Reddit reviews Boy Meets Girl: Say Hello to Courtship

Read the book. Then read the followup book, Boy Meets Girl. Both are by Joshua Harris. Both give sound advice, once you understand the advice. Then you will understand where this mother is coming from, and useful dialog will result.

I think that this attitude is the product of the book I Kissed Dating Goodbye written by Joshua Harris. It gained a lot of traction among Christians in the late 1990s and spawned a competing book called I Gave Dating a Chance. Harris doesn't actually think that dating is wrong, but he advocates a different attitude towards dating. Much of what he says is semantics. He advocates going back to courting instead of dating, but his definition of courting resembles what many people would call dating. In the end, he does make some good points about society's attitude towards dating, but he doesn't make a very good argument for getting rid of it completely. I haven't read it yet, but he apparently wrote a sequel called Boy Meets Girl: Say Hello to Courtship after he got married.

I'm sorry for your pain brother. The devil hates the Church, and the devil hates marriage, and he has been using the world to attack both with a new ferocity for the last three generations. I am so sorry that you are a victim of that. But stand fast and put on the armour of God (Ephesians 6!). The victory belongs to Christ and with His Spirit you can overcome the battles you are faced with.

Pray to Our Lady to stay pure for as long as it takes, and thank God that you do at least have the teachings of the Church and the grace of the sacraments to protect you - I had neither of these until I finally came to know God in my 40s, and though I now have a beautiful and committed Catholic wife, our marriage is attacked daily by the effects of our previously sinful lives outside of the Church.

What I have heard, anecdotally, among younger married Catholics, is that long non-marriage relationships are a very bad idea, for the reasons you have outlined and experienced. If you are not discerning marriage with someone, you should not be dating them at all, and if you don't feel after a year at most that you are sure you should marry each other, then it is time to part ways, give yourself and the other a chance at finding someone more obviously suitable.

Some recommended reading:

• Seraphic Singles, blog by a traditional Catholic lady who is now married so not updating it any more. It's mostly aimed at women, but apart from having some useful posts specifically for men, the rest is still quite enlightening. Her main tip for men seems to be: traditional Catholic women want to find husbands, but it is our job as men to lead the process, to do the asking out and to lead the discernment process
  
• Boy Meets Girl non-Catholic book on Christian "courtship", which proposes a plan for specifically, intentionally dating with a view to discerning marriage
  
  The alternative, of course, is to try not to think of marriage so much at all, put more effort into serving God and the Church, keep trying to grow into authentic manhood and leave it in God's hands. I'm not saying you should do this, and I understand very well the problem of lust, but it's something to think about. At least consider the possibility that you may be at risk of allowing marriage and/or sex to become an idol in your life and thus taking your attention away from God and your pursuit of holiness. One book I can recommend, if you think this may be a factor, is Wild at Heart by John Eldredge.
  
  And whatever you do, do everything in your power to avoid pornography, masturbation and other sexual sins. Which basically means accepting you don't have power and you need God's grace.
  
  Also, I think the closer you get to God, the more your opinion of what is attractive in a woman will change. I'm not at all suggesting you should marry someone you find physically repulsive, but remember you have been brainwashed by a broken world to expect sexual arousal based on the external appearances of women you know nothing about. Figure out what character traits in a partner you need to make a successful, Catholic marriage and they are very different from what the World tells us we should expect. When your hearts are united with God, and you are both committed to marriage His way, then I firmly believe that He will give you the grace of great and satisfying sex too, but it will be nothing like we are conditioned to expect by pornography and Hollywood. Proverbs 31:30 seems to have an opinion on this.
  
  I hope and pray that your frustration and disgust, when you offer it to God, will be turned around by His grace into a determination to change the world for the better, to pull the world back from the traps that the Devil has set for us, to raise a good Catholic family and to use your experience and wisdom to help lead the next generation back towards the Truth. Amen?!

So, the issue here is that marriage isn't just a paper you sign. The whole point of marriage is that you are joining together as one flesh with your bride. It is an archetype of God and this bride, the church.

Sex is that physical act of joining as one flesh, so it is supposed to be done in a marriage and not outside one.

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As far as avoiding temptation, it is all about boundaries. It is different for each couple, but in general, you need to limit the touch. Many couples choose not to front hug (hence the jokes about side-hugs) or cuddle. Other common limits are no touching below the waist or sitting in each other's lap.

The idea of these kind of rules is that by limiting yourself you avoid being in a bad situation.

A helpful book is Boy Meets Girl: Say Hello to Courtship which talks about how to create these rules for yourself, among other things.

> I only wish I had your wisdom.

It was only after being a fool for many years prior.

> I think the fathers of the girls I dated would have given me a funny look if I talked to them about that stuff or asked them permission to do anything.

Yeah, you gotta know your audience, who you're dealing with. I wouldn't recommend that approach with every father of a girl you wanted to date.

> I have a daughter and a son on the way now, and when they are older I want them to take your path.

When Boy Meets Girl was a very helpful book to me. It's best to approach the book as a source for wisdom in relationships, rather than this is what you have to do kind of thing.