the danger of preferential dating…

what is preferential dating?

most of my friends have heard me throw around the term more than once in the past few weeks and here i am again…

not even really sure where i got it from, or if it even gives you an accurate picture of what i’m referring to but for me it simply means shopping.

yeah, so, shopping… you pick out stuff that you like, you try on stuff, you steer clear of whole racks of clothing, you like different colors, basically you just want to find something that makes you look good.

wow, it’s not hard to imagine how that translates to dating. at all.

so, dating… you pick out people that you like, you try them out, you steer clear of whole personality types of people you don’t enjoy, you [even] like different colors and you basically want to find somebody who makes you look good [read: i want to date "up" in every category, not across or down].

so my problem is not that we like to shop, it’s that shopping sometimes makes us forget what we really NEED. like, i’m so worried about how this tank top fits me, that i don’t even remember that the purpose of clothing is to cover my body, keep me warm, etc. once again, i’m so worried about dating that i forget that the purpose of dating is to love someone. really love them. not for what they offer, not for their SES, not for their likes/dislikes but for love.

oh, and then we hit the nerve that reminds us that we don’t have a really super awesome working definition of love. i mean, we do. like: we force ourselves to love certain people (because we just KNOW we’ll never like them)… we love our lives (because i did cool things today on twitter)… we love our families (because if we didn’t say love, we would interchange strangle)… we love our friends (because they reciprocate). ok… so maybe we don’t.

i’m pretty sure it was God in the covenant with abraham that gave us the best definition of love and also the vision of how he would love the church well (there’s some strange, remote tie between the way Christ loves the church and the way husbands are supposed to love their wives but maybe i’m pulling that out of thin air). he essentially makes a covenant with abraham (and consequently with anyone who is in relationship with him) that says, “i love you. i love you so much, i’m going to sacrifice for you. i’m going to buy you out of your sinfulness with my blood. and i’m going to do it whether you keep your part or not. i want you to, i want you to love me like i love you, but this holds no matter what.”

and so then i look back at dating and i’m really confused. i don’t really know of a ton of people who are dating because they’re willing or wanting to enter a covenant with another person that requires so much. i see a LOT of people dating because they both play disc golf, both enjoy the same kind of movies/tv, both want to kayak, both want to chase the same dreams (or something), etc. i see a lot of people starting off on a selfish foot… a foot that is imagining what someone else is going to “do” or “be” for them and not wondering how they can best love selflessly with a covenantal love like Christ.

basically, i see a lot of shopping and not a whole lot of loving.

you see, at the end of the day those things, those preferences that we all have are just going to bridge the gap between liking someone [read: commonalities] and choosing to love them. if we go into marriages delighted because we’ve found someone who lines up with everything we ever dreamt of, we’re just waiting for the bridge to collapse.

i’m not saying i don’t like shopping either, i do. it allows me to be human and self-centered and have 1,000,000 different choices that i never needed (thanks adam and eve) but i am saying, when i find the perfect outfit, i hope it keeps me warm.

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