What Goes Around Comes Around in the Dating World

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You have heard the saying, "What goes around comes around."

Some people would call that karma but it's actually less some cosmic punishment than the natural consequences of how you choose to live in a moral universe. As the Bible says, you reap what you sow.

In the dating world, this means that you don't just have to be careful about how you act when you are in a relationship, you have to be careful about how you act even when a relationship does not work out.

For instance, a young woman I know once dated a guy who was pretty crazy about her. She liked him a lot too but something about him made her feel pressured. She just wasn't ready for the kind of commitment he wanted. So she broke off their relationship. He responded by saying some pretty mean, nasty things to her. If this was calculated to get her to reconsider, it failed. It made her decide never to date him again.

Be careful how you treat a date, because you never know how it'll come back to bite you.

The story reminded me in a weird way of the guy who threatened my sister with cats. 

Remember that story? She had dated him once, decided not to date him a second time and he had reacted by turning up the pressure. He said he was her last chance at a good Catholic husband and that she was likely to wind up alone and forgotten with nothing but cats for company in her old age. My sister, who was around thirty at the time, was not the only woman he had thus presented himself to. He moved on to freaking out a twenty-one year old college student just weeks later.

The story gets even weirder because shortly afterwards, I met him.

It was in the early years of our marriage, when I was six months pregnant with my second child. My husband and I had gone on a retreat out of state. It was the kind of event that attracted lots of serious, educated Catholics who got up and gave presentations about all kinds of serious, educated subjects, none of which made any sense to me:

“Indeed, as we have seen, God is the most immediate implication of self-consciousness."

But I didn't care. The people were awesome. Most of them were young adults our age. They preached the love of God, they played raucous games, they sang comic songs in Italian. What's not to love?

Another feature of their get-togethers was that lots and lots of people happened to meet their future spouses.

That's why he was there.

He sat down at the lunch table opposite me and struck up a conversation. The table was full so he did not realize that the guy next to me was not just some friend of mine but my husband. Since he was approximately 45 and I was just shy of 24, and he was clearly trying to meet me, I knew something was up.

Then he told me his name and I could not believe it. It was him! He was still on the hunt. Whatever he liked about my sister obviously had shown up in my DNA as well. And with the table covering me, he couldn't see baby bump # 2. There was only one thing to do.

Stand up.

End of conversation.

What do you want your dating reputation to be?

St. Paul tells us in the Book of Romans that as far as possible we should live at peace with everyone. This is hard when you are dating and get disappointed.

But fighting to get someone back by fighting with them just doesn't work. And it is likely to get you a reputation which might well come back to haunt you. Don't be fooled by the fact that there are 1.2 billion Catholics in the world. The field of single American faithful Catholics is smaller than that. Circles often overlap. Word gets around.

What kind of word do you want going around about you? Act accordingly because what goes around comes around.

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