Dating Teaches You Skills for Marriage; Hooking Up Doesn't (An Interview)

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 Kerry Cronin is a professor at Boston College and teaches a popular class on dating. She has a lot of insight into how difficult dating in today's world is, and shared some of that with me when I got a chance to talk to her recently.

What made you start teaching people how to date?

Twelve or thirteen years ago, maybe even more, I had a conversation with a group of students and we were talking about  life after graduation. I was asking them all sorts of questions, because in philosophy we are interested in asking questions. What do things mean? What is the best way to live? What is the just way to live? How do we best live in community? So I was asking those kinds of questions, and I came to find out that out of the eight seniors I was talking to, and they were all amazing people, there was only one who had dated while at Boston College. And I thought what?  There are several thousand students here!  All of them are wonderful and attractive! And you didn't date anyone?  It kind of left me stupefied.

When I started asking  my own students about it, what I discovered was that everyone wanted to talk about dating, everyone was craving conversations about this. My students' roommates, their friends, everyone wanted mentoring and coaching. I realized that the larger culture is so weird and messed up about dating that we all want to talk about it, and we want to tell our stories. Aristotle says there thousands of ways to go wrong and only a few ways to go right, and that is so true in this conversation. There are so many ways to go wrong in the dating conversation, and the Holy Spirit led me to this one, right way to talk about it: which is to laugh with students about it. Once they feel not judged and like someone really cares about them, they they are ready to open up. And that is why the movie The Dating Project is such a great vessel because it starts with stories.

The hook up culture doesn't prepare people for marriage, but dating does.  

Lots of people are quite happy in the hook up culture, but many more people who want to date find the hook up culture problematic. I often say to students that the hook up culture promises a lot of things, and it delivers some of those things.  It gives you an ego boost, makes you feel part of the social scene, it is a funny story to tell, it gives you social status. But at the end of the day it erodes your soul and body and leaves you lonely.

Dating asks something different; it requires a different set of habits and skills. But it also builds those skills in you as you date, and those skills  are what you need for long term commitment, what you need for marriage. Dating asks you to pay attention to your feelings and what is unfolding or not unfolding. Dating helps you figure out how to pay attention to another person's wants and needs. It teaches you how to let someone down with grace and dignity. It teaches you how to lean on someone emotionally, and how to move someone from your emotional JV team to your emotional varsity team.

What are some of your favorite stories from the students who complete your dating challenge?

I'll tell you two. The first one is from yesterday, I was grading and read a student's reflection on the date he asked someone out on (Kerry assigns her students a dating challenge as homework where they have to ask another student out on a first date, and they have to follow certain rules about the first date like: No alcohol, keep it under $10, you ask you pay, keep the date under two hours). In his reflection he explains that they walked from campus to a coffee shop, and it was about a fifteen minute walk.

They were doing all the normal small talk on the way there, and while they were talking she kept checking her phone. He thought the date was so boring, "If this is a first date, I don't want to go on another one." So he decided to change his tactic. "I really went deeper and I asked a different kind of question. And it was amazing, she totally responded! We ended up talking about art and movies and books. From that point forward she never checked her phone again even though it buzzed and buzzed." In reading his reflection, I thought it was very interested that he noticed she stopped checking her phone, and that he appreciated it so much!

This second story is older, it's one of the classics. For this particular student's date, he took a fellow student out for ice cream and he said that it went really well. "I was really excited about it, and I was walking her back to her dorm. I was walking on a cloud. I almost couldn't hear what she was saying because I was so happy and mesmerized. And then I wondered if I should ask her out again or what I should do? And I was just freaking out. I had all this inner turmoil. Should I be casual? Should I tell her how excited I am?"

And while he was so caught up in all of this he forgot how he was supposed to end the date according to the dating assignment rules. And so he high fived her. "As soon as I put up my hand, I just knew that that was not the move. And she had to jump up because I was so tall and she was so short." The story is a sweet story, but what I really loved was how the class reacted to his story. Everyone in class gasped when he said what he had done, they were worried with him. Thankfully she said yes to another date, and all the class cheered. I just thought, how wonderful it was to see how much they support each other, and want each other to succeed!

Editor's Note: One way to help build a culture of dating is to check out a great new documentary The Dating Project (it features Professor Kerry Cronin from this interview) and is in theaters April 17th only.

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