Here is an excerpt of a conversation I had with my wife this morning at 6AM in our kitchen:
Me: “So a lot of people have emailed me about writing something on the book, I kissed dating goodbye.”
Gorgeous Wife: “Are you going to?”
Me: “I don’t know. I never read that book. My parents gave me, “Daring to date differently.” I read that one.”
Beautiful Wife: “Really? Read is the word you want to use in that sentence?”
Me: “Yeah, why?”
Smart Wife: “I dated you and very few things that you did struck me as the actions of someone that had read a Christian book on dating.”
Silence
Me: “OK, I didn’t read it. I looked at the back cover and the chapter titles. Not all of the chapter titles, but some of them.”
All that to say, I am probably not the best one to write about Christian dating books. And when you search for “Daring to Date Differently” on Amazon the only thing that comes up is a movie called, “The Monkey’s Mask” starring Kelly McGillis. Maybe that is why I sucked at dating. The book I read is no longer available which is never a good sign.
But here’s the thing about dating books for teens. I think they can be good, I do, I do. The teenage brain is pretty malleable. The challenge though is one authors Cloud and Townsend raised in one of their Boundaries books. They said, “People in denial are deaf to words, they can only respond to pain and loss.” So sometimes, when a teen believes they know everything there is to know about the world, all the words in all the books don’t make a difference. They are destined to make mistakes and hopefully learn from them. So give them books, give them lots of books, but know they might not learn what it means to have a broken heart until they actually have a broken heart.
My own daughters? They’re not dating until they are 52 and only then as a last resort if I see them heading down the path of becoming the crazy cat lady that is single, with hair down to her feet, eating soup for one and watching old episodes of Murder She Wrote and calling soap operas her “stories.”