a declaration of something big.

 

[E_7]

This is only my opinion but my opinion is that non-exclusive dating sucks. At least so far as an actual romantic relationship with more than one person, or rather, having multiple romantic relationships at the same time but with different people is concerned.

As long as you’re having coffee and conversations, even perhaps flirting a little (after all, you’re discerning), it’s fine. But when it’s sitting in the tree kissing, Jane on Monday, Joan on Tuesday, Ann on Wednesday, Jane on Thursday again, that’s wrong.
**
Just my opinion.**

I completely agree with this.

 

[nfreak141]

So now I’m put on the flipside. I’ve entered the dating scene and now dating Catholic women who are innocent like I am. Except there is a time where I date multiple women and my conscience tells me I’m cheating. My secular friends says I’m not. A girl thinks she really loves me and I’m
the one but then I start liking another girl.

It sounds to me that the devil is taking advantage of your pain and longing for a soul mate. It’s quite possibly one of the easiest things he could use.

I would crush her soul if I told her that. Am I bound to stay and be patient with her? I don’t want to be like the girls who dumped me. But now it’s different. I now feel and understand what they feel. If I can’t stand this girl now how else am
I going to stand her for the rest of my life?

If I may ask, what exactly are you looking for in a relationship? Correct me if I’m wrong, but if I’m understanding you correctly, you like the secular, more liberal girls but can’t stand the Catholic, more conservative girls.

You see if I dump her then go out with one of my ‘friends’ that I mentioned that there is nothing more than friendship. She would panic and be crushed.*

I do not want to hurt anyone as I’ve been hurt. So I am stuck in the middle.*

If I may ask, what exactly are you looking for in a relationship? Correct me if I’m wrong, but if I’m understanding you correctly, you like the secular, more liberal girls but can’t stand the Catholic, more conservative girls.

As a righteous Catholic man. What rules of dating should I apply? Should I limit myself to date one girl at a time? Should I complete close contact with girls during a relationship?

I tell you this because recently my girlfriend broke up with me. She thought I was cheating on her since I hung out with this girl a lot. She even ranted to her friends that I was going for this girl. It wasn’t even my intention.*

Now it turns out that I am going with this girl. We were just friends before. But I poured my soul to her about my ex gf. I cried. And she listened and comforted me.*

I feel guilty now. It’s as if I have to restrict myself from dating my potential soul mate because of a jealous ex girlfriend. And I fear continuing through because of what her friends might think of me. See! He’s the culprit.*

Thoughts and feedback?

Your relationship troubles seem chaotic. There are too many factors, too many seams for you to pay attention to at this moment. Allowing this situation to continue could these seams to tangle into a very uneccessary situation.

As of right now, I suggest you do nothing but asking God for guidance about this conundrum. Who better to ask for love advice then Love Itself?

 

[djmauck]

I’m sorry for all you’re going through, and for the girls.

I highly recommend two books for you, both from the same author, Joshua Harris:

• I Kissed Dating Goodbye
• Boy Meets Girl: Say Hello to Courtship

check them out, you can read the first pages in Amazon.

I say don’t date if you’re not seriously seeking a nice catholic lady to get married.
If you don’t see yourself with this girl as your wife and the future mother of your kids, stop dating her and wasting her’s and your time.

I highly recommend those two books as well. In a nutshell, Harris says that “dating,” by today’s standards is backwards. Instead of creating a shallow intimacy based on shallow attraction and then getting to know somebody, we should instead first seek deep, Christ-centered friendship with people of the opposite sex, then only AFTER we have gotten to know them well begin courtship. You don’t date a girl to see if you want to marry her. Instead, you wait to see if you want to marry a girl and THEN start dating her. The books are geared towards evangelicals but the same principles apply. They’re very quick and easy to read.

Also, I want to disabuse you of the notion that the Catholic Church in any way teaches that there is a “soul mate” for somebody. This goes back to Plato’s theory that humans used to be man and woman and that we were cut in half, and now spend our time looking for our literal other half. What the Bible and the Church teach about marriage is that God MAKES us one. There is no one “perfect” person out there. God, through the sacrament of marriage, accomplishes the union. “What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate” (Matthew 19:6). That’s not to say that you can’t have standards and that there aren’t people you’ll get along with better than others. But I think the idea of a perfect soul mate hurts people in the end because nobody is perfect! In any relationship there will be problems. What counts is the dedication and patience to work through them. When people think there is a perfect match for them, once they pass the infatuation stage and the hard work of a marriage starts, they start to find faults with the other person and think “I thought he/she was my soul mate! I guess we’re not perfect. My soul mate must still be out there.” And then there’s dissatisfaction and maybe even divorce.