Expert Articles

Boundaries in Dating

January 14, 2009

   by Paul Meier, MD, Meier Clinics       Much of the dating culture in America and around the world today is basically boundary-less, and the attitude of many is that the only taboo in dating is to have a boundary in the first place. I have many clients who are in their twenties and thirties, in college or in the workforce, who tell me that most of their friends don’t date in the first place. They go to parties and “hook up”—meaning to have a sexual encounter—with various people they meet there. If anyone who hooked up with them dared say anything intimate like “I love you,” or sought a more committed relationship, they would be out the door.  The world is increasingly promoting casual friendships (rather than deep ones) and sex without any commitment (sometimes called “friends with privileges” in this era).

When I was 21 years old, in 1966, nearly eighty percent of 21 year olds polled said their major purpose in life was to have a meaningful life that included making a contribution to society. In 2008, USA TODAY reported the current version of that poll, showing that the vast majority of 21 year olds today, when asked their purpose in life, wanted sex without commitment, fame, power, and money. Precious few were concerned with making a contribution to society. There is more selfishness, less connectedness, and a great deal more loneliness today.  Is it surprising to anyone, therefore, that the teen suicide rate today is 300% higher than it was fifty years ago? As a psychiatrist, I know full well that the only people who find true happiness in this life are people who have a personal relationship with God, and genuinely love and are loved by others who know all their secrets and love them anyway.    It is also important to be your own best friend.   Being your own best friend is not being selfish—it is the opposite. Being your own best friend means loving God first and foremost, and loving yourself as God loves you.  This balanced self-love includes protecting yourself from being hurt unnecessarily and setting healthy boundaries for yourself and your relationships.

Having said all this, following are the BOUNDARIES IN DATING I recommend to my clients. I am a committed Christian psychiatrist who has been meditating on Scripture daily for over fifty years. But if I were an atheist who believed there were absolutely no rights and wrongs, I would recommend the very same boundaries that I believe Scripture states or implies for those seeking true love and intimacy.

BOUNDARY #1:  Choose to truly love and be loved by others. The number one dating boundary should be to make emotional intimacy your top priority. Build skills to become more emotionally intimate in healthy relationships with friends as well as with the person you are dating, so that the love is reciprocal and you do not end up feeling used or discarded as an object. Lonely people have blind spots and overlook significant flaws in people they date. If you have a support group of two or three close friends to share gut-level feelings with and to pray with during the tough times, you will not be so needy for a mate or a romantic relationship. The less needy you are, the better choice you will make if finding a mate is your desire.

BOUNDARY #2:  Do not live together before marriage.  Couples who live together before marriage have about a 75% higher divorce rate than couples who do not. In my opinion, this is because most people in our current society are fairly selfish and more narcissistic than people were in older generations. They are out for themselves and demand immediate gratification. Narcissistic people who demand immediate gratification make poor long-term mates, but make demands to live together as soon as possible to get immediate gratification. So if you want to marry a person who will more likely be mature, faithful, generous, and not demand immediate gratification, do not live with him (or her) before marriage. If that person maintains a developing relationship with you without living with you, that person is 75% more likely to make a great mate and stay married to you.

BOUNDARY #3:  No sex before marriage for the exact same reason. Most people of dating age in modern society either want sex without commitment, as stated earlier, or else they pretend to love you if they need to in order to get sex. They want to use you as an object. If you refuse sex with every person you date, the selfish “users” will ditch you like a hot potato, because they don’t really give a rip about you. They just want to use your body to make them feel power over you and your sex, or for mere pleasure. Don’t feel bad when rejected by someone like this. Thank God for delivering you from a load of pain. Of course, it is fine to feel bad or even weep over the disappointment that someone you thought was Prince Charming ended up being the frog. If you refuse sex before marriage, your guy or gal will stick around because they are growing in love with you so much that sex is worth postponing as your emotional intimacy grows.  That guy or gal will probably make a great mate who respects you and will actually live for you instead of expecting you to exist for his or her pleasure. Besides the emotional intimacy that makes sex worth waiting for, there are the physical reasons.  There are more than 36 current, active venereal diseases. Twenty-five percent of the adult population in the USA has genital herpes, which, although not deadly, is a major irritant.  Condoms prevent some of the venereal diseases unless they break, leak, or are used improperly which is far more common than most people realize.  But the two deadliest venereal disease, HPV (Human Papilloma Virus) and HIV (Aids), cannot be prevented by condoms.  Condoms are almost no protection at all against HPV, which often develops into cancer, and while condoms make HIV infections less likely, they do not prevent them. The AIDS viruses are smaller than the pores in condoms and could easily go through them.  Even using two condoms results in the non-HIV partner contracting HIV one-sixth of the time.  THERE STILL IS NO CURE FOR HPV OR HIV.   Having multiple sexual partners increases the likelihood of any one of the 36 venereal diseases infecting the fallopian tubes and blocking them, one of the most common causes of infertility. Is sex with multiple partners really worth dying for? Is it really so much your goal in life that life itself is worth risking for it? Or can you wait for lifelong sex with one partner instead, with sex being an expression of true love rather than a quick burst of pleasure with a human object?

BOUNDARY #4:  The Bible says not to be “unequally yoked” with an unbeliever—a non-Christian. I recommend making friends from all different backgrounds, but only dating and considering marriage to someone who is a committed, growing Christian who loves God and embraces his Word. Statistically, your marriage has a much greater chance of being successful and deep emotionally when your mate holds very similar morals, values, and world-views.

BOUNDARY #5:  Do what is right and let the chips fall where they may.  Some people date others whom they do not really like at all or even fear, because they do not want to hurt the feelings of the other person, or because they have such low self-esteem they feel like they deserve to be abused or misused. Get therapy, if needed, to gain enough self respect to say “yes” to who you want to go out with and to say “no” to people you have no desire to go out with. If you wouldn’t want your best friend to date that person, then treat yourself with the same dignity you would your best friend and refuse to date that person too.

BOUNDARY #6:  Study the laws of codependency and avoid all codependent relationships.  I wrote one of the first books published on codependency years ago, Love is a Choice, which I talked about on Oprah in 1993. Love is a Choice has sold over a million copies, and is still selling well today because the information is still vital and pertinent to developing a healthy life. Learn everything you can about codependency.  Most people in this world make a host of mistakes in their relationships because of varying degrees of codependency. We probably all have a degree of it. There is not enough room in this article to explain the multiple facets of codependency, but in a nutshell, let me give you a brief example to illustrate how it works. A girl grows up in a home with an alcoholic, physically abusive father. She erroneously grows to think she is trash and deserves to be abused. She may grow up to be sweet, intelligent, and beautiful, but still only be attracted to males who are physically abusive and either alcoholics or drug addicts, because that is what she got used to growing up. Kind, loving guys are boring to her. She has a hole in her soul shaped like her father, and she is looking unconsciously to fill it so she can “fix” her broken relationship with her Dad, or for other motivations. If she marries an abuser who changes and becomes a wonderful husband, she is likely to divorce him and run off with another abuser. As incredible as this sounds, mental health professionals see this happen over and over again. Insight-oriented therapy can point out these patterns of “stinkin’ thinkin’” that we often have without even realizing it. We helped coin the word codependent because one mate is dependent on drugs or alcohol or even addicted to violence, while the abused mate is equally addicted, in many but not all cases, to being in that kind of relationship.

These six basic boundaries in dating are what I would consider a must. There are a host of other suggestions I give to my clients that are not strict boundaries but simple guidelines to think about, but those would fill a book. One to ponder is that the great emotional sensation of “falling in love” is sometimes a true feeling and often a false one. “I love you” may feel
genuine when it is merely more accurately stated, “I love the way you make me feel” or “I love the status I get in society by being in relationship with you.” Puppy love is what seems real but is not, and it can last anywhere from eighteen minutes to eighteen months, but rarely lasts longer than eighteen months. That is why so many celebrities marry someone new every couple of years or so. So if you want to be sure your relationship is based on true love rather than puppy love, then date that person, without sex and without living together, for eighteen months.  If you are still in love, it is probably true love and that partner is probably a keeper.

The purpose of this article was not to scare anybody. My purpose is to advise you, the reader, just like I would advise my own child, client, or anyone else I cared about a great deal. I want you to enjoy a life of loving and being loved, not a life of being used and abused. Loneliness is one of the greatest pains, so avoiding all intimate relationships is not the solution to avoiding pain. It is equally painful. But the solution is to carefully choose and develop long-lasting relationships with good people who put your interest above their own. There really are some people like that—you just have to find them in the right places. There are jerks even in churches, but there is a higher percentage of good singles in church than in local bars. When you have been hurt by relationships in the past, often even including with your parents growing up, then it is more difficult to let your walls down when you do find a safe person. I love the song by Paul Simon called Something So Right. In the song, Paul sings about a wall in China a thousand miles long, built strong to keep the foreigners out. But Paul says there is also a wall inside himself, and that is why it takes so long for his significant other to get close to him. It is a very deep and brilliant song. My advice is the same. Have boundaries to protect yourself from getting hurt, but find good people to develop relationships with and gradually, carefully, let your walls down to let them in.

We all need to love and be loved by friends. We don’t all need to be married, but marriage can be a really wonderful lifelong and safe relationship. One of mankind’s greatest fears is to die alone with nobody in life who really cares. So start building healthy relationships with others, with God, and with yourself, starting right now.