What about dating and marriage?

Question 11006.

Christian dating is a phrase the Bible never uses, and that alone should shape how confidently we answer this question. Courtship as we practise it is a modern arrangement, and anyone who claims chapter and verse for a particular method is stretching the text.

What Scripture does give us is a settled understanding of what marriage is, plain instruction about purity and honesty, and a great deal of wisdom about character. Put those together and you have more direction than most of the books on the subject manage between them.

Start with marriage, not with Christian dating

Every sensible conversation about Christian dating has to begin at the other end, with what marriage actually is. Jesus took the Pharisees back to the beginning: God made them male and female, a man leaves his father and mother and holds fast to his wife, and the two become one flesh (Matthew 19:4-6). Marriage is a covenant before God, lifelong by design, and it is not a contract with an exit clause.

Paul adds a further layer. Marriage pictures the relationship between Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5:31-32), which means a Christian marriage is a public display of something far larger than the two people in it. That raises the stakes considerably.

So the question underneath Christian dating is not whether you like each other. It is whether you are prepared to make and keep a covenant of that weight with this particular person, in front of God, for the rest of your life. Get that question in view and a good many lesser questions answer themselves.

Only in the Lord

The clearest boundary Scripture sets is that a believer should marry a believer. Paul says of a widow that she is free to marry whom she wishes, ‘only in the Lord’ (1 Corinthians 7:39), and he warns against being unequally yoked with unbelievers (2 Corinthians 6:14).

This is the point at which pastoral conversations about Christian dating most often become painful, because the person in front of me has usually already fallen in love. I have never found a gentle way to say it, so I say it plainly and early: the deepest thing about you cannot be shared with someone who does not share it, and the loneliness that follows is real and long.

Note what Paul does not say. He does not tell a believer already married to an unbeliever to leave; quite the opposite (1 Corinthians 7:12-14). The instruction governs whom you marry, not what you do once married. If you are already in that position, this is not a rebuke to you.

Character over chemistry

Attraction matters and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But attraction is the cheapest information available about a person, and it is the information that arrives first and speaks loudest. Christian dating that never gets past it is simply infatuation with a prayer at the end.

Look instead at the things Scripture keeps naming. Is this person honest when honesty costs? How do they treat people who can do nothing for them? What is their temper like when they are tired? Are they teachable? Proverbs is blunt that charm is deceitful and beauty is vain, and that the woman who fears the LORD is to be praised (Proverbs 31:30).

Watch them in their church as well as with you. Are they under authority anywhere? Do they serve when nobody is watching? A person’s relationship with the local congregation tells you a great deal about what they will be like at home in ten years, and I have never known that indicator to mislead.

Purity without shame or naivety

Scripture is not shy here. Flee from sexual immorality, Paul writes, since every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body (1 Corinthians 6:18). The word is porneia, and it covers the whole field rather than a narrow technicality.

So Christian dating means deciding in advance rather than in the moment. Decide where the line sits before you are tired, alone and fond of each other, because the decision made at eleven at night on a sofa is not really a decision at all. Keep company with other people. Let someone know where you are and what you are doing.

And if you have already crossed lines you regret, hear this properly. There is forgiveness in Jesus that is complete and not grudging, and no sexual history disqualifies you from a good marriage or from God’s welcome. Repentance means turning, not permanent shame, and any teaching that leaves a forgiven believer feeling permanently damaged goods has misrepresented the gospel.

Where the church fits

One of my objections to modern Christian dating is how private it has become. Two people conduct an entire relationship on their phones, largely unobserved, and the congregation only learns about it when an engagement is announced or a friendship collapses.

That is not how anything else in Christian life works. In an abundance of counsellors there is safety (Proverbs 11:14), and the people who have watched you for years can see things you cannot see about yourself. Invite them in early, and give real weight to what they say, particularly when it is not what you want to hear.

Parents come into this too, where the relationship is a healthy one. I do not hold that adult children need permission, and Scripture does not give parents a veto over an adult believer’s marriage. But wisdom takes counsel seriously from people with a long view and no romantic stake, and a settled life in a committed local church gives you exactly that.

Singleness is not a waiting room

Any honest discussion of Christian dating has to say that marriage is a good gift and not a requirement. Paul was single and considered it an advantage for undivided attention to the Lord (1 Corinthians 7:32-35). Jesus was single. Neither of them was living a reduced life.

Churches are often careless about this. We build our programmes around families, speak about marriage as the natural next step, and leave single believers feeling like a project awaiting completion. That is a failure of teaching before it is a failure of hospitality.

If you are single and would rather not be, I am not going to tell you that is easy or that contentment arrives on schedule. But I would resist building your life around a hope that may or may not come. Serve, give, work, and let a relationship find you doing something worthwhile rather than waiting by the window.

Practical wisdom for the years before marriage

Take your time. There is no virtue in a long, aimless relationship, and equally none in rushing to the altar in six months because the feelings are strong. You want to have seen each other tired, ill, disappointed and under pressure before you make promises about a lifetime.

Talk about the things people avoid. Money, children, where you would live, how you would handle in-laws, what you each expect of a Sunday, how decisions get made when you disagree. Couples who cannot discuss these before the wedding will not suddenly discover the vocabulary afterwards.

And be willing to end it. That is the hardest counsel in any account of Christian dating, and the one most often ignored. Ending a relationship that should not continue is painful and honourable. Continuing one out of guilt or momentum is neither, and it commits two people to a marriage begun in cowardice.

Two further matters are worth naming plainly, since couples rarely raise them until it is late. The first is how each of you handles conflict, because you will have plenty of it and the pattern you set now will harden. The second is whether either of you is quietly hoping the other will change after the wedding. Marry the person in front of you rather than the improved version you have imagined, because that version may never arrive and the disappointment will be nobody’s fault but your own. I have written elsewhere about how marriages come under attack, and most of it begins long before the vows are taken.

So, now what?

If you are in a relationship, ask what it is actually for. If marriage is not in view at all, be honest with yourself and with the other person about what you are doing and why.

If you are pursuing someone, do it openly, involve people who know you both, guard the other person’s purity as carefully as your own, and set the pace by what you would be glad to describe to your church rather than by what you can get away with.

And if you are single and weary of the subject, take heart. Your worth was settled at the cross and not at a wedding. What would it look like to spend this year serving God gladly where you are, rather than treating it as the interval before the real thing begins?

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

Genesis 2:24, ESV