Choosing God's Best by Dr. Don Raunikar

Author:Dr. Don Raunikar [Raunikar, Dr. Don]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-56865-6
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2013-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

BEHIND THE MASK

Learning to build solid friendships is an important aspect of preparing for the marriage relationship. One of the major cries I hear in marriage counseling is “my spouse is not my best friend.” A vast collection of research studies proves that you tend to be happiest with someone who is much like you. That seems to suggest that most people will find their spouses from within their own pool of friends, a pool usually comprised of people with similar interests and ideas.

When God does begin directing you to a possible marriage partner, it is very appropriate to ask how you get to know each other without dating. The issue is not that you can’t spend time together, but how can you be together in ways that will avoid counterfeit oneness? The aim is not to curse dating but to avoid the shortcomings of dating. You do this by avoiding activities that encourage intimacy without commitment or accountability.

In a dating relationship, it’s easy to put up a facade for three to eight hours and never reveal who you really are. How many times have you or one of your friends been involved in a relationship and found that after the first three months the scales fell off your eyes? You met the other person—the real person—for the first time. “I didn’t know he/she was like that,” you say to yourself. Bad temper, selfish attitude, controlling spirit, manipulative nature, moody disposition. The list of possibilities is endless. The discovery process also can work in the reverse—but rarely does. You can discover good qualities as well as bad, but most people’s good qualities are already on display.

If you’re one of the people who was able to break through a dating partner’s facade in the first three months, you’re fortunate. Many of the couples I counsel complain that the other person was never “like that” before they married. The facade didn’t come down until after the wedding. Over and over they say that the person they married isn’t the person they dated. How can that be?

Masking our unpleasant qualities is easy to do in today’s dating world. Most couples are alone and completely absorbed in each other much of the time they are together. They rarely see the other person interacting within a family or group setting. What people are like within their own families before marriage can be a reliable indicator of how they will act in a new family after marriage and after the new grows old.

Courtship stresses time spent with each other’s family and in ministry and group activities. How people treat others is a good barometer of how they will treat you when the honeymoon is over. How they serve others indicates how they will serve you. Spending every minute alone while the bloom is still on the rose won’t give you a clear picture of what the garden will look like in another season.

Although the intimate friendship you develop with your future mate will last for a

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