This is a story that helps us to better understand how to build Godly relationships.
Keep your passion for Jesus central. It’s
easy to give Jesus priority status when there’s no competition. When we
start dating, however, it’s common for many of us to slowly channel the
energy that we’ve been investing in our relationship with Him into our
newfound love. But Jesus isn’t our relational back-up plan, someone we
put first until someone better comes along. He needs to stay central for
us regardless of whether we’re single, dating, or married.
Relationships flourish when Jesus and His kingdom are the priority of
both people, but falter when they aren’t. When Jesus is our first
priority, our view of love, sex, and relationships is enhanced and
enriched. But when Jesus is relegated to being our second, third, or
fourth priority, our entire view of love, sex, and relationships becomes
distorted. Knowing Jesus intimately is critical if we want to know what
authentic, life-giving expressions of love, sex, and relationships look
like. If we’re not anchoring our heart’s deepest hopes and longings in
Jesus, our romantic relationships will always end up disappointing and
frustrating us. We’ll be placing unrealistic expectations on our
relationship that can only be fulfilled by God.
It’s a wonderful thing to fall in love and find someone with whom we
can share our lives. However, we need to be careful that even good,
healthy dating relationships don’t become stumbling blocks that cause us
to forsake our first love (Revelation 2:4).
Don’t rationalize an abusive relationship. It’s
common for many people (especially women) to find themselves in an
abusive relationship at some point in their lives. Maybe it’s a
boyfriend who is physically abusive, or a girlfriend who is controlling
and emotionally manipulative. Regardless, I often see the rationalizing
of major dysfunction. Many of us would rather put up with abuse and
dysfunction in our relationships than be alone, so we go to great
lengths to minimize or deny any abusive behaviour.
“Well, she’s not like that all the time.”
“It isn’t really that bad.”
“It’s no big deal. That’s just the way our relationship is.”
No relationship is perfect. Each one has its fault lines and issues,
but there comes a point when a challenging relationship becomes a
destructive one, and when abusive patterns have emerged that line has
been crossed.
Sometimes denial can run deep. If we don’t identify and end the
abusive relationship until it has run its course, we will be heartbroken
and devastated. Or maybe we believe we’re the one sent into this
person’s life to do the saving, to make them a better person, and so we
wear the abuse as a kind of badge of honour. Maybe it brings us some
kind of self-righteous satisfaction that we’re suffering for a greater
purpose and are willing to love someone so “complicated.”
Regardless of your particular situation, if you are involved in an
abusive relationship—whether the abuse is physical, emotional, or
sexual—you need to end it. You know it’s unhealthy, and chances are it’s
negatively impacting every area of your life, including your
relationship with God. You should talk to a friend, parent, or pastor
you trust who can help you transition out of your relationship.
Don’t believe that romantic relationships are the key to happiness and fulfillment.
This piece of advice often comes from one of my high school students
when we brainstorm relationship advice together as a group. All of us go
through a stage where we assume we’re a boyfriend or girlfriend away
from having it all. We believe that if we could find our “true love,”
all the issues that bring us down will fade into the background. We
believe that love, peace, and joy will flood into our lives and give us
our “happily ever after.”
Falling in love and being in love is awesome, but if we think a
relationship is what will save us from loneliness, low self-esteem, and
purposelessness, we’re just wrong. No matter how good, godly, and
healthy a relationship may be, it cannot fully satisfy the deeper
spiritual hungers within you. To enter into any relationship with the
expectation that it will be the key to a happy life is to place an
idolatrous, unhealthy, and unrealistic expectation on it. This
expectation will only suffocate any potential for the relationship to
grow in a healthy way. We must never ask or assume another person can
provide what only God can. When we stop looking to a relationship to be
the key that will unlock the potential of our lives, we open up space
for healthy relationships to emerge into what they are meant to be.
Only date someone who has a passion for following Jesus with their whole lives.
“Christians should only date Christians.” That opinion is repeated in
countless books on Christian dating, and yet from my point of view it’s
just not a helpful way of approaching things. The statement is clearly
well-intended, but like many things within the church the attempt to
simplify in order to communicate things clearly has created new
problems.
For example, the overly simplistic categories of Christian and
non-Christian can be an enormous stumbling block. If the discussion
centres on dating Christians vs. non-Christians, we can quickly (and
mistakenly) substitute “people who go to church” with “Christian” and
unintentionally lower our standards to anyone who shows up to church on
Sunday. But should a Christian relationship be validated by something as
trivial as church attendance?
I think it’s much better to frame the discussion within the larger
context of discipleship. If we want our central passion to be Jesus and
His kingdom, does it make sense to date someone who doesn’t share that
same intention? If discipleship to Jesus is something we take incredibly
seriously, does it make sense to date someone who supports us in our
faith but isn’t actually committed to it themselves?
No, it doesn’t. That’s why I encourage people to pray for and seek out
someone whose passion for Jesus is profound, undeniable, and inspiring.
That is the kind of person, that kind of disciple, is someone you should
pursue. Too many people settle for someone who’s churched instead of
prayerfully holding out for someone whose discipleship commitment
expresses itself in dynamic, passionate, creative ways. If you want your
love for Jesus to deepen throughout your life, committing to only
dating (and eventually marrying) someone with a strong and vibrant faith
should be non-negotiable.
Never settle. Personally and professionally
I’ve never seen anything good come from relationships that started
with, “Well . . . you’ll do.” That being said, I’m not an idiot; I know
how difficult it is to be the only person without a boyfriend or
girlfriend, and the ache that situation creates. But we need to have the
courage to move into and through that discomfort, trusting God to
somehow satisfy what we’re longing for, even if we can’t anticipate how.
Make a list of qualities you want in your future spouse, then work
backwards. If you want someone who is fun, spontaneous, spiritually
intense, wise, and playful, that’s not going to happen if you date
someone who is some of these things, some of the time. Obviously this
means we’ll have to do a bit of reflection on our future marriage
partner before we start dating, but isn’t that a good thing? We date in
order to allow God to help us find a kindred spirit with whom we can
become a soul mate through marriage. If someone told me they were ready
to date but couldn’t articulate what they were looking for in someone
beyond being attractive and funny, I’d tell them they just aren’t ready
to date. If we don’t know what we really want in our dating
relationships, the likelihood of us settling for something “good enough”
is exponentially higher.
Before I met my wife, I spent a few months putting together a list of
character qualities that I wouldn’t budge on. If someone only had three
out of ten, I wouldn’t date them. eight out of ten? Sorry. I wanted a
perfect score. Why? Was I some kind of unreasonable jerk with an
inflated sense of entitlement? No. I knew what kind of marriage I
wanted, and I’d lived and learned enough about myself to know the kind
of person I needed to hold out for. That didn’t make times of singleness
easy, but because I had a razor-sharp clarity about what I wanted and
needed, settling for anything else became much harder.
Avoid the Romeo and Juliet syndrome. Romeo
and Juliet were star-crossed lovers who were so in love they could never
be separated. They quickly melted their own identities into each other
and made each other their entire world. This syndrome is all too common
in dating relationships. We’ve probably all known a friend who started
dating someone and then stopped hanging out with everyone except their
new love. All their spare time was spent with their Romeo or Juliet, and
the relationships and priorities that were previously very important
were disregarded and pushed aside.
The Romeo and Juliet syndrome is closely linked to the assumption
that was addressed previously in this list (i.e., romantic relationships
are the key to happiness and fulfillment). Out of this assumption we
look to another person to be the emotional saviour we’ve been waiting
for, and we do all we can to surround ourselves with this person as much
as possible. This trap is easy for us to fall into, so my advice here
is to put limits on the amount of time we’re spending with our
boyfriend/girlfriend, so that we don’t (intentionally or
unintentionally) make them the focal point of our daily routines and
habits.
Set boundaries. It’s really important to
establish boundaries before we enter into a dating relationship. If we
don’t, we’ll find ourselves in a literal free-for-all in terms of what
is done, said, and experienced together, and this is always destructive
to everyone involved. Healthy relationships need boundaries, and they
need to identify and decide what boundaries are going to be in place as
it relates to four dimensions of the relationship:
a. Physical. What physical boundaries need to be in place in order to protect each person’s dignity, reputation, and purity?
b. Emotional. What emotional boundaries need to be in place in order to ensure the Romeo and Juliet syndrome doesn’t take hold?
c. Social. What social boundaries need to be in place in order to ensure
that each person is investing in healthy relationships outside of the
dating relationship?
d. Spiritual. What spiritual boundaries need to be in place in order to
ensure that each person is growing spiritually as individuals and not
just focusing their spiritual growth on the context of their
relationship?
Ideally, the couple should meet with a few older and more experienced
couples to help them define what boundaries will be in place for them.
These older couples can also play an important ongoing mentoring role in
the new couples’ lives.
Learn from your mistakes. We all make
mistakes. As much as we parade around ideas of personal holiness, the
biting truth is that imperfections and blunders seem to be the rule
rather than the exception within our lives. Even during seasons where I
feel an uncommon clarity of purpose, strong sense of conviction, and
deep connection with God, I’m ashamed to admit how easy I’m seized by
sins like lust, envy, pride, and idolatry.
But as I look back over my life, it seems to me that the only sinful
slip-ups that have really cost me in the long run have been the ones
I’ve stubbornly repeated, knowing precisely what I was doing. Proverbs
26:11 states,
“As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.”
That’s the cycle that can destroy us if we’re not careful. So when we
make a mistake, regardless of what kind or what severity, we need to
realize that beating ourselves up is of limited value. Genuine
repentance doesn’t always need to be a tearful exercise in self-pity.
Sometimes it expresses itself with a clear decision and focused
intention to put together a game plan to avoid repeating the mistake
again. After reflecting on my own journey and many years of pastoral
ministry, I’m convinced that God won’t let our mistakes define our lives
if we’re willing to learn from them and seek restoration in Him.
Take three months between dating relationships to reflect and learn.
The temptation to rebound with an immediate dating relationship after
one has ended is enormous. Why? Because we’ve been in a relationship
long enough that we’ve become accustomed to having someone to call,
touch, and hang out with. To go from that to nothing feels like the rug
has been pulled out from under us, and our first instincts are to get
ourselves back into a relationship as soon as possible in order to avoid
the awkwardness of readjusting to being single. But when we start
relationships in order to avoid being single, we’re actually just using
the new guy or girl for our own selfish ends. That foundation isn’t
going to take us very far, and we should expect more heartache to come
if we just rush into new relationships after ending old ones.
If a relationship doesn’t work (for whatever reason), it’s always
important to take some time away from dating relationships and
recalibrate our hearts and minds. We need to carve out time to reflect
on what went wrong, and why. We should explore how we need to grow from
our experiences in the previous relationship so that future
relationships are healthier and more Christ-centred. Relationships teach
us a lot if we’re willing to listen to the lessons. Be sure to carve
out at least three months between dating relationships so that you can
focus on learning whatever lessons God wants to teach you during your
time of transition.
Break up well. This might be one of the
most surprising and overlooked pieces of advice I share on the subject
of building healthy relationships, but it’s so important. Nothing tests
the genuineness of our discipleship commitment to Jesus than our
willingness to refuse to blame, badmouth, or hurt the other person
during a break-up.
A break-up usually results in a lot of hurt for everyone involved.
Two people who once thought of each other as “true loves” now become
enemies looking to strike back at each other. However, it’s exactly in
this new and awkward context that Jesus’ challenge to love our enemies
(Matthew 5:44) comes into play.
If we’re the ones doing the breaking up, we need to do so in a way
that minimizes the emotional damage for the other person. We’re going to
cause hurt, so we need to be as gentle, reasonable, and kind as humanly
possible. Being rejected is a horrible feeling, and we don’t need to
escalate those feelings (even if we think the other person deserves it).
We should strive to be gracious and kind, and after the break-up never
speak badly about the other person.
If we’re on the receiving end of the break-up, the emotions that
flood into our hearts are going to make it very easy for us to justify
hatred and retaliation. We need to fight those impulses with everything
in us. That doesn’t mean minimizing how much it hurts to have someone
dump us, though; it just means refusing to let the hurt we’re feeling
morph into a cancer of anger and bitterness. Getting dumped sucks, but
striking back through hatred and retaliation won’t provide the healing
we’re looking for. That can only be found when we pour our energy into
our relationship with the One who is
“close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (Psalms 34:18).
