I Kissed Dating Goodbye

"The best relationships are between two people who care more about each other's good than their own momentary pleasure."

Six years ago I was taking a walk with the girl who would become my wife, and she told me I'd need to read I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Josh Harris. It was a book she'd read at age 13 during a community symphony rehearsal, and as she sat in the auditorium she'd nodded along to all the good sense she found. My own expectations of the book were low. I opened it anticipating an out-of-touch primer on romance in the style of certain conservative southern Christian colleges, where coeducation fraternizing is prohibited except under supervision and even then carried out in painfully absurd legalism. What I found instead was all the balance and sense that I'd noticed was missing in romantic love everywhere else.

You see, the world at large thinks Christians gone mad on religion for insisting on chastity, and most Christians seem to think the world at large is gone mad on sex to so utterly ignore all religious learning on the subject. The more important and wonderful a thing is, like a war or an election, the more likely people are to tell absurd lies about it. In the cases of sex and religion, either the Christians are telling a very great lie about the dangers of sex or the rest of the world has made a dreadfully dangerous whitewashing of religion; someone is making a grave mistake. As far as I can tell, Joshua Harris has said in the simplest and sanest way the answer to this riddle: The best relationships are between two people who care more about each other's good than their own momentary pleasure.

You see, if one of these views is madness and one is sanity, the saner one ought to cohere with the other sanities we find universal; the sorts of sanities that, when lost, we can recognize as madness. In which system is affection best preserved, in which system is wisdom beyond moment-to-moment passion? Where could one find respect, liberty of will (in a meaningful sense), and honesty? You find these things when two people care more about each other's good than their own momentary pleasure.

And this one sentence is the whole brilliance of the book. Harris has some good ideas about how this might practically play out in his "standards" of courtship, some of which contain the same broad wisdom, and some of which are fairly provincial. He touches, however, a great truth in this book, and it was upon this principle that my wife and I built our dating days into a marriage.