This Courtship Generation

This morning I was thinking about various conversations over the last year, and I came to a conclusion:

This generation of courting homeschoolers are lost relationally.

Not that they don't have relationships (because they ARE socialized!), but that when they are in a relationship, or thinking about being in one, they are confused. Their parents didn't practice courtship.  They've heard dating horror stories.  But they don't know what a good courtship looks like. All they have are the books and platitudes of older couples burned with broken hearts and bitter tears.  My generation has heard a lot of "don't"s.  But they just don't know what the "do's" are.

This became evident my final semester, when I was engaged. All of a sudden I was the relational guru on campus.  Girls I hardly knew asked me for advice that semester.  I would know nothing about them except all their relationship woes, wonderings, and wishes.  It was like having navigated a successful courtship gave me a wealth of experience - something that others desperately wanted to understand.  It had nothing to do with me.  It had everything to do with being a novelty - one of the first in my circles to try my hand at this courtship thing.

Am I a relationship expert?  No - I don't believe there really is such a thing.  But I welcomed the questions, because there are a lot of hurting hearts with undue pressures, misconceptions, and erroneous ideas.  I am not a fountain of "courtship wisdom."  But I did have a textbook courtship.

Yes, a textbook courtship.  What is that anyway?  Josh and I each were in only one relationship.  When my dad said "wait," we obeyed and waited. We prayed and had Bible study together.  We held hands for the first time after five months of being together - which was when we said "I love you" too.  We were open with our parents every step of the way, as well as with our accountability partners.  We had our first kiss at the altar.  What isn't textbook about that?

And that's why I feel qualified to criticize some of our ideas of what a good courtship entails: because I had one.  In blog post, it looks textbook.  In reality, there were all sorts of pitfalls.  And I watch others fall into the same ones just as naively as I did.

That's why I write this: I want to explain not only to girls, but to their parents, the areas of courtship that need a little more clarity.  I think oftentimes the parents understand and had no intention of leading their children into these misunderstandings.  But because they were never in that situation, they don't realize the disconnect between the advice our girls hear and the interpretations they are given.  And that causes a lot of heartache.

So I'm going to attempt to dreg up the uglier parts of our courtship: the things I was blinded to, the misconceptions I had, the pressure I submitted to because I didn't know there could be a better option.  And hopefully, it will help someone else avoid the same.