Dating Is Good for the Soul
Monday, June 30th, 2008Dating isn’t just a road to marriage — it’s spiritually good for you, too.
It’s Friday. You have a 7 p.m. date scheduled with someone you’ve had your eye on for a while—she’s smart, pretty, and funny. Just for kicks, you visit a fortune-teller for the inside scoop on your future with this girl. At first, the seer’s words lull you into what feels like eternal bliss: this date has great potential.
But she doesn’t stop there, and your steadily growing excitement is suddenly crushed like that scary bug you saw on the bathroom floor the night before. Apparently, after two years of relationship paradise, something will shift. Eventually, you will go your separate ways. Your once fluttering heart drops like a stone through your body.
Unfortunately for many singles, if someone could give us a damage/risk assessment for every possible date, we’d probably choose to remain at home alone in front of the TV instead of going out with anyone. Lurking behind the innocent question “Do you want to go for coffee?” lies the hope that this date will turn out to be a soul mate, that you will be compatible, and that you will build a future together.
Dating has spiritual value
Our culture’s obsession with marriage only furthers the idea that dating should be for the sake of marriage. This view of dating can easily make us forget that dating has spiritual value in and of itself. We need to stop focusing on its potential for marriage and accept its temporary nature. Dating can help us to grow spiritually — if we allow it to.
While it is not quite friendship and not quite marriage, dating shares similar qualities with both types of relationships. Through all of these relationships we learn about other people, and in turn about ourselves, who we are, what we like and dislike, and what it means to be in a good or not-so-good relationship.
The spark of intimacy that turns a dinner with a friend into a date is the same spark that holds the seeds of spiritual possibility.
Divine intimacy
Countless theologians and spiritual figures understand setting out on a spiritual path as waking up to the possibility of divine intimacy, an experience “sparked” in much the same way our interest in dating another person begins. Upon discovering God, Methodism founder John Wesley described his heart as strangely warmed, Catholic theologian Bernard Lonergan talked of suddenly falling in love and seeing the world anew, and the Persian poet Kahlil Gibran, urges that “when love beckons to you, follow him.” Hafiz, the fourteenth-century Sufi master and poet, described loving God as if a game of tag. In playing, God flirtatiously tags us as “It.”
As with divine love, going out on a date is like an invitation to mystery: the mystery being both the other person, as well as the depths within ourselves we have yet to discover. Dating encourages us to take leaps of faith into the unknown, to invest ourselves, even for a short time, in the idea of a relationship, in opening ourselves up to someone new, and in presenting ourselves in our best form.
There’s no denying that heartbreak is part of the deal, as it is with any relationship — marital, friendly, and even divine. No relationship comes with a guarantee, not even a godly one. A broken heart is not an indication that God is punishing us; it is the very human experience of knowing that we have loved, an experience foundational to spiritual growth, one that can lead to a deepening relationship with the divine, and a growing understanding within ourselves of what it means to love another.
Forget the need to know the future
If we allow it to, dating can encourage self-transcendence, asking of us that we forget the constant need to know the future, encouraging us instead to see another person as an end in themselves. Our contemporary dating sensibilities too often make us forget about the person before us in favor of the aisle we hope to walk down some time in the future. Rather than seeing our date as a person worth at least an hour of conversation, we instead subject them to our respective checklists and interview them as a means to another end: for the job as our future mate, forgetting the tried and true religious teaching of treating someone else as we would wish to be treated, as worthy of an investment of our time.
So, when 7 p.m. rolls around and your date comes by, reconsider your approach to the man or woman knocking on the door. We would do well to take the advice of that fourteenth century Sufi poet, and bask in the idea that at least for the night, we’ve been tagged as “It.” We are free to learn, share, and grow, whether it lasts the evening, or a lifetime.
