What's Happened to Dating?

One of my favorite movies of all time is White Christmas. I watch it every year during Christmas time and I revel in the intricate dance numbers and the beautiful voices singing lyrics of hope. In one of the musical numbers, Danny Kaye’s character, Phil Davis, sings these lines, “The theater, the theater, what’s happened to the theater? Especially where dancing is concerned.” Today I would like to rewrite these lyrics: “Dating. Dating. What’s happened to dating? Especially where marriage is concerned.”

What has happened to dating? In the past few decades, what society views as dating has taken on a new meaning. In fact, no one really goes on dates anymore. Dating is a thing of the past. All people seem to do now is hang out, hookup, or both. This is what teenagers called “Netflix and Chill” a couple of years ago. Does anyone see the problem with this however? What are the benefits of hanging out? Personally, I don’t see any. Many people actually don’t see the difference between dating and hanging out. But there is a difference. A big one.

What happens when a couple hangs out especially when you hang out with a group of people? What you see a lot of times is people competing for attention, especially the girls. They are trying to make an impression because they are afraid it they don’t that they will never get a boyfriend otherwise. But the problem with this competition is that it’s very difficult for people to be themselves. They feel like they have to act a certain way in order to get romantic attention. Hanging out doesn’t allow you to get to know the personality of the other person. What do you learn about someone’s likes, dislikes, their family, or their personality by hanging out?

A date on the other hand, allows you to see a person in many different circumstances and can show you how they react in different situations. This is because of what a date is. A proper date is planned, paid for, and while you are on a date, you should be paired off. Yes, paired off, not just a group lumped together. When a date has all of these three qualities it provides the ideal time and place to get to know someone.

I do not however want you to misunderstand what I mean by dating because there are many different phases of dating. I like to think of them as stairs. The first step of dating is casual dating. This is where you go on a variety of dates with a variety of different people. And here is where I want to make myself perfectly clear: Casual dating does not mean long term commitment. Accepting a date does not make you boyfriend and girlfriend nor does going on lots of dates with lots of people make you a “player”. Many people see causal dating in a negative light, but it actually is a really healthy thing to do. Just like you wouldn’t make a commitment to buy a car without test driving it, you wouldn’t want to commit to being exclusive with someone until you knew for sure that you liked them for who they are.

That brings us to our next step, courtship. I do want to point out however, that the transition between each step should include the intentional decision made together to go to that next step. You shouldn’t slide into the next stage. When you slide you miss opportunities to make important decisions and you may regret that later. This is the point where you should define the relationship. Yes, that conversation probably will be awkward. Life is just a big ball of awkward so get over it. But back to courtship. This is the step where the relationship is exclusive. This is where you date one and only one person. But the important thing is that you should still be dating here. Going on dates shouldn’t cease to exist once you become a “Facebook official couple”. Exclusive dating is the time to get to know everything about each other and that requires that you are together, sharing activities, that you talk to one another mutually self-disclosing, and that you give your relationship time. Deep friendships come with time. That’s what this step is for. Building a friendship.

This is where I am going to end my thoughts this week. Next time I will explain the last two steps of the staircase: engagement and marriage. I hope you learned something valuable from my ramblings this week. See you next time!