Well, courting takes work. But there's just something about that word courting that adds a few extra pounds to a sentence. When you say, "courting" it adds a layer of responsibility and officialness (is that a real word?) to a relationship. It's like when you finally mastered those 20 lunges on each leg then your personal trainer says do it again, but this time he puts 10 pound dumbbells in each hand. That's courting.
I've already told you guys that when Rob first asked me to be his girlfriend, he had a plan. This wasn't going to be one of those relationships where you essentially just have a partner to go to the movies with and someone to text all night about nothing. This was going to be something more.
One of the first things we set into place in our relationship was weekly Bible study. We chose a relationship study geared toward courting couples. It was a good way to fuel conversations and work through Biblical principles about relationships together. This Bible study was not always an easy decision to actually do. Most times we would meet at Starbucks at 7 am or earlier on a Saturday morning before Rob went to his job. Courting takes work.
“Courting takes work”
We don't do overnight trips very often. It's only happened a couple of times. One time was in August of that first year we were dating. We met in Dallas for MegaFest and then stayed for Adventure Saturday. We had two rooms. The next summer we took a road trip to Ohio to visiting my family then to Michigan to visit his family. We stayed with family or we had two rooms. In this day and age, everyone understands to economic benefit of staying together. With there being a lot of people around us who are choosing to move in together, the decision to stay in the same room should have been a piece of cake. If you've ever paid to stay overnight in a hotel, I don't need to explain to you how expensive it is. I also don't need to clarify for you the difficulty of the decision to hit the button that increases the number of rooms on the hotel website, and request that hotel to double the price of your overnight stay.
For us, there were things that outweighed the increased dollar amount of getting separate places. There is an increased level of temptation that goes along with staying together. I don't simply mean the temptation to sleep together, but also to get to a level of comfort and familiarity with each other that is not safe or wise of us to have while we are courting. Another big thing for us was that we did not want to taint our testimony. We wanted to be able to tell our friends and our children (one day guys, hold off) that it is possible to do it God's way and be successful. We wanted to be able to witness the fact that courting based on Biblical principles comes with a lot less of the headaches and heartbreaks that courting based on worldly principles comes with. Courting takes work.
“Courting takes work”
We then moved into completing our bachelor's and master's degrees in pre-marriage classes. Well, that's not what it's officially called, but that is what it feels like. We started an 11 week class in September of that first year for pre-engaged couples. This class sparks a lot of conversations that typical "dating" couples don't talk about. We had to discuss everything from what we specifically expected out of marriage to how we would feel about moving an aging parent into our home once we are married with anything and everything between. We had homework every week and had to do our homework separately, because our answers were not allowed to be swayed by our significant other, then after completing our homework we would bring it together and discuss.
After that we had another 11 week class for engaged or going-to-be-engaged couples. This class was to teach Godly principles to instill in your marriage. We discussed the ups and downs, trials and tribulations that often affect people in their marriages and how to look at them from a Godly perspective. For example, we future wives learned how to speak to our husbands when we are frustrated about his not taking the trash out for three weeks without ruining our whole marriage over some trash. We learned Godly "tools" to put into our marriage tool belt. Courting takes work.
In that second class we learned that marriage takes work. We had to recite it every class. I'm under the opinion that courting also takes work. And it isn't for punks!
“Courting takes WORK and it ain’t for PUNKS.”
