Dating vs. Courtship

I was presented with this new Christian view on dating about halfway through last school year... I still haven't developed an opinion on it but, here are some excerpts from a website I found about it (http://polynate.net/books/courtship/part1.html):

Dating was invented in the early part of this century. Prior to that time, marriage always involved much more input from the parents, and "trial relationships" leading up to marriage were not conducted at all. Courtship, as discussed in more detail subsequently, seeks to emulate the Godly models described in the Bible that were conducted by God's people up until the invention of dating.

Courtship is a word that has been adopted to describe a biblical model for the relationship leading up to marriage. In the Bible, the parents were always involved in the marriage process.

Once we are married, we recognize that certain things are sacred to our partner. Things such as co-habitation, kissing, intimate hugging, sex and bringing up children. We recognize that not only our physical body, but our emotions, even our spirit are dedicated to that one partner, for the rest of our life (according to our vows).

The dichotomy is this: in dating, we presume to partake of many of these privileges of marriage. We would be shocked if a married man had an emotional attachment to another woman, and yet it's quite acceptable for singles to have a different emotional attachment every week. On the one hand, we save sex for our partners (and some even do that sparingly), but on the other, we engage in rampant emotional promiscuity, giving pieces of our hearts away until one wonders what will be left for that special, life-long partner.

The primary purpose of marriage is not to please you, but to serve God.

So to have a successful marriage, the most important thing is to ensure that you follow His principles that He laid down when He designed marriage. The irony is, when we focus on His principles instead of our pleasure, we end up having a very satifying and pleasant marriage!

I'm going to be looking into these concepts a little more in order to form a more definitive stance on this stance on dating... Sometime in the near future I'll post again on this topic.