Readers' Note: Dating Rules Amendments

Readers' Note: Dating Rules Amendments

With a little more experience under our belts, Sister Jo and I are considering some slight modification to the “Dating Rules for Teens”.

(If you’re not familiar with the rules, you can read them HERE.)

The first thing we’re considering is an exemption to the “no dating the same person twice in a row”, adding “unless it’s been one month since your last date with that person”. The reason for the original rule is to discourage The Boyfriend-Girlfriend Thing, but it makes getting dates for formal dances very difficult and, at least with my teenage boys, we’ve discovered that in our predominantly non-LDS area many people (not just teens, but adults, too, and not just non-members, but Latter-day Saints as well) are not yet “converted” to the idea of Casual Group Dating. This amendment would makes it easier for a guy to ask the girl he dated this month to next month’s formal dance and make it easier for our boys to meet the 12 dates-a-year standard. If adopted we would add the proviso that “you can’t date the same person more than twice in a row”.

The second amendment was alluded to in the first: instead of “requiring” (“rewarding” might be a better word) our boys to date once a month, minimum, we would change that to 12 Dates per Year. Our reasoning behind that change is that some months are very easy to line up dates, often more than one, while other months just seem to have so much going on. In our family April, July, November and December are easy months for the boys to go out more than once, while sports and other activities make it difficult, even stressful, to line up dates in January, March, August, and October. The change would allow our guys to skip October, for example, and then date twice in November or December. Get it?

What do you think? Are we getting soft in our Old Age, or do you think these Amendments make a good system better?

If you’d like to comment, feel free below. If you’d like to join the Facebook discussion, click HERE.

If you’d like to comment on this post on the Dear Bro Jo column site, click below!