Dating done right

There are 4 clear stages in a dating relationship.

1.     Dating

2.     Courtship

3.     Engagement

4.     Marriage

I will be discussing what each of these stages are, the dangers of sliding from stages and why a failing marriage can be traced back to the way you dated.

What is dating? Dating: is an opportunity to get acquainted with others and to form friendships. It is wise to date a variety of people in a variety of situations. The purpose of dating is to get to know people better and to see what qualities you like and what you don’t like in the opposite sex.  There is a difference between hanging out and going on a date. The biggest difference is that dates should be planned for, paid for and paired off. It has become a much bigger deal to ask someone out on a date in our generation. But you do not even have to be interested in a long term relationship with someone to ask them on a date or to accept a date. Dating is simply an opportunity to get to know different types of people and to have a fun time!

Courtship: is a time when two people want to date exclusively. There is no reason to date someone seriously and exclusively unless you think marriage is a possibility in the future. During this time you get to see one person in a variety of situations.  You are able to get to know this person in much greater depth. This is a time to see if your personalities mesh well. During this stage of dating it is crucial that you ask lots of questions that would reveal information about a person’s opinions and ideas about marriage, how many kids they want, finances, sexual intimacy, commitment, insecurities and fears, habits or addictions, where they would want to live, what their goals are, what their traditions are, what their expectations are and the list goes on and on.  If you find that your goals, beliefs and values do not match up then the relationship would probably break off then. If you find that your strongest beliefs, ideas, and goals do match up then courtship will lead to engagement when the man proposes.  Men should talk to the women’s father before hand. This will help him to gain the confidence of her parents and show that he is respectful of her parent’s opinion and approval. It also helps over protective fathers to feel better about their daughter’s choice.

Engagement: is a time when you are confident that you have found the person that you want to marry.  The man has proposed and the woman has said yes. Together they have picked out a date for marriage. You continue in this stage, as well as for the rest of your life, to learn how to join together in decision making, planning and learning to work together. During engagement you plan the wedding, figure out where you are going to settle and work out all of the other bits and pieces.  Remember that this is not just a time to plan your wedding, more importantly it is a time to plan out your marriage. Have a plan for your marriage.  Ask each other “How are WE going to do this?”

Marriage: As a couple you should continue to work out differences and come together as one. In marriage it is crucial that you carve out time for just you and your spouse to be together. Date nights once a week is a great way of making time to foster your relationship. Too often in marriage people claim to have “fallen out of love.” Falling out of love doesn’t just happen over night, it happened when both people stop taking the time to foster and work on their relationship. Don’t let this happen! Take the time to ask each other how they are doing and what they are feeling and experiencing. Can you truly call your spouse your best friend? You have to learn to work out differences and come to have fondness and admiration for your spouse despite their flaws, weaknesses and shortcomings. You have to be kind and gentle when bringing up an issue of conflict and always being considerate of the other’s feelings. Together as a couple you need to share and discuss your goals in life and work together to accomplish them. 

Now reading through this might seem pretty logical and straightforward but the matter of the fact is that often times people do not pass through this stages clearly and distinctly. There is often “sliding” from one stage to the next and this can lead to problems. For instance, our generation is experiencing a phenomenon I like to call “instant dating.”  Many times when a boy has interest in a girl he asks her to “go out” with him. They become exclusive (courtship) without first getting to know each other in a variety of situations (dating). This leads to problems because you are entering a relationship with most likely a pretty high level of commitment and physical touch but not a lot of knowledge about that person. This will lead to a break up once they realize that there is much they don’t even know about the person they are dating or that they share nothing in common.  Dating in this way is like practicing for divorce. Think about it, you become heavily committed emotionally, physically and spiritually with a person and then break if off. Then you do it again.  You are learning how to divorce. Dating correctly and then entering courtship allows you to build a solid friendship and knowledge of the person first and then to let trust, commitment and physical touch build off of that foundation of friendship that was formed while dating.  

Another example of sliding from stages is sliding from courtship to engagement. During courtship when you ask questions about marriage, it is important that as a couple you are only discussing “how would you do X in this situation” not “how would we do X in this situation.” When you ask how would we, it starts feeling like you are already engaged and committed to marriage before the man has even proposed. The commitment to each other will be a lot higher so if you find something that collides such as you only wanting 1 child and him or her wanting at least 6, it ends up being harder to break off the relationship.

Culturally, we are not dating in these 4 stages but you can see how important it is that we try to follow these 4 stages of dating. The way you date is actually a predictor of how your marriage will turn out. Building that solid foundation of getting to know someone and being good friends and then dating exclusively (courtship) is fundamental for a happy and healthy relationship. 

Cohabitation: A Counterfeit to Marriage

Cohabiting has become the norm in modern society. Around some 80% of Americans prepare for marriage by cohabitating. Logically there are some reasons that cohabiting may sound appealing. Many believe that

1              1. It is a “test run” to marriage. You can have a trial before the risks are too high

2              2. It is a test of commitment

3              3. If it fails, it is less painful because there was less invested emotionally and financially

4              4.You can get to know the person better

5              5. It is convenient to live together

The belief that cohabitation is a good way to see how committed a person is and to see if a marriage would work out is a myth!! There is no research done to support either of those ideas. Cohabiting is not an accurate test run for marriage because the level of commitment is simply not the same. When a couple is married, they bring together all of their resources and it becomes both of theirs. When a couple cohabits, they often have separate bank accounts, separate cars and their own personal items that are “your” and “mine”. When a couple cohabitates they commit physically to each to each other and spend more time together but they DO NOT commit to changing their identity to “us”. It is still very much a “yours” and “mine” relationship. In contrast of this, when a couple gets married, the woman gives up her last name signifying that they are coming together as one. They also become financially responsible for each other and learn how to spend and save their money. They must work together and form common goals such as buying a house, finding job opportunities or having children. The man and his family and the women and her family come together with the marriage union. This kind of unity does not occur with cohabitation. One of the reasons people cohabitate as listed above is because if it fails, they can easily get out of the relationship. The level of commitment is just not the same as a marriage. It is true that cohabitation might be more convenient for a couple and that you might get to know a person better, but you do not accurately get to see how life would be if you were married to that person. In fact those who cohabitate before marriage “are at higher risk for problems and breakups. In spite of the logic of the arrangement, there is nothing to suggest that cohabitation yields the benefits that people expect from it” (Lauer and Lauer Marriage and Family: The Quest For Intimacy 2012). Let’s take a look at the facts.

• ·      Married couples report greater happiness, less depression, higher levels of commitment to the relationship, and better relationships with parents (Kurdek 1991; Nock 1995; Skinner et al. 2002).
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• ·      Married couples have a better-quality relationship than do cohabiting couples, particularly than those cohabitating couples who do not plan on marrying (Brown and Booth 1996; Dush. Cohan, and Amato 2003).
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• ·      A women is 9 times more likely to be killed by a partner in a cohabitating than a married relationship (Shackelford and Mouzos 2005; Brown and Bulanda 2008).
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• ·      Those who cohabit have more health problems and poorer health behavior than those who are married (Fuller 2010).
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• ·      Married couples report more sex and more satisfying sex (Popenoe and Whitehead 1999)
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• ·      Marital unions are more stable and durable than cohabiting unions (Binstock and
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• ·      A study in the Journal of Family Psychology found that about 19 percent of those who cohabited before getting engaged had later suggested divorce compared with just 12 percent of those who moved in together only after getting engaged and 10 percent of participants who did not cohabit prior to getting married. 
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• ·      Children born to cohabiting parents are 5 times more likely that those born to married parents to experience parental separation; the instability is higher for whites than for black or Hispanic children (Osborn, Manning, and Smock 2007).
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• ·      Cohabiting-parent families spend more than married-parent families on alcohol and tobacco but less on education (DeLeire and Kalil 2005).
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• ·      Those who cohabit before marriage exhibit poorer marital problem-solving skills and are less supportive of each other than those who did not cohabit (Cohan and Klienbaum 2002).
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• ·      The rate of infidelity is higher among couples who cohabited before marriage than those who did not (Forste and Tanfer 1996).
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• ·      National surveys conclude that those who cohabit before marriage have a marriage of lesser quality and are far more likely to perceive the possibility of divorce than those who do not cohabit (Dush, Cophan, and Amato 2003; Jose, O’Leary, and Moyer 2010).
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• ·      The divorce rate is particularly high among serial cohabiters; women who have multiple cohabitations before they marry are twice as likely to divorce as those who cohabit once with eventual husbands (Lichter and Qian 2008) 

   The research is clear, although majority of Americans are cohabiting, it is NOT an effective way to test out a marriage nor will it lead to a happy and healthy marriage. It may seem only logical to cohabit, but the studies have shown that they do not bring the benefits that people expect them to. The most successful marriages come when a couple waits until marriage to move in together. 

Gender Roles

Men and women are different and that is OK. In our society there has been a push for equality between the genders, but their idea of “equality” is to make men and women exactly the same.

Boy and girls are different and these differences show from birth. Infant boys startle more than girls and girls will move their lips more than boys. We have found that women have more white matter in the brain that allows them to make more connections, which is perhaps why they are more observant and more capable of multitasking. Men have more grey matter that allows for the transporting of information from sensory and motor stimuli. They are better with spacial directions and can focus very well on one task. When women had an MRI and were asked to do a visual task, there were many parts of the brain that showed activity. When men are asked to do a visual task, only one part of the brain showed activity.

These are just a few examples of how science has shown that men and women are born with differences. The beautiful thing about differences is that both genders have strengths. Women are naturally more nurturing, sensitive, caring and observant of others. Men are naturally more competitive, protective, aggressive and strong. Are these differences bad? Is one gender superior to the other? Should we change these differences? Some people argue that yes, in order to be “equal” we must disregard these natural differences and treat everyone exactly the same. In my view, there is nothing wrong with being different and unique. As I see it, when men and women come together using their natural strengths and abilities, amazing things can happen. We were made to work together. Men and women complete each other.

Now what about this whole equality thing? I believe that men and women are equal and should have equal rights. But does equal mean we should all be treated the same? I would say no! Why? Simply because we are not the same.  Here is an example of why we shouldn't be treated exactly the same. Men score higher then women in math. If we look at the fact that women learn better in a group then maybe we could try teaching women math in a group setting to help improve their math scores. This solution would not be possible if you don’t acknowledge that there are difference between men and women and that women learn better in a different way. In this example if you ignore the difference between the genders and say “we should all be treated the same” then women would continue to score lower. So perhaps the answer is not to ignore gender differences but acknowledging them.

I believe that there is no superior gender. We can have separate gender roles, responsibilities and inborn characteristics and still be equal as human beings. In fact there is something really quite wonderful about these differences. Something beautiful happens when we take the strengths of man and the strengths of a woman and unite them in marriage. Together working as a unit, they can achieve more and do more than they ever could on their own. Gender differences are not bad, they are essential.

Social class and the family

In class this week we discussed how social class effects the family.  First off we discussed all the functions that a family provides. They provide a support system, means such as food and shelter, security both physically and emotionally and they teach values to their children. So how does social class affect your ability to function as a family?

 Surprisingly, although social class can have an affect on the family function, it truly matters less about your social class, and more about where your priorities lie. The questions that really matters is what is most important to the parent? Are the parents putting the needs of their kids above their own? Are they not only providing physically but emotionally as well? You can come from the worst of situations and still have a loving family and you can come from the highest of places and be neglected and forgotten by your parents.

Parents of a lower social class may have a harder time meeting all the emotional needs of their children because they are spending most of their time trying to met their physical needs by working all day. These parents may have less time to teach their children or to spend quality time with them. This is not because they don’t love their children, they simply don’t have the time and energy to do it all. Other times a lower income might come short of meeting all the physical needs but it is still a very loving and nurturing environment. What I found most fascinating about his topic is that the biggest prediction of poverty is if you don’t have a dad in the home.

The upper class will not have any problems providing for the physical needs of their children but it is still possible for their children to be neglected emotionally. Too often families with high income get so caught up in their job and maintaining their high level of living that they neglect the emotional needs of their children. They hire a nanny so they can work longer hours. Perhaps both parents get a job.  They might want to go out and socialize on the weekends. This emotional neglect can be very damaging to kids.

My final conclusions are that social class will inevitably affect how your family functions, but in the end the ultimate decider of a happy family life is not the money, where you come from or what job you have. It all comes down to where you as a parent put your priorities. Our family relationships should and must come first above all else. Consider this, when you have lived your life and you are about to take your last breath, you are not going to be wishing you would had worked more hours so you could had got the boat or new car you wanted. You will not be wish that you would had focused more of your attention on having that career advancement. No, when all is said and done, you are going to wish you would of had more time with your spouse and children. You are going to regret the moments you missed and the opportunities you neglected to strengthen those bonds and relationships. Where are your priorities? Don't live your life with these regrets.