The wedding invitation arrived on a Tuesday. I checked the date twice, certain I’d misread something. Sarah and Marcus were getting married—in six weeks. They’d met four months ago at a church potluck.
I texted my friend Rachel, who’d introduced them. “Did I miss something? Weren’t they just figuring out if they both liked hiking?”
“Christian time,” she texted back, adding a bride emoji and a racing car. “It moves different.”
She wasn’t wrong. In the peculiar physics of evangelical dating, time seems to operate on its own accelerated schedule. Three months of knowing someone becomes sufficient for lifelong commitment. Six months feels like an eternity. A year of dating? People start asking if you’re “serious about God’s plan for marriage.”
I’ve been watching this phenomenon for years now, this strange dance where faith and romance collide in ways that would make Jane Austen raise an eyebrow. The pattern repeats with startling consistency: Meet at church event. Have three conversations about calling and compatibility. Get engaged somewhere between month two and month five. Plan wedding while still learning each other’s middle names.
But lately, I’ve been wondering what we lose in the rush—and what that rush says about how we understand both love and faith.
The coffee shop confessions
Last month, I found myself in a coffee shop that’s become an unofficial therapy space for post-wedding reality checks. Across from me sat Emma, married eight months, stirring her latte with the kind of intensity that suggests the spoon is standing in for something else.
“I didn’t know he reuses dental floss,” she said, looking up with genuine bewilderment. “Who reuses dental floss?”
This wasn’t really about dental hygiene, of course. It was about the thousand small discoveries that typically happen during dating but, in the compressed timeline of Christian courtship, often surface after the honeymoon. Emma and her husband had dated for four months, engaged for three. They’d spent more time planning their wedding than getting to know each other.
“We talked about all the big things,” she continued. “Kids, calling, theology. I know his position on predestination but not how he handles stress. I can tell you his five-year ministry plan but not what he does when he’s sad.”
The conversation reminded me of something relationship counselor Debra Fileta once observed about the Christian tendency to treat dating like a sprint rather than a marathon. “There is something sacred about the season of dating,” she noted. “It’s where vulnerability, discovery, and friendship deepen before commitment.”
But in many Christian circles, dating itself has become suspect—a worldly practice to be endured rather than enjoyed, rushed through rather than savored.
The intentionality trap
The word “intentional” might be the most overused term in Christian dating vocabulary. Every coffee date must be intentional. Every conversation should move toward a purpose. Every moment together needs to be building toward something.
I once overheard a first date at a bookstore café where the guy literally pulled out a typed list of questions about family planning and theological positions. His date, to her credit, managed to keep a straight face through “What’s your perspective on complementarianism?” before excusing herself to what I assume was either the bathroom or the parking lot.
This hyperfocus on intentionality creates a paradox. In trying so hard to be purposeful about relationships, we often miss the actual purpose of dating: learning whether you can build a life with this specific human being, with all their quirks and complexities.
A friend who leads premarital counseling at a large church told me she regularly meets couples who can articulate their shared mission statement but have never seen each other navigate disappointment. They’ve discussed their theology of marriage but not their approaches to conflict. They know where they want to be in ten years but not how the other person loads a dishwasher.
“The questions they ask each other are often about compatibility on paper,” she explained. “But marriage is lived in the mundane moments, not the mission statements.”
Time and the kingdom calendar
There’s something uniquely Christian about our relationship with time. We serve a God who exists outside of it, yet we’re constantly trying to discern His timing for our lives. This tension plays out dramatically in dating, where “waiting on the Lord” meets “why aren’t you married yet?”
I’ve noticed distinct seasons in how church communities approach relationship timelines. January brings the post-holidays push—”New year, new relationship status.” Spring sees a surge in engagements, as if romance follows the liturgical calendar. Summer weddings pile up like a holy traffic jam. By fall, the cycle begins again with fresh urgency.
The pressure isn’t always explicit, but it permeates everything. Small groups for singles that feel more like holding pens. Well-meaning questions about “anyone special” that carry the weight of communal expectation. The subtle implication that marriage is the real beginning of adult spiritual life.
Marcus and Sarah, the couple with the Tuesday wedding invitation, embodied this perfectly. When I finally talked to Sarah about their whirlwind romance, she said something revealing: “We figured, why wait? If it’s God’s will, the timing doesn’t matter.”
But timing does matter—not in the cosmic sense she meant, but in the human sense of two people learning to see each other clearly.
The slow revelation
Not everyone follows the script, though. I’ve been watching a different story unfold with my friends David and Melody. They’ve been dating for two years, and their church community is collectively holding its breath.
“People keep asking when we’re getting engaged,” Melody told me over lunch. “As if we’re behind schedule on some timeline I never agreed to.”
What strikes me about their relationship is how it’s deepened through ordinary time. They’ve weathered job losses, family illnesses, and the thousand small negotiations of compatibility. They’ve learned each other’s rhythms—how David needs space to process conflict, how Melody expresses love through small acts of service.
“I know it sounds unromantic,” David said when I asked about their pace, “but I wanted to see her in all four seasons. Literally and metaphorically.”
They’ve discovered what rushed relationships often miss: the grace found in slow revelation. How someone changes across time. What wounds they carry and how they’re healing. The way faith actually works in daily life, not just in ideal conditions.
Beyond the binary
The Christian dating world often presents a false binary: either you’re carelessly dating around or you’re sprinting toward marriage. But what if there’s something sacred in the middle ground? What if taking time to truly know someone is its own form of faithfulness?
I think about the biblical narrative of Ruth and Boaz—a story we often romanticize but which actually unfolds with remarkable patience. There’s gleaning and observing, wisdom-seeking and careful consideration. Nobody’s rushing to the threshing floor on the second date.
Or consider the ultimate love story—Christ and the church. God took centuries to prepare for the incarnation. Jesus spent thirty years in obscurity before three years of ministry. The metaphor of marriage used throughout Scripture suggests a long courtship between the divine and humanity, full of pursuit and revelation, covenant and discovery.
If God himself moves slowly in matters of love, why do we rush?
The grace of going slow
Emma, the newlywed with the dental floss discovery, recently gave me an update. She and her husband started something they call “retrospective dating”—deliberately creating space to learn what they missed in their rush to the altar.
“We have weekly ‘first dates’ where we ask the questions we skipped,” she explained. “Last week I learned he’s terrified of butterflies. How did I not know that?”
They’re finding grace in going backward, discovering that knowing someone is a lifelong project, not a pre-marriage checklist. Their story gives me hope—not that rushing is fine because you can figure it out later, but that there’s always room to grow deeper, even when you’ve started out of order.
The couples I know with the strongest marriages aren’t necessarily the ones who moved fastest or slowest. They’re the ones who approached their relationship with curiosity rather than urgency, who treated getting to know each other as a joy rather than a prerequisite.
Final thoughts
That Tuesday wedding invitation still sits on my desk. Sarah and Marcus got married on schedule, radiant with the particular joy of people who believe they’re living inside God’s perfect timing. Maybe they are. Maybe their story will be one of those beautiful testimonies about knowing immediately and never looking back.
But I can’t help thinking about all the couples I know who are discovering each other slowly, who are resisting the cultural pressure to compress love into a predetermined timeline. They’re learning that intentionality doesn’t require velocity. That honoring God with your relationship might mean moving slowly enough to actually see the person in front of you.
There’s no shame in taking time to fall in love. No failure in dating for years before deciding about forever. Sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is refuse to rush a story that deserves its full telling.
After all, if we believe in a God who knit us together in our mothers’ wombs, who numbers the hairs on our heads, who knows us fully and loves us still—shouldn’t we offer that same patient attention to the person we’re considering spending our life with?
The kingdom of God may be at hand, but that doesn’t mean your wedding has to be.
