Making Decisions: Relationships and Dating
What Is the Purpose of Dating?
1) Choose a marriage partner and prepare for a lasting relationship.2) Develop your sense of independence.
3) Learn to feel more at ease in a male/female relationship and enjoy friendship with someone of the opposite sex.
4) Get to know other people—their likes, dislikes, values, their ways of communicating and yourself.
What Should I Remember When Dating?
1) Set your physical intimacy boundary before you go on the date Boys and girls are jointly responsible for setting and maintaining limits.2) Verbally communicate your boundary to your partner. You can stop at any step of intimacy—physical intimacy does not have to progress.
3) Have self-control.
4) Consider your manner of dress and stay sober.
5) Use non-verbal and verbal refusal skills if needed.
6) Avoid dangerous or tempting situations like being alone in an empty house.
What Are Some Smart Dating Strategies?
1) Get a life of your own.• Get grounded
• Get grouped
• Get goal-oriented
• Get giving
• Get growing
2) Use your brain.
• Balance romance with common sense, reason, judgment and discernment
• Balance the head and the heart
• Refrain from physical intimacy
• Analyze your past relationships
• Include others in the process
• Never neglect opportunities to evaluate along the way.
3) Seek similarities.
Healthy relationships and marriages are ones in which there is a strong foundation of similarities in background, temperament, goals, dreams, values and the way in which individuals managed and ordered their physical and mental lives.
4) Take it slow.
• You do not get to know a person in a short period of time.
• You need time to bond.
• You protect yourself from getting attached too quickly.
5) Set clear boundaries.
• Draw definitive lines in the physical/sexual area of your relationship. Your body belongs to you.
• Communicate how you feel to your date. Own your own feelings and be able to separate them from your date.
• Take ownership of your thoughts – keep them pure.
•Take responsibility for your own actions – don’t try to change someone.
6) Save sex for marriage.
Practice the healthy steps of intimacy. Reserve petting, heavy petting, mouth to breast, and oral and vaginal intercourse for marriage.
7) Living together before marriage doesn’t promote a healthier marriage.
Research show couples that live together have a far greater chance of getting a divorce than those who don’t. Women who cohabitate are more likely to experience domestic violence than married women.
8) Engage in healthy responses to conflict.
Avoid “avoidance,” “defensiveness,” “invalidation,” and “intensification.”
Fight fair: take a time out to consider what you really need to express and be respectful to your partner. Be quiet and listen – seek to understand, then to be understood. Use “I” statements. Negotiate and compromise. Reevaluate your solution at a later time.
9) Notice danger signs and end the relationship.
• Any form of abuse: physical, verbal, emotional or sexual.
• Addictions.
• Untruthful in the relationship.
• Irresponsibility and immaturity.
• No physical/sexual attraction.
• Emotional baggage.
• Denial – you can’t admit that this relationship is not healthy for you.
10) Choose your dating and marriage partner wisely.
If you date and then marry the wrong person, you will live with significant, negative, and lasting consequences of that decision for the rest of your life.
Discern their character. Character is who you are when no one is looking. Look back at prior relationships to determine patterns of behavior. Crisis reveals someone’s true character. Give your relationship lots of time.
Do you feel encouraged, affirmed, inspired, and challenged to grow and be a better person when you are with him/her?