Waiting and Dating-Part 1

• Habits and attitudes established during the dating years generally carry over into marriage.

Principles of Dating Readiness

1. You are not ready to date until you are fully aware of both the benefits and the dangers of dating. Human beings interact with each other in the spiritual, soulical and physical dimensions. Healthy relationships should always begin at the spiritual and intellectual levels - the levels of purpose, motivation, interests, dreams and personality. The physical dimension is the least important.
2. A good understanding of God's standards for relationships. This requires a certain degree of spiritual maturity.
• There are only 2 choices: either you will follow God's standards by deliberate choice, or you will follow the world's standards by default. Unless you plan ahead to keep yourself pure on a date, you probably won't.
• Dating is no place for trial and error.
3. Resolve in your spirit that you will not lower or compromise God's standards for any reason, even if it means losing dates. Standing firm on what you believe is a sign of both spiritual and emotional maturity. There are no second-class areas of life to God. He is after your best. He wants you to obey Him, follow His Word, and stand firmly on His standards. Anything less and you cannot expect to receive His best.
4. YOU ARE READY TO DATE WHEN YOU DON'T NEED TO
• If you feel that you need a date in order to be complete or fulfilled personally, you are not ready for dating. Need involves demand and implies that there is something lacking in life. As long as you perceive lack or incompleteness within yourself, every relationship you enter will be, to one degree or another, an effort to supply that lack or bring a sense of completeness.
• You are ready to date only to the extent that you feel whole and complete within yourself, apart from any other person (except God). When you regard dating as a matter of choice rather than necessity, you are ready.
• Before Eve came along, Adam was alone, but he was not lonely. Loneliness is a spiritual disease. Adam was alone because he was the only one of his kind, but he was completely fulfilled as a person. In tending the garden he had meaningful work to do. In his authority over the living creatures, he was exercising his God-given dominion over the created order. He enjoyed full and open fellowship with his Creator.
• The time you are most prepared for dating is when you don't need anyone to complete you, fulfill you or instill in you a sense of worth or purpose. You are ready to date when you have first learned how to be single.

LEARN HOW TO BE ALONE

• Contentment with being alone involves learning how to be fulfilled in your singleness. A truly single person is one who is complete physically, spiritually and intellectually without dependence on anyone else. Successful singles find their personal identity and sense of wholeness within themselves and in relationship with God. Only whole individuals are fully comfortable being alone. They can thrive and prosper whether or not they are involved in a relationship. For such people a relationship is an added blessing; it is an icing on the cake.
• A whole person has a healthy self-concept. If we do not love ourselves, it will be difficult for us to love others, or even relate to them properly.

1. Our first responsibility is to love God with our whole being.
2. A whole person has a clear and solid faith. When we know what we believe and why we believe it, when we know what the Word of God says and are committed to obeying it, and when we have a good grasp of God's standards for our personal lives and are determined to live by them, we are well on our way to wholeness.
3. Growing one's own roots. Have your focus of motivation and control within yourself rather than in other people. Don't allow others to control your life. Whole people are self-motivated, internally-directed, comfortable with themselves, and rooted firmly enough to stand strong and confident in the values they live by, even if at times they seem to be standing alone.

• Being alone as a single person has many advantages, especially for a believer. One of the greatest of these is the opportunity to give undivided attention to the pursuit of spiritual growth and deep relationship with the Lord.
• Unfettered by the ties of marriage or other serious relationships, single people are free to concern themselves wholly with the things of God. Make the most of this time in your life. Learn to grow deep with God and to love Him by yourself first. Don't be in a rush to get into a relationship. Get your spiritual roots firmly embedded in God...
• Work to develop yourself fully as a single person. Learn to be like Adam; get completely lost in God today. Become so consumed by God that He will have to interrupt you to bring another person in your life. Think of singleness as a blessing and a perfect opportunity for character development.
• Learn to be an asset first. Prepare yourself for whoever God is preparing for you. Don't be too busy looking for the one God has prepared for you that you fail to prepare yourself for him/her.
• True singleness is a sign of spiritual and emotional maturity. When you can be alone and enjoy it, you are a self-confident and self-aware person. You are well adjusted, not needing other people's approval to feel okay about yourself. It means that you have your act together and are ready for a deeper relationship. You have discovered and accepted who you are and can now truly give and share yourself with others.