In the past, I mentioned and explained the 3-Date Rule here and here but there seems to be some confusion surrounding the details of the concept. Some of you may think it is rather restrictive or unnecessary.  Some of you may be confused about the details and reason behind the practice.

I knew I had to dedicate a post to the topic when a girl emailed me and asked if it was okay to talk to her Mom about a guy prior to having 3 dates with him.  I was so touched by the closeness she has with her family and so I wrote back and let her know that of course she can talk about a prospective date with her Mom.

Note:   Please don’t confuse this with the secular 3-Date Rule which refers to sexual conquests.  You know, if a girl won’t sleep with a guy after 3 dates, then he dumps her.  Stupid, yes. 

For clarity, the 3-Date Rule I am referring to is this:

“..The next time a guy flirts with you, don’t say anything to anyone until this guy has taken you on 3 dates….”

“…Do not even consider a guy or allow him to occupy your heart or thoughts until he has taken you on 3 dates. Yes, 3 real dates where he pays and impresses you…”

Rules

I am not a big believer in Rules unless they serve a purpose. When you hear about dating rules, they are usually rules that are imposed upon the guy by the girl.  This rule, however, is a rule you impose upon yourself.

The purpose of the 3-Date Rule is to help you practice Emotional Chastity. Emotional Chastity is an apprenticeship in self-mastery.  Being self-contained means having mastery over your passions and your speech and not allowing your emotions to dominate you.  It means keeping yourself intact (unity of the persons) and having integrity in all you say and do.  It means avoiding duplicity in your speech and presenting your life in a way that is truthful. The 3-Date Rule keeps your words contained which in turn can help keep your emotions contained.

Emotional Chastity is a virtue that keeps you from getting ahead of yourself.  It allows you to see this new blossoming romance honestly.  It prevents you from attaching yourself to a Fantasy Relationship.

Not A Formula

Keep in mind that what I am suggesting is simply for your benefit.  It is not a formula for ensuring a certain outcome.  Not talking about a guy until he has taken you on 3 dates is not a guarantee for dating success. 

The emotional chastity that results does, however, have the potential to make a positive impression on the guy.  Instead of adding pressure to the budding romance, you are confident and at peace.  Instead of allowing your emotions to dominate your actions, you are happy and responsive. It allows you to just enjoy and assess the romance. This is a great impression to make!

Family, Age and Temperament

If you are young, living at home or extremely close to your parents, then I think it is fine for you to mention to them that you are about to go out with or that you have had a couple of dates with a new guy. 

If, however, you have been out on your own for a while and have been single longer than you have ever imagined you would be, then 3-Date Rule helps to keep yours and everyone else’s hopes contained.  It helps reduce the pressure.

I have sort of a reserved temperament and I tend to keep things to myself until I can figure them out. In my case I knew Gregg for over four months before telling my parents about him. I had been living on my own for a number of years.  And, I was single for a long time.  Even if my loved ones did not intentionally cause the pressure, after a certain age, I felt pressure.  A benefit of the 3-Date Rule is that it keeps this outside pressure off of you and allows you to discern the courtship.

What About Friends?

I am not trying to be an extremist by suggesting that you not tell your friends about a guy until after he has taken you on 3 dates.  It is sort of like not eating meat on Friday. Is it a requirement?  No.  Instead, it is a spiritual discipline.  This discipline keeps things between you and your Lord.  It allows you to hear Him rather than yourself and your girlfriends gushing over (or complaining about) a new guy.  It saves you from having to embellish the details in order to make things sound juicy.

If you are the kind of girl who can talk in a ‘matter of fact’ manner about a new man, then I see no problem with you sharing with your family and friends that you have had a couple of dates. 

But, if you find yourself chatting a little too much about a new guy and building things up beyond reality or if you find yourself asking your friends if they think a guy likes you even before he has taken you on the first date…..then, the 3-Date Rule might be a good spiritual discipline for you to try.

God love and bless you!

Coming Up:  I get the best emails from girls asking great questions and so far I have been responding to them privately.  Over the next couple of weeks I will be sharing their questions and my answers.  I will, of course, change the details!  I also have some exciting guest posts planned!

If you have enjoyed my blog, please “like” my Facebook Page, The Veil and sign up to receive my blog posts automatically by clicking the rectangular “Follow“ button. Please check me out and follow me on Twitter too! Thank you!

This is going to be a short post because there is not much I can add to Allie’s wildly popular post from last week about Friending!  I think we can all agree that her conclusions (“loving the person in front of you” and “I am the best version of myself when I am in God’s will.”) are spot on.

I would like to, however, add some guidance concerning friendships with the opposite sex.  Namely, guidance on what you communicate to the world about yourself and how you communicate your interest in a specific man:

Friend-Only Girl:  This is when you present yourself to the world as a ‘friend-only’ kind of girl rather than a divinely designed mysterious feminine creature with the potential romantic role of wife and mother in your future.

Cue-less:   This is when you fail to give men the “I am interested in you too!” cues they need to feel confident in pursuing you.

Friend-Only Girl

If, in how you present yourself to the world, you limit yourself to the friend-only role, it can sometimes be difficult for a guy to ‘see’ you in a romantic light.  You could stunt the attraction from growing into a romance and this could result in the guy viewing you in a sisterly way rather than in a romantic way.

For Gregg and me, the romance aspect of our relationship blossomed first and our friendship deepened over time. We are indeed best friends but we are clearly husband and wife in the most Sacramental way.

When a healthy man considers you romantically, he needs to imagine you as his wife and the mother of his children…. as well as his friend. It is in these romantic (and vulnerable) roles (including the marital embrace) and the shared experiences (joys, sufferings) that the deep marital friendship takes root and grows.

It is possible for a romance to grow out of a friendship. But sometimes fear can keep us from believing we are capable or worthy of it.  And, it is that fear that can provoke us to project a friend-only image to the world.

What image of yourself are you projecting? Are you comfortable with yourself in a romantic role? Are you able to confidently see yourself as a wife and mother?   If not, is this keeping you in friend-only mode?  Are you vulnerable to Fantasy Relationships because they are safer and because you aren’t yet willing to take the risk associated with the romantic role?

If any of this is a struggle for you, take this to the Lord in prayer.  Ask Him to heal you of whatever is causing the discomfort and blocking this healthy feminine vision of yourself.  He will know what you need.

Cue-less

Men need cues because they can sometimes have a fear of scaring a girl off with a strong pursuit.  A guy who is in your circle of friends may be interested in you but if you are sending out friend-only signals to the world, he may refrain from pursuing a romantic relationship with you.  I am not saying that you should flirt and give cues to every guy.  But, if a certain guy sparks your interest and if he seems to want to get to know you better, throw him a bone!  Flirt with him. Look him in the eye and smile!

Then, remain emotionally chaste by practicing the 3-date rule!

3-Date Rule

This rule has so many benefits!  One benefit is that it significantly reduces the stress on both of you when attempting to move from ‘just friends’ to a ‘romance.’  If you refrain from talking about a guy (with your friends and family) until after he has taken you on 3 real dates, then you have afforded him plenty of opportunity to overcome his stress.  3 dates is plenty to define a pursuit on his part.  It has, at that point, become a romance.

Make sure you have that distinction straight in your head or else you may lower your expectations to the just friends level out of fear of appearing too serious or intense.  Do not be tempted to accept ‘hang out’ sessions in the hopes of a romantic relationship forming.  You are friendly, you are sweet, but you have standards! It is perfectly normal and healthy to have these standards and expectations.

If, after 3 dates, your expectations scare him off, then revert back to friend-only status and stay there. Do not toggle back and forth in a Frelationship.  Do not fill the role of practice girl. Refrain from ‘hanging out’ with this guy so that you can remain open and available for the one God wants to place in your life.

This post was longer than I planned but I can’t help but get all ‘Mama Bear’ about you girls!

God love and bless you!

If you have enjoyed my blog, please “like” my Facebook Page, The Veil and sign up to receive my blog posts automatically by clicking the rectangular “Follow“ button. Please check me out and follow me on Twitter too! Thank you!

This guest post by reader Allie Millette addresses a common problem which is more challenging now than ever before.  The daydreaming part is not new. Heck, I was guilty of that back when I dated in the 80’s and 90’s.  What is different is the casualness of if all and how common it is today for a guy to want to walk the line between friendship and relationship.  Things can easily turn into a ‘frelationship.’  Allie’s insight here (combined with Emotional Chastity and the 3-date-rule) is wise advice for preventing frelationships.  Thank you, Allie for this guest post!

——————————————————-

When Cindy asked me to do a guest blog post, I was so excited!  Then I asked her what she wanted me to write about and she said, “How about the challenges of dating in 2013?”  My heart sank.  I can’t fit that into one little article.  So I sat down and really thought about it.  Obviously, there are many challenges to dating, but I think the most difficult part for me is being friends with a guy.  Yep, that’s what I said.  Friendship is the hardest part of dating, in my opinion.

I have noticed that in my generation, people skip over the friendship thing altogether.  Either you are interested or you’re not.  But it is truly so sad.  How can you enter into a relationship with a person without getting to know them and being their friend?  All of my ex boyfriends except for one, were guys that I was friends with first.  They had to be because I would not have dated them had I not known them to the extent that I did.

I’ve noticed that I don’t try to be friends with men anymore.  In fact, the current dating culture makes it difficult to become friends first.  We are so conditioned to think that if a man requests to spend time with us, he is interested in more than a friendship.  In reality, there are a lot of men out there who wouldn’t mind spending time with a beautiful woman on a friend level, but they are deathly afraid that their acts of friendship will be misunderstood for acts of romance.  It’s a vicious cycle.

About a month ago, I started reflecting more on my friendships with men.  I realized that I don’t fight for my friendships at all.  I will let myself get so carried away in the daydream that the guy ceases to be my friend and becomes this weird prospect for someone I want to date.  Ladies, I know I’m not alone in this.  The reality is that as much as we HATE being looked at for our bodies and being reduced to an object by men, at some point, we need to realize that we are doing the same exact thing to them by reducing them to a prospect for our relationship goals…whatever they are.

So I tried a little experiment with myself.  I stopped striving.  I stopped trying to get face time with the men in my life, I stopped trying to analyze and predict what would happen with them.  I honestly will say that I stopped intentionally flirting.  (Most women have a natural flirtation about them.)  The biggest thing I had to do was stop the daydreams.

Oh yes, the daydreams.  They will take you places you have never been before.  They are dangerous because they build up this fake world in your mind and you become oh so disappointed when reality doesn’t live up to that beautiful pretend world.  This version of Neverland is where women find and cling to unrealistic expectations.  Giving up the daydream is paramount in fighting for your friendships with men.

What I found when I did this was complete and total peace.   I was no longer worried about how men saw me or whether or not I was doing everything I could to get his attention.  I was able to just relax, be myself, and have fun.  It has enriched my friendships greatly.  Not just my friendships with men, but my friendships with women.  Why, you ask?   Now that I don’t see men as prospects, I don’t see women as my competition.   I am simply free to love the person in front of me for exactly who they are, not what they can offer me.

I had a beautiful experience of this freedom just this past weekend.  I went to visit some friends in Colorado and one friend in particular had me over to her house for her brother’s birthday party.  First of all, her family is fantastic.  I’m pretty sure I ended up telling them that they were “like southerners who live a little further north!”  They were so welcoming and loving.  I met several wonderful people while I was there and the whole time was not distracted by the annoying thoughts of “Do I look okay?” or “Is that guy looking at me?  Should I smile?  Should I not smile?”  The only thing I was concerned with was the person right in front of me.  It was a beautiful victory.

Of course the Lord wants us to find our vocation, but I’m afraid there is so much emphasis on it that it has become the end rather than the means.  The Lord created us for eternity with Him.  That is our ultimate destiny.   I remember when I first started thinking I needed to change from a “dating” mentality to a “friending” mentality, I immediately thought, “I will be an old maid.”  I basically had to completely change what I was doing, not for the purpose of landing a man (I’m still very single!) but for the purpose of maintaining my sanity.  For the purpose of loving life again.  For the purpose of loving God again and not being bitter that I wasn’t the one chosen.   This process of learning how to be a friend wasn’t easy, I also had to face the most basic friendship in my life.  My friendship with Jesus.  How do I treat Him?  I had to look at my past behavior and realize that this whole time He has been waiting there to love me while I just keep looking for my prince charming elsewhere.

I already know that no man will satisfy the longings of my heart, but Jesus will.  I literally sat on my bedroom floor and cried for hours one day because I had to face the reality of “What if you (God) never bring that man into my life?  Will I still be okay?”  Ladies, that question changed my life.  Of course I will be okay!  I will have eternity with Him!  Oh and by the way, I do NOT plan on settling for just any man simply because I want to be accepted into the “cool married kids club “.   I am the best version of myself when I am in God’s will.  I am the best version of myself when I am genuinely happy, laughing, confident, and generally not caring what anyone else thinks.  I am the best version of myself when I am loving the person in front of me, not distracted by the prospects of the world, and when I’m serving.

God has put us on this green earth to LOVE Him and the people he puts in front of us.  So, my challenge to you today is to throw all of the dating advice out of the window!  Stop being so concerned with whether or not you’re doing it right, the woulda, shoulda, coulda and get out there and start “friending” people in real life (not on facebook).  Love the people in front of you.  Always.

————————————————

What are some other challenges of dating in 2013?  Please consider sharing your experience in a future guest post (anonymous guest posts are welcome!). I love hearing from you!  Contact me at theveilofchastity@gmail.com

If you have enjoyed my blog, please “like” my Facebook Page, The Veil and sign up to receive my blog posts automatically by clicking the rectangular “Follow“ button. Please check me out and follow me on Twitter too! Thank you!

In early September, the girls participating in the Not Alone Series tackled this question: Can A Woman Pursue A Man?  I love what Morgan from Follow and Believe wrote:

“Can women pursue men?” is very different from “Should women pursue men?”

These are indeed two different questions.  This post will address the “should” question. 

Stephanie

Stephanie from Captive The Heart is happily married and also contributed to this series both on her blog and at Ignitum Today.  I very much agree with what she wrote.  She did not seem to be encouraging single women to pursue men.  I think what she encouraged was for single women to not play games and instead to be honest.  I totally agree.  When you are with the right guy, no games are required.  In fact, I think that when you are with the right guy, you can almost do no wrong (except sin, of course). 

Stephanie’s husband, Andrew, was enamored with her.  He asked her out first.  She said ‘no’ at first and then when she was ready, she asked him to ask her out again.  Totally cute! Stephanie did not pursue him.  She responded enthusiastically to his initiation and pursuit.  She is so darn cute and sassy, when you combine that with him being enamored with her, of course it was fine.

Men Need Cues

In the same Not Alone Series, Jen from Jumping in Puddles wrote:

“….Yes, sometimes we might have to help them out by letting them know we are interested.  Because of our culture today, so many men are knocked down from pursuing us, they are constantly getting rejected.  The more rejection, the less they want to try.  It’s a sad thing, really….”

During my discussion with Gregg about this topic, he wanted me to let you girls know that men need cues!  Before he met me, he experienced some of this rejection that Jen described and it can make a guy gun-shy.  Gregg needed cues from me and he got them!  I was occasionally pretty bold!  You may be surprised at my boldness during our courtship…..

I Was Sort of Bold

Look, I am bossy by nature.  And, Gregg does not seem to mind it that much. I had never been ‘bold’ when dating other guys because they always seemed to be holding back on me.  It felt too risky.  But, during our courtship, I was uncharacteristically bold with Gregg.  And, the reason I was bold was because Gregg gave me the confidence I needed to be my bossy self. And, I knew he was looking for cues from me.

For example, after talking on the phone for about a month, I said, “So, when are you going to come visit me?”  You see, I lived in Virginia and Gregg lived in Kansas City.  Things were going really well and I was curious to know if we had a future.  Figuring that out required that we meet in person (duh).  Gregg was very happy that I asked him to visit me because, again, he was looking for cues from me. 

Another example of my boldness is when Gregg visited me the first time.  I hugged him as soon as he exited the security gate at the airport.  This surprised him, but in a good way.  You see, we had talked on the phone for 4 months.  When he arrived in person, I wanted to hug him.  I was pretty sure he wanted this too.  Again, Gregg was extremely happy to receive this and other positive cues from me. 

Another example of my boldness was in our engagement.  It was March/April 2002 and we had known each other 6 or 7 months.  We both knew this was a ‘go.’  So, one day I was emailing Gregg and I included this major cue:  R.I.N.G

We laugh about it now because when I am bossy in our marriage, I tell him that he really should have paid more attention during the courtship.  It is not like I hid this aspect of my personality!  🙂

Like Stephanie, when you are with the right guy, you can almost do no wrong.  You are free to be yourself.  I emailed her to ask her permission to quote her in this post and this is what she said, “When it comes to Catholic women’s perception of dating, it seems to me that honesty and candor are sometimes equated with pursuit, which I think is incorrect.” 

So, be your honest self. Give your sweet man some cues. But, first make sure that you have his heart.

Marriage Is Hard

As the wife, you will be so much happier with a cooperative husband.  I am not saying he needs to be a push over but there are daily things in marriage that need cooperation, teamwork and collaboration.  This is the ‘hard’ part of marriage.

But marriage is easy when you are with someone who decidedly pursued you.  Marriage involves two wills rubbing against and bumping into each other.  The rubbing removes the sharp edges over time which is good.  But, like sand paper on your skin, it can hurt. It is a ‘dying to self’ that is required. 

When the sand paper hits Gregg’s skin, he has to remember who he is dying for.  That girl, Cindy.  His wife.  It is during those times he has to remind himself, “Oh, yeah, I spotted her, pursued her and asked her to marry me.  I have chosen this.  Die, Gregg, die.”

When the sand paper hits my skin, I remember his courageous pursuit.  I remember that he picked me.  He asked me to marry him.  He risked himself for me.  He dies daily for me.  It is during those times that I say, “Die, Cindy, die.”

Should You Pursue?

I think the answer to this question is that it depends on your definition of Pursue.  If you mean Chase, then I say it is not a good idea.  If you mean Respond and Flirt and give Cues, then yes, of course you should.  If you mean, return his efforts with your equal effort, like a tennis ball in a tennis game, then I think that is fine too.  But, I think the relationship should be established first.

For example, after Gregg visited me the first time, he asked me to visit him in Kansas City.  He felt that if things were going to progress, then I needed to be willing to visit him.  I think it was important to him that I see his home life and meet his family and friends.  I took that as a great compliment so of course I said ‘yes’ to his invitation!  He served the ball and I hit it back. 

But, here is the thing.  I never felt like I was pursuing Gregg with my actions and affections.  His pursuit of me was consistent and reliable. I responded, I flirted and I gave cues. I felt no angst or obsession.  I felt happy and cherished.  I was free.  God had finally lifted the Veil.

“…know that if someone gives you anxiety and draws you into obsession, it’s not a relationship coming from God….” Christina from The Little Signs

Preach It Morgan

 I am going to close with a quote from Morgan from Follow and Believe (I added caps for our Lord): 

“…I think there’s a delicate line to walk between being open and approachable and being the desperate throwing-herself-at-you girl.  Because like everything in life, there is an order and all of that was put in place by the One who knows what He’s doing…”

God Love and Bless You!

Related Posts:

https://theveilofchastity.com/2013/06/05/your-smile-is-like-honey/

https://theveilofchastity.com/2013/05/30/do-men-need-help/

https://theveilofchastity.com/2013/06/20/is-he-just-practicing/

If you have enjoyed my blog, please “like” my Facebook Page, The Veil and sign up to receive my blog posts automatically by clicking the rectangular “Follow“ button. Please check me out and follow me on Twitter too! Thank you!