Thank you for the comparison! I’ve heard it before and it really encourages me. Thank you!

We’ve Seen Each Other

We’ve seen each other in line at the movies for tickets to the next rom-com, at the grocery store for a magazine’s tips for how to make him swoon, and at the bookstore buying self-help books about love languages, and anything else that will make us better competitors in this battlefield of love.

Dating rituals didn’t emerge until about two hundred years ago, and two hundred years later, we’re all still trying to figure out when to text back, how to not “lead them on,” “how far is too far,” and when to have the “DTR,“ since of course, "to be FBO or not to be FBO—that is the question.”

All joking and cliché dating jargon aside, romantic relationships and all they entail permeate our thoughts, conversations, future hopes, and present fears. Ultimately, we just don’t want to be alone. Isn’t that what we’re all running from? We want purpose, and how can we find purpose apart from love? Our deepest emotional need is to be seen and affirmed for who we are—told that we’re enough, that we matter, and most of all, that we are wanted.

Many of us believe that our best shot at finding this is in the face of romance, so we consume and collect all the tactics we can get our hands on. Love is projected like a puzzle, and we’ve all been set loose in a frenzy searching for all the pieces so we won’t be the last to put it together. Even once we might have finished the puzzle, we suspiciously wonder if there’s any glue so it won’t fall apart.

A fish doesn’t know it’s wet until it’s out of water. What I mean is that it’s hard to consider our own experience until we’re confronted with something different. It’s important that we realize that everyone grew up in a different pond hearing different advice, gathering different philosophies about dating, and developing different habits.

This is what my pond looked like growing up. I grew up going to purity class every year. One session, they presented us with fine china teacups and then held up a styrofoam cup and asked us which one we wanted to be. I wish I would have been able to see through that crooked presentation instead of being bullied into a self-righteous, performance-driven understanding of purity. It cornered me into a place of fear, hoping desperately that I’d never mess up. I wasn’t allowed to date until I was 16, yet by the time I was entering high school, a full row on my book shelf fell under the dating category. There was a time I believed that “The Notebook” was emotional porn, that it was promiscuous to be alone in a room with the opposite sex, that saying “I love you” meant I wasn’t “guarding my heart,” and the fact that I had lost three different purity rings was more likely a scheme of the devil himself than my knack for misplacing things. That metal token never did more than create awkward conversations with strangers in the grocery aisle.

I had one boyfriend in high-school. We dated for two years and never kissed. We didn’t want things to “get out of hand.” I laugh and roll my eyes at this memory, trying to figure out how I could be so silly and so serious at the same time.

Fast forward to my first semester in college on a couch in a dim room with a guy who wasn’t my boyfriend. My first kiss. I was realizing that the rest of the world didn’t think kissing was a big deal, and started to consider crossing over to their side of the court. Even though I had nothing to feel guilty about, I felt like I couldn’t tell my friends—the girls who I’d grown up with in the thick humidity of Southern Purity Culture.

The problem is not the purity rings, dating, or anything else for that matter. The problem is our obsession with designating things into black or white when there’s a whole sea of grey. With dating, it’s important that we all show up with our unique thoughts and opinions, but we can engage a conversation that seeks to rid ourselves of any ideologies or habits that withhold the joy and freedom that Christ’s love has purchased for us.

It’s not that you should throw your convictions to the wind. Rather, it’s that wherever you fall on the spectrum of dating—whether you’re a serial dater, or you’ve never been on a date—know that we’ve pulled up a seat just for you. You can take a deep breath and stop looking over your shoulder, fearing who is judging you for either being too uptight or too lose in your approach to dating. I’d like to usher you into a place that is drenched in grace and coated with wisdom as you do yourself a favor and join a conversation that seeks redemption within a realm of reality.

I don’t want to point my finger in any specific direction. The long list of misconceptions, self-assigned penance, guilt-induced convictions, and overall uptightness that the church’s dating culture has influenced is not our parent’s fault, or our youth minister’s, or the authors of dating books.

It began with the brokenness that traces back to the Fall when the first humans did exactly what we would have done, by believing that God owed them something more than Himself and that He was withholding something from them. In the same mentality, we chase after security, purpose, and affirmation in people who are chasing the same thing instead of returning to our first love—the one who offers fulfillment and encourages us to imitate this life-giving love in the way we connect with others.

We were made for connection, but when we believe that our relationship status is the only way to fulfillment, we will spiral into an unhealthy paradigm. The purity classes and the promise rings and the dating section of Christian bookstores put a simple, concrete puzzle together throughout my middle school and high-school years.

We are all broken, so if we are going to join the commentary on how truth pertains to relationships, we’re going to have to stop drawing attention to each other’s debris and acknowledge our own. And maybe it’s our pieces of debris that will allow us to put the pieces together—not to be “solved,” but a wholeness to live in as the Lord brings healing, meeting our ultimate needs for purpose, security, and affirmation. And once we find wholeness through our true love, we can be demonstrators of this wholeness—tracing the cracks that remain as testimonials of how we’ve been reassembled— personalized maps of redemption that tell a story far more compelling than perfection.

This love finds us where we are and promises to carry us, to change us, and to use our lives for His glory, for our satisfaction, and for the benefit of others. When my peer group, my environment, and my way of thinking were all changing, one thing remained—I still believed that truth was relevant. The more life I lived, the more questions I asked, and the more my static and stiff ideologies began to bend and grow and blossom. From one of the books that sat on the row above my dating collection, an introductory sentence read, “God has spoken and the rest is commentary.” That is what these pages hold—commentary.

There is truth, and with the spirit’s leading, when we seek to uphold truth in the way we live, this is applied wisdom. My friend J. has quite a story, and it’s an account of how truth has given new shape to his life. Here, you will not find a dating manual, but a commentary on truth and how to apply it within the vast topic of romantic relationships.

I think it’s worth a shot, because I wish that the middle-school me would have had access to a book like this just as much as I wish the college freshman version of myself would have. All I ever wanted was someone to look at me and tell me that choosing to not kiss my boyfriend in high-school didn’t make me a teacup, and my choice to kiss someone I barely knew in college did not make me a styrofoam cup.

Maybe you’ll reach the last page of this book without a single aspect of your mindset being altered, or maybe you’ll find a thoroughly edited version of yourself at the end. There isn’t an agenda for either. My only hope is that you’d be willing to shed any pride or apathy you might have and that you’d open yourself to commentary.

— Lauren Britt of yesdarlingido.tumblr.com