Talking with Our Kids About Dating and Marriage

In today’s society, more and more families are falling apart, and broken marriages have a serious impact on children’s healthy growth. Young men and women often don’t really know each other before marriage, their relationships grow complicated, and combined with today’s sexually open culture, the question of who their children will date and eventually marry has become a quiet worry for many Chinese parents. My husband and I often use our Family Time to talk with our children about dating and marriage, so we can understand their thinking and their peers’.

The Children Have Grown Up

I remember when our two sons were in kindergarten, they often served as ring bearers at weddings. They were adorable and easygoing, and had a knack for lightening the mood, so they were much in demand — almost “professional ring bearers.” When they were in third and fourth grade, someone asked them to do it again, but this time they flatly refused, saying they were too grown up now to be paired with girls, or their classmates would laugh at them. That was when I realized my sons had begun forming their own opinions about boys and girls, and had moved past the early-childhood stage where gender didn’t matter at all.

On a recent family trip with all six of us, we kept up our Family Time, and our two teenage sons talked about how their classmates viewed dating. In middle school, they’d use sleepovers at friends’ houses as a chance to talk about who they secretly liked — just crushes, never spoken aloud, though somehow everyone still knew who liked whom. By high school, if a boy still liked a girl, his friends would egg him on to finally tell her and ask her to be his girlfriend.

From what they observed, most high school boys date mainly to relieve loneliness and have a companion of the opposite sex — and maybe to show off a little in front of classmates and prove their own appeal — without ever thinking about marriage. It’s not until college that they start seriously considering whether the person they’re dating could become their future spouse.

Our two grown daughters said their ideal partner would be someone like their father — a responsible, family-devoted man — and that he absolutely had to be a Christian.

They Love Hearing Our Love Story

All four of our children love hearing the story of how my husband and I fell in love. Our teenage sons once asked whether I’d wanted a boyfriend back in middle and high school. I told them that back then, all my energy went into my studies — in Taiwan we faced tremendous pressure from the joint college entrance exam — and besides, I knew that as a teenager I was too emotionally unsteady and immature. Even when boys showed interest in me, I had no desire to date.

I majored in science and engineering in college, and afterward worked in computer automation — so whether in school or at work, I was almost always the only woman in a sea of men. But I held firm that whoever I married had to share my Christian faith and the same views on marriage and family, so I made a point of training myself to be able to share the gospel with anyone I dated.

Our sons pressed further, wanting to know how their dad had won me over. I told them I first met their father in a church fellowship group. He hadn’t been baptized yet — he thought simply making a decision for Christ was “qualification” enough — but when I asked him some basic questions about the Christian faith, he couldn’t answer any of them. Because I held firmly to my convictions, he began studying the Bible more seriously, was eventually baptized, and threw himself into serving in the church.

My husband and I came from completely different backgrounds — nothing like what people call a “well-matched pair.” I grew up in a loving Christian family with nine brothers and sisters, while he was an only child raised by a single mother. His parents separated when he was three, and his mother raised him alone through great hardship. It wasn’t until his freshman year of college, when his mother was diagnosed with cancer — she passed away in his sophomore year — that his father finally stepped forward to acknowledge him as his son. If my husband hadn’t already become a Christian, his heart would surely still have been full of resentment toward his father, blaming him for his mother’s early death and unable to forgive him for failing to care for the family.

What made me decide to marry him were these words, which touched my heart: ‘First — does coming from an unhappy family mean I can’t have a happy marriage? I couldn’t choose the family I was born into, but I can learn from it and become a good husband and father. Second — don’t trust me too much, because I’m a sinner like everyone else, and I’ll have my moments of weakness, so keep praying for me. I’m a child of God, and if I ever stray, He will discipline me. Let’s walk toward God together, and work together to build a Christian home.’

Actively Preparing Ourselves

Through the unconditional love found in the Christian faith, my husband worked to move past the bitterness and resentment inside him. Over time his feelings toward his father shifted — from hatred to no more hatred, from no love to love. In the thirty years since he became a believer, we have kept praying for his father, and a few years ago, to our great joy, his father finally became a Christian too. Together we’ve experienced God’s wonderful guidance — He prepared for each of us a lifelong partner that “eye had not seen, ear had not heard, and mind had not conceived,” yet who turned out to be exactly the right person for the other.

Holding onto our faith in God, we stepped bravely into marriage, willing to accept our many differences and turn destructive arguments into constructive conversations. And it is precisely because we are so different that our marriage has been so richly blessed.

We encourage our four children to pray for their future spouse and to actively prepare themselves to become someone worth marrying, rather than rushing to settle for anyone just for the sake of getting married. We firmly believe that the person God has prepared may not be the smartest or most impressive in other people’s eyes, but will be exactly the right one for them.

Three Major Dangers in Dating and Marriage

In recent years, through my work in parent-child education and premarital counseling, I’ve noticed three dangers that come up again and again around dating and marriage:

Danger 1: The Phone Affair

Nowadays, when young men and women meet through the same social circles, it’s common for a woman to repeatedly “borrow” a friend’s boyfriend to help her with an airport pickup or a move. Lending a hand like this can be a good thing, but often these women don’t tell their friend beforehand — they simply text the boyfriend directly, sometimes in a tone that’s a little too familiar, with no clear boundaries. Over time, this can turn her into the third party who comes between her friend and her friend’s relationship. And some men, unwilling to turn anyone down, let what started as an innocent friendship spiral into a complicated entanglement, stirring up heartbreak among several friends at once — truly a shame. And this pattern shows up just as often among married people.

Danger 2: Addiction to Video Games

In recent years, online gaming has reached fever pitch. You could see it in the summer of 2016, when thousands of people flocked to Beitou Park in Taiwan to catch Pokémon — clear evidence of how many young men and women are caught up in it, many of them highly educated. Between their studies or work, they spend much of their time at home, holed up with their online “comrades.”

I’ve met a number of young men who were once outstanding — even pastors’ kids — now in their thirties, dating someone for five or six years and still not married. It’s puzzling, until you find the real problem: he’s addicted to video games, and she’s left wondering whether she really wants to marry a man like that. And if getting married won’t change the habit, why marry at all? Better to stay single than to settle. Some couples take the risk anyway — setting ground rules with the boyfriend before the wedding, which does bring some improvement — but once the wife becomes pregnant and no longer has the energy to keep reminding him, he drifts right back to the online battlefield. Cases like this have become more and more common, a strange new sickness in modern married life.

Danger 3: Cohabitation and Premarital Sex

Statistics show that out of every hundred couples who cohabit before marriage, forty break up before ever reaching the altar. Of the sixty who do marry, thirty-five end in divorce, and only twenty-five make it through.

What actually holds a marriage together isn’t romantic love — it’s commitment. The Christian view of marriage is a sacred vow made before God, in reverent fear of Him: what God has joined together, let no one separate. Marriage is a commitment without conditions, and when two people enter marriage, they enter into that unconditional commitment together.

But many young people today don’t want to be single, and yet they’re unwilling to make good on the commitment of marriage either, so they choose to cohabit as a kind of trial marriage, avoiding any real responsibility. And even when they do marry, the moment conflict arises, rather than face it and learn from it, they too often just call it “incompatibility” and divorce.

In the end, as social attitudes keep shifting and the values around dating and marriage grow more distorted, the best thing we can do is make good use of family time to communicate — helping our children build sound values early on. Raising up more happy, healthy families is the real hope for tomorrow’s society.