They are years so full of life, emotion, changes, and new information. Filled with homework, football, video games, music, and of course…dating! Ah yes, the age-old ritual of dating…or is it? You know, dating really isn’t that old. It started somewhere around the 1920’s, when our modern-day culture was starting to move more towards and attitude of the here-and-now. Everybody’s mindset became more geared toward instant gratification. After dating became more common and widely accepted in our nation, many problems started arising in relationships. Divorce rates started to soar and pop music began singing songs about broken hearts (Harris, 1997). Is this ritual of dating the cause for all these problems? If so, then as Christians, should we abandon our society’s mating rituals and declare dating wrong or evil? This is the question that has puzzled me for many years, and so I now write on what my research into this controversial topic has thus far concluded.Before dating came into existence, there were a variety of different cultural approaches to marriage. Two of the most widely used have been courtship and arranged marriages. Courtship is where a young man, or possibly an older man, goes to the father of a girl that he knows to ask his permission to begin courting his daughter with the intent of marrying her. You couldn’t just court one person and then if it didn’t work out, break up and move on to the next person. Once you courted someone, you didn’t back out. You only courted if you intended to marry. Arranged marriages were totally different. In an arranged marriage, you had little to no say-so upon whom you would marry. Parents of one child got together with parents of another child and made the arrangements for their children to marry (Harris, 1997).So why does our culture do this dating thing? To answer that question, I think we first need to look at our need as humans for inti...
