Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Online Dating Advice for Christians: 7 Things to Know Before You Swipe Right | Keith & Patrick

Episode Date: September 25, 2019

Every culture has a way of pairing people. In some cultures, it's arranged marriage and in our culture, it's dating. But over the last ten years, a new form of dating has appeared: Online dating via websites, social media, and dating apps. While some people want to give black and white answers—either we should or shouldn’t date online—we want to help Christians develop wisdom for online dating. Whether it’s dating or online dating or something else, every approach has pitfalls, requires discernment and demands wisdom. We’ll look at 7 questions we think every Christian should ask him or herself before they swipe right. Website: https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/about/sundays/ (https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/about/sundays/) Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheCrossingCOMO/ (https://www.facebook.com/TheCrossingCOMO/) Instagram: https://www.facebook.com/TheCrossingCOMO/ (https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/) Twitter: https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ (https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/) Support this podcast

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to drive across town. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. We've been talking about 1st Corinthians 13, which is Paul's definition of love. Now, the average person today, if you ask them what love is, they would think of romantic love. Now, that has very little to do with what Paul is talking about. But today, we are going to talk a little bit about that. We're going to talk about online dating. I think one reaction to online dating is that we say, oh, that's great or it's bad. And I think that's the wrong way to think about it. Every culture has had a way for people to move into a marriage commitment. And sometimes that's looked like arranged marriages, whatever. In our culture today, it looks like dating. And now in the 21st century,

it looks like online dating. So instead of saying that's good or bad, I think as Christians, we're better off saying, what's a wise way to approach the culture? way of developing relationships in getting to a point where you're ready to make a marital commitment. I think one good way to develop wisdom isn't to come up with a list of seven things you must do, but to come up with a list of questions you can ask yourself so that you can discern and think through what's the best way to do something like online dating. So instead of saying this is right or wrong, what if we said what kind of person am I becoming? So to help us think about what kind of person we may or may not end up becoming through the process of online dating,

we've come up with seven questions that we think it would be helpful for any Christian who's going to be doing online dating to think through. So this leads to our first question we think anybody should ask if they want to be wise in online dating. And that's what's your goal in dating. Now, here's the deal. That's obviously not just a question for people who are dating online. This can be a question for anybody who's dating out there. Because as I talk to lots of different people in their 20s and they're in the dating world, there's a lot of different reasons people go out. Sometimes people are going out because they're lonely. They just want a companion, someone to be around them, someone to text. I know a lot of people who are dating because they're looking for sexual

experiences. They want sexual partners. They want to feel good about their bodies and themselves. Whatever it is, that's their real drive. Now, what we're not saying is that every time you go out with someone, you have to say to yourself and to them, look, I'm interested in marriage and I'm evaluating you in light of whether or not you're going to be a good marriage partner. I think you can go out to have fun and meet people and have a broader social group. But if you're not at some point thinking I want to date in order to get married, that I'm looking for a person who I can make marital lifetime commitments to, then I don't think a lot of what we're going to say in this episode is really going to make much sense to you.

And remember, remember, remember. We're coming at this from a Christian perspective. So I think two Christians who are spending time together in a dating context need to be thinking that my ultimate goal here is to end up in a marriage. And it may or may not be with this person, but that's where I'm headed. If I'm not headed there, then I have no business continuing to date this person. That leads pretty well into our next question, which is, will online dating erode my commitment to commitment? That's kind of a weird way of framing it. But I read an Atlantic article and it tells the story of this guy who had been in a relationship for a long time, ends up breaking up, and he starts turning to online dating. And when he gets online, he realizes, oh my gosh, there are so many attractive women out who want to go on a date with me. And in the past, I could have never imagined this many women who would have wanted to go out on a date with me. And so he starts going on all these online dates and he finally meets somebody who really kind of likes and they end up moving in together. And they live to live to together for two years, but after two years, she up and moves. And on that exact same day,

he gets onto Match.com and starts online dating again. Now, here's the key part. He said, look, if there weren't lots of options out there, if I didn't know that I could just get back online and find someone else, I would have married her. I would have married her. And I think this applies to a lot of people who are online dating. Because we know there are so many different options available to us, it becomes really, really easy to just put off being committed. If you're not totally perfect, if you're not exactly what I think I want, well, there's a lot of other fish in the sea, and I'll find them. So I want to spend a little bit more time on this question because I think it's a really important one and counterintuitive. I think one of the

attractions of online dating is that you have lots of options and you can meet people outside of just where you work or go to church or your close circle of friends. And I think that's great, fantastic. But there's this idea out there called a paradox of choice. And the way we think about choice is that the more options I have, then that's better. But what studies have shown is that the more options you have leave you disappointed with the option that you chose. If you have a big box of chocolate, say 30 chocolates and you get to pick one versus if you have a box of six chocolates and you pick one, you'll be happier with the one you chose out of the six option box than the six option box than the one. the 30 option box because you're always going to be thinking, man, I bet you there was another one there that I would have liked even better than the one that I chose. Another way to think

about it. Think of The Bachelor. And in every person's dream, man or woman, to have all these options and then you get to pick one. And you can sort through their physical attractiveness, their interests, their personality, whatever. But why is it that so few of those couples that end up at the end of the show, end up married. I'm sure there are numerous reasons, including that it's a reality television show, right? But I think the paradox of choice comes back into it. And I'm always thinking, well, there's somebody else out there that might have been better. Maybe I should have picked the other man or woman inside the context of the show. So like Patrick's saying, when you know that all I have to do is go out there and find the perfect person online, it makes you

unwilling to live with the actual people that you're dating because here's the reality. Real people have flaws. They have things that you don't prefer. You have to work through conflict. An ideal person that doesn't really exist, but somewhere out there in the online dating world doesn't have flaws. Of course, that person isn't real and so you're never going to end up in a relationship with them. Yeah, I think it's one of the challenges is we're constantly comparing the real, the messy, person right in front of me to the ideal, the person who I think I can meet online, which actually leads to our third question, which is, am I being attracted to superficiality? And again, this is not just an online dating question. It's pretty easy to meet charming people who come across really

great and be attracted to them because it seems like they're perfect, because it seems like they have everything together. But when you're looking at people's profiles online, we all know the fact, right? They've chosen a picture that is their best picture. I was, hanging out with a guy and he does online dating and he was showing me how different parts of it worked and he showed me a picture of someone we both knew and my first thought was that doesn't look like them at all that's the most inaccurate picture of that person i've seen and that's probably true of almost everybody on social media we put our best picture it's not just our best picture it's the best version of ourselves and the profiles and so again one of the things that can attract us to coming back to the apps back

to online dating is that it's full of ideal people but that ideal is that ideal is that ideal is always superficial. So I think we have to ask ourselves a question, am I being attracted to superficiality or am I willing to be attracted to reality, to real people with all of their mess? And of course, it's not just the other people out there who are trying to fool you with their great picture, but it's also you that's trying to fool them. And so it's not just am I being attracted to superficiality, but is this making me a more superficial person? Now the fourth question is what are the pros and cons to dating within my community? We know the pro of online dating is that it expands the number of people that you can meet. And I think Patrick and I both know people who have met a future

spouse or have a great story about a meaningful relationship that came out of meeting someone through an online dating app that they would not have normally met within their social circle. but there are also cons to that. Again, I talk to a lot of people in their 20s, and I hear again and again, there's just no one for me to date here. There's no one for me to date. Everybody I talked to keeps telling me that there's no one there to date, which means that something isn't adding up.

People are looking to date. People want to meet someone, but for whatever reason, no one feels like they can do it inside of our community. And we're lucky here because we've got about a thousand-ish people in their 20s who are coming to this church. I mean, that's a lot of people to be dating. and yet everybody's saying there's no one here for me. And so it makes me want to ask the question,

is online dating taking you out of your community? Okay, let's go back to the days of arranged marriages. And we can all say that that's weird. It gives families too much control. I get all that. But one good thing is, is that the people who knew you best and cared about you the most would have been able to help you choose a mate

that would be good for you. All right, so let's pull that back in to our culture. And when you date within the context of your local community, then your friends get a chance to know this other person. They get a chance to watch you. They get a chance to give advice to you. And you see how this person you're dating interacts with your friends. Not only that, but you have a chance to know his or her character. You don't just have to go by what they said at dinner or what you've learned about them through the app or a few dates. You get to know what kind of person they've been over a period of time. You've been able to see their flaws. What are they like under

stress? Who are their friends? What kind of reputation do they have? And I'm not saying all that as perfect information, but you get to take it in and then sift through it. And you feel like you know this person a lot better, not necessarily from one-on-one interaction, but from being in the context of the same community. Yeah. So I think one thing I would beg anyone to do who's dating is before you get on to the app, just ask yourself the question. Are there people I could meet in my community? Are there places I could go inside of my church to meet other people? It can be hard and awkward to walk up to someone and introduce yourself and start a conversation. But I think those are skills anybody wants to have to be successful in life. Can I just jump in here one last thing

on this idea of dating within my community? And that comes down to the faith component. because when I meet a person on an app, they are able to designate their faith or not, and then that's all I have to go on. But if I'm a Christian who's serious about following Jesus, and I want to find another person who is serious about following Jesus, it's hard to do that in a context in which you're just finding out people over dinner or what their image that they're projecting is. But when you have seen them up close and personal in a community,

you get a sense, are they growing in their faith? Do they go to small group? Are they the kind of person that serves in their church? Whatever it is, you have a much better opportunity of finding a person who's on the same place spiritually with the same convictions and the same goals in their faith as you do. So again, this is for Christians. Christians need to think about the process that I'm using in my dating. Is it helping me find another person who is committed to the same biblical convictions that I am. I think it's easy when you're not married to idealize the situation of being married. We kind of have the sense of, oh, if I could just get married, if I could just find someone, then I'm going to be happy. Everything's going to be great. It's going to be some sort of storybook

situation. And while no one would ever say that, again, I think it's something that we believe. And because we believe it, we don't take seriously sometimes that the character of the person that I am dating right now isn't just something that matters right now. It's something that can matter for the rest of my life. Their beliefs about God and who Jesus is. It doesn't matter just right now. It's going to matter when we have children. And all of a sudden, we're having to have conversations about how we're going to raise them. These things aren't things that matter right now in the present. They're things that will actually continue to be amplified and matter more and more and more the older you get. And you don't want to be in a situation where you look back on your marriage and

think, what a terrible decision I've made. How did I get myself here? The next question I think I'd want anybody to ask is just do I have a wise plan? So I'm realistic. I realize that if you're single, you're probably going to try online dating at some point. And I hope you'll think through these questions as you're doing it. But if you're going to do online dating, you need a wise plan. Do you have a wise plan? Because it is so easy just to literally swipe right and find yourself caught up into some bad situation. So these are some of the things I've heard people do in dating that I think are really smart ways to do online dating. The first thing kind of goes to what we were just saying. Use apps that let you see mutual friends. So if you're on an app and it lets you see who this person

who you may go on a date with, you can see who their friends are and who your mutual friends are, you could reach out to those people and say, hey, do you know them? What do you know about them? What have you heard about them? That's a great step towards not just walking blindly into a date with a stranger. A second thing would be to chat with them. Again, those first level chats are going to be superficial. You can't believe, and you shouldn't believe everything. someone says. But having a conversation is certainly a better place to start. The third thing, is one of the best things I heard. This is from a woman who's done some online dating. She makes the first date super short. She'll usually try to plan it for about 30 minutes. Let's go get ice cream

together and then she'll plan something 30 minutes afterwards so she can leave. And it's just a way of saying, hey, I don't want to invest a ton of time and energy into this. Instead, I'm just going to get to really briefly know you and then I can reflect on it before I go back. I think the very last thing I would say is this, if you have abused online dating apps in the past, things like Tinder and you've used them to hook up with people to have very short-term sexual relationships, it might be wise for you personally to not use dating apps. Because what I've seen time and time again is that people have misused dating apps, continue to misuse dating apps. It's hard to backtrack once you've done it. That brings us to our seventh and final question, and that is, am I trusting Jesus with

my singleness? Again, this applies. to online dating, offline dating, any kind of dating. In our culture, as Patrick says, marriage has been idealized, and therefore people get anxious about, am I going to find a person? When am I going to find them? Sometimes it gets to the point we were saying, okay, my biological clock is ticking. Am I going to be able to have kids?

We have this vision of a storybook life, and everybody says a little different, but we start getting panicky if it isn't going the way we expected to when we expected it to go. So singleness is something to trust God with, just like we might trust them with our money or our time or career or lots of things in our life. We also have to come back and say, am I willing to trust Jesus with my singleness? Am I willing to say, Jesus, your will, not my will be done here?

Am I willing to go slow? Am I willing to wait for a person that shares my Christian convictions? and that's easier said than done. I've seen a lot of people who have gotten panicky and tried to take this into their own hands and tried to make it work and tried to justify why it's okay for them to go down this road with the person, even though their small group leader and their Christian friends think it's unwise. So it really comes back like almost everything does to a heart issue. And the person who is ready to do dating, whatever it's form, is the person who says, I'm content being single.

I'm happy in Christ. And I would like to have a relationship, but I don't need to have a relationship in order to have the life God wants me to live. Sometimes following Jesus requires costly obedience. You might not know this, but less than 1% of people in Japan are Christian. In fact, there's lots of people in Japan who have literally never heard the name of Jesus. And so that means that if you start following Jesus, there's a good chance that your family might disown you. And there's a good chance that you may never find a spouse. In fact, there's lots of Japanese women who are converting to Christianity, knowing that they will probably never meet

a Christian male who they could marry. They know that converting to Christianity, following Jesus, means giving up on their dreams of having a family, having a husband, having children. And yet they take the cost because they know that following Jesus is ultimately worth it. Now, I'm not saying that God is calling you if you're single right now to stay single or to give up having a family. That's not my point at all. My point is that if you're single right now, God might be calling you to some form of costly obedience. That might look like saying no to a date with someone who's not walking with Jesus. That might look like taking things a little bit slower than you normally would. It might look like trying to find someone in your real life human community, even though you know that shrinks down the pool,

even though you know that might take a little bit more work. I don't know exactly what the costly obedience might be, but I can be totally sure of this. The gain is worth it. Because when we pay the cost of obedience in our relationship with Jesus, we always get him at the end. Okay, let me run back through these questions. What kind of person do I want to become? what's my goal in any dating relationship? Will this erode my commitment to commitment? Well, this erode my ability to make commitments to people and stick with him? Am I attracted to superficiality or am I presenting a superficial image?

What are the pros and cons to dating within my community? Do I have a wise plan for my online dating? and am I trusting Jesus with my singleness? When I was dating the woman who became my wife, online dating wasn't even an option. So it's easy for me to sit back and try to find holes in it. That's not our heart. Every culture has a dating system.

Those dating systems can be used wisely and unwisely. So as Christians, we just want to help each other have a sort of biblical wisdom in this area, of our life. We hope this episode has been helpful. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps others find this podcast more easily. Also ask yourself who you could share this podcast with. Texting an episode to a friend or family member is a great way to help them grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations.