dear Wondering,
For most girls, a crush is easily identifiable — your heart beats faster, you have butterflies in your stomach, and you feel excited around him. Though such a romantic attraction is often the basis for a relationship, others have found that love comes in different ways. Sometimes, love comes fast and furious. For others, love comes softly. Many couples share that while they didn’t experience the typical K-drama or Hollywood kind of infatuation, love crept up on them as they enjoyed their friendship and time spent together. For others, while their partners had an intense romantic attraction towards them, they were not so sure! However, as they gave the relationship a chance, their feelings slowly warmed and their hearts turned towards them.
Love comes in many ways, but the Author of our love stories remains the same. Bring your confusion and feelings before the Lord and He will give you clarity about what to do with them. Also, your friends and families are good allies, as they sometimes may have a clue to your true feelings before you!
dear Unsure,
I’ve often found that the trick to having sensitive conversations is to start from a posture of listening and understanding. It can be helpful to ask questions like, “What do you think is the purpose of dating?”, “What are some of the things that make a couple compatible?”, or “Do you think it’s important for a couple to have similar life goals?” These can spark wonderful conversations that help you and your friend find you have more in common than you both realise.
Often, explaining an “unequally yoked” relationship can come across as offensive as it seems to make the non-Christian somehow inferior to the Christian. However, when one approaches the topic from the understanding of what makes a relationship work and how important one’s faith is to one’s life goals, it steers the conversation away from potential offence to the real issues at hand.
Of course, it’s important to remember that this often quoted phrase from 2 Corinthians 6:14 was written about general partnerships between Christians and unbelievers, so it wasn’t specifically about but could be applied to romantic relationships.
In the context of the verse (2 Cor 6:14–16), Paul contrasted righteousness with wickedness, light and darkness, and the living God with idols to indicate the likely conflicts in such partnerships. While it may not be helpful to bring these up into a conversation with a non-Christian, if it does come up, you can tackle it with sensitivity and tact by asking questions like, ‘’What makes a person righteous?”, “Do you think most people live in light or darkness?”, and so on.
This could lead to a conversation that helps you share the gospel in a respectful manner. Don’t let a tough topic force you to avoid difficult discussions, but rather, use a posture of sincerity, humility, and curiosity to have conversations that are life-giving to you and your friend.
