Dating With a Purpose

Dating can be a tricky topic. You will find about as many opinions on it as you will find people to talk about it, and there is a lot of room for personal interpretation. 

That being said, there are good ways to date, and there are less than good ways to date. 

There has been a big shift in how dating works in the current era, when compared to how dating worked up until these past few generations. In the past, you were very likely to end up dating and marrying someone from your community. The main reason for this is pretty simple; the proximity and access to each other made it easy to meet and get along. With less forms of transportation, there was less reason and opportunity to travel far. 

Dating someone from your community has some advantages. You both grew up in the same area, so you will share things like friends, education, and culture. When you share these elements, you will already have a basis of understanding between each other, and you will have a better initial understanding of who it is that you're dating.

In our modern world, it is much more common for people to move far away from home for things like school and work. Suddenly, moving long distances is not as abnormal because of things like planes and cars. This can create some interesting situations for dating.

In my case, I did move across the country for school. All of the sudden, everyone around me was completely new. I had to make new friends, and get to know the people around me for the first time. While not inherently a bad thing, this does present its own set of interesting challenges. One thing that I noticed as I started to meet people from different states is that there are a lot of cultural elements that I am not familiar with.

    

When you approach dating with a mind to learn and compromise in healthy ways, then these cultural differences can create good opportunities for personal growth, but it could also go the other way. If you are not being very careful, you could find yourself coming into conflict with others because you have cultural differences that you had not thought of. 

That brings me to an important point: your intentions when going on dates can and will sculpt the outcomes of your relationships. The most observable example of this would be to think of two people who go on a date, but they do not desire the same outcome. If one person wants to simply have fun with people, and the other is searching for a relationship that can lead to marriage, they will eventually come to an impasse. 

Sometimes when we meet new people, it can be easy to get caught up in the "romance" of the moment. Things are fresh and exciting, and this element of mystery in the other person can excite us. This can easily backfire on us, though. We can begin to project our expectations onto this person before we really get to know them. Rather than making an attempt to truly get to know someone, we ascribe these lofty traits to them, and we might become disappointed when we think that they aren't who we imagined they were in our heads.

It is important to put forth an effort to get to know someone before you try to engage in any kind of serious relationship. There are many different ways that we interact with each other, and these create different forms of attachment. This can cause confusion, because in the case of something like physical touch, we might find that we can become physically attached to someone, and then find that we don't actually know them as a person very well. This could be a shocking revelation. If you aren't prioritizing getting to know a person first, then it can throw things off of balance.

It is good to put ourselves in situations with our dates that allow us to learn more about the other person, and to see how they react to different situations. Patterns and habits like this can form better relationships down the line, and prepare us for marriage.