Faith

Picture the scene: you’re on the train or the bus, thinking about joining a dating website, and contemplating which one to choose. Or perhaps you’re feeling disillusioned because you’ve been online for a while and you keep meeting people who look great in their profile, but turn out to be everything you don’t want in real life.

Most of us hope that our future will include love and marriage. After all, that’s why we’re on a dating website: to meet a life partner! But the church’s focus on married couples and families means that many of us grow up believing we won’t be fully-fledged adults until we manage to secure a spouse. It’s easy to pick up the idea that life doesn’t really begin until we get hitched.

How often have you heard people dismiss the thought of dating someone because in their biased opinion, they’re ‘just not my type!’ This was my mistaken view.

So a few months ago I came across an article about ‘China’s leftover women’. These are women over the age of 27 that are not married. The article resonated with me because it is so similar to what myself and thousands of other women in different parts of the world have experienced; that feeling that you haven’t quite made it unless you’re married, no matter how successful you are. What I found saddest about the article was the fact that the parents did not help the issue but instead added to the pressure. Parents that make their daughters feel like failures just because they are not married appear to have no idea the negative effect that it has on their self-esteem.

The journey of online dating is unique to each individual and couple: everyone has different experiences in terms of timing, something that’s true not only in this scenario, but in life in general. Many singles start out with high hopes of quick results, but can become despondent after a while and even give up after a series of unsuccessful dates, or time spent searching. But the key is perseverance, so whatever stage you’re at right now, don’t lose heart. Here are some of the reasons why it’s important to keep going.

‘I find Mothering Sunday really tough,’ confided my friend. ‘I’m happy for those who’ve been blessed with children, but I’ve spent my whole life yearning to be a mum, and a service celebrating motherhood is just a painful reminder of my grief.’

As Lent progresses, I’m reminded of what I gave up for Lent seven years ago and how that 40-day period of abstinence changed my relationship with myself and paved the way to a healthy and loving relationship with my now fiancé.

I used to try my hardest not to hurt anyone in dating. I’d be very careful not to be too friendly to guys I wasn’t interested in. I’d be wary of being too friendly to guys I was interested in, because what if I got to know them better and then found out I didn’t actually like them that much? Wasn’t that leading them on? Needless to say, this is not a productive dating strategy. But more than that, it’s probably not meant to be how we’re supposed to relate to other human beings at all.