There was a time when we had researched and considered a form of betrothal for my three daughters. Yes, that was past tense because back then we were steeped heavily in legalism. The idea of betrothal is huge among legalists and since legalism is a form of feeding the flesh I can’t help but to wonder if betrothal is also of the flesh.
There hadn’t been many books on the topic of courtship until this last decade. I spent about a year studying the history of courtship and sought the advice of many pastors about this topic. Over the past few years I have come to the conclusion that courtship is defined differently by each family, but it most often veers into betrothal.
Betrothal is a controlled appointment of a spouse under the authority of the parents.
This removes the freedom from the men and women who are to be wed.
When Jesus came to be our High Priest he gave us a New Covenant where He is our individual authority.
Any amount of total control we would have over our adult children getting wed would be usurping the Divine Authority of Christ in their lives.
I am not opposed to adult children seeking their parent’s advice for wisdom when it comes to relationships. I am in full support of that kind of wisdom within a family and between two families who would be joined by their children’s marriage.
{photo credit by Ellen}
I believe an adult child would be wise to consider the parent’s beliefs when choosing to continue in a relationship that appears to be growing. When a son of a grace filled couple chooses to court a woman whose parents are strict legalists, there is bound to be division later in life when grandchildren enter the picture.
Just because someone goes to church doesn’t mean they are an ideal future spouse. Ideas and beliefs in church traditions can change drastically as each individual in a relationship grows and their beliefs change somewhat.
Many times I have had conversations with friends who walked away from a one congregation as they discovered something in different interpretations of another denomination. The heartache the couple goes through when the In-Laws shun them over choosing a different church can be incredibly difficult.
When my husband and I ventured out of our former church, we were so blessed that both our sets of parents were in total support of any decision we make about where we choose to grow our faith.
Not every couple has this kind of freedom to really grow as a couple.
Some parents try to divide their married adult children when they try to usurp the marriage relationship between a husband and wife. Parents who insist on their own religion on a couple who is independent from them and under the Headship of Christ is causing division of the union between man and wife and their Lord.
When one of our daughters told my husband and I that a young guy was interested in getting to know her we took a step back to consider how we were going to embrace this growing process in our daughter’s life.
Since our daughter met this young man at a church we sought out the youth leaders for advice about this friendship. We got to know the parents of this young guy and began scheduling opportunities for us all to get together so we could get to know each other.
As parents we all agreed that this would be a friendship that we all wanted to supervise and watch closely. It was a relief to know they believed a lot of the same things we believed, but more important than theology was the wisdom in which we all had come to know through our own heartaches growing up.
Neither of us couples wanted to be controlling or legalisitic with the friendship between our teens.
It was so important that we all agree to walk with them through this time in their lives.
During this time we continued to cultivate our own relationship with our daughter and it gave us the opportunity to watch her grow and learn under supervision and guidance of us as her parents.
As with any new relationship, especially between a guy and a girl, there are bound to be difficult times in which the parents are to step in. These other parents were so open to all four of us being involved in the growth our two teens were taking in their friendship and a mutual agreement between all of us, including the teens, was made to have a time of rest in the friendship for reflection on the few months they had to get to know one another.
It was a difficult time, yet it brought my daughter and I so much closer than we had been before.
She appreciated that while we gave her the freedom to have this friendship, she also appreciated that both sets of parents stepped in to give them this time to contemplate the relationship.
It was during this time, which was one month of no contact, she decided that this friendship was not going to continue to grow in the direction she had once hoped for.
She made this decision on her own after many nights of prayer.
She experienced a lot of crying. The decision was extremely difficult for her, but as a parent I have to say that I am very proud of her for making the decision without us having to insist.
But not only was this hard for her and the young man, it was hard on all of us as parents. We had come to really care deeply for each other’s teens. We became friends with the parents and genuinely love them.
Although the break up was incredibly difficult for them both, we walked with them through it. All four parents. We were all involved with helping each other’s teens heal from this new direction and help them continue to grow forward as individual families seeking the Lord every step of the way.
It’s been quite a journey and we have no regrets over the decisions we all made.
Even though there were some difficult feelings to get through it was well worth it to glean more wisdom from God and from each other as parents.
We want our daughters to wisely grow in their friendships and give them supervised freedom to grow as individuals and remain close with us during that process.
My daughter said that because we gave her some healthy boundaries and freedom within those boundaries to explore life, friendship, and love, it gave her room to breathe and grow dependent upon the Lord for the decisions she needed to make.
We gently pursued our daughter’s heart through that time and continue to do so today.
But more important was the nurturing of her dependence upon Christ and encouraging her to seek Him as her Lord and the Voice of guidance in her life above our own.
We want our daughters to fall in love without forcing our control over them. They need to develop a good solid listening relationship with Jesus and we don’t want to insist that we have that Voice in their lives. We choose not to usurp Christ’s authority over our children, but instead we seek Him in all their friendships and listen to him telling us to give Him room to work in their lives without us trying to control His work in their hearts.
It’s been a wonderful experience for our family and we are thankful for the difficulties that came with it.
We grew as a family, as parents, and our daughter grew in her relationship with Christ.
We chose to allow the Spirit to guide us, instead of the Law. It was by faith that we all grew closer to God and to one another in love.
This is my response to the wonderful article, ‘Bondage of Betrothal‘ by Eric M. Pazdziora published at Quivering Daughters.
{photo credit by Sisterlisa My Wedding Day 1992}
Sisterlisa
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Thanks for this, Sisterlisa! It’s great to have a parent’s perspective on this question. I appreciated reading the account of implementing grace and wisdom in helping your children learn to make decisions for themselves. Well done! Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences.
Thank you, Eric. Keep in mind some articles I write as a parent are not as full as I’d like them to be, out of respect for my children. These experiences are for them to one day share more about. I can only share the parent’s perspective.
Of course. Since I’m not a parent myself, I’m very grateful someone is able to contribute from that vantage point.
Thank you for sharing your experience with your daughter. Sounds like a lot of wisdom to me. You also have given me some ideas for our son for the future.
Thanks, Abigail. Everything is by faith. What works for one family and one situation may not work again for another family.
My thanks, too, Sisterlisa, for this article. We are currently in a similar situation with a teenage son, his girlfriend, and her parents. Actually, two different teenage sons. One is 18, and he understands the decision to remain in his relationship is his, but he has been asking for our insights. I never considered the idea of he and his girlfriend taking a “break” while they seek the Lord about their relationship. I’ll be bringing this up with him and my husband. It’s been very difficult, but we are very concerned that regardless of whether they continue dating, that neither feel they can’t be in worship together, or that they consider one another anything less than a brother/sister in Christ.
With the younger brother, the parents of the young lady have been friends of ours for many years. My son and their daughter have been friends since kindergarten age. THis has been great because we CAN come to each other with concerns, come together to discuss them with the kids(we recently went out to dinner to discuss some issues, and it was a blessed evening).
This has been so different than with our older 6 children as they simply “dated” in the norm of the culture, some with good resuts, but some with diastrous results…..I praise God that He moves and grows us in all things!
Lois,
Even the Royal Prince and Kate took a few breaks in their several years of courting.
I know other young couples who took breaks in their courtship/dating as well. Especially when they are seeing each other over an extended period of time. One couple I know personally took a full year break. It was incredibly difficult for them both. But they were truly in love and could not even think about seeing other people and they eventually got back together and after they finished their junior year in college, they got married. They finished college together, graduated with honors and now have 4 children.
The decision was extremely difficult for her, but as a parent I have to say that I am very proud of her for making the decision without us having to insist.
This is the perfect example of how young men and women can safely grow and mature within healthy, grace-filled families. If you and your husband had merely controlled her every decision (which I’m sure was a little tempting at times because you love her, want to protect her and keep her from heartache) she would not have had the opportunity to learn serious heart-lessons that will stay with her the rest of her life. More importantly, this directs her eyes to the Lord and not to man.
Yes, it was very tempting..to force her to make decisions, but they would not have been her decisions. If it’s not her decision, then she doesn’t learn to make them on her own. And if we had forced her to do what WE thought was right..and there had been bad consequences, she would have blamed us for that.
We can’t always protect our kids from heart ache. And we can’t blame ourselves when things happen when we’ve made decisions we felt were the right ones. We don’t regret the mistakes we made in this situation. We DID make mistakes with this one. I just can’t say too much about it since it’s not entirely my story to tell.
This is how I’d wished “courtship” to be. My Father turned it into a very controlling thing that ended up really offending my (now) husbands parents, BUT even through those issues, by God’s grace, I am married to the man that GOD picked for me! Our story very obviously only worked out because of the Holy Spirit working in our lives. My parents trying to jump in and do the betrothal thing actually caused many more problems in his and my relationship (not to mention my relationship with my parents) that didn’t need to be there, but .. as I said, it turned out well in the end. Looking back I wish my parents could have been there for me and supporting me and talking to me… rather than assuming and judging out of fear. I think the key point (and my goal with my own three daughters for when they are grown) is to be able to trust God enough to let our children grow up and to listen to the Holy Spirit’s leading in our lives to know how to support them in their decisions.
Thanks, I enjoyed reading this article after I read Eric’s. I do have a couple of questions. Was your daughter 18 and an adult during this time? Also, I realize that every family has the right to do things differently and even differently with each of their children, and I agree with you for the most part. However, I have to ask, when you say that you were glad your daughter came to her decision to apparently end the relationship without you ‘having to insist’, does this mean that if she made the decision to stay in the relationship, you were ‘prepared to insist’ that they not be together? How is your ‘insistence’ in this case different from the betrothal legalism that you fled? I apologize in advance if I have misunderstood anything that you said, as you explained, your desire to keep part of this story out based on your respect for your children’s wishes makes the story vague in places, and I may have misunderstood you.
Hi Rob, I don’t mind you asking. She was just shy of 16 years old. If she had not come to her decision on her own, both sets of parents were prepared to insist on the break up and it was for very practical reasons that most parents would intervene in. How would that decision be different than betrothal?
Even with basic friendships in our children’s lives, there comes a time when a parent has to make a decision to halt the growth of such friendships for the time being. The few times we have felt the need to do this, I explained that over time as we see these folks and our own teens, grow in wisdom and responsibility, then we can revisit the idea of restarting friendships again.
In my own childhood friendships, there were times when we just weren’t good for each other. But now we’re all going into our 40′s and are very good friends again. People grow over time, they mature, and earn trust again. In all things, grace and sensibility.