Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Love, Joy, Feminism

Home
Nonreligious
Guest Post: I Hugged Dating Hello, Part III: Developing Emotional Intimacy

Guest Post: I Hugged Dating Hello, Part III: Developing Emotional Intimacy

Last updated on: October 23, 2018 at 6:33 am by Libby Anne

Guest Post: I Hugged Dating Hello, Part III: Developing Emotional Intimacy 2018-10-23T06:33:38-04:00 Libby Anne

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

A guest post by Molly

Part III of An Open Letter to Joshua Harris

“Before two people are ready for the responsibility of commitment, they should content themselves with friendship and wait on deep emotional intimacy. Exercising this patience will not handicap them relationally. In friendship, they can practice the skills of relating, caring, and sharing their lives with other people. In friendship, they can observe other people’s characters and begin to see what they’ll one day want in their mates” (78-79).

Dear Josh,

I don’t know about our readers, but relating to my friends, caring for them, and sharing in the joys and sorrows of their lives sounds like a fairly good definition of emotional intimacy. I don’t draw a boundary between “friendship” and “emotional intimacy,” yet I Kissed Dating Goodbye assures me that “friendship is about something other than the two people in the relationship; intimacy is about each other. In a true friendship, something outside the two friends brings them together” (130). As we discussed earlier with using one’s trust in God to deny one’s active participation in building relationships, waiting to build emotional intimacy isn’t enough. You have to work on it. Emotional intimacy is the point in any relationship—between friends, or lovers, or a parent and child—where your attention is fixated on the two of you as a cohesive unit, a merging of interests, enthusiasm, and caring. In the case of potential mates, such a relationship can (and should!) happily exist before marriage, require continued nurturing throughout your lifetimes, and won’t be limited to just your future spouse. And while we agree on that point, Josh, you seem to see the development of emotional intimacy as a linear process that originates from an initial commitment. [1] I believe that the development of emotional intimacy and commitment works as a progressive cycle; you cannot have one without pursuing the other.

Emotional intimacy is necessary for commitment, and commitment triggers a desire to deepen emotional intimacy. [2] You quote C.S. Lewis as saying “we picture lovers face to face, but friends side by side. Their eyes look ahead” (ibid). I want friends (and perhaps eventually a spouse) who are equally comfortable looking me in the eye as we confide in each other, at my side for our next grand adventure, and at my back for whatever battles we face.

When you’re raised to expect a fairy tale…

*“*They’re girls from my past,’ he answered sadly. ‘Anna, they don’t mean anything to me now…but I’ve given a part of my heart to each of them.’

‘I thought your heart was mine,’ she said.

‘It is, it is,’ he pleaded. ‘Everything that’s left is yours.’

A tear rolled down Anna’s cheek. Then she woke up.

Anna told me about her dream in a letter. ‘When I awoke I felt so betrayed,’ she wrote. ‘But then I was struck with these sickening thoughts: How many men could line up next to me on my wedding day? How many times have I given my heart away in short-term relationships? Will I have anything left to give my future husband?’” (14).

Josh, I’ll start by giving some credit where it’s due: none of your books (to my knowledge) contain blatant references to the fairy-tale narrative so prevalent in Christian purity culture. Christine Gardner’s book Making Chastity Sexy contains a large section about female speakers at abstinence rallies (like True Love Waits) describing their courtship in details that echo a Disney script. The narrative usually details the female being swept off her feet by her “prince” on horseback [3] and galloping through the woods, being wooed with roses and poetry, and acquiring the “perfect dress,” [4] arriving at the ceremony by horse-drawn carriage, and culminating—in theory—in happily ever after. You don’t endorse the fairy tale. In fact, you cite your experience as a wedding videographer to remind us that this narrative is “beautiful and romantic, but it’s not reality” (166). And I thank you for that admission. You tell your readers that good marriages “require work, patience, self-discipline, sacrifice, and submission” (172). And—from my limited knowledge—that seems to be true.[5] While I appreciate your realism and your omission of the fairy tale narrative, I Kissed Dating Goodbye’s emphasis on remaining “emotionally pure” is far more troubling than daydreams of slaying dragons and climbing towers.

In the autumn of 2011, Libby recalled her experience with reading I Kissed Dating Goodbye as a teenager:

What I gleaned from Joshua Harris was that I should only ever have a relationship with one person, else I would be giving away pieces of my heart and would end up with marital discontent and problems. I should marry the first man I loved, the first man I had a relationship with, for only then would my heart be intact and pure.

The concept of emotional purity has strong ties to the fairy tale narrative and our previous discussion of the problems inherent with trusting God to manage one’s social calendar. When young women are taught to believe that their “Prince Charming” will be (or has been) sent, delivered, and ordained by God, there is tremendous pressure to make the relationship work, even when it’s clearly not working because breaking up will result in not only a broken heart, but a heart that is no longer whole.

I’ve come to believe that purity culture views emotional intimacy as the most dangerous kind of relational intimacy—even more so than sexual intimacy— because our basic ability to feel affinity for another human being is seen as a constant threat to our bodily integrity and emotional well-being. You seem to think so, Josh, quoting Jeremiah 17:9—“the heart is wicked and deceitful; who can know it?” (179).

When I first read descriptions of failed relationships in I Kissed Dating Goodbye, I thought I was reading the testimonies of teenagers rather than adults of marrying age because of the ubiquitous descriptions of emotional devastation following the breakup of a short-term relationship, and I cannot help but think that growing up with an emphasis on “emotional purity” could do anything but compound the pain surrounding the dissolution of those unions. (I mean, sure, breakups can be devastating regardless of the philosophy you were raised in; that’s part and parcel of being able to feel emotion.)

So let’s be clear about a few things, Josh:

If you are raised to believe that human relationships are condemned to imperfection and dissatisfaction because they cannot compare to God’s divine love, you’re not just setting high standards for your future lover; you are setting impossible standards. You are setting yourself and your partner up for failure.

If you are raised to expect that, from day one, your life’s partner has been chosen by God for you and will someday end up as your spouse, you have been, despite the well-meant intentions of others, set up for failure.

If you are raised to believe your motives are inherently selfish, that you are not in control of your own physical impulses, and that harboring a crush on another person skews your priorities so badly that it can damage your relationship with a God who is ever-loving and everlasting, you have been set up for failure.

I think the ideal of emotional purity is downright blasphemous because it assumes that love—which I’ll define as philia (friendship) striving for agape (the unconditional love attributed to the Divine) with a periodic scoop of eros (lust) thrown in for good measure, if you’re lucky—is a finite resource. The doctrine takes the patient, kind, humble, calm, protective force that 1 Corinthians 13 tells us surpasses even hope and faith in its strength and tells us to lock that force away, to keep our emotions under constant control, and to feel only the “right” things. Hillary McFarland, author of Quivering Daughters is correct to remind us that to “guard [one’s] heart is to protect its worth, not ignore it” (90). Josh, I think our hearts are big enough (and, with time, well-protected enough) that nothing can be truly, permanently “taken” from us when we give parts of it away. I think God designed it that way in order to give us the closest approximation of divine grace we could have without us catching fire from the inside out due to the sheer ferocity of that love [7]. No one “will know we are Christians by our love” if we insist there’s a finite limit to how many people that our love can touch. While I appreciate I Kissed Dating Goodbye’s emphasis on community service and volunteer work, Christian service is more than working with others. It is being willing to empathize with others, to share in their story, or, to strike a middle ground between our viewpoints, to exchange a piece one’s heart for a bit of someone else’s. Christ’s narrative is one of self-sacrifice and loss out of love, and it is an unfortunate—but very true—fact of the human condition that each relationship we build contains an inherent certainty of loss.

Purity culture doesn’t prepare people for loss beyond “’til death do us part,” yet it’s not just death that can part us. Distance, priorities, and maturation manage to do that just as easily and (possibly more) frequently. Kissing “dating” goodbye in exchange for “courtship” doesn’t prevent loss; it only (hypothetically) reduces the number of opportunities to experience loss.

And tomorrow—or whenever the next installment is posted—we’ll finish the discussion of emotional intimacy by talking about loss, healthy self-care, and the types of fear you find in relational intimacy.

Molly

—————

Gentle (and Not-So-Gentle) Readers: Come back soon for Part IV of I Hugged Dating Hello, where I will write about both the importance of self-care and the fear of sex evident in I Kissed Dating Goodbye*.* ~ Molly

—————

Notes:

[1] Emotional intimacy exists with more than just your spouse (thank God, or, if that’s not your thing, thank your brain chemistry!). As far as I Kissed Dating Goodbye goes, however, marriage is the most important human relationship someone can have because you’re sharing a person’s body as well as his or her heart (28-29).

[2] “Commitment” nearly almost always connotes eventual sexual intimacy in I Kissed Dating Goodbye, despite (to my mind) all friendships and family relationships being a form of devotion and commitment.

[3] A public safety announcement: Based on the description of this feat in Gardner’s book, the groom is more likely to suffer a spinal fracture than to be rewarded with an assent from his intended betrothed. Incorporating large, fast, spookable animals into your wedding proposal is a risky venture. Please don’t do it. Thank you.

[4] Women are also constantly depicted as lost and needing rescued while men (and their faithful steeds) are always capable of providing rescue.

[5] Aside from the “submission” part, which is a troublesome term we’ll be dealing with when we talk about intellectual intimacy.

[6] McFarland, Hillary, and Megan Lindsay. Quivering Daughters: Hope and Healing for the Daughters of Patriarchy. Austin, TX: DarkLight, 2010. Print.

[7] I mentioned in the comments of Part II my perceived necessity of using religiously-loaded language to debate religious conservatives, so for the sake of this not blowing up into a huge creationism/evolution debate:
This seminarian understands the creation accounts in Genesis to be beautiful etiological myths (that are especially pretty in Hebrew!) She’s usually not too bothered by other Christians reading Genesis literally; on an individual level it’s kind of cute. And then it makes its way into public schools and a generation of kids in Louisiana is growing up learning we rode dinosaurs and dragons were real and Daenerys Targaryen is the rightful ruler of the Iron Throne and NO, STOP, YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.

—————

Molly grew up in southern Louisiana and, after spending college partially (emotionally and physically) frozen in Iowa, somehow ended up in seminary where she’s cuddling her inner demons by moonlight and wrestling her faith by daylight. She likes bellydance, historical combat, 80s cartoons, Pema Chodron, and wants to use her M.Div to found the Bene Gesserit sisterhood. She doesn’t have a blog yet, but maybe Libby will be generous enough to provide trackbacks when she does?

Evangelicalism/Fundamentalism

Previous Post

February 8, 2013

Quick Hits: Doug Wilson on Women and Submission

Next Post

February 9, 2013 Jonathan Last, Race Suicide, and Demographic Collapse

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Atheism Evangelicalism/Fundamentalism Family Feminism Homeschool Meta Parenting Patriarchy Politics Purity Quiverfull Social Justice Uncategorized Worthwhile reads

Select a Month February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What happened to the golden calf?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Set up for worship Burned, ground to powder Taken to Canaan Hidden