Ok. So, dating. When I first started dating my now sweet husband, I really needed a template and a vision, something to define what it was I wanted dating to look like, and how I wanted to approach it. I wanted God to be our center, the focus, the goal, and the destination, always. But it can be super confusing when you aren't really a unit, but you kind of are? But kind of not. Obviously, this is confusing, as you can see.

So I wrote a letter to my lovely, and let him know some of the ideas that had been bouncing around in my head that I thought would help put some definition to what I was imagining. Knowing that dating is to see if you could do the normal things with someone for the rest of your life, I wanted to bypass some of the awkward, and hopefully keep things intentional but normal. All of these thoughts morphed themselves into a small list of four ideas that I think are critical to keep in mind. So here it is, a conceptual template to balance the tension in the first stages of dating.