Why Your Relationships Keep Failing!

This month we are taking a look at how our relationship with God impacts our relationships with everyone else. Already, we’ve talked about our friendships and how God wants us to deal with our enemies. Today, we’re going to discuss our dating relationships, why they keep failing and what God has to say about all of it. Read until the end to find out if you are guilty of the big killer in your relationship and, no, it’s not sex.

So, you’re in High School, College or venturing out into your adult life. You have your eye on this cute new person and you start to make your move. After a couple of casual hang outs with some friends, you decide to take the plunge and ask them out and they say, “Yes!” At first, things are going great and you are caught up in the whirlwind of emotions and activity in the early phases of the relationship. Then, come the conflicts. Conflict is what happens when expectations meet reality and, as you start to realize that this person is not all that you expected, conflicts start to rise up. Before you even know what happened, the relationship is over; you’re sad, you’re lonely, and you move on to someone new. Sound familiar?

It’s hard to say just how many dating relationships the average American has in their lifetime. According to an article on weddingstats.com, they state that most people have 3-5 dating partners, which seems to contradict the data showing the average American having 7.2 sexual partners. We also know that the vast majority of High School dating relationships don’t last, with right around 2% actually ending up in marriage. Over the years, sociologists, data analysts, researchers and Christian thought leaders have grappled with the question of dating and/or courtship. In the 90’s, “Purity Culture” became a hardline Christian youth group alternative to the dating culture seen in the world. Books like Joshua Harris’ “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” convinced many teens to leave behind the modern dating practices and take an, apparently, more Godly approach to romantic relationships. By the early 2000’s, even major teen celebrities like the Jonas Brothers were proudly wearing their “Purity Rings,” a visible pledge to abstain from sex before marriage. Fast forward to today and the Jonas’ are singing some not-so-pure songs and Joshua Harris has not only disavowed his multiple books on purity, but has produced a new one attacking his former work as well as publicly renouncing his faith in 2018.

So, where does that leave us? With the rise of dating apps and then hook-up apps, it has never been easier to meet someone for the purposes of dating or even for casual sex. In the wake of what is now widely considered to be a “toxic purity culture,” does the Church still have a voice in this conversation? Does God? While the Bible doesn’t give us any specific guidelines on dating, it does give some very clear parameters about romantic relationships before marriage. First, you have to have the right motivation.

In Matthew 19, Jesus is questioned by the religious leaders about divorce. Rather than give them a simple “Yes” or “No” reply, Jesus appeals to the foundation of the marriage relationship originally given in Genesis chapter 2. In Matthew 19, starting in verse 4, it says:

He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

God’s intent, emphasized here by Jesus Himself, is for a man to leave the home, the covering and the provision of his parents, and to “become one” with his wife.

Notice how intentional this whole process is. The man is literally letting go of his security and building a new home with his wife. Imagine Tarzan, swinging through the jungle from one vine to the next. If he doesn’t let go of the first vine, he can’t go anywhere, so he has to reach out, grab ahold and hang on to the next one in able to move forward. Now, imagine Tarzan, rather than intentionally swinging from one vine to the next, instead just flings himself out into the air; aimless, directionless, and full of blind ambition comes crashing down to the jungle floor. That’s what a lot of our dating patterns look like. Aimless and directionless until they all come crashing down. The aim, when stepping out into the world and trying to start a relationship like this, biblically must be marriage. From the beginning. I’m saying, don’t date, court or whatever you want to call it unless you actually intend to marry that person! Get to know them so well that, before you ever ask them out or you say yes, you already know this is the person you want to spend the rest of your life with. I know that sounds crazy. Like, do I actually think that the majority of people today are building their relationships like this? No, of course not! But, do I actually think that a majority of these relationships are going to last?... If you want what everyone else has, keep doing what everyone else is doing and don’t be surprised when you get what everyone else gets. But, if you want something different, something better for yourself, you have to be willing to do what no one else is willing to do in order to have what no one else has.

So, dating with the intention to marry or “Date to Mate” is step one. But, what do we do in the relationship? I mean, if we already know that we are going to get married, can’t we just skip to the good part? Why do we need to wait until marriage to have sex? Well, once again, the Bible doesn’t give us a clear cut line of “how far is too far” that tells us you can touch here but not here or you can only kiss for 4 seconds, closed mouth, no spit. What the Bible does give us is actually something far more useful!

2 Timothy 5:1-2 says,

“Do not rebuke an older man but encourage him as you would a father, younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, younger women as sisters, in all purity.”

The books of first and second Timothy are letters written from Paul, the apostle, to the young preacher Timothy, whom Paul regarded as a son. In this chapter, Paul is telling him how he should treat other people in the Church. He tells him to treat older men as fathers, younger men as brothers, older women as mother and younger women as sisters, but specifically adds “in all purity.” It’s a quick passage, but the implications are huge! For the young, single leader Timothy, his instructions were to treat everyone like family and to especially treat the younger women like his sister, meaning, if you couldn’t do it with your sister without someone around you reaching for a banjo, you shouldn’t be doing it at all. When you are married, that is when you get to become one flesh, but for any situation outside of that, your physical interactions should be the same way you would treat your siblings.

Now, does this mean that if you have had sex that you’ve blown it? No. Does this mean that you’ll never be able to have a healthy relationship if you have had a bunch of failed relationships in the past? No. Thankfully, God is full of grace and mercy and He can take the sins of our past, whether they are few or many, big or small, a long time ago or earlier today, and the blood of Jesus can wash us completely clean! Now, this doesn’t mean we should go on sinning just because we know we’ve already been forgiven. We have been set free from the bondage of sin, so we don’t want to go back and live in slavery to it. Yes, we will still definitely mess up, but now we have something that we didn’t have before, the Holy Spirit, God, actually living and dwelling inside of us, which means we now have the power to overcome sin and temptation without being a slave to it anymore. We’ll never be perfect this side of eternity, but when we recognize the truth that the wages of sin is death, why would we want to continue doing things that are leading to more depression, broken hearts, spiritual and physical death? When we put our faith in Christ, we now have access to the Father and are the temples of the Holy Spirit, so we can actually live the way that we were created to live, free from the curse of sin!

So, if we’ve been a Christian for a while and our relationships still aren’t working, what is going wrong? Maybe you’re not a believer but you still want to know why your relationships haven’t worked out, either. Well, the good news is that you don’t have to believe the truth in order for it to be true, so here it is: From the beginning, most of us weren't really serious about our relationships. Ask yourself, did you honestly think that the person you were dating in your junior or senior year of high school, that boyfriend you met at the party or the hook-up you met on tinder were really going to be the person you ended up marrying? I mean, sure, it could happen, but did you really believe that is how it was going to end? Well, if from the beginning you didn’t actually believe you were going to marry this person, that means that, from the beginning, you already knew you were going to eventually break up. Our beliefs frame our worldview and determine the decisions we make. If you believe this person is eventually going to leave you or that you will leave them, will you be willing to invest and give the relationship what it needs to survive? Will you be willing to build that foundation of friendship, getting to know if they are the person you want to marry before you start dating? Will you be willing to trust them? Will you be willing to wait? If I don’t think that something better is coming in the future, I’m going to try to get as much as I can right now before it’s gone. Your relationships fail because you weren’t willing to make the hard choices required to build a healthy one and you weren’t willing to make those hard choices because you didn’t believe the relationship would last anyways. Now that you know, you have to decide if you want to continue the cycle or if you are actually willing to make the hard choices to get you where you actually want to be.