Guest Post: I Hugged Dating Hello, Part III: Developing Emotional Intimacy

A guest post by Molly

Part III of An Open Letter to Joshua Harris

“Before two people are ready for the responsibility of commitment, they should content themselves with friendship and wait on deep emotional intimacy. Exercising this patience will not handicap them relationally. In friendship, they can practice the skills of relating, caring, and sharing their lives with other people. In friendship, they can observe other people’s characters and begin to see what they’ll one day want in their mates” (78-79).

Dear Josh,

I don’t know about our readers, but relating to my friends, caring for them, and sharing in the joys and sorrows of their lives sounds like a fairly good definition of emotional intimacy. I don’t draw a boundary between “friendship” and “emotional intimacy,” yet I Kissed Dating Goodbye assures me that “friendship is about something other than the two people in the relationship; intimacy is about each other. In a true friendship, something outside the two friends brings them together” (130). As we discussed earlier with using one’s trust in God to deny one’s active participation in building relationships, waiting to build emotional intimacy isn’t enough. You have to work on it. Emotional intimacy is the point in any relationship—between friends, or lovers, or a parent and child—where your attention is fixated on the two of you as a cohesive unit, a merging of interests, enthusiasm, and caring. In the case of potential mates, such a relationship can (and should!) happily exist before marriage, require continued nurturing throughout your lifetimes, and won’t be limited to just your future spouse. And while we agree on that point, Josh, you seem to see the development of emotional intimacy as a linear process that originates from an initial commitment. [1] I believe that the development of emotional intimacy and commitment works as a progressive cycle; you cannot have one without pursuing the other.

Emotional intimacy is necessary for commitment, and commitment triggers a desire to deepen emotional intimacy. [2] You quote C.S. Lewis as saying “we picture lovers face to face, but friends side by side. Their eyes look ahead” (ibid). I want friends (and perhaps eventually a spouse) who are equally comfortable looking me in the eye as we confide in each other, at my side for our next grand adventure, and at my back for whatever battles we face.

When you’re raised to expect a fairy tale…

“They’re girls from my past,’ he answered sadly. ‘Anna, they don’t mean anything to me now…but I’ve given a part of my heart to each of them.’

‘I thought your heart was mine,’ she said.

‘It is, it is,’ he pleaded. ‘Everything that’s left is yours.’

A tear rolled down Anna’s cheek. Then she woke up. 

Anna told me about her dream in a letter. ‘When I awoke I felt so betrayed,’ she wrote. ‘But then I was struck with these sickening thoughts: How many men could line up next to me on my wedding day? How many times have I given my heart away in short-term relationships? Will I have anything left to give my future husband?’” (14).

Josh, I’ll start by giving some credit where it’s due: none of your books (to my knowledge) contain blatant references to the fairy-tale narrative so prevalent in Christian purity culture. Christine Gardner’s book Making Chastity Sexy contains a large section about female speakers at abstinence rallies (like True Love Waits) describing their courtship in details that echo a Disney script. The narrative usually details the female being swept off her feet by her “prince” on horseback [3] and galloping through the woods, being wooed with roses and poetry, and acquiring the “perfect dress,” [4] arriving at the ceremony by horse-drawn carriage, and culminating—in theory—in happily ever after. You don’t endorse the fairy tale. In fact, you cite your experience as a wedding videographer to remind us that this narrative is “beautiful and romantic, but it’s not reality” (166). And I thank you for that admission. You tell your readers that good marriages “require work, patience, self-discipline, sacrifice, and submission” (172). And—from my limited knowledge—that seems to be true.[5] While I appreciate your realism and your omission of the fairy tale narrative, I Kissed Dating Goodbye’s emphasis on remaining “emotionally pure” is far more troubling than daydreams of slaying dragons and climbing towers.

In the autumn of 2011, Libby recalled her experience with reading I Kissed Dating Goodbye as a teenager:

What I gleaned from Joshua Harris was that I should only ever have a relationship with one person, else I would be giving away pieces of my heart and would end up with marital discontent and problems. I should    marry the first man I loved, the first man I had a relationship with, for only then would my heart be intact and pure.

The concept of emotional purity has strong ties to the fairy tale narrative and our previous discussion of the problems inherent with trusting God to manage one’s social calendar. When young women are taught to believe that their “Prince Charming” will be (or has been) sent, delivered, and ordained by God, there is tremendous pressure to make the relationship work, even when it’s clearly not working because breaking up will result in not only a broken heart, but a heart that is no longer whole.

I’ve come to believe that purity culture views emotional intimacy as the most dangerous kind of relational intimacy—even more so than sexual intimacy— because our basic ability to feel affinity for another human being is seen as a constant threat to our bodily integrity and emotional well-being. You seem to think so, Josh, quoting Jeremiah 17:9—“the heart is wicked and deceitful; who can know it?” (179).

When I first read descriptions of failed relationships in I Kissed Dating Goodbye, I thought I was reading the testimonies of teenagers rather than adults of marrying age because of the ubiquitous descriptions of emotional devastation following the breakup of a short-term relationship, and I cannot help but think that growing up with an emphasis on “emotional purity” could do anything but compound the pain surrounding the dissolution of those unions. (I mean, sure, breakups can be devastating regardless of the philosophy you were raised in; that’s part and parcel of being able to feel emotion.)

So let’s be clear about a few things, Josh:

If you are raised to believe that human relationships are condemned to imperfection and dissatisfaction because they cannot compare to God’s divine love, you’re not just setting high standards for your future lover; you are setting impossible standards. You are setting yourself and your partner up for failure.

If you are raised to expect that, from day one, your life’s partner has been chosen by God for you and will someday end up as your spouse, you have been, despite the well-meant intentions of others, set up for failure.

If you are raised to believe your motives are inherently selfish, that you are not in control of your own physical impulses, and that harboring a crush on another person skews your priorities so badly that it can damage your relationship with a God who is ever-loving and everlasting, you have been set up for failure.

I think the ideal of emotional purity is downright blasphemous because it assumes that love—which I’ll define as philia (friendship) striving for agape (the unconditional love attributed to the Divine) with a periodic scoop of eros (lust) thrown in for good measure, if you’re lucky—is a finite resource. The doctrine takes the patient, kind, humble, calm, protective force that 1 Corinthians 13 tells us surpasses even hope and faith in its strength and tells us to lock that force away, to keep our emotions under constant control, and to feel only the “right” things. Hillary McFarland, author of Quivering Daughters is correct to remind us that to “guard [one’s] heart is to protect its worth, not ignore it” (90). Josh, I think our hearts are big enough (and, with time, well-protected enough) that nothing can be truly, permanently “taken” from us when we give parts of it away. I think God designed it that way in order to give us the closest approximation of divine grace we could have without us catching fire from the inside out due to the sheer ferocity of that love [7]. No one “will know we are Christians by our love” if we insist there’s a finite limit to how many people that our love can touch. While I appreciate I Kissed Dating Goodbye’s emphasis on community service and volunteer work, Christian service is more than working with others. It is being willing to empathize with others, to share in their story, or, to strike a middle ground between our viewpoints, to exchange a piece one’s heart for a bit of someone else’s. Christ’s narrative is one of self-sacrifice and loss out of love, and it is an unfortunate—but very true—fact of the human condition that each relationship we build contains an inherent certainty of loss.

Purity culture doesn’t prepare people for loss beyond “’til death do us part,” yet it’s not just death that can part us. Distance, priorities, and maturation manage to do that just as easily and (possibly more) frequently. Kissing “dating” goodbye in exchange for “courtship” doesn’t prevent loss; it only (hypothetically) reduces the number of opportunities to experience loss.

And tomorrow—or whenever the next installment is posted—we’ll finish the discussion of emotional intimacy by talking about loss, healthy self-care, and the types of fear you find in relational intimacy.

Molly

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Gentle (and Not-So-Gentle) Readers: Come back soon for Part IV of I Hugged Dating Hello, where I will write about both the importance of self-care and the fear of sex evident in I Kissed Dating Goodbye. ~ Molly

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Notes:

[1] Emotional intimacy exists with more than just your spouse (thank God, or, if that’s not your thing, thank your brain chemistry!). As far as I Kissed Dating Goodbye goes, however, marriage is the most important human relationship someone can have because you’re sharing a person’s body as well as his or her heart (28-29).

[2] “Commitment” nearly almost always connotes eventual sexual intimacy in I Kissed Dating Goodbye, despite (to my mind) all friendships and family relationships being a form of devotion and commitment.

[3] A public safety announcement: Based on the description of this feat in Gardner’s book, the groom is more likely to suffer a spinal fracture than to be rewarded with an assent from his intended betrothed. Incorporating large, fast, spookable animals into your wedding proposal is a risky venture. Please don’t do it. Thank you.

[4] Women are also constantly depicted as lost and needing rescued while men (and their faithful steeds) are always capable of providing rescue.

[5] Aside from the “submission” part, which is a troublesome term we’ll be dealing with when we talk about intellectual intimacy.

[6] McFarland, Hillary, and Megan Lindsay. Quivering Daughters: Hope and Healing for the Daughters of Patriarchy. Austin, TX: DarkLight, 2010. Print.

[7] I mentioned in the comments of Part II my perceived necessity of using religiously-loaded language to debate religious conservatives, so for the sake of this not blowing up into a huge creationism/evolution debate:
This seminarian understands the creation accounts in Genesis to be beautiful etiological myths (that are especially pretty in Hebrew!)  She’s usually not too bothered by other Christians reading Genesis literally; on an individual level it’s kind of cute. And then it makes its way into public schools and a generation of kids in Louisiana is growing up learning we rode dinosaurs and dragons were real and Daenerys Targaryen is the rightful ruler of the Iron Throne and NO, STOP, YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.

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