A Return to Friendship

I have been astonished lately at the disconnect in my world between dating and marriage. As I talk to friends about dating woes, I realize that they (including myself) are "dating" people whom they have no relationship. No friendship. Nothing more than interacting a few times, going on dates, and hoping a sizzling romance appears. And we wonder why we aren't interested most the time. We go on 5 dates and feel nothing, and then it's over. We are puzzled why we aren't married and figure we must just need to date more. We feel if we aren't going on dates all the time we are failing at life. So we commit to spend more Friday nights with strangers and hope that one day it will work out. Something isn't quite right with this picture.

And I've come to see and believe truly that most of us, above all, long to find a companion and partner. Yet very often the very way that we look at each other and approach each other betrays our ability to find a fulfilling and lasting romance. We don't build relationships. We build superficial acquaintances that we hope will magically bloom into full-blown romance, and when they don't, we throw them away. We aren't paying the price and building the foundation.

We've lost the art of building relationships, friendships. Dating, at least the way most of us do it here at BYU, is bad preparation for marriage. In fact I don't think I know of anything more opposite to a marriage relationship than "dating".

Not that dating in and of itself is wrong. I'm not being a man or dating hater here. I just want to express that maybe dating fails because it is often built on a shallow foundation. Lacking the necessary preparations to make it successful.

I think a lot of it has to do with valuing the wrong things in each other. Or at least in the wrong order. We definitely want marriage and relationships. But we are trying to get there in the wrong order. And much of that is due to culture.We have been saturated in a culture of initially valuing others almost exclusively for their attractiveness. There is such an over-sexualization of our world right now, and it seeps into our interactions very easily. My friend calls it the "porn mentality". And it's not like you ever have to seek out porn to allow the way the world values beauty and looks to seep into your mentality and daily criteria for judging others. It is like water to the fish- we can't avoid it. It becomes an instant filter and reaction to others.

Our instant assessments of others often are based on superficial looks and superficial interactions. Again, to cope in the world, some of this is understandable. We all have to make certain instant assessments about those around us. We all do it. But this is bad criteria for dating.

The problem is when it becomes exclusively a culture of superficial self-interested interactions, that isn't followed by or in chorus with caring for others unconditionally. I feel like the scales have tipped to heavily to eyes of self-interest all the time. I feel like it needs to be the other way around.

Now yes, it's true we aren't supposed to marry or even want to marry everyone we meet. We can and need to have strict conditions on our romantic love. But I'm talking about the prerequisite conditions to even get to the point of considering that kind of relationships needs to be friendship and charity. Our pursuit of marriage  doesn't excuse us from the responsibility of learning to love and care for those around us first, even and especially when we are not romantically interested in them. My view is, to get to the kind of romance we want, it is only by paying the prices of the day in and day out exercise of charity with everyone. Romantic love should grow out of  charity, not the other way around. Often I feel we exercise charity only on those we are romantically interested in.

Thus we reduce our concern for others to "am I interested in dating you? Or not?" And we lose our humanity as we are reduced each other to objects of our "interest".

I am convinced that, while we have always had hormones as a race that spur on romance, in the past there was an especially strong and recognized emphasis in disciplining such thoughts, which allowed us to view someone much more holistically- Don Quixote sings in The Impossible Dream, "to love, pure and chaste from afar", knowing real love comes from the restraint of attraction while building mutual respect and admiration. To love others as a human being, and with an understanding that we need others and must bear with their weaknesses.


Yet what we long for is for someone to love us unconditionally. Absolutely, with the faults and the flaws, the bad hair days, the bad attitude days, and everything in between. Do we do the same when we meet and interact with others? Are we practicing that in any of our relationships? Why is there such a disconnect here?

My friend Philip makes time to go to his best friends' house because he's married and he knows he needs to step away from dating culture to be part of that culture of real relationships. You realize that it's about companionship, the friendship, the long-learned virtues of loyalty and patience with others weaknesses. And very little about how your companion looks. Where is this learned in our dating and choice of who we socialize with as singles?

We need to cultivate a culture of friendship first in dating and being interested.

We want instant connections, instant relationships, instant friendships without the long suffering and work to lay the foundation. We don't realize we have to pay the price through friendship and building lasting relationships. In fact, we don't understand lasting relationships. When we think of lasting relationships, we think only of marriage. These things ought not to be.

I am so grateful for those relationships in my life where I can practice patience, long-suffering, repentance, change, loyalty. They are priceless. They are the best marriage prep I have. Roommates, sisters in relief society, friends that call to see how life is. Men who care even when they aren't interested in pursuing you. So often we want to skip right to the end and think anything in between is a waste. This is not the truth. We are prolonging our miserable isolation by focusing so intensively on "dating" and not the foundation of friendship.

We need to care for each other authentically. In fact, I would say that until we begin to practice the true preparation for marriage and relationships, that even if we do by some miracle end up married (and it is a miracle that marriages can last with such a shallow foundation), that at some point we will come to the fundamental realization that the true happiness of love is loving others when they are not necessarily "interesting" to us. Until then, we are missing the selfless essence of true love.

I think this is why my Stake President once promised that our search for an eternal companion would be expedited in proportion to how well we did our home and visiting teaching. We need to learn how to really care about others without thought of personal interest. This question must come later. Our own determination to "just date" and just be content with either being "interested" or "not interested" in each other creates a self-imposed isolation makes us all miserable, alone, together.

Elder Bruce C. Hafen said, "Be friends first and sweethearts second." Lowell Bennion once said that relationships between young men and young women should be built like a pyramid. The base of the pyramid is friendship. And the ascending layers are built of things like time, understanding, respect, and restraint. Right at the top of the pyramid is a glittering little mystery called romance. And when weary travelers in the desert see that glitter on top of the pyramid from far off, they don't see what underlies the jewel to give it such prominence and hold it so high. Now, you don't have to be very smart to know that a pyramid won't stand up very long if you stand it on its point instead of its base. In other words, be friends first and sweethearts later, not the other way around. Otherwise, people who think they are sweethearts may discover they can't be very good friends, and by then it may be too late." (The Gospel and Romantic Love, Bruce C. Hafen)