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Joshua Harris hasn't made my life any easier. In fact, thanks to him, my future wife—wherever she is— may very well have given up the idea of ever dating. Harris's surprise 1997 bestseller, I Kissed Dating Goodbye (penned when he was only 21), has caught the attention of hordes of young women of my generation—particularly those who are evangelical Christians.

In his book, Harris encourages young Christians to look beyond our Western culture's dominant paradigm for developing serial intimate relationships (namely, the process of "dating") and instead commit to "purposeful singleness." Romantic relationships, he suggests, should exist only as a means to preparing for marriage—what's commonly called "courting." Harris avoids that quaint-sounding term in I Kissed Dating Goodbye, but the idea is implicit in his promotion of relationships that emphasize long-term commitment and the supervision of the community of believers over and against traditional dating, which he feels emphasizes self-centered emotional and physical satisfaction.

Harris's book struck a chord with an entire generation of young believers. The book far exceeded the sales expectations of Multnomah, its publisher, and has spawned an entire genre of works on how to do relationships in a "Christian way." Recent titles include Dating and Waiting (Kregel, 2000) by William Risk, Boundaries in Dating (Zondervan, 2000) by Henry Cloud and John Townsend, and I Gave Dating a Chance (WaterBrook, 2000), Jeramy Clark's almost-as-popular response to Harris.

Though the semantics often differ (Harris's "principled romance" isn't all that different from Clark's acceptable kind of "dating"—they're both basically dating with specific boundaries), the message of the books is generally the same. To wit: in a culture that seems increasingly disinclined toward the self-sacrificing attitudes that encourage healthy relationships, those who seek to follow Jesus through their relationships need to establish unique rules for ensuring that those relationships do indeed honor God.

This is obviously a need. Even some academics at secular institutions realize this. University of Chicago professors Amy and Leon Kass recently edited a large volume titled Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying (University of Notre Dame Press, 2000); the title is taken from the closing line of a poem Robert Frost composed for his daughter on her wedding day. The readings, which range in origin from Genesis to Darwin, bring into focus a time when courting—of a rather different sort than Harris describes—was the norm for most in the Western world.

There's a reason why these books are generating such a response. In its popular iterations in our culture, dating can often become manipulative, confusing, and even abusive—not to mention downright frustrating.

For instance, I have one roommate who is legendary among the other three of us in the house for being a "Christian Casanova." Somehow, he manages to scrounge up dates almost weekly in a town that I thought was bereft of possibilities. He sees these dates almost as job interviews. If the first date works out and the woman maintains his interest, then great; he'll ask her out again. If he sees no romantic possibilities, then that's great as well; he'll remain her friend.

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June 11 2001, Vol. 45, No. 8