VISION: the christian dating narrative, reimagined
None of the books we read, none of the advice we’ve been given, none of the workshops we attended about “Godly dating” ever spoke to us concretely about what actually looks like to center Jesus in a dating relationship. And if there are materials that cover this topic well, they’re written by people already married, or still single, or by people who by ethnic, socio-economic, or geographic characteristics don’t speak accurately into our millennial/Gen-Z, urban, multiethnic experience.
Advice like “date for marriage,” “court, don’t date,” and “a woman should be so lost in God that a man will have to go to God to find her,” doesn’t tell us anything practical about what talking to someone you’re interested in looks like or how it should be, or even if it should be, different because we’re Christians. They don’t say anything about how our Christ-centered values inform the way we would practically get to know someone in a romantic relationship. And no one ever talks about it!
This is our early-twenties, Korean-American, evangelical, Christian, heterosexual, cis-gendered, Jesus-centered story. We wrote this to get the conversation started again. We believe what we experienced––what God has shown us––as we began to date is worth talking about. To break the ice. To break down unhelpful structures that are out of time and out of place for our context. We should be able to have conversations about and different examples of living out the Gospel in all areas of our lives, including dating.
As of penning this, we are still dating. Not engaged. Not married. We felt that it was important to tell this story not knowing the ending. Dating is not a success-or-failure endeavor that succeeds only when it ends in marriage. Kyle and I have both been in relationships that have ended, relationships for which God had a perfect purpose. There is no shame in carrying our stories with us; they glorify God. We recognize that in our lives, God had, in his perfect love, planned for us to date and not marry people, the same way that he planned for me and Kyle to date. Will we get married? God only knows. We hope so. But God’s plan is perfect, and we trust him. He is good. Through everything, even relationships that end, he desires to win our hearts and mold us ever more into the likeness of Christ.
*I wrote this in May of 2019 as a much overdue response to I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Josh Harris; I’ll be posting segments of the resulting project on this blog.
