Serve God, Love Me, and Mend: To Date Well, Flourish First 

Editors’ Note: This is the third article in a week-long series offering practical advice for adolescents and young adults in the areas of family formation, vocation, career, and friendship. 

In the winter of 1938, a group of young people were ice-skating in Southern Indiana. A woman fell and a man swooped in, lifted her up, and kissed her cheek. “I don’t know you!” she protested. He grinned. “I’ve had my eye on you for quite some time,” he replied. 

It was always a treat to hear my grandparents tell the story of how they met—my grandfather looking like he’d won the lottery, my grandmother looking like she’d been (happily) hoodwinked. They were married sixty-eight years and raised four children together.  

But stories like these seem to live on only in nostalgia for a bygone era. For a variety of reasons, we have lost the script for dating and romance that leads to such stories, and the replacement scripts are not very good. The dominant culture claims to have no script while holding rigidly to unspoken expectations, one of which is that dating does not have to lead to marriage at all. This has resulted in not only a decline in marriage, but a decline in dating, as twenty and thirty-somethings pursue other ambitions, loiter in “situationships,” or cohabit with no intention of marrying. 

Individuals who want to marry—or at least to discern it—must choose from options that lack the spontaneity and spark many hope for: singles groups, dating apps, speed dating. One is left wondering whether a bad script is preferable to no script at all. And well-intentioned people—mostly married—offer all kinds of conflicting advice about how to date to find a spouse. I aim to tackle these seeming contradictions in order to show how each can be true and helpful for the Tough Mudder that is twenty-first-century dating. I will do so especially with an eye toward what is required during the early years of marriage, since what I can offer is the insight of nine years of marriage and three young children. 

Take Dating Seriously: But Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously 

You may know that person who brings too much gravitas to a first date, steering the conversation toward the traits of an ideal spouse or number of children, or asking palpably high-stakes questions veiled in casual conversation. Their logic: why waste time getting to know someone you probably won’t marry? The problem is that this has a consumeristic feel that reduces a person to an object to be scrutinized.  

True, anyone who takes dating seriously must remember that marriage is the goal. But even with this healthy teleology, you can—even should—enjoy being with the person you are dating. Seriousness need not be solemn, but it must be circumspect. Much can be observed from casual first dates. If someone is a poor sport at putt-putt, he may not play well with a sub-rational five-year-old. If she doesn’t treat the waiter well, it speaks volumes about how she will treat you or your children when she is angry. 

There is continuity from how a person handles the most rudimentary parts of life to being in a successful marriage, so much so that in the early stages of a relationship you need ask yourself no other question than, “Could I see myself with this person?”  

During the first few dates with my now-husband, I remember sensing that some story was opening up before me. I didn’t know the ending, and I wasn’t sure what he was thinking, but this sense was enough to convince me that further dates were warranted. It was only several months later that we began seriously talking about marriage, and by that point, we had enough shared everyday experiences that we were not surprised by one another’s answers to the more serious questions.

Be Willing to Compromise: But Don’t Settle 

Many years ago, a friend met her now-husband on Catholic Match and told me about their first date, which she really enjoyed. “He’s going bald,” she shrugged. I could tell by the way she said this that “going bald” was not among her traits in an ideal spouse. Years later, now that he really is bald and she is going gray, it matters little. 

Most people accept both that some level of attraction is essential for dating, and that a potential partner might not fit all the ideal accidental qualities. Still, people are written off too quickly. Are you willing to miss out on an incredible person because he’s not your “type,” he has a hobby you find weird or boring, or because age has been unkind to him in different ways than it has been to you? The flip side of this is caring nothing for appearance, which can be equally disastrous. Health is a virtue of the body, says Aristotle. 

But beyond the skin-deep, it is important to know what your non-negotiables are and why. I once asked a boyfriend what he’d do if his daughter wanted to be sexually active in high school, and he had no advice to offer except to “be careful.” I knew then that this man and I could not parent together, no matter how much I cared for him, or how much else we had in common.  

My husband and I agree that that life begins at conception and ends at natural death and that humans are fulfilled in self-gift and ultimately made for beatitude, which requires the cultivation of virtues within a community that desires the same. We agree less on whether Don Giovanni makes good breakfast music or how to live out Saint Basil’s injunction, “the extra coat in your closet belongs to the poor.” And I have other happily married friends, English, who didn’t cast Brexit votes because they knew they would cancel each other out.  

How you navigate life’s big questions is as important as what your ideals are, for in marriage and parenting, new questions come up all the time—and often before you’re really ready for them, if children are involved. You need to have enough respect for your spouse that you entertain the possibility that they may have a better answer to a problem than you. You need to be able to explain your reasoning, the pros and cons behind it, and then ask with complete sincerity, “What do you think?”  

There Is No Spouse-Finding Formula: But a General Script Helps 

We can lament the modern dating scene all we want while being grateful that our fate is not in the hands of our father and some woman named Yente, or that we do not have to learn all the steps of the Quadrille for a coming-out party. Still, dating lacks structure to such an extent that it is possible to be on a date without even knowing it, as I once unpleasantly discovered when I went out to talk shop with a colleague over a beer. As Kerry Cronin has said, having a general script, a set of low-level expectations for dating, brings welcome parameters that lead to greater freedom when dating. A non-negotiable for her is using the word “date” to avoid ambiguity. It is also essential to be straightforward about the likelihood of things continuing. It is acceptable and even charitable to say, “I’m not sure we’re compatible, but I’d like to spend a little more time with you to figure it out,” or “I’m grateful for this time but I can’t see myself moving forward with you.”  

We should also be prepared to be merciful when there are failures in communication. A woman who thinks she’s giving a guy a fair shot might be accused of leading him on. A man who breaks things off because of a lack of attraction might be called superficial. But if you might really marry this person, it’s good to practice clear and merciful communication from the start: good communication is a bedrock of marriage. And communication in dating compares to that in marriage like tee-ball compares to the big leagues. Marriage does not really feel like one long date. It feels like you missed your train on the way home from the date, because one person lost your luggage and the other was cavalier about the schedule, and now you have to find alternate travel plans, a process that somehow triggers all your fears of inadequacy and decades of childhood wounds, all while small humans ask you nonsensical questions and demand snacks. This is not to say marriage is miserable—far from it. This can all be quite manageable and even funny if you’re with the right person and you know how to talk to one another. 

Tend to Your Wounds: But Know That a Healthy Relationship Can Heal You, Too 

One of the most difficult things about dating today is that people seem to carry with them a great number of wounds, some beyond their control and some self-inflicted. It is important to recognize that everyone is broken—and not even a little, but very deeply—and to commit to dating is to commit to sharing life with other people who are deeply broken. 

It is crucial to begin working on healing these wounds as a single person. “The married man is concerned about the things of this world” (1 Cor 7:33), and it is difficult to keep up the pace of marriage and family life when unresolved trauma or vices won’t leave you alone. One luxury of the single life is the freedom to devote time and energy to mending oneself.  

It is especially crucial to focus on developing the virtue of chastity. Nathaniel Peters writes on this subject: 

I’ve come to see chastity as primarily a question of freedom: we are more free and more satisfied when we relate to others without trying to possess them, when we appreciate beauty and excellence without needing to grasp it for our own. In this sense, chastity is an integration of our senses, intellectual powers, and actions: a way of being more holistically directed toward our happiness regardless of the desires and attractions we experience.  

Certain virtues, like fortitude, come into play later in relationships, but chastity is a great gift you can give to your date, or partner, or spouse from the outset. Yet the beautiful thing about a good relationship or a good marriage is that it can be a balm for some of these wounds. Thomas Aquinas says that marriage, like all sacraments, is a remedium, an occasion in which God’s grace helps the spouses temper one another’s sinful dispositions and provide a healing that leads to true freedom. This is true at the natural level as well. Spousal love requires both a tenderness that can speak to the hurt child hidden in the other, and a severity that demands one grow out of childish self-centeredness.  

Spousal love also demands a strength to do the work of two people. Sometimes—most times—a partnership is not split fifty-fifty, but one spouse gives 100 percent so the other can rest, grieve, or heal. As Benedick says to Beatrice, “Serve God, love me, and mend.” 

You Are Enough: But You Were Not Made to be Alone 

As a single person I had an abundance of time to spend at my discretion, to the envy of my married friends. The weekends stretched before me like a banquet. I learned how to play the tin whistle badly, trained for a trail run, and volunteered at a homeless shelter. I made a career change and freely bore all the sacrifices that required.  

There is no reason to see any of this as frivolous, to see oneself in a holding pattern until one’s “real” vocation kicks in. This is a beautiful time of life in which you can discover your interests and make a gift of yourself to the community in ways married people cannot. There are times, now, when I see a social need in my community and lament that I don’t have evenings and weekends to devote to it. 

Yet so often, I remember wishing I could more deeply share that time. I wanted to share the joys and sorrows of life with a spouse. I missed him at Christmas, though I did not yet know him. I wished he could have known my grandpa. These desires were intimations of the vocation I now live, and I laugh at how I romanticized them.  

No matter our vocation, we were never meant to be alone. Pope St. John Paul II often quoted a line from Gaudium et Spes: “Man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.” Marriage requires constantly pouring ourselves out for our spouse and family—whether we feel like it or not—for the kind of love that married life requires is not merely transactional. It is an ecstatic love, a kind of daily, scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel love that confounds give and take, balance and predictability.  

The most important thing single persons can do, I wager, is to pursue such love in their own lives now. It will strengthen a marriage, but it is also the surest path to fulfillment in the present.  

And remember: very few things in life look like a good story as they are happening. The best stories are retrospective. We can’t go looking for one; we have to busy ourselves about living in one.  

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.