IKDG Part I: I Dreamed a Dream (p. 17-18)

Well, here we go! The first bit of my "series", "Alternate Realities: A Personal Response to Joshua Harris's I Kissed Dating Goodbye."

The book begins with the story of a dream, had by Anna, one of Josh Harris's many elusive friends. In the dream, Anna is getting married to this guy David, but, alas and alack, six other girls show up and stand next to David for the wedding ceremony. David informs Anna that they are "girls from [his] past" to each of whom he has "given part of [his] heart" in dating relationships. The dream concludes with David telling the languishing Anna, "Everything that's left is yours."

Now, there is probably no more interesting way to start a book than by telling a dream. Because, who doesn't like to talk about dreams? I have often found that a dream-telling session is practically a no-fail conversation creator when you're running out of things to talk to someone about. One of my favorite dreams to tell is when I dreamed that I accidentally got involved in the plot of this evil spy dude (he stumbled into my apartment by mistake because he thought it was where he was supposed to meet someone). We actually ended up falling in love, even though he was evil. But he had curly hair. So what did you expect me to do?

Anyway. As fun as dreams are, I'm not sure that it's very accurate to take a dream and extrapolate it to apply to real life as JH does in the first chapter of IKDG. Because dreams AREN'T reality. Even the least nightmarish dream has something bizarre and odd about it. I've no doubt that the dream!Anna was very sad about the six dream!girls who showed up with the dream!David, but that honestly has no correlation to the real!Anna or anyone else real.

Because, the dream makes it sound like "giving your heart away" to someone that you don't marry is unfair and cruel to the person that you eventually do marry. Of course, I believe that it's wrong to have sex before marriage, but "giving your heart away" is NOT the same as sex. I've noticed this confusion among many in the pro-courtship crowd. It's like they assume that your feelings and emotions are something you can package up neatly on a shelf and take down and unpack at will. But in real life, emotions are messy and complicated. Sometimes you feel something even though you really, really don't want to. Sometimes you feel something even if you believe it's wrong. Sometimes you feel something and don't even know that you feel it. I'm sure that some people would sleep better at night if they could tell their spouse 100% truly "I've never loved anyone in the world but you," but that is simply an unrealistic, and certainly an unbiblical, expectation.

I remember in the Mahaney's book "Girl Talk," which my mom once went through with me as a study, Carolyn Mahaney would have her daughters come to her periodically during their adolescence and "confess" to her which boys they had a crush on. In addition to being extremely invasive and embarrassing, this system makes no sense to me because the way we feel about people is simply not that simple!

Anyway, the point. JH is wrong to blame "David" for having attatchments to other girls before marrying Anna. People have crushes. People experience attraction. And people get in relationships, realize they're making a mistake, get out of the relationship, and start over again. (In fact, I know someone who was engaged and the engagement ended up getting broken off. And they were a courting couple!) And, if anyone here is nerdy enough, I'm sure we could hear some stories of "giving our hearts away" to a book or movie character. (hee...) And all of this is not equivalant to fornication or adultery. Believing that it is makes people awkward and repressed, afraid to even talk extensively to the opposite sex because that might be too much of an investment if they don't end up marrying that person. But how can you know that someone would be a good marriage partner if you don't invest in them prior to walking down the aisle?

-Violet