Gee - Why Doesn't Anyone Date Anymore?

Gee -Why Doesn't Anyone Date Anymore?:

Posted by Palco MP3

Fifty years ago parents wrung their hands wondering what to do with their daughter who was 'going steady' with her high school sweetheart. Back then, parents encouraged their daughters to see many boys, correctly believing that this would provide experience with a wide array of relationship styles, promoting better choices of a life mate. Behind that rationale, however, lurked a hopeful belief that seeing many casual suitors would keep their daughters chaste. The practical goal of society's dating strategy was to get Susie to the altar, if not as a virgin then at least not as a mother-to-be.
The '60s sexual revolution, and the widespread availability of the birth control pill, changed all that. Now that girls could say 'yes' as well as 'no' to sex without the threat of unintended and often unwanted pregnancies, parents squirmed realizing their little princesses could be experimenting sexually with several boyfriends, none of whom she may marry. The face of dating changed.
Today, parents are relieved if their daughters hook up with only one partner. In the effort to keep our girls safe, we settle for fidelity if not virginity. Sadly, the double standard still informs our decisions about sex and dating -- boys get a free pass (if not a wink and a nudge) about early sexual activity while girls juggle labels of 'slut' (those who put out) and 'bitch' (those who do not). Saddest perhaps is the trend for very young girls to provide sexual favours (usually oral sex) for multiple boys while receiving little or no sexual pleasure themselves.
Dating seems to have disappeared from our cultural landscape. People now define as single or partnered/married. Rarely do we hear that someone is playing the field or dating several people. The sex-negative message from half a century ago trumpets a different answer to the question of mate acquisition, but it is no less damaging. We hear routinely of new couples assuming sexual exclusivity after they have had sex but before they know much else about each other -- an 'all your eggs in one basket' approach. Not surprisingly, most of those couples emerge some months later disillusioned and believing they will find true love in another lover, not in another system.
The opposite of single is married, not dating. Dating and marriage should feel different from each other. Why are we so quick to abandon the freedom of choice dating offers, replacing it instead with lightning-quick courtships and instant sexual exclusivity? Do we still believe that sex is so potent, so dangerous, that we dare not play with it? Haven't we grown beyond the 'kisses are contracts' stage? Have we been so silenced about negotiation and communication that we settle for any relationship that affords us sexual gratification? Moreover, if that is true, how much talking could be going on within that relationship regarding how sex can best be expressed and enjoyed?
Surely we can do better if we define dating as an enjoyable process in which we learn about potential partners by trying them on for a good fit. We need not limit ourselves to exclusivity with each one to whom we are sexually attracted. We are willing to shop endlessly for a new car or home, yet couple far too quickly once we establish a sexual liaison. Responsible, compassionate sex should be an adjunct to the process of coupling, not the prime reason for doing so.
There is an old saying: "You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you meet the handsome prince (or princess)." How much happier we would be if we used sex as but one of the many criteria upon which we base our coupling decisions.

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What Does the Bible Actually Say About Marriage?

What Does the Bible Actually Say About Marriage? "

by Greg Carey






Love

   

When you attend a wedding at church, what passages of Scripture do you expect to hear? Congregations occasionally invite me to speak on the current same-sex marriage debates, and I ask them this question. Their answers are remarkably consistent.

Someone invariably mentions 1 Corinthians 13, the famous "Love Chapter." Love is patient, love is kind, love never insists on its own way and so forth. Wonderful advice for marriage, but Paul was not talking about marriage. He was addressing a church fight: the believers in Corinth had split into factions and were competing for prestige and influence. We see echoes of this conflict throughout the letter, but especially in chapters 12 and 14, which surround this passage.

Others call out, "Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God" (Ruth 1:16; NRSV). Another moving passage, but it's certainly not about marriage. Ruth addresses this moving speech to her mother-in-law Naomi.

The second creation story in Genesis comes up: "Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh" (Genisis 2:24). This passage is certainly appropriate to marriage, as it reflects the level of intimacy and commitment that distinguishes marriage from other relationships. Jesus quotes this passage, too, but he isn't exactly discussing marriage. Instead, his topic is divorce (Matthew 19:5; Mark 10:8). When ministers read the Gospel passages at weddings, as they often do, the message seems a little off. I'd rather not hear about divorce at a wedding.

One other passage frequently surfaces in weddings but rarely in mainline Protestant churches, the Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodists and United Church of Christ congregations that invite me to speak. Ephesians 5:22-33 commands wives to obey their husbands and husbands to love their wives. Conservative Christians may try to explain away the offense of this passage, but there's no escaping its ugly reality. Ephesians calls wives to submit to their husbands just as children must obey their parents and slaves must obey their masters. See the larger context, Ephesians 5:21-6:9.

Not a Lot to Say

The point is, Christian weddings rarely feature passages that directly relate to marriage. Only one passage, Genesis 2:24, seems especially relevant, while other passages require us to bend their content to our desire to hear a good word about marriage. Things are so bad that the worship books for many denominations turn to John 2:11, where Jesus turns water into wine at a wedding feast, to claim that Jesus blessed marriage. My church, the United Church of Christ, has developed a new wedding liturgy, but it retains this common formula: "As this couple give themselves to each other today, we remember that at Cana in Galilee our Savior Jesus Christ made the wedding feast a sign of God's reign of love."

So we know Jesus blessed marriage because he attended a wedding? That's the best we can do? No wonder it's common for couples to struggle over the choice of Scripture for their wedding ceremonies. The Bible just doesn't have much to say on the topic.

Let's Be Honest

Unfortunately, many Christians use the Bible to support their own prejudices and bigotry. They talk about "biblical family values" as if the Bible had a clear message on marriage and sexuality. Let's be clear: There's no such thing as "biblical family values" because the Bible does not speak to the topic clearly and consistently.

It's high time people came clean about how we use the Bible. When Christians try to resolve difficult ethical and theological matters, they typically appeal to the Gospels and Paul's letters as keys to the question. But what about marriage? Not only did Jesus choose not to marry, he encouraged his disciples to abandon household and domestic concerns in order to follow him (Matthew 19:29; Mark 10:28-30; Luke 9:57-62). He even refers to those "who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 19:10-13). Whatever that means, it's certainly not an endorsement of marriage. Paul likewise encourages male believers: "Do not seek a wife" (1 Corinthians 7:27, my translation) -- advice Paul took for himself. If neither Jesus nor Paul preferred marriage for their followers, why do some Christians maintain that the Bible enshrines 19th-century Victorian family values?

Let's not even go into some of the Bible's most chilling teachings regarding marriage, such as how a man's obligation to keep a new wife who displeases him on the wedding night (Deuteronomy 22:13-21), his obligation to marry a woman he has raped (Deuteronomy 22:28-30) or the unquestioned right of heroes like Abraham to exploit their slaves sexually. I wonder: Have the "biblical family values advocates" actually read their Bibles?

Christians will always turn to the Bible for guidance -- and we should. If the Bible does not promote a clear or redemptive teaching about slavery, that doesn't mean we have nothing to learn from Scripture about the topic. The same values that guide all our relationships apply to marriage: unselfish concern for the other; honesty, integrity and fidelity; and sacrificial -- but not victimized -- love. That's a high standard, far higher than a morality determined by anachronistic and restrictive rules that largely reflect our cultural biases. Rules make up the lowest common denominator for morality. Love, as Paul said, never finds an end.



On Second Thought, Don't Get Married
by Dr. Neil Clark Warren

1 person liked thisMore than 2 million couples will get married in the United States this year alone. Several hundred thousand of these couples should reconsider, postpone their weddings or not get married.

Shocking new statistics released recently by the U.S. Census Bureau suggest that Americans may no longer need marriage. For the first time ever, fewer than half of the households in the United States are married couples. In the past decade, the number of unmarried couples increased 25 percent as more people chose to cohabitate. A Pew Research Center study last year put it more succinctly, finding an increasing number of Americans now believes marriage is "becoming obsolete."

This is a dangerous conclusion. It's true that far too many marriages, as currently constructed, end up disastrously. But with some common sense societal changes at the front end, marriage can still serve a vital purpose for a vast majority of adults.

Interestingly, around the same time the Pew study came out, the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, in their annual report on the health of marriage and family life, affirmed that more than three-quarters of Americans still believe marriage is "important" and that more than 70 percent of adults under age 30 desire to marry someday.

So it's clear that a majority of us still crave to be married. It's like we are hard wired to search after that person with whom we can spend the rest of our lives -- even in the face of these dire marital statistics.

I'm not trying to say that marriage is not in trouble. I am trying to say that there are some clear answers to the question of how marriage can get uniformly more satisfying for the people involved. And this I firmly believe: When done right, marriage can be the greatest institution on earth.

In his best-selling book, The Social Animal, New York Times columnist David Brooks says that "by far the most important decisions that persons will ever make are about whom to marry, and whom to befriend, what to love and what to despise, and how to control impulses." He cites multiple studies that have found a strong correlation between the stability of good relationships and increased life happiness.

But the skill of choosing a marriage partner has often been treated as relatively unimportant in our society and a whole lot less complex than it actually is. And herein lies the secret of why marriage has often turned out so disappointingly for so many.

It's frighteningly easy to choose the wrong person. Attraction and chemistry are easily mistaken for love, but they are far from the same thing. Being attracted to someone is immediate and largely subconscious. Staying deeply in love with someone happens gradually and requires conscious decisions, made over and over again, for a lifetime. Too many people choose to get married based on attraction and don't consider, or have enough perspective to recognize, whether their love can endure.

When people choose a partner unwisely, it's a source of enormous eventual pain. During my 35-year clinical career, I "presided over" the divorces of several hundred couples. I never experienced a single easy one. If one or both partners didn't get clobbered by the experience, any children involved often felt deep emotional sadness and loss. Sometimes this sadness kept impacting these people for years -- even decades.

A significant amount of research data, including an in-depth report by the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values, buttresses my clinical impressions that parental divorce (or failure to marry) appears to increase children's risk of dropping out of high school. Moreover, children whose parents divorce have higher rates of psychological problems and other mental illnesses. And ultimately, divorce begets divorce; i.e., when you grow up outside an intact marriage, you have a greater likelihood of having children outside a marriage or getting a divorce yourself.

I have often suggested that more pain in our society comes from broken primary relationships than from any other source. If we could ever reduce the incidence of marital breakup from 40 to 50 percent of all marriages to single digits, I suspect it would be one of the greatest accomplishments of our time.

Of course, no one intends to be in an unhappy marriage. Bad marriages don't just happen to bad people. They mostly happen to good people who are not good for each other.

And inspiring marriages don't happen by accident. They require highly informed and carefully reasoned choices. Commitment and hard work are factors too. But after decades of working with a few thousand well-intended and hardworking married people, I've become convinced that 75 percent of what culminates in a disappointing marriage -- or a great marriage -- has far less to do with hard work and far more to do with partner selection based on "broad-based compatibility." It became clear to me that signs which were predictive of the huge differences between eventually disappointing and ultimately great marriages were obvious during the premarital phase of relationships.

When two people have a relationship which is predicated upon broad-based compatibility, there is every reason to be optimistic about their long term prospects. A marriage of this type has virtually no chance of becoming "obsolete."

If all of us together can focus on the challenge of getting the right persons married to each other, it just might change our society more than anything else we could do. Goodness knows, when marriage is right, little else matters nearly so much.

Dr. Neil Clark Warren is founder of eHarmony and chairman of its Board of Directors. eHarmony is an online dating website grounded in relationship science that matches single men and women for long-term relationships.

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