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Xantippe
Guest
Nah. “Hot date” definitely suggests that there will be more than passionate hand-holding going on, but “date” by itself is pretty tame.
- Status
U
UbiCaritas
Guest
There’s also the question of what, exactly, is meant by the word “courtship.”
For example, a lot of Scott Ross’ ideas make sense, but he doesn’t seem to have a firm grasp on what practical impact they have. (I’d disagree vehemently with his idea that his adult, self-supporting daughter should need his permission to date anyone, but that’s a rant for another time.) He sensibly suggests making a list of real deal-breakers, but keeping it short–a very good idea–but then never gets around to saying what, in his mind, is acceptable courtship behavior.
In a lot of circles, the word “courtship” has the connotation of the couple never spending any time alone without a parent or sibling present prior to the marriage. This is a bad idea for all sorts of obvious reasons, but in any case, Ross doesn’t seem to subscribe to it.
It also doesn’t help that in many of those circles, once you’ve been “courted” by two or three men, you’re expected to have found Mr. Right. If you didn’t, the social implications are that there’s something wrong, and probably sinful, with you. Never mind that you didn’t really have a chance to get to know Mr. Right because your courtships consisted of hanging out with the whole family at all times, and neither of you were especially comfortable discussing future dreams and ideas in front of your ten-year-old brother; having that many close relationships with men (even though it can pretty much be demonstrated that nothing happened beyond a handshake, given the number of witnesses involved) makes you “damaged goods.”
This all kind of ties into the whole Chastity Rose speech. For anyone else not unfortunate enough to be familiar with it, here’s how it goes. It’s pretty much SOP in conservative church youth groups.
The speaker hands one of the kids a rose, tells the kid to look at it, play with it if he or she wants, then pass it on to the next kid, and so on. At the end of being handled by 40+ teens, the rose is understandably rumpled. He then holds up another, perfect rose in comparison with the original one, and asks the boys which they’d prefer. They, of course, say they like the nicer-looking one. He then turns to the girls, and tells them that if they “let” the boys do anything, they’ll be the equivalent of the damaged rose that no one wants, but if they don’t, then they’ll be like the nice, clean, whole one. Never mind the implication that the boys aren’t equally at fault, or that they wouldn’t be damaged by today’s culture of serial monogamy, either. Sigh.
Not the sort of message I want my kids to be given, thankyouverymuch.
Now, the idea of dating with a purpose makes sense, and if that’s what’s meant by courtship, I’d agree. “I’d like to meet Mr./Ms. Right, so I’m going to go to the diocesan young adult events and keep an eye out. Worst case scenario, I have fun and make some new friends; best case scenario, that sounds like a good way to meet someone serious about their faith.” You meet someone, chat for a bit, are interested, and propose catching that interesting new movie and having dinner next week. This should neither mean “he’s going to propose by Christmas!” nor “he just wants to sleep with me.” It means you’re interested in getting to know one another better, period.
The problem that can be encountered with the courtship model is that asking someone on a date translates to “he’ll propose by Christmas” because dating means things are serious…when really, it should mean no such thing. Leaving aside anything else, it places a terrible strain on the couple to be expected to know after a dinner or two if this is the person they want to spend their life with.
DH and I met online. While we never talked exclusivity per se, we considered each other boyfriend/girlfriend a few months later, and were engaged nine months in. I’d been talking to a couple of other guys online, but after a few weeks of dating DH I gently let them know that things had gotten a bit more serious with someone, and I needed to be able to focus on that relationship for a while. (I was in grad school and working three jobs at the time, so even dating one person was kind of pushing the limit on what I could manage.) We were both looking to get married. We did hang out at restaurants, friends’ places, and so on, but we also spent time at one another’s apartments, with some common-sense rules in place. (Read: no physical contact unless we’re in public, or at least where anyone might walk past.) It’s not kind or fair to the waitress to sit at a restaurant for six hours on a weekend evening, and you really aren’t going to get to know each other if you’re only spending a couple of hours together every other weekend. (We were long-distance.) We did make sure to have specific things to do at the apartments, usually a movie or show to watch, but as I said–opposite ends of the couch, or different chairs. Things don’t “just happen”; we were adults, we had self-control, and we never had more than a beer or so over dinner, so alcohol wasn’t involved.
I am a rather firm believer that if two people can’t manage to go out to dinner without having sex right then and there in the restaurant, they aren’t mature enough to be getting married anyway.
For example, a lot of Scott Ross’ ideas make sense, but he doesn’t seem to have a firm grasp on what practical impact they have. (I’d disagree vehemently with his idea that his adult, self-supporting daughter should need his permission to date anyone, but that’s a rant for another time.) He sensibly suggests making a list of real deal-breakers, but keeping it short–a very good idea–but then never gets around to saying what, in his mind, is acceptable courtship behavior.
In a lot of circles, the word “courtship” has the connotation of the couple never spending any time alone without a parent or sibling present prior to the marriage. This is a bad idea for all sorts of obvious reasons, but in any case, Ross doesn’t seem to subscribe to it.
It also doesn’t help that in many of those circles, once you’ve been “courted” by two or three men, you’re expected to have found Mr. Right. If you didn’t, the social implications are that there’s something wrong, and probably sinful, with you. Never mind that you didn’t really have a chance to get to know Mr. Right because your courtships consisted of hanging out with the whole family at all times, and neither of you were especially comfortable discussing future dreams and ideas in front of your ten-year-old brother; having that many close relationships with men (even though it can pretty much be demonstrated that nothing happened beyond a handshake, given the number of witnesses involved) makes you “damaged goods.”
This all kind of ties into the whole Chastity Rose speech. For anyone else not unfortunate enough to be familiar with it, here’s how it goes. It’s pretty much SOP in conservative church youth groups.
The speaker hands one of the kids a rose, tells the kid to look at it, play with it if he or she wants, then pass it on to the next kid, and so on. At the end of being handled by 40+ teens, the rose is understandably rumpled. He then holds up another, perfect rose in comparison with the original one, and asks the boys which they’d prefer. They, of course, say they like the nicer-looking one. He then turns to the girls, and tells them that if they “let” the boys do anything, they’ll be the equivalent of the damaged rose that no one wants, but if they don’t, then they’ll be like the nice, clean, whole one. Never mind the implication that the boys aren’t equally at fault, or that they wouldn’t be damaged by today’s culture of serial monogamy, either. Sigh.
Not the sort of message I want my kids to be given, thankyouverymuch.
Now, the idea of dating with a purpose makes sense, and if that’s what’s meant by courtship, I’d agree. “I’d like to meet Mr./Ms. Right, so I’m going to go to the diocesan young adult events and keep an eye out. Worst case scenario, I have fun and make some new friends; best case scenario, that sounds like a good way to meet someone serious about their faith.” You meet someone, chat for a bit, are interested, and propose catching that interesting new movie and having dinner next week. This should neither mean “he’s going to propose by Christmas!” nor “he just wants to sleep with me.” It means you’re interested in getting to know one another better, period.
The problem that can be encountered with the courtship model is that asking someone on a date translates to “he’ll propose by Christmas” because dating means things are serious…when really, it should mean no such thing. Leaving aside anything else, it places a terrible strain on the couple to be expected to know after a dinner or two if this is the person they want to spend their life with.
DH and I met online. While we never talked exclusivity per se, we considered each other boyfriend/girlfriend a few months later, and were engaged nine months in. I’d been talking to a couple of other guys online, but after a few weeks of dating DH I gently let them know that things had gotten a bit more serious with someone, and I needed to be able to focus on that relationship for a while. (I was in grad school and working three jobs at the time, so even dating one person was kind of pushing the limit on what I could manage.) We were both looking to get married. We did hang out at restaurants, friends’ places, and so on, but we also spent time at one another’s apartments, with some common-sense rules in place. (Read: no physical contact unless we’re in public, or at least where anyone might walk past.) It’s not kind or fair to the waitress to sit at a restaurant for six hours on a weekend evening, and you really aren’t going to get to know each other if you’re only spending a couple of hours together every other weekend. (We were long-distance.) We did make sure to have specific things to do at the apartments, usually a movie or show to watch, but as I said–opposite ends of the couch, or different chairs. Things don’t “just happen”; we were adults, we had self-control, and we never had more than a beer or so over dinner, so alcohol wasn’t involved.
I am a rather firm believer that if two people can’t manage to go out to dinner without having sex right then and there in the restaurant, they aren’t mature enough to be getting married anyway.
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Xantippe
Guest
You’re right about the parental duty to help find a suitable spouse. There was also a parental duty to settle your (at least male) child in a suitable profession.There was a time when the parental duty to find a suitable spouse was taken for granted as much as our contemporary parental duty to have a child educated and, if possible, sent to college. The reasons were much the same: that is, this is how wealth and social status were preserved and sometime enhanced from one generation to the next. Education is now how parents make sure the futures of their children are “seen to,” but it used to be done by arranging favorable family alliances.
This duty did not necessarily extend to the less-affluent social classes. At those stations in life, at least one of the children might have been encouraged to stay with the parents and not marry at all. The parents would expect that child to care for them in their old age in return for the child receiving the family home when they died. Other children might be given as an apprentice to a tradesmen, found a position as a servant in a wealthy household, or highly encouraged to join a religious community.
An essentially supervised courtship is not impossible in our times. It is called avoiding near occasions of sin by conducting the courtship while sober and at times and in places where inappropriate kinds of physical intimacy aren’t attractive because of lack of privacy. There are many places a couple can have a private conversation where groping or disrobing are not options a sober person would consider!
My feeling about the supervised courtship you describe is that it has perils of its own that will only appear after the couple gets married. My dad, for instance, married my mom straight out of a college dorm, and then spent the next several decades lamenting about her various failures in cooking and housekeeping. If he’d known her as the mistress of her own apartment, that might not have happened. (Of course, I might not have happened, either…)
I encourage any couple that is planning on getting married to spend a lot of time doing household type activities together and figuring out which of them is the slob and what to do about it. Even with a fair amount of time spent visiting my future husband’s apartment, it didn’t register on me that when he said, “I like to keep stuff in stacks!” that that might be a problem down the road. The fact that he never cleaned and I cleaned on major occasions was something that if we’d known it, we could have saved ourselves a number of newlywed fights over. (We eventually got cleaning ladies and have lived basically happily ever after. My sister and I recently talked our parents into getting cleaning help, so there’s hope for them, too.)
There’s so much besides premarital sex to worry about in a serious relationship.
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Xantippe
Guest
Yes.It also doesn’t help that in many of those circles, once you’ve been “courted” by two or three men, you’re expected to have found Mr. Right. If you didn’t, the social implications are that there’s something wrong, and probably sinful, with you. Never mind that you didn’t really have a chance to get to know Mr. Right because your courtships consisted of hanging out with the whole family at all times, and neither of you were especially comfortable discussing future dreams and ideas in front of your ten-year-old brother; having that many close relationships with men (even though it can pretty much be demonstrated that nothing happened beyond a handshake, given the number of witnesses involved) makes you “damaged goods.”
[snip]
Now, the idea of dating with a purpose makes sense, and if that’s what’s meant by courtship, I’d agree. “I’d like to meet Mr./Ms. Right, so I’m going to go to the diocesan young adult events and keep an eye out. Worst case scenario, I have fun and make some new friends; best case scenario, that sounds like a good way to meet someone serious about their faith.” You meet someone, chat for a bit, are interested, and propose catching that interesting new movie and having dinner next week. This should neither mean “he’s going to propose by Christmas!” nor “he just wants to sleep with me.” It means you’re interested in getting to know one another better, period.
The problem that can be encountered with the courtship model is that asking someone on a date translates to “he’ll propose by Christmas” because dating means things are serious…when really, it should mean no such thing. Leaving aside anything else, it places a terrible strain on the couple to be expected to know after a dinner or two if this is the person they want to spend their life with.
DH and I met online. While we never talked exclusivity per se, we considered each other boyfriend/girlfriend a few months later, and were engaged nine months in. I’d been talking to a couple of other guys online, but after a few weeks of dating DH I gently let them know that things had gotten a bit more serious with someone, and I needed to be able to focus on that relationship for a while. (I was in grad school and working three jobs at the time, so even dating one person was kind of pushing the limit on what I could manage.) We were both looking to get married. We did hang out at restaurants, friends’ places, and so on, but we also spent time at one another’s apartments, with some common-sense rules in place. (Read: no physical contact unless we’re in public, or at least where anyone might walk past.) It’s not kind or fair to the waitress to sit at a restaurant for six hours on a weekend evening, and you really aren’t going to get to know each other if you’re only spending a couple of hours together every other weekend. (We were long-distance.) We did make sure to have specific things to do at the apartments, usually a movie or show to watch, but as I said–opposite ends of the couch, or different chairs. Things don’t “just happen”; we were adults, we had self-control, and we never had more than a beer or so over dinner, so alcohol wasn’t involved.
I am a rather firm believer that if two people can’t manage to go out to dinner without having sex right then and there in the restaurant, they aren’t mature enough to be getting married anyway.
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EasterJoy
Guest
I’m not saying you can’t visit the home of someone you’re courting. It would just be a good idea to make it a practice not to spend much time there alone, or at night. If your boyfriend comes to your place when his team is playing on TV on Sunday afternoon, the chances that he’ll be able to resist your advances are a little better than if he’s there at night after the two of you have split a bottle of Pinot.
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EasterJoy
Guest
By “courtship,” I mean the social process of choosing a marriage partner, whatever form that takes. You’re describing exactly what I mean by accomplishing a supervised courtship without actually having a chaperone. I think in the NFL they refer to it as “using the boundary line as a defender.” You can use the general public as chaperones. As long as you behave yourselves, they’ll ignore you entirely.
You don’t approve of sex in restaurants? Well, aren’t you the Puritan!I am a rather firm believer that if two people can’t manage to go out to dinner without having sex right then and there in the restaurant, they aren’t mature enough to be getting married anyway.
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UbiCaritas
Guest
Something else just came to mind.
I grew up in a very, very strict traditional church. Dating was verboten. Courtship was The Way To Go, and that in the most strict interpretation: always with other people until you’re married, courting only with dad’s permission and oversight, and so on. At the same time, young people of the opposite sexes were actively discouraged from hanging out together. While there was a youth group, it was made clear that too much fraternization (…in front of one’s parents, in a church hall, over pizza…) was Not Okay and might lead to Impure Behavior.
At the same time, you were expected to get married young and have a lot of kids, because that’s what Good Catholics ™ do.
All but one or two kids at this church were homeschooled, so no classroom intermingling, either.
The last nail in the coffin was that older girls weren’t really schooled much past the 8th grade or so. As younger siblings came along, the older girls were given more and more household and childcare responsibilities, to the point that they had no time for their studies even if their parents were interested in directing them, which they weren’t. The boys were generally discouraged from pursuing college, trades, or any sort of career because doing so would mean they’d leave home, and see above re temptations and such. Leaving aside anything else, this meant that as supporter-of-the-family material, they were lacking.
Some of the older teenagers would eventually get low-level, part-time retail or fast-food jobs, but that was about it.
As a result, these were the homeschooled kids the local public school teachers warned you about. They genuinely had no idea how to socialize with members of the opposite sex, they were terribly awkward with anyone who didn’t grow up to their exact standards (sinful!), and they had no real purpose in life because they’d never been allowed to hope or dream or work for anything real. They’d never even been allowed to think terribly hard, because catechesis consisted of memorizing the Baltimore Catechism (an excellent resource, but not the end-all for high-school-level apologetics) and questioning anything your parents told you was sinful and rebellious, even to the extent of knowing why the Church teaches what She does.
It was as though their parents thought that on their 21st birthdays, their fairy godmothers would show up, hand the boys a good job and the girls a husband, and float off again!
As you might imagine, this worked terribly. Most of the kids I knew in that youth group left the church. Some came back. Many ended up having kids out of wedlock–I suspect in some cases, out of a sort of desperate way to get out from under their parents’ thumbs and be seen as adults. The partners in such situations were rarely good people; they were just the first person who seemed interested, period. In retrospect, I honestly don’t know of anyone in that youth group except the undersigned who a) graduated college, b) had a “real” job, and c) got married in the Church, having waited to have sex until marriage. Out of 50 kids or so, that’s a pretty bad statistic.
I grew up in a very, very strict traditional church. Dating was verboten. Courtship was The Way To Go, and that in the most strict interpretation: always with other people until you’re married, courting only with dad’s permission and oversight, and so on. At the same time, young people of the opposite sexes were actively discouraged from hanging out together. While there was a youth group, it was made clear that too much fraternization (…in front of one’s parents, in a church hall, over pizza…) was Not Okay and might lead to Impure Behavior.
At the same time, you were expected to get married young and have a lot of kids, because that’s what Good Catholics ™ do.
All but one or two kids at this church were homeschooled, so no classroom intermingling, either.
The last nail in the coffin was that older girls weren’t really schooled much past the 8th grade or so. As younger siblings came along, the older girls were given more and more household and childcare responsibilities, to the point that they had no time for their studies even if their parents were interested in directing them, which they weren’t. The boys were generally discouraged from pursuing college, trades, or any sort of career because doing so would mean they’d leave home, and see above re temptations and such. Leaving aside anything else, this meant that as supporter-of-the-family material, they were lacking.
Some of the older teenagers would eventually get low-level, part-time retail or fast-food jobs, but that was about it.
As a result, these were the homeschooled kids the local public school teachers warned you about. They genuinely had no idea how to socialize with members of the opposite sex, they were terribly awkward with anyone who didn’t grow up to their exact standards (sinful!), and they had no real purpose in life because they’d never been allowed to hope or dream or work for anything real. They’d never even been allowed to think terribly hard, because catechesis consisted of memorizing the Baltimore Catechism (an excellent resource, but not the end-all for high-school-level apologetics) and questioning anything your parents told you was sinful and rebellious, even to the extent of knowing why the Church teaches what She does.
It was as though their parents thought that on their 21st birthdays, their fairy godmothers would show up, hand the boys a good job and the girls a husband, and float off again!
As you might imagine, this worked terribly. Most of the kids I knew in that youth group left the church. Some came back. Many ended up having kids out of wedlock–I suspect in some cases, out of a sort of desperate way to get out from under their parents’ thumbs and be seen as adults. The partners in such situations were rarely good people; they were just the first person who seemed interested, period. In retrospect, I honestly don’t know of anyone in that youth group except the undersigned who a) graduated college, b) had a “real” job, and c) got married in the Church, having waited to have sex until marriage. Out of 50 kids or so, that’s a pretty bad statistic.
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UbiCaritas
Guest
No argument at all there. When we were dating (as I said, long-distance) the visiting person always got a hotel for the night. We also didn’t drink much at all. Alcohol is awesome
, but not always a good idea.
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Naskor
Guest
No need to try and revive it. Just apply it to the modern day. There is a very good book by Joshua Harris that outlines this:
amazon.com/Kissed-Dating-Goodbye-Joshua-Harris/dp/1590521358
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Xantippe
Guest
Oh dear.
That’s the sort of underpants gnomes problem that Umstattd was talking about:
- isolate and undereducate children
- ???
- happy, fruitful marriages!
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UbiCaritas
Guest
Some of Harris’ observations about our modern culture are accurate; I don’t think anyone here will disagree that serial sexual monogamy is a bad thing.
However, at some point…well, as I said, if you can’t go out to dinner as a couple without having sex right then and there in the restaurant, you aren’t mature enough to be married. His idea that you shouldn’t spend time alone together before marriage is seriously problematic. First, some subjects are not appropriate topics of conversation for anyone but the dating couple, but really must be discussed prior to marriage.
As one topic, do you really think it’s appropriate for parents to be so involved in their kids’ sex lives that they have to have the NFP discussion in front of them? Or, for that matter, their far-younger siblings? If someone’s old enough to get married, they’re old enough to have adult conversations.
Or, for another: if the girlfriend was molested as a child, that’s something a potential spouse (read: fiancé or about-to-be) should know. That’s none of her potential-future-inlaws’ business.
Nor does anyone but the couple in question need to know that Fred had a problem with porn as a teen, but he has repented and has taken obvious steps to avoid it since, with the result that he hasn’t looked at any such thing in five years.
Lastly, personal financial matters are just that: personal, but important in the extreme that they get hashed out pre-marriage.
People who are in a position to get married aren’t kids. They’re (hopefully) responsible adults, with all that that entails. In many cases–see DH’s and my example above–spending time at one family’s or another’s houses simply isn’t practical. DH’s family lived 1500 miles away; mine lived a thousand miles away, and were crazy dysfunctional to boot. We were adults, responsible to each other and God. Period.
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Xantippe
Guest
Right.
Plus, there’s the question, do you really know this person if you’ve never spent any time alone with them? People are often different with an audience.
If a guy (or gal) is going to lustfully lunge at the other given a moment’s opportunity, that’s worth knowing before getting married to them.
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Xantippe
Guest
Also, a person with no sexual self-control is going to be very unpleasant to be married to (given NFP, postpartum abstinence, medically ordered abstinence, etc.).
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UbiCaritas
Guest
Yep. A lot of Harris’ stuff is geared towards an audience for whom that’s not an issue, though–women who are told it’s sinful to ever say “no,” even if you had a baby a week ago and are correspondingly still stitched up/recovering, or your OB has put you on pelvic rest for some duration, and so on. The idea is that if you do what you’re supposed to do (submission in all things) God will take care of you. Also, in justice, a lot of those faith traditions are also okay with non-vaginal types of intercourse, so in some cases it’s less of a risk to mom or baby. Still a rather immature attitude, to say the least, though, in the cases I described.
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Naskor
Guest
Depends where you are. I’m in America and a “date” doesn’t mean some night out on the town, but when something sexual has happened.
When I was in college asking a girl out on a “date” was considered the same thing as asking her for sex, if you happened to use the word “date”. Lots socially awkward guys got in trouble for not making the connection.
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UbiCaritas
Guest
It might have that specific connotation at some colleges, but neither I nor my friends, Catholic, Christian, or secular, would instantly assume date=sex, and I’ve only been out of undergrad for four years.
X
Xantippe
Guest
Right.
I think you EFL guys are misunderstanding the meaning of the word “date.” It’s not nearly as explicitly sexual as you think. When people mean that, they say “hook up,” if I’m not mistaken.
Date means that there is definitely some sort of non-sexual entertainment planned in advance that almost always involves being out in public.
Edited to add: Although, come to think of it, “date” may also be a prostitute’s euphemism for what she does at work.
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Sarcelle
Guest
I do not know how prevalent this is, but there is an assumption out there in the dating world that if a man paid for a dinner date, then the woman is obligated to have sex with him.
I don’t know if this concept is widespread but I certainly encountered a lot of people, both men and women, who seem to think this.
LaughingBoy1503
Well-known member
When a woman say yes when I ask her out (which is about 2 maybe 3 times a year if I am lucky) I date. So by extension, the women I have dated do too. So, yes, people still date. And I do the old school, not even a kiss on the first date, and I pay for everything and treat her with respect thing. But not for the sake of some old gentleman’s code about manners. I do it just because I am like that anyways. Except the flowers thing. I have only taken one woman I dated flowers (other than a girlfriend of mine who I use to give roses sometimes) because she said she liked flowers. I think flowers is a little too much too soon for a first date (I do not mean money wise) unless you already know the woman quite well and know she will like the gesture and not be put off by it. And I know some women these days would be put off by it. Otherwise, I would have no problem buying flowers every single date. I just would not mind at all.
Maybe… now that I think about it 2 or 3 dates a year… since the other 362 days of the year I do not date, perhaps I do not date enough to say that I date.
Maybe… now that I think about it 2 or 3 dates a year… since the other 362 days of the year I do not date, perhaps I do not date enough to say that I date.
LaughingBoy1503
Well-known member
I actually talked to a woman recently who told me that she feels uncomfortable with a man paying for a date, she prefers to pay for herself because she does not like feeling like she owes the man anything. The assumption you speak of is out there but I do not think it is very wide spread. I have never heard any of my guy friends, back when I was a hoodlum, saying that a woman has to have sex with them if they take her to the movies or out to burger king or whatever. Sure, that is what they were hoping, but I do not believe they expected they were owed it. And my buddies use to sleep around quite a bit.
- Status