Posted on 11/10/2004 3:52:01 PM PST by iheartusa
There is a growing debate within Catholic circles surrounding the merits of courtship as opposed to dating. As the youngest canon lawyer in North America, I am less than a decade removed from my teenage years, and I also served as a canonical adviser to various adolescent-orientated Catholic apostolates. Therefore, I keep in touch with what-is current among today's youth. Yet I am also experienced with marriage tribunal ministry, where I regularly encounter broken marriages.
My experiences with canon law and teenagers have taught me a thing or two about what constitutes unhealthy teenage dating behavior, as well as what type of courtship leads to healthy marriages. Allow me to share this advice with teenagers and parents whose teenagers are of courting age.
Do Not Date Don't date. This will seem like rather strange advice, given the fact this reflection is about teenage dating. When one talks about boyfriends or girlfriends in our current age, however, too often the emphasis is on the "boy" or "girl" rather than the "friend." I often witness relationships fail because the couple is romantically involved before they get the chance to know one another. What do I suggest to teenagers as a substitute for dating? Be friends with members of the opposite gender, hang out, but do not call these social outings dates or think of these as such. Rather, think of these outings as an opportunity to deepen your friendships. Sooner or later, you will find yourself hanging out more and more with one particular friend, and this is much more likely to lead to a healthy marriage.
A Single Warning Suffices While teenage boys are a little different, most adolescent girls I know do not set out in a relationship to lose their virginity. Rather, it happens in a moment of weakness, usually alone somewhere as the couple carouse, after the girl has incrementally yielded to a series of moral compromises. Therefore, I suggest teenagers give the object of their courtship one warning that they intend to save sexual intimacy until marriage. If the suitor then puts pressure on you to compromise in this regard, ditch him or her immediately. Again, this is both my tribunal experience and my pastoral experience with teenagers: If your suitor does not respect your Catholic morality even after you have warned him, either you will eventually give in or the relationship will eventually fail. More often than not, the result is both.
Adult Supervision Stay near adults. In other words, go to movies, go out for dinner or coffee, but do so in well-populated areas where there are always adults nearby. You do not have to drag your mom along, but keep to public places. If your potential suitor wishes to talk privately, discussion can take place in a restaurant booth. If your potential suitor wants to go somewhere quiet with you, find a nice concert hall or museum.
You can talk privately and spend quiet time together in these places, because the people around you will not notice when you do exactly that -spend quiet time together and talk privately. The same people, however, will notice if this is not what you are doing. This is why you are infinitely less likely to morally compromise yourself when adults are nearby.
Zero Tolerance For Violence One punch is one too many. If your potential suitor hits or physically abuses you once, it will happen again. In all my experiences dealing with marriage tribunals and youth apostolates, I have never seen physical abuse end with one incident, unless the victim ended the relationship after that one incident. So if you get punched, either get rid of the person immediately or prepare yourself for future abuse. Your potential suitor will say the violence was accidental because he was angry, and he may apologize, profess his love, and promise you it will never happen again.
He probably means it and intends to follow through. If he hits you once, however, he is not in control of his temper. Until he gets help and brings his temper under control, he is in no condition to court. Therefore, out of Christian charity you should forgive him; however, out of this same love you need to dump him and carefully tell him the truth: Until he gets counseling for his violent temper, he is not ready to court.
Just Say No Learn to say no. This applies to any situation in which you believe your potential suitor is leading you to compromise your Catholic faith and morals. Again, most teenagers do not go out looking for compromising situations; rather these situations arise because adolescence is an awkward time when young people are trying to fit in, which leads to a certain group mentality taking over. Be an individual, and learn to say no in awkward situations.
No Pornography If your potential suitor is into pornography, either he ditches it or you ditch him. This may seem like a harmless activity, but from my tribunal experience I have come to realize just how unhealthy are the expectations pornography creates in marriage. It severely undermines the marriage covenant because one spouse looks upon the other as an object of pleasure, rather than as a spouse.
Quite often, the addicted spouse gets bored with the other after a year or two, and as a result pressures the other spouse into doing the same things witnessed in those filthy magazines.
If you read Pope John Paul II's Familiaris Consortio, you will learn that in marriage the couple give themselves over to the other totally. This means physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically. Spiritually, however, pornography can, and often will, prevent a sacramental marriage from being entered into. In short, pornography creates mental, emotional, spiritual, and psychological barriers that prevent one spouse from totally giving himself over to the other. Pornography fragments the focus of one's sexual desire, and thus one no longer focuses exclusively on one's spouse.
Jesus Loves You "Jesus loves you": This is the most gentle way I could think of to introduce the subject of "fat and ugly" comments. Nevertheless, this is something I witnessed all the time as a teenager, as well as something I regularly come across in tribunal ministry. Many teenagers are pressured to compromise their moral virtue because their date tells them they are fat, ugly, goofy, or some other derogatory comment that plays off adolescent insecurity. Girls are particularly vulnerable to this tactic, especially when they come from one of the following backgrounds: abusive; few prior courting opportunities; previous difficult or unhealthy dating relationships; extreme insecurity about their looks which leads them to wonder whether any guy will find them attractive.
Often, such an adolescent becomes desperate to latch on to the first potential suitor who gives him or her the slightest attention. Using the example of a teenage girl, the boyfriend will assure her he loves her, while asserting that nobody else will date her because she is overweight, unattractive, socially inept, or some other reason. If she does not wish to lose him, he states, she must prove her love for him by engaging in premarital sexual relations. Granted, adolescence can be cruel to those whom Hollywood deems less than cosmetically perfect, but this, usually passes by one's senior year, when many an ugly duckling becomes a beautiful swan. Furthermore, God loves you, as does that special person whom God has chosen for you to marry, provided He has not called you to a higher vocation of the priesthood of the religious life. Who does not love you is the potential suitor pressuring you to compromise yourself before marriage. So beyond the usual moral and religious issues, pause for a second and ask yourself why you would give yourself to a person who thinks you are an unattractive loser and who lies abut loving you.
Go Dutch This is the most controversial piece of advice I give teenagers looking to court. Granted, it goes against our established custom in North America, but it is also a piece of advice I received from a youth minister whose pastoral experience with inner-city youth ministry corroborates my experience on the tribunal. Thus, given our present cultural expectations, a little adjustment to the custom of courtship is warranted. To explain, guys were originally expected to pay the girl's way because this offered an opportunity for the girl to judge the guy as a potential provider for the family. This was before our culture degenerated to the point where instant gratification may be purchased. In short, quite often when a guy pays a girl's way, he unconsciously expects something by way of sexual gratification: in return. Therefore, girls, pay your own way. If you do this, a guy is less likely to expect something in return. This also makes you more assertive, and thus more resistant, should a situation arise in which you are pressured to compromise your Catholic faith and morals.
On the other hand, in keeping with the spirit of the former custom, do not pay a guy's way. If he never has money, either because he has not earned it or because he cannot resist spending it, then he probably not be a good provider in marriage
Concluding Remarks None of this advice is totally infallible. As long as human beings possess, free will, and as long as our fallen natures tempt us to sin, like everyone else, teenagers are free to choose between good and evil. Nevertheless, when you are courting a potential spouse, these points will help you make the right decision by protecting you from situations in which it becomes easier to make the wrong decisions
I'm the guy means well, but it sounds, well, hokey. Nothing short of hokey. For some reason, the whole thing makes me picture the author in pajamas, a covering bathrobe, slippers and a pipe. Something straight out of 50's sitcom.
No, but they don't go out to dinner any less. That is to say I want to know when this golden era of dating supposedly existed. As I've said in another thread, todays generation couldn't be any more promiscuous than mine, and I have it on good authority that the woodstock generation prior to mine wasn't exactly chaste. Then if we go back and read about the life and times of people like say Henry Miller, we have wonder if it was ever really any different.
I didn't realize it until you mentioned it, but I know a cannon engineer married to a domestic lawyer.
I just printed the article for our 16-1/2 yr. old daughter!
Hey, back when I was a teenage boy, I would do just about anything to get into a girl's panties, even, gasp!, talk to them.
Ping
Bump!
They don't change with age, from my experience.
You are exactly right in that today's youth does not date. In fact, that term has practically fallen out of the lexicon. The positive side of this is that in a way it fits very well with the first piece of advice from this article, to develop friendships first. Casual sex has always been a reality for some teenagers, but at least now there is a much stronger focus on friendship and developing a larger social circle. It seems to me that girls (or guys) who want to remain chaste actually have it easier now, in a way.
I was 16 when woodstock was held. I was also the product of 12 years of Catholic school and was subject to a bit more parental control than some, though many girls in my school had the same parental demands, so I didn't consider myself unusual.
There may not have been a golden age of dating, but I think that, up until recently, there was a golden age of being a teenager. For many years you could just hang out w/your friends, be involved in scouts and school activities and not be thought of as a nerd. You were just a teen having fun. Now you've got young kids worried about STDs and pregnancies, things that weren't even on my radar because my lifestyle didn't include the sexually active dating that is commonplace among high schoolers today.
I have a 27 yr old son. I think I gave him a lot of freedom, but I tried to emphasize that the sex stuff was secondary to his development as a human being and his selection of decent people (male and female) to be his friends.
But I coupled that with not being stupid - he didn't have a lot of unsupervised time as a teen; what the Church used to call 'near occaissions of sin.' I think that's an error that parents make - they assume kids have more maturity than they do and then they leave them alone where they're almost sure to get into trouble.
Dating advice *ping*
I think on the East and Left Coasts it probably went out of fashion in the middle to late 1960s. It hung on a bit longer in cultural backwaters like the Midwest. I actually went out on "dates" like that in high school (LONG ago; I was graduated in 1971) but it was definitely considered an "uncool" thing to do by the time I was out of high school.
People have always fooled around. General Pershing tried to keep his WW I troops out of the brothels of Paris (with varying success), and the song was born, "How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm / After they've seen Paree?"
Men in WW II had affairs with Italian and French women, but that didn't stop them from returning to the US postwar and building families in the suburbs.
The "beatniks" (1950s precursors to the hippies) had a similar emphasis on 'free love.'
The major difference until the late 1960s is that all these deviations from the ideal were kept "under the sheets," so to speak, and weren't bragged about in mixed or polite company. Birth control before the pill was not so convenient and required forethought. Abortion was largely unobtainable. That kept a bit of a damper on things.
But in short, "dating" among teenagers is very last-century, and exists only in the minds of conservative "courtship" advocates.
One Additional: Realize that when dating as a teenager you are probably NOT in a relationship with your future spouse.
Thanks for the Ping, I can use it. LOL
Bumping back up for Anoreth ...
But I have to say, this guy's not conservative enough for ME! (And yes, I expect to be whomped upside the head by reality eventually ...)
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