Danny ChaiIf I were to go back to college, you know one of the things that I’d do differently? I’d encourage Christians to date more. At least in the conservative Christian circles I was in, we had all these weird hangups about dating, calling it dirty or whatever. To be perfectly honest, I can’t even remember why. I’m sure we had good reasons, something about potential pain of heartbreak or treating dating too casually. But looking retrospectively after 10 (!) years, I think the opposite is, in the long-term, a worse problem.
One thing I’ve seen is that Christian guys who didn’t date in college occasionally just go crazy afterwards, in a bad way. It’s not good. It would have been better if we all learned how to date well in college. And that requires dating in college, without hangups about it being dirty or whatever. I kind of feel this way about other things also. Guys who didn’t drink in college started getting hammered afterwards. Or other things. I don’t know if it’s even possible to teach Christian drinking or Christian partying, maybe that’s a contradiction in terms. But like, when the implicit message in Christian fellowships to lots of things like dating or drinking is just don’t, we never learn to handle it well, and don’t handle it well when we leave college.
Or maybe it’s just an American problem, the not handling it well thing. I remember at one party early freshman year, I was avoiding it because I didn’t drink, and I was talking to a dorm-mate from Portugal, and we shared about our mutual disgust of that particular party scene. I asked if he didn’t drink also, and he said no, he did, he just didn’t understand why Americans had to get so trashed. That always made me think, maybe in Europe, where alcohol is no big deal, they know how to handle it better, that it’s just the U.S. where its alcohol restrictions make people go crazy in response.
Then again, some of my European coworkers were crazy drinkers so I might be totally wrong. In short, I have no idea what I’m talking about. Uh, I’m not advocating underage drinking, either, just to be clear. I’m not sure what I’m saying.
Anyway, dating. So like on the girls side, it must be hard. With guys, it’s sucks because we have to work up the courage to ask girls out and risk rejection. But with girls, you have to wait and hope that the right person approaches you. I can’t imagine how hard that must be. You can’t just hope to find the one, you have to hope you find the one and that he initiates with you. I do think this is how it should be, that guys should initiate, not for any chivalrous reasons or anything, but just because of the psychology of the sexes; things just work out better when the guy initiates. But it makes it hard on the women.
What I’ve seen is that, when Christian guys are shy about asking Christian girls out, girls get tired of waiting and start dating whoever else is asking them. And understandably so.
Therefore, were I back in college, I would encourage Christian guys to date more. I’ve mentioned this before, but Br@d Fulton did this thing where he encouraged creative dating, founded upon pretty much these same ideas, that if Christian guys don’t initiate with Christian girls, other guys will. So (I only went to the intro meeting he set up at Sundance, I think he implemented more with Crusade, right Wong?) he set up creative group dates where guys would ask girls out and they’d all go out together. I highly support this. Encouraging Christian guys to be more initiative-taking, and teaching them to date in good ways, like with group dating. Maybe if we did that, we wouldn’t have Christian guys going a little too crazy after college or Christian girls feeling like they’ll have to wait forever and giving up.