At times, young women ask me, “Should I date while in this under-graduate or graduate program?” Or should I wait until I am finished?
I usually answer that what you do is less important than how you think about doing it.
The Lord originally gives two commissions (Genesis 1:28) to God’s image, male and female (or three or four, depending on how you count. For our purposes let’s count two):
- 1): be fruitful & multiply, and
- 2) have dominion over & subdue the earth.
The interplay of those two callings introduce some complexity into planning for your future as a woman.
The first, multiplying, usually involves getting married and raising a family. Jesus in His restatement of the commission (Matthew 28:18-20), however, broadens this multiplying to making disciples. So, even if marriage is not in your future, you should still order your life to fulfill this calling through disciple-making.
Your future also definitely includes the second, working in God’s creation to bring all things under His reign. This involves participating, for Christ’s kingdom, in some vocation and/or ministry.
So it is good to prepare for a mission in life, the second call. However, many young people today emerge completely unprepared to realize how answering the first call may interrupt or shift, and certainly shape, the second. Their education and culture has not told them true. If you are a woman who is going to answer the first call by marriage and family, you have to reckon with the reality of home-building.
Do you have a great desire to date? Then you should. But think now about how it would work. How strong is your call to your particular work? Is that going to change if the right guy comes along? Is there a way to do it that allows later withdrawing for building a family? In my book, Dating With Discernment, I call that negotiation, when dating gets serious, doing a “mission-merge.”
One woman I tell about in the book, Rose, so focused on her career that she lost a great guy who was pursuing her. In another of the book’s illustrations, Suzanne, a student at Yale law school, surprised her neighbors w/her statement that she felt that the highest calling a woman can have is to be a wife and mother. She was very clear on her priorities that allowed answering both calls. She found herself not yet married. In the meantime, a Yale law degree was a valuable thing to have in life. For her, it was worth the effort, however things would turn out.
Surveys show that over 75% of married moms would prefer only part time additional work or none at all, that is, to be devoted to full-time home-building. That is because, when you get into it, the exalted calling of wifehood and motherhood turn out to be really hard. Especially to do it well.
So, the big question as you start to date is, am I ready to be a homebuilder?