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What If I Don't 'Just Know'?

Middle School Wisdom and Dating Dilemmas

I was not a normal middle schooler.

I definitely liked boys, but I had little interest in dating them. It wasn't because my parents forbade me. I guess I figured that, realistically, I wasn't going to marry someone I started dating in middle school, so why start dating? Odd, huh? I know.

I won't bore you with the non-existent details of my teenage dating career. Suffice it to say that by the time I had the opportunity to date seriously, the stakes were pretty high because I was old enough to actually consider marriage. There was only one problem: I hadn't the faintest idea how to go about choosing a spouse.

Sure, I knew I ought to pick someone who shared my faith and my values, someone whom I liked and respected and someone with a great balance of humor and depth. But seriously, is it ever that easy when you're in a relationship, trying to decide whether to take it deeper or call it off? Not in my experience.

Analysis Paralysis

My problem wasn't a lack of advice. There was plenty of that to go around:

"Don't marry someone you can live with; marry someone you can't live without."

"Use your head to choose a marriage partner — don't get swept away by your emotions."

And my favorite: "When you find the right person, you'll just know."

Somehow, these words just didn't help me out. In fact, they sent me into a tailspin of indecision. I doubted myself; I overanalyzed; I second-guessed. Somehow, I did manage to get married. And along the way I learned a few things. I'd love to share them here. Maybe it will prevent some others from going through the turmoil I experienced.

It's Different Now

The first thing I figured out is that the "helpful hints" I mentioned above are not necessarily bad advice — they're just the right answers to the wrong question. These words were very helpful in a time when societal pressure pushed toward marriage and people tended to have an idealized view of it. In a culture like that, it's important to warn young women against letting their hearts run away with them. But our generation has grown up in a culture of failed marriages. We're much less likely to idealize marriage, and we're pretty aware of how rare good marriages are. On top of that, we're educated, independent and self-sufficient. Now more than ever before, it's possible for a woman to live her whole life without a man and be financially stable and professionally successful.

So, when we hear that we should only marry the person we can't live without, many of us can honestly answer that we could do fine on our own. And when we're told not to let our emotions run away with us, we stare blankly — how could our emotions possibly get the best of us when we're scared to death of the marriage commitment? In short, many young women today will never have that "I just know" feeling about marriage. Does that mean we can't or shouldn't get married? No. But getting there takes a bit of work.

Deal With Your Stuff

To my surprise, the hardest thing about making a decision to get married was not the questions I had about the guy — it was my own issues. I didn't know it, but for years, I had been stockpiling assumptions, expectations, attitudes and habits that made it difficult to take that leap. So, the first thing I had to do was sort through those things.

For example, I'm a person who likes to keep my options open. Besides being part of my personality, it's something that's been reinforced by my culture. (I mean, seriously, if you choose the wrong college, you can transfer. And if you choose the wrong major, you can change it. The same goes for almost every big decision in the lives of college students.) Anyhow, because of this, I made it into my 20s without really considering that saying "I do" to one person means giving up all other options … for the rest of my life … before I even know what they are. Yikes! In our culture, that's nearly unthinkable. So I kind of freaked out when I recognized the magnitude of the decision I was trying to make.

The crisis helped me to come to grips with a simple truth: God created time. And He made it to run in one direction, irreversibly. He also created marriage as a commitment to be made at a point in time, by people who cannot possibly know what will happen in the future. And if He created it that way, it must be OK. In fact, it's more than OK: God calls the forever union of a man and woman "very good."¹ This may seem extremely simple to you, but to me it was revolutionary. Once I got that little issue straightened out between God and me, I was one step closer to being able to make a wise choice.

That wasn't all — there were other things. Like an intense fear of conflict. I had to work through that one and learn that the presence of conflict isn't necessarily a red flag. Healthy conflict is a skill that can be learned. And conflict, when it's done right, can actually increase intimacy.

Those were my big issues. Your "stuff' may be something else entirely. The important part is to examine yourself before the Lord and find out what attitudes and habits might be sabotaging your ability to make a decision about marriage. Then ask God to show you the truth and give you the courage and strength to live by it.²

Make a Wise Choice

Once you've destroyed roadblocks in your own life that paralyze you and prevent you from making a decision, you can more clearly see the man in question. If you've been together for any significant length of time, you know he's not perfect. And that shouldn't surprise you, because you've almost certainly seen plenty of friction in the marriages around you. And that's what's hard to decipher: How much friction is "normal"? You know you're not going to marry a perfect person. But you also don't want to spend every day of the rest of your life in pain caused by another person's bad choices or habits. How are you supposed to know which scenario you're dealing with?

It helped me when I learned to distinguish character issues from preference issues. Integrity, the ability to make and keep commitments, honesty, humility, teachability, biblical values and a willingness to forgive and ask for forgiveness — these character issues are all of utmost importance. Red flags in these areas should not be ignored and can rightly become deal-breakers if they aren't resolved.³

In contrast, preference issues such as neatness (or messiness), recreational interests and worship style are important in a very different way. There's no right or wrong here, just preferences. So in this realm, differences may raise concern, but they don't necessarily need to be relationship-enders. The question to ask here is, What's a good balance of similarities and differences for us? Some couples delight in a good debate over differing political or theological views. For others, that would cause stress. Some couples need to connect recreationally; others are happy as clams pursuing their hobbies independently. The important thing is to consider carefully whether you've got enough preferences in common to keep you connected. And when you find areas of difference, think about whether — in the long-term — they will add spice to your marriage or drive you apart.

It goes without saying that making a wise decision in this area is, in some ways, a lot like making any other important choice. You should definitely turn to Scripture, prayer and wise friends to help give you some perspective. Sure, these things feel a lot less romantic than "just knowing," but they're more likely to lead you into a healthy marriage.

The Long-Term View

A little-known fact about the "You'll just know" theory of choosing a spouse is that most people who enter marriage that way still have to deal with all the stuff I mentioned above. They glide into marriage on a wave of euphoric emotions and later, they get smacked by their own selfishness, bad assumptions about marriage and differences in matters of preference.

Putting it that way makes it seem like it doesn't matter very much which approach you choose (or which approach chooses you, as the case may be). In the end, isn't it true that all couples who desire to build a godly marriage have to do some hard work? Yes. But it didn't feel true to me as I was trying to count the cost of the marriage commitment and be sure that when I said "I do," I really meant it — for life. At that point it seemed like a little euphoria would help me to buck up and make a decision. I wondered if not having those feelings was a red flag in and of itself.

Since then, I've learned that the presence or absence of an emotional high in the process of choosing a spouse really means very little. I ended up making a very good choice, even though the emotions that accompanied it were often difficult ones. I've also learned that Christian marriage provides for a different kind of "I just know" feeling after the wedding, even if it doesn't happen before.

For example, because God blessed me with — and I committed myself to — a loyal, godly, servant-hearted man, I just know that I don't have to worry about whether he'll be faithful. And, because we both stand on the principle that divorce is not an option, I just know that we will continue to face our own sinfulness and deal with our conflict because that's the only thing that's left to do. Because of this, I just know that we will get to keep growing together for as long as God leaves us both on earth, and that gives me great joy.

C O F F E E  S H O P

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Do you think you'll "just know" who to marry?

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Of course, this doesn't mean I have a guarantee of lifelong bliss. There will always be circumstances in life that I can't control. And perhaps that's why this is my favorite lesson I learned through the process of choosing a spouse: If the worst things I can imagine were to actually happen, I just know that my God is big enough to sustain me, provide for me and heal my heart. That is the best assurance of all.