Preparing for Marriage

                There are a few steps in preparation for marriage. They are: dating, courtship, engagement, and marriage.

 What is the difference between dating and courtship?

Often, today, we think of dating and courtship as the same thing. In fact, we use the word dating to replace courtship. When we tell friends and family we are dating, they think that we are dating one person steadily, with the intention of marriage. In other words, they think we are courting that person. Courtship is rarely used to describe a relationship anymore.

The true meaning of dating is going on a planned activity with a certain person to get to know them better. There should be no commitment on dates. A person should go on multiple dates with different people to get to know different people with different qualities. Dates give a person the opportunity to understand what characteristics and qualities are compatible with their own and that they like in the opposite gender. Some people also get dating and hanging out mixed up. Dating a lot more effective than hanging out. To make something a date, it needs to be Planned, paid for, and Paired off. This prepares men to Preside, Protect and Provide in a marriage.

If roles of a husband or wife are not being practiced throughout the dating experience, then how do we expect marriage to work when we’ve been practicing just being around each other? What we do while dating, courting and throughout engagement will be what happens through marriage. Therefore, dating is more effective. Men get the opportunity to practice providing by paying for the date, protecting by being paired off and needing to watch out for his partner, and presiding by planning the date. If two people choose to hang out all the time, there is no structure to it. It is very casual. They are not practicing anything except for being around each other. That is not what marriage is, and the marriage frequently does not work out when the couple chose to hang out instead of going on dates.

Only date exclusively when ready to marry. This will lead into courtship. This is when two people have the intention to marry and are more committed to each other. This is the time that a couple takes to get to know each other well and build trust in each other. It is very important that we are careful to decide who we court.

An engagement should be a time to get to know each other even better. Engagement is for togetherness, time and talk. You should already know a person well before getting engaged because now you have a higher commitment level to them. They should make time to be together and talk about things.

It is often that people slide into the different levels of the relationship. Many people don’t even know what stage they are really in because they aren’t stepping into new levels and officially talking about it. It’s more of a slide, which many times makes the process a lot quicker.

The RAM (Relationship Attachment Model) explains what should be happening throughout a relationship. From left to right, the model has: know, trust, rely, commit, and touch. Everything to the left should be at a higher level. We should know someone more than we trust them. We should trust someone more than we rely on them. We should rely on someone more than we are committed to them and be committed to them more than we touch them.

The first dates we barely know the person, yet we feel that we know them well. It takes a long time to really know someone, yet people make their relationship “official” after only the first few dates. They trust the other more than they know them and do the opposite of what the RAM model says is most effective. Many people have high levels of touching, such as kissing and hand holding before they even know a person. This leads to dangerous outcomes many times.

We would not be willing to hand our car keys or credit card to someone we don’t know well, yet we are willing to hand our hearts over to someone we know very little about. It is so important that we are careful to evaluate how much we really know a person before giving them all our times and our hearts.