Persuasion Episode 32: Is Courtesy Dating Kind or Cruel?

1. Seems more like Christian women should welcome people asking them, if just that it seems single Christian men drop off the face of the earth post college. The ones that are left post 23, like myself and others I know, generally don’t make good marriage material. We have too many issues.

   I mean, barring obvious first impression dealbreakers, why not? As long as people understand its just getting to know each other, and it’s okay if it doesn’t work out.

2. I think part of the problem is that single people have lost a language of signaling interest to each other when we’re open to pursuing something before the request for a date ever happens. There is no broadly acknowledged, cultural standard for letting a man know that he is welcome to ask you out on a date before he actually does so. This sets men up for rejection and women up for feeling obligated to say yes to dates they aren’t interested in, purely out of sympathy for a man who had to get the blind nerve to string together “dinner” and “you” in the same sentence with no idea how things would turn out. I’m a single woman in my 30s, and I’ve been on the dating scene since before the internet exploded. It’s done nothing to make subtle communication easier and just adds to the bag of mixed signals people can send each other.

3. I think courtesy dating is actually far more problematic than this episode is letting on, and not because it might lead guys own. First, I think it contributes to a feeling of entitlement among Christian guys, who, let’s face it, already have the dating odds stacked in their favor. I went to a Christian college where there wasn’t a strong expectation that you say yes to the guy asking you out, but even so there were still guys there who I think would have been very offended to be turned down, simply because, hey, they are a guy and they chose you to ask out.

   But secondly, and more problematically, it causes women to second guess their own instincts. They may not be able to put their finger on it, but they might be picking up on some very subtle cues that indicate that the guy is off. Not to go all extreme, but there are lots of stories of women being raped by men who they had a gut feeling about, but who got into the elevator, etc, anyway because they didn’t want to be impolite. This is like the same thing, but with dating. Women are being pressured to set aside their own feelings, their own judgement about who is a good fit for them, perhaps even their own instinct for self-preservation, to be polite. That’s crap. A girl doesn’t owe anyone a date, even a low-stakes pity date! During one such date (although I was not aware the gentleman in question regarded our lunch at the cafeteria as a date) I found myself being pressured by the gentleman to start attending his church, right after I finished telling him about how involved I was at my church! His next romantic strategy or his assumption about what our ‘date’ entitled him to expect, I’m not sure, but I can see how a more timid person would find it very hard to say no (politely) to the chain of expectations that a single date sometimes leads to. I’ve had a lot of problems with guys (from my downtown city church) who don’t have any notion of boundaries and/or have mental issues, not respecting my polite or non verbal nos, and it took a huge amount of effort to counteract against the Christian lady training to be polite and be kind, to actually take steps to protect myself.

   Young women (Christian or no) already do a lot of emotional work supporting male friends as it is, and often feel an obligation to sacrifice their own well being to do so. My favorite reminder of how often women do emotional and actual work for male friends is ‘A Harry Potter Where Hermione Doesn’t Do Anyone’s Homework For Them’: https://t.co/m0ZZAbqmDK

   I think I’ve ranted long enough, but I think it’s worth pointing out that since there are so few Christian guys out there (relative to women), I think most young women aren’t needlessly blowing off eligible guys. I know I would certainly go on dates with guys I wasn’t interested in if they asked me, simply because there are too few guys to needlessly eliminate one who might actually be eligible for me. But that’s because of my own dating strategy and realism as a 30 something Christian single, not because anyone is guilting me into dating.

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