In other words, you should connect enough to know whether or not you want to connect more in marriage. With each increase in emotional attachment you should add commitment. If you do this, you will get married fairly quickly. So guard your heart. Just like your emotions, planning for the future together in your Christian dating experience should coincide with increased levels of commitment.
The more commitment the two of you make, the more it makes sense to talk about the future. All you are going to do is increase your emotional intimacy which will influence your sexual desires, all while your commitment is too low for such feelings. If you want to keep your emotions and heart in healthy places during your Christian dating relationship, make sure you have healthy boundaries around conversations regarding the future. You can list a lot of fun things in Christian dating.
It should be fun. And one of the fun parts about dating is the hope it often brings. Hope is a joyful expectation of something good. While our hope should ultimately be in Jesus Christ, there should be healthy levels of hope for a dating relationship to progress into marriage. If there is no hope in a dating relationship, why would you be in it? But on the flipside, the unfulfilled hope of a dating relationship turning into a breakup rather than a marriage can make a heart sick.
Any breakup is going to hurt because all dating relationships have hope in them, and when hope is deferred the heart grows sick. The higher the hope was, the more the heart is going to hurt if that hope is deferred. Dating for a week and then breaking up will hurt but not nearly as bad as breaking up during the engagement period because your hope was so much bigger and closer to becoming reality.
Therefore you should put boundaries around your expectations and hopes in your Christian dating relationship.
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Ask God to give you healthy and realistic levels. List your goals for each season of the Christian dating relationship and try to balance your emotions with logic. Dating needs to be vulnerable. You just need to be wise as well. Hope deferred makes the heart sick. So to guard you heart, you need to make sure your levels of hope are appropriate for the season your Christian dating relationship is actually in.
If this one is not on your list of Christian dating boundaries, something is wrong with you. How far is too far? What are you aloud to do in dating? Anything done with your spouse is good. Anything done without your spouse is sin.
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I get these two categories from 1 Corinthians 7: So the Bible does not give us a list of sexual boundaries we are not to cross in Christian dating. Rather, again, it gives us two big categories we are to stay within: Sexual experiences away from your spouse are sin. Sexual experiences with your spouse are good. The trickier part will be to define what is an act rooted in sexual desire and what is an act that is simply a sign of affection.
Read the article for more on this. You can resist temptation if you put on the whole armor of God Eph. In fact, usually the opposite is true.
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It feels incredibly good to give in to passion. But, the authority of Christ needs to take precedence over your physical drives.
Building Strong Christian Relationships
Society tells you to give in to the moment. Christ tells you to be obedient to His word. Physical touch should be in the context of a meaningful relationship, not reduced to satisfaction of personal need. Both partners should take responsibility for setting limits. Mutual boundary keeping reflects maturity. What is your motivation -- power and control, gratifying your own ego, meeting a selfish need, or genuine affection?
If the social, emotional, spiritual dimensions are missing or lacking, you are out of balance. You should respect and honor each other.
If you are a teen, you must honor your parents and respect their counsel Ephesians 6: You are subject to parental authority. Linda Mintle is a author, professor, Approved Supervisor and Clinical member of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, as well as a licensed clinical social worker with over 20 years in psychotherapy practice. For more articles and info, visit www.