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Thank you for participating in our Relational Studies course. The students will post questions below, weekly. Please respond to all questions by pressing the comment link associated with each question. We will be looking at the differences and similarities between answers. Make sure you click on Older Posts at the bottom of the page as many of the questions will be on the next page.

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Monday, February 20, 2012

What difficulties did you have to maneuver/ work through while dating?

6 comments:

  1. Okay.... so you guys probably thought "wow, they were really old when they started dating, got married, had a family, etc." Well, there are advantages to getting together when you are older, more mature and have experienced a lot in life. Steve & I had plenty of difficulties in previous relationships, but by the time we got together we had learned our lessons and things went pretty smoothly. The only real difficulty we had was the weekend that Steve first met my family (refer to previous comment). It was a big, loud gathering and after an evening of playing volleyball, charades, and a few other group games, Steve came to the conclusion that he might not be a good fit with my family. He left the weekend early - in search of peace & quiet :). Once we were able to talk about it, he realized that I wasn't expecting him to be just like my family and that I wanted him to be comfortable being who he was, even in my loud & crazy family setting.
    Tricia & Steve

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  2. Ken and Louise - We can't think of any.

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    1. Ok, evidently Ken and I interpreted this question differently than my sisters.....so I am re-replying to clarify. We thought you wanted to know if there were things that happened that led to conflict between Ken and I. When we thought about it, the answer was no. We dated for months, not years and our relationship was still in that "honeymoon" phase. But if you want to know if there were difficult things for us to overcome, then the answer is Yes. Telling m y parents that I was pregnant and we were getting married a mere 6 months after my parents heard the same message from my oldest brother was probably the most difficult thing We had to do. Especially since I knew how upset my mother was about my brother and I had said to her in an effort to comfort her.....don't worry mom, I am smarter than that , I will never do that to you. Yeah, Those words were running through my head from the moment I found out I was pregnant. I will tell you that we were using contraceptives, but they aren't 100 percent fool proof. It was tough for ken too, he ended u p moving into my parents house until we could line up an apartment. Knowing how disappointed they were with us, it was very awkward for him to be in their house. We got through it, my parents were great and hosted a fantastic wedding reception and thirty years later Ken kids with my brother-in-laws that he is their favorite son-in-law!

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  3. Matt- The major challenges we faced while dating were our age (and resulting immaturity), our fool-hearted admission that we were "too young" to really have met the love of our lives, geographic separation, and our desire to live our own lives before commiting to someone else. While I think that a lot of these challenges were self imposed in the long run having gone and worked through these has made us a stronger couple. After all of the pain, hurt, and anguish we finally came to the same resolution...the one love we had been looking for was the same person who had been there all along.

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  4. Our biggest hurdle was having to date long distance (Arizona to Maine) after only dating for a month one summer while working together. Since we were friends before that and had a strong foundation there, it certainly helped, but having to travel through three time zones to visit each other only once a month was hard. It was only hard though in the sense that having to say goodbye for another month was awful. It was never hard mentally (I guess is the word I'm looking for?) during the time apart, as we had a huge trust and respect for each other. We talked on the phone every day and learned so much about each other. I had always wanted to explore and live other places, and a year after we started dating I moved out the AZ, got my own apartment, and we dated normally without having to go through airport security to see each other :) It could have been hard if things didn't work out, but I knew in moving out there I was doing it for ME not for him (reminding myself never to resent him or anything that could come after moving out there). Luckily, as I knew deep down it would, our relationship only grew stronger. Living that far from my family was really hard, but Brett and his parents just scooped me up and welcomed me into their lives. It was an amazing experience that definitely made me closer with not only Brett, but his family as well. - Jenna

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  5. Sheryl and I did not really deal with any difficulties while dating, the only thing that probably bothered us the most was that we only saw each other on weekends/holidays, etc because of our schedules and where we lived, unlike college where we could see each other everyday if we wanted to. To counter that, we always spoke on the phone, and when we did see each other, we made the best of each others company. I cherished seeing Sheryl on the weekends...Val

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