What You Don’t Know Really Can Hurt You
Dating can be a dangerous dance, with each partner focusing on the wrong things and actually inhibiting the development of a mature relationship. Unless you’re thoughtful about how you date and what you do on your dates, they won’t give you much of a clue about each other. Going to the movies, biking through the park, eating out—of course that kind of activity is going to produce and maintain a certain level of affection. But it’s not real life; it’s often not even real relating. It’s just playing. It doesn’t tell you squat about how a man could face a medical or vocational crisis, what kind of courage a woman has, what values each person lives by, or what spiritual pursuit drives the other person. Instead, you find out that you both like vegetables on your pizza and movies that have a plot—that’s something, I guess, but it’s not much on which to base a lifetime decision. It’s okay to have fun. We need to have fun. But some dates also need to be purposeful, designed to ferret out your boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s character.
Let me approach this from another angle: women, any guy can fork over forty dollars to buy a dozen roses, but not any guy is truly generous and unselfish toward others. One romantic present, given with mixed motives, reveals nothing about a man’s true character. Men, you can find women who will take off their clothes, but can you find a woman who will bare her soul so that the two of you can become one? Or is she so hurt and troubled that she’ll lie and cover up anytime you get close to the truth of who she is, maybe even using sex as an escape valve to avoid truly relating to you or dealing with conflict?
Your mission is to truly get to know this other person—that takes intentional effort. Here’s what to do to get there.
Watch With Me
A young man lost a chance at employment when he went out to dinner with a prospective boss. As soon as the waiter put a plate in front of him, the young man salted his food and started eating. The boss was blunt, and perhaps unfair, but said, “I don’t hire people who salt something they haven’t tasted. I want you to know what’s going on before you try to fix it.”
That might seem trivial to you, and maybe it is. I’m just making a point from a real-life example: when you’re with your boyfriend or girlfriend, pay attention. How do they treat their family? What’s their relationship like with their parents? Their siblings? How do they act around kids? How do they treat “invisible” people—waiters, janitors, and the like? If a guy is too lazy to bus his own table at McDonald’s, what makes you think he won’t leave his stuff around the house, expecting someone else to pick it up?
Here’s the painful reality when you enter any dating relationship: your partner can’t be completely 100 percent altruistic. That person just can’t. She wants something from you. Maybe he wants to marry you. Maybe she wants to make out with you. Maybe he just wants to make you like him. You can assume that she’s on her best behavior with you. So whatever your boyfriend or girlfriend does for you—buy flowers, bake food, offer encouragement—comes from somewhat mixed motives.
The only way to know true character, then, is to watch your friend with someone else. Women, if you’re with a guy who wants to be in ministry, but he’s criticizing every pastor and every sermon he hears, I guarantee you that five years after he’s married to you he’ll have a whole lot of criticism about your role as a wife. Guys, if you’re around a woman who does kind things for you but no one else, the days of her doing kind things for you are severely numbered, probably within weeks of the wedding, if you want to know the truth.
Choose dates that will test your boyfriend or girlfriend. Sprinkle this season of your relationship with impromptu “interviews.” Get into ministry situations, family situations, maybe even stressful situations, to see how he or she reacts. If one little thing goes wrong and ruins the whole date, you can bet that on a future family vacation there is going to be a whole lot of drama and not much rest, because something always goes wrong on a family vacation.
Most modern dating focuses on how two people treat each other. That’s not particularly helpful, especially in the blush of infatuation. You’ve got to get outside the relationship to get inside the motivations and heart of the person you’re thinking about marrying.
Go Down Memory Lane
Keeping with this theme—how to test a serious dating relationship—now try to explore what your boyfriend or girlfriend was like before meeting you. Did he enjoy sports, did she attend church, did he do the things the two of you enjoy doing together now? Without letting on what you’re doing, purposefully try to crack the code of your beloved’s past, as that past is a fairly good indicator of the future.
Infatuated couples invariably try to change for each other. Remember, during infatuation you become obsessed with getting and keeping your heart’s desire. Because you so desperately want the relationship to work, you will find yourself astonishingly open to making little compromises and temporary changes in your lifestyle and even personality to accommodate the relationship. This motivation almost always fades with the infatuation. If your future spouse didn’t go to church before he or she met you, it’s unlikely church will be a priority after the wedding. If that person pretended to like sports, or museums, or cooking, it won’t take long until the playacting ends. Get to know your potential spouse’s past so that you can get a read on your future. Be very suspicious of any major change.
Talk to his or her siblings, parents, friends. Ask to see old photo albums. You’ve got to be a bit discreet here—don’t sound like an FBI agent interrogating a witness. But informally drop a few questions in the middle of casual conversations to get just a little bit deeper into your potential spouse’s psyche.
Pray
At the start of the Boston Marathon, everybody looks the same. Sure, there are different ethnicities and genders, but people tend to have a certain “look”—or they wouldn’t be able to race there. This makes it difficult for spectators trying to locate a loved one. At the prerace expo, which is wall-to-wall people, my daughter said she almost called about a dozen different men “Dad.” She saw a Boston coat (which you don’t see that often in Bellingham, Washington), a certain body type, and a man wearing a baseball hat and assumed it was me—until the guy turned around. In my hometown—in that getup, anyway—I look distinct. Here, I looked like everyone else.
During the race, however, people begin to distinguish themselves. A woman asked me my time the next day, and when I said “3:31” she replied, “Oh, you’re much faster than my friend. He was 550.”
“Do you mean he placed 550th or that he finished in five hours
and fifty minutes?”
“He placed 550th.”
“Ma’am,” I said, “there was a wall of humanity between your friend and me at the finish line. He is way faster than I am.”
We might have looked alike, but we didn’t run alike.
In the same way, dates can “look” alike, but get them alone before the Lord of the universe, hear the concerns of their heart, and you can get a better read on who they really are in Christ. How do they talk to God? Is He their friend or some distant stranger they almost seem afraid of or embarrassed by? Do you pick up a heartfelt passion, a sense of someone who is familiar with this conversation, or do you feel like you’re listening in on someone who is talking to you and trying to impress you more than actually talking to God?
What does she pray for and about? Does he have a concern for others, do her prayers reveal a trivial life and petty concerns, or is he swept up by God’s compassion for others?
Are you praying with someone who is comfortable being silent before God, listening to God as you would in any other conversation? Or is he in a rush to just impress you and move on, afraid that silence or a lack of eloquence will make him look bad?
Most of all, does it sound like this person has been here before, or is all this just a show? Of course, people can still “act” when they pray, but if you pray with them more than a couple of times, you’ll begin to get a better feel for where they’re at with the Lord.
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