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How can we prepare ourselves—and help prepare those we know, including our children—to deal with the dominant dating culture? Clearly the commandments to love God and our neighbor should guide the way we live. But how does loving our neighbor work out in practice? Certainly we should make friendship the basis of our relationships—including romantic ones—and learn to put the interests of others ahead of our own.

The New Testament actually describes believers in Christ as “brother and sister” and “family” (Matthew 12:50, Galatians 6:10). We should desire, therefore, church communities in which brother-sister friendships are commonplace, rather than the exception. To the extent that such communities are loving and encouraging ones, people will feel less compelled to find love and acceptance in the dating world, as if that were the only possibility. Also, a group setting more naturally facilitates getting to know others in a way that is less threatening and less pressure-filled than one-on-one activity.

Moreover, the Church continues to have a crucial role to play in encouraging people to make responsible choices and to accept love, not selfishness, as the better thing to embrace. The Church does this when it preaches the Gospel of God’s love towards mankind, makes known the Great Commandments to love God and our neighbor, and acts as a community of loving individuals. In doing these things, the Church draws a critical contrast between unconditional love and selfishness masquerading as love.

The parents of underage children have a unique role to play. Parents—even if they themselves have failed in various ways earlier in life—should not compound that failure by neglecting to teach their children. In particular, they should teach their children what they know of God and of right and wrong. They should put their children first, before their own desire for personal success, by taking an active interest in their children’s lives and how their children spend their time. Parents should teach their children the importance of being responsible, especially the importance of delayed gratification, which is so important to many areas of life, including education, career, finances, love, and romance. Husbands and wives should stay married, thereby helping to break the cycle of divorce, and otherwise set the best example they can for their children.

The dominant culture is challenged whenever an individual—regardless of his or her marital status—does the right thing. At that point everyone watching is encouraged to also make right choices. We challenge the culture whenever we say no to selfishness and embrace Christian love and virtue.

I’m pleased to say that my book is now available on Amazon, both in paperback and e-book format. It has been years in the making and has benefited from the input of many professionals in the industry, friends, and colleagues, to whom I am grateful. It is my hope that it will change the culture by changing lives. Happy Reading!

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So how should we respond to the dominant dating culture? Giving up Christian values and virtue is hardly an option. Some try to “Christianize” dating by embracing a softer approach that doesn’t break outright with the questionable norms commonly associated with dating but rather settles for modifying them a bit. (“Let’s just be careful not to be too selfish!”) Still others may become so discouraged or cynical that for a time they become reclusive or avoid the other gender to the greatest extent possible.

Many long to find a different approach to relationships, but how do we go about this? Although it is not easy to part with a me-first mentality, a good starting point is to apply the Golden Rule—“love your neighbor as yourself”—without regard to gender.

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We may find it easy to reject, on moral grounds, the promiscuity that has become pervasive in the dominant dating culture. But what about the consumer-related aspects of dating: shopping around for a significant other, assigning worth to other people, and discarding someone when it suits us? Here perhaps we are more tentative, both in our assessment of the culture and in how we choose to conduct ourselves.

Unfortunately, we are more influenced by the prevailing culture than we realize. If everyone around us embraces a certain belief, we are more likely to accept it uncritically. Likewise, if those around us accept a certain kind of behavior as normal, we are inclined to do so as well. Small wonder, then, that the dominant dating culture is taken by most people who grow up with it to be a given—a cultural norm that for better or worse is “just the way things are.” Even some Christians are inclined to believe that Christianity does not apply to this area of life. Rather, it is just assumed that dating is the thing to do and besides: “If I don’t participate, won’t I be ridiculed or left out?”

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The me-centeredness of Western culture, particularly with respect to sexual matters, is a reflection of immaturity; a truly mature person is an outward-looking one who desires to become more loving and more giving, not one who is focused on what he or she can get. Given that the mindset of most is self-serving, though, it is not surprising that the dating culture is predominantly one that is contrived and artificial, with the players being manipulative and deceitful. The fact that this behavior has been largely accepted by Western society as the way that men and women should relate to each other—as normative—is an indication of how alienated from God its thinking has become.

Those who cherish virtues, such as honesty and unconditional love, will not feel at home in the dominant dating culture, even if they cannot precisely pinpoint the reason for their unease. Indeed, it is impossible for the virtuous person to be happy about putting his or her interests ahead of others’.

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Our society’s pursuit of selfishness has led to much brokenness, leaving us with a culture in which it is all the more difficult to experience loving relationships. As relationships have become more privatized, more selfish, and less family-oriented, marriages are not doing so well and divorce has become common. Dating as it is commonly practiced is a bad proving ground for marriage, and the problems that characterize our dating relationships will carry over into our marriages. The converse, however, is also true: The good habits we practice in relationships before marriage will also manifest themselves in marriage and in all our relationships. Therein lies a tremendous opportunity—it is not an overstatement to say that to the extent we practice unconditional love in our premarital relationships, we chip away at the coarseness of society and change it and the marriage culture for the better.

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When wedding vows are exchanged, a man and a woman make a promise to each other. They promise to love and stay with each other “till death do us part,” for as long as they both are alive—this is the permanence of marriage. This is indeed a “big promise.” But any relationship is full of many “little promises” as well: “I promise to be there tomorrow to help you” and “You can count on me to do that.” A measure of someone’s ability to keep promises on an ongoing basis goes to the heart of what is meant by the words “dependable,” “reliable,” “trustworthy,” and “responsible.” It is not surprising that those who exhibit these attributes are much more likely to keep the big promise of staying married. These are not the attributes, however, that come to mind when one thinks of the typical dating relationship.

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Sometimes a romance is like sparklers, sometimes there might be fireworks. The wisdom of Benjamin Franklin is worth considering, who wrote in 1738:

“Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.”

(Poor Richard’s Almanack)

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The desire for romance is an integral part of human nature. The romantic impulse is a huge part of our lives—consider how it is used to sell practically everything. We long for someone to come along, reach inside of us, and quench some inner desire and show us that we are loved and appreciated. We want someone to be there for us who will be completely committed to us and will always meet our needs. But anyone we meet will just be human. At the deepest level, everyone wants a sense of acceptance, belonging, and security that can only be met by God, our Creator. The temptation is to believe that someone else can do for us what only God can. People want to be loved and accepted, but they make a mistake when relationships, sex, and marriage are used as proxies for the love that only God can provide them. 

Nevertheless, if the romantic impulse in us remains unsatisfied, it may gnaw away at us. By nature, we tend to focus on what we want but do not have, and this is especially true of romance. Romance is, by its nature, preoccupied with the here and now and tends to focus our attention on the temporal rather than what is eternal. Thus, we can easily find ourselves “chasing after love,” as if it were something that could be caught. 

True love between people, on the other hand, comes after much time. It grows, and love is ideally the soil in which romance lives. Love doesn’t just happen after one conversation, experience, date, or even after a marriage ceremony. Ironically, a preoccupation with romantic and sexual interests inhibits interpersonal growth and communication—prerequisites for a successful long-term relationship.