How To Date or How Not to Date, that is the question?

This week in our class we talked a lot about dating and the very wise counsel given in a book called,

How To Avoid Falling In Love With A Jerk by John Van Epp

https://www.amazon.com/How-Avoid-Falling-Love-Jerk/dp/0071548424

When I married 34 years ago, I really was just plain lucky (or blessed )to pick an amazing man to marry because I was only 18.  I loved him and he was an amazing young man, we dated for two years and I thought I knew him because we did each of the things listed below,  but I didn't really know him and I didn't have enough life experience to know the things that would be really important to me as we got into all of the messiness of life.  We shared 33 1/2 amazingly happy years before he died suddenly last December.  I knew him as an amazing husband and father to our 5 kids but I didn't know what an incredible man he was in each of his different roles until after he died.  It was an honor to find out that he was even better than I knew him to be.       

Even though I have no plans at this time to date again, If I do, I will be much more aware of how I should do it and what I will be looking for. 

In particular the KnoQuo from the book mentioned above was brilliant to me.  It goes something like this:

TIME+TOGETHER+TALK=Knowing someone

Time - enough to be able to have a wide variety of experiences together (a year?)
Together- Dates that put both of you in a variety of circumstances, hiking, museums, road trips, holidays, sickness etc.  So you can see how he or she reacts in a variety of conditions.  After all, life gets really messy, or scary, or adventurous.
Talk- Mutual Self disclosure-how do you both feel about _________? Fill in the blanks and have that conversation over and over.

With these experiences, you will know someone sufficient enough to know whether they are worth your time and emotional energy.   You will have saved yourself from a lot of heartache maybe years of heartache. 

Marriage can be the best of times or the worst of times, and it is always hard work.   It is worth our concentrated effort to pick someone who will be by our side (hopefully) happily forever.




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