What is the PURPOSE of dating?
Did anyone ever speak to you about this? In your childhood, or in your adolescence?
It’s such a BIG question. A relevant question. A question with repercussions that will last the rest of your life.
I never asked the question. I never heard anyone ask it.
But I did receive … “answers” … that were inferred from books I read, movies I watched, and stories I heard the adults in my life tell me about their own experiences meeting the people who they eventually married.
There was some merit in those stories.
There were also assumptions and impressions embedded in those stories that ultimately some held risk for me.
Decades later, my oldest son suddenly had a girlfriend.
Oh, my! This was new territory for which I felt weirdly unprepared.
How was I supposed to define boundaries for him and for her? How much oversight? How much control? How much conversation? I really didn’t know. I really wasn’t sure. I wasn’t confident AT ALL about how to behave, because I had no clarity about the answer to the unasked question about the purpose of dating.
So that is how, and why, and when, the question shaped itself succinctly in my head for the very first time:
What IS the purpose of dating?
I suspect that most people haven’t asked the question, but that this is what they believe: that the purpose of dating is … to find somebody to love you.
Some might say it is … to find somebody to love.
The latter choice is a little less needy, and sounds a little more healthy, but I think both are inadequate; both imbalanced and unstable.
So here is the answer I’ve formulated, which I hope will be useful to some of you.
I believe there are three primary purposes of dating.
- The first purpose of dating is to PRACTICE being loving towards somebody else. Yes, we can be loving towards our parents and our siblings and our relatives and our friends and any person we meet, but romantic love is a specific variation on that theme. Every new skill requires repetition to improve, and dating is an opportunity to practice the skill of being-loving towards a romantic partner.
- The second purpose of dating is to DISCERN whether you a match (romantically) for a particular person. Not all puzzle pieces fit together comfortably. There are so many variables that make each one of us unique! Our interests, our personalities, our core values, our hobbies, our aesthetic preferences, our religious practices, our behaviors, our habits; all of these create a distinct shape for our own identity as a beautiful individual puzzle-piece. All of these variables can make our shape a mis-match for someone else as a romantic partner. I fully believe it’s possible to be cordial to anyone; friendly with anyone, but the stakes are so much higher for this category of relationship. Possible is not at all the same as wise. Possible is not at all the same as optimal. So, dating allows us to evaluate whether we are, or are not, potentially a good match with that other puzzle-piece of a person.
- The third purpose of dating, in my opinion, is a little trickier. It is to discover another answer, which is whether that other person brings out the best in you. We all know (to some extent) our strengths and gifts. We all know (to some extent) our quirks, flaws and weaknesses. And we all respond in certain ways to the characteristics of the people with whom we interact. Some of those characteristics will provoke us to respond in ways that make us “more” of what we perceive as our best possible selves. Some will tempt us to respond in ways that make us “less” than we want to be. Now the tricky part of this purpose is in the grammar, because the truth is that when we respond (to invitation or provocation or temptation) it is a choice that WE make ourselves. We may choose as an unconscious reflex, or consciously and thoughtfully, but we are the ones responding. We are, in the words of my NLP friends, “at cause”. The other person is not controlling us, so to say that THEY bring out the best in us is not quite correct. That grammar, even though it is familiar and sounds reasonable, adds a distortion because it suggests that they are the ones who should either receive the credit or get the blame. But it’s just a bit too unwieldly to say that the third purpose of dating is to observe whether your response to that other person is in alignment with your highest values and aspirations for yourself; whether the result of interacting with them is what you perceive as elevation of your best and truest self, or degradation of it instead.
Our relationships with other people are part of the tapestry of our lives. Dating is a very particular type of interaction, and I do not believe it should be frivolous. Ultimately, I believe it should be purposeful, in at least these three distinct ways.