Being Clear About Your Relationship

There are quite a number of reasons for men and women to date:
* Social interaction.
* Recreation.
* Sex.
* Practicing social skills. (This is particularly true for people who have not dated or haven’t dated in a long time.)
* Practicing seduction skills. (This is particularly true for people who have been celibate or “out of circulation” for a while”.)
* Experimenting with different relationships. (This may be a motivation for people who have had unsuccessful relationships and want to see what other options are available to them.)
* Testing to see if they are desirable to others. (This may be a motivation for people who are insecure or narcissistic.)
* Finding someone to marry. (Yes, and some people really do date to find a mate.)

Obviously, this is only a partial list. The point here is that if you go out on a number of dates, you will meet people at a variety of emotional levels of readiness to tie the knot. This array of motivations is enough to be a veritable field of emotional landmines where your boundaries or your potential partner’s boundaries are in danger of being invaded.

OK. Let’s say you do find someone that interests you. There is yet another tangle of motivations to get through.

There Are Different Types of Love
There is
* Friendship
* Sexual attraction
* The love between siblings
* The love between a parent and a child
* Platonic love between students, teachers, colleagues.

Sexual love is often a fun place to start a relationship, but most couples know that it can’t just remain there. The relationship needs to be transformed into something deeper.

What’s often confusing is that couples will initially meet each other expecting that good friends will make good marital partners. Many dates turn into friendships where the couple will act out their sexual attraction. Later, when these friends decide to marry, they are surprised at the difficulty in transforming the relationship. The task for this sort of couple is to realize that it’s not enough to be friends in a marital relationship. Friends can go home when the night is over. Even friends who live together and have sex have the option of moving out.

A married couple goes home to each other – every night, for the rest of their lives. This is because somewhere after the marriage begins a mysterious thing called bonding occurs. At some point in the relationship, the couple mutually recognizes that they are more than friends and more than just individuals. Marriage has pushed these individuals into a situation where one partner always has to always consider the impact of one’s behavior on the other partner to maintain the relationship. At some point it dawns on the couple that they are no longer individuals, but have transcended into something more than themselves. You’ll often hear widows and widowers of every age describe their loss of a spouse with whom they have bonded by saying: “It was like losing an arm or a leg.” Genesis says it best: “Therefore, shall a man leave his father and mother and cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.” We’re not just talking about being roomies here.