Courting and College

Points to Jonathan for proving to me once again that I am not insane. His comments on the student forum concerning courtship & college were almost word-for-word what I expressed to my mother in a miniature treatise on the subject about a month ago.

I began with this interesting insight: "Mom, I just realized something. Josh Harris never went to college!" This is true. Josh came to Gaithersburg MD instead, to train under C.J. Mahaney. Now, this doesn't mean that the relationship principles in I Kissed Dating Goodbye and Boy Meets Girl aren't spang-on. They are. But, as Jonathan rightly observed, courtship is meant to be lived out in a community of which the two families and especially the four parents are primary members and integral to the process.

Trying to do courtship right at college is just plain frustrating, from everything I've seen. Especially when I compare it to the courtship that my brother is walking out with one of my best friends here at home: night and day difference. Of course, there are problems on this end too. Mike recently quipped, "Our problem is that we have two functional (as opposed to dysfunctional) families, and they both want to spend time with us, and we don't have enough time!"

Mike is fully launched in his career, and Jessica is in nursing school even over the summer. They're kinda booked, especially since he leads a caregroup. Taking time with both of our busy families (whose schedules are almost impossible to mesh) is hard. To their credit, Mike and Jessica make the effort. The results are lovely in every way--it is such a delight! Mike is able to meet regularly with his courtee's father, and regularly talks with Dad about the courtship. Jessica lives at home, where she can receive the benefit of her wonderful mother's wisdom. It's just neat to see them walking through this season with so much humility and so much maturity. I attribute the former to the grace in their lives, and a large part of the latter to their parents' involvement.

Now, college. Most of my friends have courted somebody at some point, and there are times, watching them, when I thank God that he hasn't seen fit to put me in a similar position. It's tough. One always says that one won't lose focus on friends and become lost in just the other half of the couple. But one usually does, to some extent at least. The rare occasions when one or the other family (almost never both) is able to visit can be fraught with nerves and that nasty "what if they don't like me/my courtive?" feeling. Parents are never on the scene to offer their valuable (by "valuable" I mean priceless) wisdom.

It's just really hard to find perspective in an on-campus relationship. There's no one (except the engaged couples) who has gone before and can give you helpful observations. Your closest advisors are likely to be your single friends, who are well-meaning but frankly clueless. You spend every day all day with... guess who? There's never a break, never a chance to switch points of view (except summer, which is usually painful because you're used to being together all the time), and seldom anybody who knows how or when to challenge your behavior because, as I said before, they are your single friends and they're clueless. I know this because I've been one often enough. Or, if they are your friends who are in a relationship, they are clueless and emotional!

At this point I have moved well away from what Jonathan said, so don't blame him for any of it. My temporary conclusion--and if anybody cares to try and change my position, feel free. I seek to be highly persuadable, at least to good arguments--is that courtship at college is a higher degree of difficulty than courtship at home, requiring exceptionally close ties with one's parents, exceptional wisdom and perhaps even intuition on the parents' part, huge amounts of effort for everybody, and some unusual benefits. For example, you can't say you don't know the other person after you've been living on the same campus and spending most every day with them for one to two years (time given being the typical courtship longevity).

Yes, I think that's fair. There are distinct benefits to on-campus courtship, and I've been consistently blown away by the maturity of my friends who have courted on campus. The only claim I wish to make here is that it's harder (and should maybe be called something different) than the at-home version, and that I wouldn't care to try it without some pretty specific leading from God.

To conclude with a related but different concept, my mother made an observation the other day which fascinated me. We were talking with Mike and Jessica about this whole issue and about PHC, and she said something to this effect:

"It seems to me that there isn't necessarily all that much eros running around at PHC, but there is an awful lot of phileo. People are making really deep friendships. Maybe they are mistaking those friendships for exclusive romantic relationships."

Could it be that we think it somehow required of us to be in a committed, romantic, parent-approved relationship before we can have a close friend of the opposite gender?