Growing up on the conservative Christian homeschooling culture of courtship and purity rings made a lot of things about boy-girl interactions different.\u00a0Everything was ramped up, accelerated\u00a0somehow. Our mothers jumped straight from simple attractions on our part to the possibility of marriage. We did too.<\/p>\n
I still remember my first crush. I was seven. He was nine. I was homeschooled, but he wasn\u2019t. My mother and his mother knew each other from church. Finally, I got up the courage to ask him what he wanted to be when he grew up, to see if our life visions were compatible. He said he wanted to be a basketball player. I knew that almost certainly wouldn\u2019t happen, and that even if it did, the longterm prospects were slim. This declaration on his part made him seem unwise, and thus definitely an unsuitable partner. How would I be able to submit to his headship when his life ambition was basketball player?<\/em>\u00a0I still thought he was cute and all, but my crush was for all intents and purposes over, because I knew there was nothing there for us.<\/p>\n We were told we shouldn\u2019t date until we were ready for marriage. Well, they told us we shouldn\u2019t date at all, that we should court, but that those relationships should not begin before each party was ready to marry. In other words, guy-girl relationships were intrinsically tied to marriage. Guy-girl relationships that weren\u2019t marriage-oriented were wrong and would have all sorts of consequences.<\/p>\n In this context, it\u2019s not surprising that we children would immediately\u00a0jump to thoughts of\u00a0marriage upon even the slightest crush. Were there prospects? Could we possibly end up married, someday? If no, attraction must be crushed. If yes? Well, one can dream, right? I mean, I might be 14 and he might be 16, and we may\u00a0not be ready for marriage and I might\u00a0be too afraid of the opposite sex to talk to him anyway, but the most important pressing question is whether maybe, someday, we might be compatible and in a position to marry, right?<\/p>\n There was one young man whom I had always found gangly and awkward and unattractive, but when I headed off to college I learned that he was\u00a0headed off to university to study engineering. Hmm, I thought. That\u2019s good prospects. Maybe I should reconsider how I felt about him? If I played my cards right, perhaps there might be something there. After all, we had the same beliefs and background. Like me, he was from a large homeschooling family, even more conservative than mine if anything.<\/p>\n Reading that now, I\u2019m struck by how mercenary it was. But that was my reality.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think it\u2019s helpful to ramp the pressure up to 100 and insert the marriage question into the slightest childhood crush. Most people will have multiple relationships before they meet the person they marry, and that\u2019s actually a good thing, because it\u2019s how we learn and grow. I was taught growing up that we give away \u201cpieces of our heart\u201d every time we have a relationship. The ideal, I was taught, was for my\u00a0very first relationship to lead to marriage. But the truth is that we learn and grow through our relationships. My husband wouldn\u2019t be the person he is today if he hadn\u2019t dated the two women he dated before me\u2014and I like<\/em> the person he is today. Far from depriving me of\u00a0pieces of his heart, those\u00a0two relationships improved him.<\/p>\n But perhaps what I find most unhealthy about this whole pieces-of-your-heart\/your-first-relationship-should-lead-to-marriage ideal is what it means for young men and women who begin a relationship and find it turning south, only to feel that leaving the relationship is not an option. I know women today who found themselves\u00a0in abusive relationships\u2014yes, good evangelical homeschooled girls who followed the rules and courted good evangelical homeschooled boys\u2014only to feel trapped. Leaving was out of the question\u2014leaving meant not simply relationship failure but comprehensive life failure, and things lost that could never be retrieved.<\/p>\n I know what I\u2019m going to tell my children: It\u2019s okay. It doesn\u2019t\u00a0have to mean more than you want it to mean.\u00a0Enjoy the moment. Focus on building healthy and fulfilling relationships rather than trying to force\u00a0things toward marriage. Oh, and also? Sometimes a crush is just a crush. And that\u2019s okay.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Growing up on the conservative Christian homeschooling culture of courtship and purity rings made a lot of things about boy-girl interactions different. Everything was ramped up, accelerated somehow. Our mothers jumped straight from simple attractions on our part to the possibility of marriage. We did too. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":845,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[132,106],"class_list":["post-23326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-purity","tag-courtship","tag-marriage-2"],"yoast_head":"\n