dating is spiritually ugly and contrary to human dignity no matter how much virtue you imbue into the practice. the disgust we feel but rarely name is a burden on our souls if we’re merely open to it in a serious capacity.
you repeatedly must evaluate others and be evaluated yourself like livestock. sensitive souls recognize this as a deeply wrong way of seeing people that only exists in dating and job interviews. however, the sane recognize it as unavoidable; it’s unwise to waste time or heartbreak on someone who doesn’t meet our bare minimum requirements for a spouse. measuring someone’s potential value in your life in such a black-and-white way—even though we know it’s necessary and important to exclude the too old, too young, those who don’t share our faith, the bums, the unstable, those with contradictory lifestyles, and so on—conjures images of culling farm animals for their various ailments and inadequacies. we don’t hate the runt rabbit or the cow that doesn’t produce milk, but what must be done must be done.
every time we open up to someone we’re romantically involved with, we’re putting our worth on a scale for them to measure. are we hot enough to be worth tolerating our quirks? are we fun enough during the good times to make the bad times worth enduring? is the baggage worth unpacking together, or is it better to roll the dice and hope for a better one next dm slide? our infinite personhood with all of its complexity and depth is distilled into a subjective, simplified pro-con list that can be expressed and conveyed over a short period of time. who you are is what they perceive you to be. no matter how incomplete or inaccurate, that perception takes precedence over reality.
when things end, as they do more often than they don’t, anything shared or built together is now supposed to be entirely meaningless. the connection, any understanding, the conversations, the jokes, the pleasant memories, the unique human being before you made in the image of God, all meant to be unceremoniously discarded like takeout you find a hair in. none of those things will ever be replaced or recovered because people aren’t objects we can order a different brand of with slightly different specifications off of amazon. regardless of the flaws that led to things not working out, all of the goodness we found in that person is gone from our lives forever. on top of that, you know that these things are all worthless to the only other person who experienced them, and that you and your wholeness, too, are metaphorically a corpse disposed of in a landfill.
this is part of the curse, i think. dating didn’t exist in eden. in the same way we respond to the sufferings of toil and childbirth, we often either turn a blind eye the horribleness of it or reject the goodness of the intended positive outcome. i don’t believe that it’s healthy or otherwise beneficial to either ignore how inherently contrary to truth, beauty, charity, and goodness this is, or to opt out out solely for fear of suffering these humiliations.