Why Courtship is Fundamentally Flawed by Thomas Umstattd. Author’s Note: This blog post has been expanded and clarified in my book Courtship in Crisis. I grew up as a member of the homeschool community back when we were hiding from the cops and getting our textbooks from public school dumpsters. For months we could talk of little else.
After reading it myself, I grew into as big an opponent of dating as you could find. Dating was evil and Courtship, whatever it was, was godly, good and Biblical. My grandparents would often ask why I wasn’t dating in high school.
I explained what courtship was and quoted Joshua Harris, chapter and verse. Their response surprised me.“I don’t think courtship is a smart idea,” my grandfather said.“How can you tell who you want to marry if you aren’t going out on dates?” my grandmother wondered every time the topic came up. I tried to convince them but to no avail. They both obstinately held to the position that courtship was a foolish idea. Well, what did they know?
They were public schooled. I ignored their advice on relationships, preferring to listen to the young people around me who were passionate advocates of courtship. As I grew older, I started to speak at homeschool conferences and events. I talked with homeschool parents, students and alumni all over the country and started to see some challenges with making courtship work.
Some of the specific challenges I identified were: Identification (Finding that other person)Interaction (Spending time with the other person)Initiation (Starting the relationship)So I founded Practical. Courtship. com. Its purpose: to instigate a national conversation about how to make courtship more practical. Visits and comments poured in from all over the country about how to make courtship work and why it did not work.
Each year I waited for courtship to start working and for my homeschool friends to start getting married. It never happened. Most of them are still single. Some have grown bitter and jaded.
Then couples who did get married through courtship started getting divorced. I’m talking the kind of couples who first kissed at their wedding were filing for divorce. This was not the deal! The deal was that if we put up with the rules and awkwardness of courtship now we could avoid the pain of divorce later. She had predicted the failure of courtship back in the 9. I wanted to understand how and why. Now let me define what I mean by “courtship”.
So what is courtship anyway? After 2. 0 years there still is no general consensus as to what courtship is.
But here are the elements most conservative communities have in common: The man must ask the woman’s father’s permission before pursuing the woman romantically. High accountability (chaperones, monitored correspondence, etc). Rules about physical contact and purity. Fathers typically hold a “permission and control” role rather than the traditional “advice and blessing” role held by their fathers. The Case for Traditional Dating.
My grandmother grew up in a marginally Christian community. People went to church on Sunday, but that was the extent of their religious activity.
They were not the Bible- reading, small- grouping, mission- tripping Christian young people common in evangelical churches today. And yet her community of friends all got married and then stayed married for decades and decades. So what on earth were they doing that worked so well?
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Over dinner, my grandmother shared her story about what dating was like back in the 3. When my grandmother dated in middle school (yes, middle school) her parents had one primary rule for her. The Primary Dating Rule: Don’t go out with the same guy twice in a row. So if she went out for soda with Bob on Tuesday, she had to go to a movie with Bill on Thursday before she could go to the school dance with Bob on Saturday. That sounded crazy to me. So, I asked her the rationale behind it.
She explained that the lack of exclusivity helped them guard their hearts and kept things from getting too serious too quickly. The lack of exclusivity kept the interactions fun and casual. Married Dating Uk Date Guide. How could a boy have a claim to her time, heart or body if she was going out with someone else later that week? She went on to explain that by the time she graduated from high school, she had gone out on dates with over 2. This meant that by the time she was 1. Bob she wanted to marry. They got married and stayed married till my grandfather passed away half a century later.“If I had only gone out with 3 or 4 guys I wouldn’t have known what I wanted in a husband,” she said.
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It is not that her parents were uninvolved; it is that they played an advisory role, particularly as she entered high school and they relaxed the rules about not going steady. The Difference Between “Dating” and “Going Steady”She went on to explain that there used to be a linguistic differentiation between “dating” and “going steady”. It often had symbols like the girl wearing the guy’s letter jacket. This telegraphed to everyone at school that she was “off the market” and that she had a “steady beau”. It seems that my great grandparents’ rule forbidding my grandmother from going out with the same guy twice in a row was a common rule in those days. The Greatest Generation was encouraged to date and discouraged from going steady while in middle school. This is different from my generation, which is encouraged to “wait until you are ready to get married” before pursuing a romantic relationship.
This advice, when combined with the fact that “the purpose of courtship is marriage”, makes asking a girl out for dinner the emotional equivalent of asking for her hand in marriage. I am not convinced that anyone is ever truly ready to get married. Readiness can become a carrot on a stick, an ideal that can never be achieved. Marriage will always be a bit like jumping into a pool of cold water.
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A humble realization that you are not ready and in need of God’s help may be the more healthy way to start a marriage. As the decades moved on, our language and behavior changed. We stopped using the phrase “going steady” and changed “dating” to mean “going steady”. For example, we would now say “John and Sarah have been dating for 3 months.” when the Greatest Generation would have said “John and Sarah have been going steady for 3 months.”We then started using new pejoratives like “dating around” and “playing the field” to describe what used to just be called “dating”. Each decade added more exclusivity, intensity, and commitment to dating and saw a subsequent rise in temptation and promiscuity.
It is easier to justify promiscuity when you are exclusively committed to just one person, even if that commitment is only a week old. In the late 8. 0s and early 9. People would “go steady” for just a few weeks and then move on to the next relationship.
It was this “hookup and breakup” culture that the founders of courtship were reacting to. But their proposed solution involved adding even more commitment, exclusivity and intensity, the very things that lead to the problem in the first place. This is why courtship is fundamentally flawed.
The courtship movement eliminated dating and replaced it with nothing. Or, put another way, they replaced dating with engagement. The only tangible difference between an engagement and a courtship is the ring and the date. Similarities between Courtship & Engagement: They both require the permission of the father. They both are intended for marriage. They are not “broken up” but are instead “called off”.
When they are called off there is an inevitable rending of a community as one of the couple no longer feel comfortable spending time with the community of their ex- future spouse. Young people are expected to jump from interacting with each other in groups straight into “pseudo- engagement”. This is a jump very few are prepared to make. The result is that a commitment to courtship is often a commitment to lifelong singleness. Why the Courtship Divorce Rate is So High. Recently I have seen a spike in divorces amongst couples who courted. I have a few theories as to why this is.
Young people whose parents often maintain veto power on all of their decisions are then expected to make this most important decision without any experience in good decision making. They have no context of who they are, past decision making or an idea of what they are looking for in a spouse. How can you know what personality you fit well with if you only go out with one other person? The result can be a mismatched couple and a marriage that is difficult to sustain. Right now all we have little research to go on in terms of the courtship divorce rate.
In my observations, some homeschool communities have a much higher divorce rate than others. I would be very interested in seeing some research on this phenomenon. This blog post is my call for more research on the divorce rate amongst couples who “courted” before getting married. Advantages of Traditional Dating. Less Temptation – It is hard to fall in love with Bob on Tuesday when you know you are going out for coffee with Bill on Thursday. This lack of emotional commitment leads to less physical temptation.
I have no idea how women are supposed to guard their hearts while in an exclusive relationship with the purpose of marriage. More Interaction – I know many homeschool girls who are frustrated that they never get asked out on a date. It is not uncommon to find a 2. The reason for this is not because the girl is unattractive (although that may be the story she convinces herself of over time). The real reason is that few guys are willing to ask permission from a woman’s father to marry her before being able to ask her out on a date to get to know her.
Even when this permission is requested, it is unlikely to be given. I know several godly, hardworking and attractive homeschool guys who have been rejected by as many as a dozen fathers. I respect their tenacity. Getting turned down by courtship fathers is tough on guys because the fathers are rarely gentle or kind.