Dating

My dad warned me against women who would take advantage of me, but he should have warned me against my own predatory, testosterone-poisoned mind.

In the natural mind, the goal of dating is "hooking up" or "scoring." This puts the wrong pressures on people who date. Reaching the goal sets you up for heartbreak and endangers the future of the relationship. Most dangerously, the carnal definition of "dating" risks creating an innocent human life whom you sentence to, at best, the stigma of illegitimacy, the emotional wounds of growing up fatherless, or at worst, the torture of being chemically burned to death or being vivisected, without even the benefit of anaesthetic, before birth.

Proper dating, however, can serve as a tool of socialization: learning self restraint, learning to enjoy, understand, and honor the opposite sex, and developing friendships.

I did not realize until I was around 25 that I needed to correct my goals in dating. I changed from looking for a wife to learning to enjoy women as friends, without the sexual or marital agenda.

Think of how men and women approach shopping. A woman enjoys shopping for the experience, whereas a man sets a goal of hunting down his prey, the specific item or deal. As I matured, I learned to shop at hardware stores just to get ideas and to see what's available for solving problems later. That's similar to the mindset one needs in dating.

Around my 27th birthday, I was praying for somebody to disciple. The Lord revealed to me that a man's ultimate disciple is (or ought to be) his wife. That was the end of that prayer request.

About a month later, God gave me that disciple. It did not take years of dating to know that she was the one. By the end of the year, we were married. It's been almost 30 years, now. The point is, a guy needs to look at dating as practice lessons in leadership, discipling, and responsibility, too.

With the right mindset about the purpose of dating, it becomes a lot easier to counter testosterone poisoning. Date to enjoy, to learn, to develop restraint. Let the goals come in their own time.