Stop hanging out, start dating.

 

Date them until you hate them, in today’s world it’s very common to date someone until you just can’t stand each other then to immediately just into another relationship and begin to make them miserable. Why do people do this? Well one thing people have forgotten, is that when you are dating there should be only two possible outcomes. You either date someone to get married eventually, or you date someone to break up eventually.

Dating

                              Courtship

                                                             Engagement

                                                                                                        Marriage

Imagine these 4 levels as steps, as we progress down these steps into marriage, we often don’t step. We slide. Nobody wants to walk into love, we want to fall in love. But what we don’t realize is that if you fall into love, then you can fall out of love. 40-50 years ago, in Europe this trend began, people started to take dating and courtship less seriously, they began hanging out and stopped going on dates, the results of this change are symptomatic in divorce rates. We in the USA followed suit shortly after and are experiencing the results.

Your brain’s job is not to discern the truth, when we entertain a horror movie our brain starts to treat it as a reality. It is the job of your spirit to know the truth from lies. This is true in the case of relationships; our brain starts to see people we like as more attractive and people we don’t like as less attractive.

What happens when a girl watches a horror movie? Her legs curl up. And she protects herself with a super secure blankey or pillow right? Even though a movie cannot hurt us, just entertaining the idea that It could be real is enough to scare us.

“Your brain is just an organ. Everything you think, your brain interprets it as its real.”

Hanging out equates to engaging in shared interests. There is 0 reliable data to support the fact that shared interests have any bearing on a happy and or successful marriage. In fact, in some cases like for gamers, this shared interest, negatively impacts the relationship in the vast majority of cases. This shared interest is a huge time sink, and if both people happen to be gamers, then they are often competing against each other. If you think competing with your spouse for hours per week with strengthen a marriage, you are a fool.

Here’s what a “date” is.

DATE:

         PLANNED

         PAIRED OFF                                         

         PAID FOR

Knowing Quotient:

            Togetherness (shared experiences)

+ Talk (mutual self-disclosure)

+ Time (3 months to begin to know..)

-----------------------------------------------

Knowing another and the couple

 

 “There is no sense dating someone exclusively until you are ready to get married.” – President Gordon B. Hinckley

 

Know   Trust   Rely     Commitment              Touch                                    - Jon Van Epp

     |           |          |                   |                             |

     |           |          |                   |                             |

     |           |          |                   |                             |

The higher you move a slider up on each of these scales the more attached you become to somebody, and starting from left to right you should never allow one of the subjects to the right to overscale the subject to its left. For example, you shouldn’t trust someone more than you know them, and you shouldn’t rely on someone more than you are committed to them. Understanding this simple scale allows people to realize the truth and interpret that data to make the best decision clearer.

What are we to make of all this data? Stop hanging out and start going on dates. I bet that if you stop hanging out with your boo and start dating again, you’ll come to a new realization of how you feel about them.