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« on: June 20, 2004, 11:51:43 PM »
This is probably the thing that makes me madder than anything else: when someone at church says it is a commandment to date.
Baloney!!! It's a commandment to get married and have kids, but dating is NOT a commandment. It's NOT a God-instituted system, and it's NOT scriptural.
While I'm ranting I'll say that another related thing that ticks me off is how often they give a chastity talk in church, yet never actually help people find someone to marry. I estimate that I am 100,000 times more likely to be involved in a car accident in the next 5 years than I am to have sex. I would rather they spend time providing the opportunity for sex (i.e. with someone I am married to, meaning that they provide some assistance on that wise) than spend so much time telling me not to. Am I alone in this? Every time I sit through one of those talks I cannot fathom how to apply it to my own life since I am in approximately zero danger of getting anywhere close to having sex.
Anyway about dating: here's what else sucks: the pressure. All the "anxiously engaged" talks. And the fact that there's a huge double standard. Girls are not expected to exert any effort toward getting married. Guys are always ragged on.
Hey, if there's someone I would be interested in dating, I will ask that person out. I estimate that approximately 50% of the girls I have gone on dates with frequent this message board, so they can attest to this fact. And I HAVE actually been asked on a date by one person, who is also here. (And by the way, all the girls I dated here are married now.) But this is basically a statistical anomaly.
In all the singles wards I've been in, never once has a girl from them asked me out. Yet I make an effort to go to all the functions. I go to ward prayer, break the fast, family home evening, linger longer, ward temple trips, and other things of that sort. I could be staying at home reading books or using the internet, but no, I take the effort to do all those things. But today in Priesthood meeting (after the sisters in the ward shockingly provided the Elder's quorum with Father's Day banana splits as reminders that we should be fathers someday and in return for the dumb practice of giving all the sisters flowers on Mother's Day [no mention of the even stupider practice of giving flowers to all the sisters on Valentine's Day, something I refuse to participate in whenever a ward I'm in does it--come on, Valentine's Day is only for women?]) where the Heber J. Grant lesson was on the value of hard work, the person giving the lesson started talking about how we need to work hard to date, and someone said that all those things I mentioned earlier (FHE, etc) do not count as working toward marriage. The nerve! And THEN someone threw out the "dating is a commandment" line. Baloney. Balderdash.
I'm thinking of starting a website to expound my views on this subject. Unless someone knows of one that already exists. Anyone?
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