Why are Christians so bad at dating?

Now, now. I’m not saying we’re any worse at dating than anyone else, necessarily. I’m just, morbidly interested, you could say, in the particular flavour of bad that Christian dating often is. Aren’t you?! I also think it’s good to understand these things, so we can get better, and be more Spirit-led than culture-led.

Alrighty, with that little disclaimer out the way – onwards, fellow singletons!

The purity culture hangover

Dating and I got off on the wrong foot to begin with. I’m old enough to have eagerly read the now notorious, ‘I Kissed Dating Goodbye’ as a teen, and while I won’t blame it for everything, it definitely did a number on my mindset around dating (as did the well-intentioned youth group purity talks of the time).

The basic premise of the book (and indeed all those youth group purity talks), was a call to reject modern dating (which was seen as ‘practice for divorce’) and an encouragement towards courtship (involving parents/high levels of accountability, and only taking place when one already knew they could marry the other person). It took the view that wrong relationships would cause irreparable damage, following you into your marriage, leaving you less of a whole person to give to your spouse.

As a girl who never believed I was attractive to guys, and whose experiences growing up confirmed this over and over, I drank up the narrative easily. It gave me a nice shield of armour to hide beneath, which I thought appeared quite noble at the time. It meant I could avoid dating like the plague, didn’t have to get out of my comfort zone, didn’t have to work through my fear of men and didn’t have to confront my deep insecurities.

Purity culture’s fear-based narrative caused what seems like a whole generation of young people (now in their 30s and 40s) to form an extremely high-stakes view of dating. And while not every teaching or word about it was bad, and it most often came from good intention, the bulk of its legacy seems to be shame, suppression, fear, inaction and confusion. Not to mention marriages that were rushed into with disastrous aftermaths.

While I had a profound longing to fall in love, get married and have a family, I happily agreed with any teaching that gave me a get out of jail free card, releasing me from having to actually date. It was quite a convenient and comforting idea that God would orchestrate some epic love story without me having to lift a finger.

Many of us threw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, taking no action towards our desire for marriage, believing it was wrong to do so. And thus, here we are with no babies.

We were terrified of getting it wrong.

From purity culture to the dumpster fire of dating apps

While many of us have been deconstructing purity culture in order to seek a healthier, more Spirit-led way of dating, we’ve been doing so smack bang in the middle of a culture shift of epic proportions, heralded in by the birth of dating apps.

I’m not one to universally condemn the apps – I think they’re just another avenue to meet potential matches. In an increasingly disconnected society, they almost seem necessary for people to meet at all. And arguably, they’ve given many the opportunity to get more comfortable with dating (especially those of us who spent most of our dating years terrified of it).

However, there’s no denying they’re changing our brains and the way we date. It seems dating has never been filled with more ambiguity, anxiety, frustration and despair. It has become highly, highly consumeristic to the point it feels there is little humanity left in it at all. And because of their prevalence, you don’t even have to be on the apps to be impacted by them. They’ve truly changed the way we date as a whole.

We’d need an entire book to cover the ways in which it’s changed us, but perhaps one of the more notable ways is that dating no longer happens in community. It happens in isolation. There is little to no accountability, so bad behaviour runs rampant, with no safety buffer of mutual connections. Quite the opposite from purity culture, dating has become incredibly low stakes, and people don’t think twice about ghosting, swiping past profiles like they’re shopping for a shirt, and constantly looking for something/someone better.

And so here we are, stuck somewhere between purity culture and the wild west of modern dating. Trying to find some kind of middle (while holding onto the last of our sanity).

The poison in the water

Adding to the complexity of what we’re navigating, there’s something in the dating pool water that is truly toxic. I think it’s one of the biggest roadblocks towards men and women falling in love and getting into healthy relationships.

Bitterness.

There are a LOT of bitter people. And that bitterness is most often directed towards the opposite gender. Men are bitter towards women, women are bitter towards men. We rack up our negative experiences and each one is more evidence to build our case that ‘men are….’ ‘women are…’. It sometimes feels that men and women just fundamentally don’t like each other. Not even as romantic potential, but just in general, as humans!

And oh, I get it. I see it in myself. I have prayed often of late, ‘God, help my heart, don’t let it grow bitter. Help keep my heart soft.’ (And I don’t think I’m doing a great job at it).

I think bitterness comes from disappointment. I think we’re tired and we’re disappointed and we’re greatly lacking in hope. We’ve experienced hurt and rejection and disappointment over and over. And I think over time, it’s inevitably lead to bitterness.

I once heard someone say, ‘There’s no such thing as private bitterness’. We may think we can let it sit quietly in our hearts, but the truth is, it will colour the way we speak, the way we see people, the way we see God. It will gradually change who we are and become evident to those around us, making it harder and harder to form healthy connections.

If you find yourself speaking or thinking wide generalisations about how much you despise men or women, and are always feeling like the victim, it might be time to check your heart and weed out that little sucker of a bitter root.

So where to from here?

On one end of the spectrum, we don’t date. We ‘wait on God’ without positioning ourselves to meet anyone, believing ‘it will happen’ without any of our own involvement. If we’re not one of the lucky ones whose partner miraculously appears in the church pew next to us, we watch the years go by and do our best not to grow bitter in our unwanted, prolonged singleness.

On the other end, we take our cues from modern dating culture. We manically swipe on the apps, we treat dates like interviews, we judge based on superficial appearances and we become increasingly close-minded as we search for a mythical unicorn who is exactly ‘our type’. Oh, and there must be fireworks immediately or it ain’t happening.

Or…

We take a breath and ask God what he wants of us in this season. Is it a time to get out there and actively date? Time to take a break from it all? Time to pursue the passions we’ve let take a back seat in our lives? Time to stop focusing on ‘finding the one’, and start ‘becoming the one’ by going to therapy/finding a counsellor?

There’s no one-size fits all approach to what healthy singleness might look like for those of us wanting to be married. I really think it has to be a tailor-made story between you and God. And I think it will very likely change season to season. Sometimes it might be time to gather up all our courage and open ourselves to going on dates and meeting potential matches, other times it might be time to pause and focus on other things, while still remaining open to meeting someone.

But one thing I know. If our approach is motivated by fear – whether that be not dating at all, or dating like a maniac searching for the best deals at a Boxing Day sale – we have to stop and reassess.

We need to get off auto-pilot and be honest with ourselves and with God for a minute. We need to sit with our sadness, our grief, our fear, our disappointment, our bitterness. Our hopes and dreams. We need to bring it all to God, and ask him to meet us in the middle of it. And we need to do this in community.

I think when we do this, we can live/date from a place of peace and authenticity, away from the noise of modern dating and our own limiting mindsets. Taking our cues from the Spirit, letting him guide us through the madness. And as we do so, I think we’ll find the courage to push through fear, whatever that needs to look like for each of us.

So, courage, dear hearts! I am cheering you all on.