Because of how God made the world, with the marriage of His Son to the Church central to the story He was going to tell, and His determination to picture this in every human marriage, the fact is settled that courtships are therefore interesting. But we are sometimes too interested, or, in another way of saying the same thing, we are interested in the wrong way. And because of this, we rush ahead.
Once there was a young woman who came home from church one day, and she had a question for her father. “Dad,” she said, “you know how Cindy’s father gave John permission to court her?”
“Yes,” he said. “I heard about that one. Which was, in my mind, the first sign of trouble. Why would I know about that?”
“Well, I was standing with Cindy after church, and three of the older church ladies came up and effusively congratulated her. Cindy was really embarrassed, I could tell. But I couldn’t tell what was wrong with it—they were all really sweet.”
“So you are asking what the problem was, if there was one?”
“Right.”
“Well, I suppose John has been getting himself congratulated too?”
“Oh, yes. Even more.”
“Suppose John came up to me and said that he had mailed off his application to Harvard Law School. Would I respond with congratulations?”
“Well, no, because he didn’t get in yet. And just between us, he wouldn’t get in either.”
“And if he filed the papers at city hall to enter the race for mayor?”
“Well, the same. He just filed. He didn’t win anything.”
“So it is with this. Courtship rightly understood is an application, and congratulations are not in order. The people involved are deciding what they are going to do, but nobody has done anything yet.”
“Thanks, Dad. That makes sense.”
“But there is one other thing. Then there are those ‘courting’ couples who are for all intents and purposes engaged. They are emotionally entangled and committed, and when standing around after church, she is all over him like ivy on the garden wall. You can congratulate people like that all you want. Somebody is getting something, and so that somebody should be congratulated. Couples like that can’t have it both ways—the social protections of not having decided and the emotional comfort of having decided.”