PART 2 OF 4
Marriage has changed…
so dating has to change too.
Historically…
Romance wasn’t a required (or even an expected) ingredient for marriage.
In fact, the primary purpose of marriage was to bind women to men (as a form of property) and make it easy for men to track their biological children.
A woman went from being her father’s property…to becoming her husband’s.
And no matter how much mainstream religion tries to romanticize the idea of “godly” marriages…this is also the truth behind the wedded couples we see in The Bible.
Throughout history, marriage continued to be a staple for not just reproduction…but also for political, economic and status gains between families.
As society evolved…romance began to play a bigger role in relationships and eventually became a major driver for marriage (yaay….I guess lol)
…BUT women were still legally subjugated to their husbands and treated as props and property in marriages.
It wasn’t until after the 1920s, when women started receiving full citizen rights (ei the right to vote, right to work, access to birth control etc..) that the romantic dynamic between men and women began making huge shifts.
We received more rights, more education, more economic freedom…hence more CHOICE.
This led to marriage evolving from a contract of duty…with a man having ownership over his wife…
….to a personal contract between equals seeking love, stability and happiness.
And because marriage symbolizes something
different in the modern world…
Dating must BE different in order to successfully attain it.
Women are not dependent on men for survival anymore…so they require more support and emotional availability more than protection and financial stability from men.
Men are no longer expected to “rescue” women via marriage or take a wife to solidify his status in society…so they actually seek love and compatibility more than beauty and homemaking skills.
We’re no longer coupling up out of survival, as a traditional ritual or to fulfill a predefined gender role.
In the modern world, people are now equal partners choosing each other based on more sophisticated choices such as mutual attraction, core values, compatibility and personal preferences.
Another way of saying…the bare minimum is no longer acceptable for both men and women.
We now need to be SKILLFUL so that we can foster attraction, engage socially, form loving bonds, build connection, establish trust, and create intimacy…
…in order to land healthy, aligned partnerships that lead to the types of marriages we desire in this modern age.
The problem is…unlike the modern workforce where we embraced becoming more skillful to land our current careers (because over centuries it evolved from physical labor to intellectual labor)...
…we instead continue to cling to false nostalgia (aka Fauxstalgia) about the good ole days of “traditional” marriage where men and women played the perfect gender roles and had the most loving, romantic relationships.
…when we NEED to be very mindful about the truth of what’s happening NOW to smartly navigate the constant evolution of our relationships.
The Ideal Traditional Marriage of the past has never existed. Your recollection of one comes from idealized images of marriage & family heavily promoted during the era of 1950s television.
The call to “Make Marriage Great Again” is just as mythical as Trump's call to “Make America Great Again.” At no point in time was either so great as we’d like to believe.
Now that we’ve covered the history around how marriages have evolved and why dating has seemed “harder” in modern times…
Let’s explore one of the biggest myths that have been keeping women of faith feeling defeated and disappointed around dating.
Next: Part 3 (of 4):
Meeting someone should be natural and organic? 👀