Modern Dating and Its Pitfalls

Dating has changed a lot over the years; it is way different today than how it was even twenty-five years ago when our parents were dating. These days people do not go on dates with people unless they think they might like them, instead of going on a date to figure out if they like them. They are too afraid to ask people on a date until they "know them" when that is what you do on a date; you get to know someone. Before this people would go on lots of dates with lots of different people. Then once they found one person they really liked, and they could potentially see themselves marrying that person, they would court them, or start dating them exclusively. Then, once they progressed enough in their relationship and decided they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with that person, they would get engaged. After that they eventually got married.

Now this is not to say that we do things completely different nowadays, we simply tend to combine steps or completely skip some steps altogether. People will go on dates with just one person and then after a little while they decide to start exclusively dating that person, even though they have yet to date anyone else. The problem with this is that they do not know the qualities they really want in a spouse, since they have yet to look at the qualities of anyone else. Another thing that can happen, and is even more common in the Later Day Saint Culture, is people will get engaged without even dating that person first. They will get to know a person for a few weeks, get engaged, and then start going on dates once they are engaged. The steps of dating, courtship, engagement, and then marriage don't exist just to be inconvenient, they are there because they help create long lasting relationships.

Something else that is very common is online dating. People will meet someone online and sometimes meet up in person and explore the relationship further. However quite often what will happen is they will experience their entire relationship online until they get engaged, and then they will meet up in person. Quite a few problems can arise from this. People can very easily lie online. They can tell you things about how they act, look, their beliefs, etc., and it could all be completely untrue. Now this can also be the case with face to face dating, however it is a lot easier to lie in person than it is to lie online. You can never truly know someone unless you have met them face to face. One of the other issues that could come up is deciding where to live once you are married. If you date long distance like this you may think that it is only temporary, which it usually is, but then you have to come to a decision of who is going to uproot their lives in order to eliminate the distance. This kind of disagreement can very easily end a relationship.

Another common practice nowadays is cohabiting. People think that they should see how they well live with their partner before marrying them to test their compatibility. However the problem with this is that cohabiting life is not equivalent to married life. When people cohabit they still have two separate lives instead of sharing a life together. They have separate bank accounts, separate bills, separate responsibilities, and separate problems. Then once they finally get married (if they do end up getting married) they are used to living in this way, so they will keep up a lifestyle of having separate lives. This created distance and contention between them and tends to lead to a lot of problems, often times even divorce.

None of the statements or situations stated are hard and fast rules, they simply are very common occurrences in our modern society. So the best thing we can do is try to avoid the situations where these problems occur, or try to change the trends that occur due to these situations.