The coffee shop near the seminary had become an accidental laboratory for Christian dating anxieties. Every Thursday, I’d watch the same ritual unfold: earnest couples hunched over journals, working through relationship workbooks with the intensity of graduate students preparing for finals. One afternoon, I overheard a conversation that perfectly captured what I’d been observing for months.
“But how do I know if he’s the one?” the young woman asked her friend, gripping her latte like it held the answer.
Her friend responded with practiced certainty: “You’ll just know. When it’s right, you’ll feel peace about it.”
At the next table, a guy was having the opposite conversation: “I have total peace about her, but my parents think I’m rushing.”
And behind them, another couple sat in tense silence, their untouched Bibles between them like a referee.
Three tables. Three couples. All asking variations of the same questions that echo through every Christian dating relationship: How do I know? What does God want? When is it right?
After years of watching these patterns—first as a confused participant, now as a curious observer—I’ve noticed something peculiar. The questions we’re taught to ask about Christian dating might actually be keeping us from finding the clarity we seek.
The clarity mythology
In evangelical culture, we’ve developed a mythology around romantic clarity that would make the ancient Greeks proud. The story goes like this: Pray hard enough, stay pure enough, seek wisdom enough, and God will make it abundantly clear whom you should marry. The right person will arrive with the force of revelation. Doubt will vanish. Peace will descend. Angels might not literally sing, but you’ll hear something close.
This mythology creates what I call “clarity paralysis”—the inability to move forward without absolute certainty, which, paradoxically, prevents the very experiences that would create clarity.
I watched this play out with my friend David, who dated Rebecca for three years. Three years of coffee shop workbook sessions. Three years of “seeking God’s will.” Three years of waiting for a cosmic green light that never came in the form he expected.
“I kept waiting to hear God’s voice telling me she was the one,” he told me after they finally got engaged. “Instead, I realized God had been speaking the whole time—through the way she showed up when my dad was sick, through how our visions for life aligned, through the wisdom of people who knew us. I was so busy waiting for the supernatural that I missed the natural.”
The dimensions nobody mentions
Marshall Segal writes about three dimensions of clarity: desire, community, and opportunity. It’s a helpful framework, but watching couples navigate these dimensions reveals how differently they work in practice than in theory.
Take desire. We’re told to examine our hearts, to ensure our feelings align with God’s will. But desire in real relationships is far messier than our theology suggests. It ebbs and flows. It gets tangled up with fear, projection, and that intoxicating Christian mixture of spiritual and romantic longing.
I knew a woman who broke up with a godly man because she didn’t feel “butterflies” when they prayed together. Another friend married someone she wasn’t initially attracted to because their “spiritual chemistry” was so strong. Both were trying to read desire through a spiritual lens, but neither found the clarity they expected.
Community—the second dimension—gets even more complicated. Yes, we need wise counsel. But I’ve watched community input create as much confusion as clarity. Parents who see red flags children miss. Friends who project their own relationship hopes or fears. Church mentors who dispense one-size-fits-all wisdom.
The most painful example I witnessed involved a couple whose relationship became a community project. Their small group analyzed every date. Their families held competing prayer meetings about the relationship’s future. By the time they broke up, it felt less like the end of a romance and more like a failed group assignment.
The opportunity paradox
The third dimension—opportunity—might be the most misunderstood. We interpret circumstances through a providential lens, looking for God’s hand in every open or closed door. But this creates its own confusion.
A couple I know nearly broke up when he got a job offer across the country. They saw it as God closing a door. Then the job fell through. Was that God opening the door again? Another door closing? They drove themselves to distraction trying to decode divine messaging in everyday circumstances.
The paradox is this: the very faith that should free us to love boldly often paralyzes us with the pressure to love perfectly. We become so focused on finding God’s will that we forget God might be more interested in who we’re becoming than whom we’re choosing.
What clarity actually looks like
The clearest couples I know didn’t find clarity through mystical experiences or perfect peace. They found it through what I can only describe as sanctified common sense mixed with stubborn commitment to growth.
Grace and Marcus met at a church plant. Both had emerged from relationships where they’d waited for supernatural confirmation that never came. This time, they tried something different.
“We decided to just… date,” Grace told me. “Not ‘court with intentionality toward marriage.’ Not ‘seek the Lord’s will for our future.’ Just get to know each other and see what happened.”
What happened was beautifully ordinary. They discovered compatibility not through workbooks but through navigating real life together. They learned about each other’s character not through intense DTR (Define The Relationship) conversations but through observing how they each handled stress, disappointment, and joy.
“The clarity came gradually,” Marcus explained. “Like watching the sun rise. You can’t pinpoint the exact moment night becomes day, but suddenly you realize you can see.”
The questions we should be asking
Watching couple after couple navigate the clarity maze, I’ve noticed that those who find healthy relationships often abandon the standard questions for better ones:
Instead of “Is this God’s will?” they ask, “Are we growing in faith and character together?”
Instead of “Do I have perfect peace?” they ask, “Can I navigate uncertainty with this person?”
Instead of “Are all the circumstances aligning?” they ask, “Do we handle life’s complications well together?”
These questions don’t produce the immediate clarity we crave. But they create something better: the gradual recognition of a relationship worth committing to.
The wisdom of getting it wrong
Here’s what the relationship workbooks don’t tell you: some of the healthiest marriages I know began with mistakes. Wrong timing. Imperfect circumstances. Doubts that lingered past the wedding day.
An older couple in my church, married forty-three years, recently shared their story. They got engaged after three months, against everyone’s advice. They had nothing in common except faith and mutual stubbornness.
“We did everything wrong by today’s standards,” the wife laughed. “But we were committed to growing together. That commitment created its own clarity.”
This isn’t an argument for recklessness. It’s a recognition that our modern Christian emphasis on finding perfect clarity before commitment might be asking for something God never promised. Scripture promises wisdom, not certainty. Guidance, not guarantees.
Final thoughts
That coffee shop near the seminary is still there. The anxious couples still come every Thursday, still clutching their workbooks and their hopes for divine clarity. Sometimes I want to walk over and tell them what I’ve learned: that clarity in relationships is less like solving an equation and more like learning a language. It comes not through agonized analysis but through patient practice.
The most profound truth I’ve observed is this: the couples who find healthy, lasting relationships are often those who stop waiting for God to write the answer in the sky and start paying attention to what He’s already writing in their daily interactions, in their growing capacity to love, in their ability to navigate life’s ordinary mysteries together.
Maybe that’s the real divine plan—not that we’d find the perfect person through perfect clarity, but that we’d become the kind of people capable of building love in the midst of uncertainty. After all, faith itself is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). Why would we expect love to require less faith than that?
The questions won’t stop coming. But perhaps the answer isn’t finding better answers. Perhaps it’s learning to live and love well while the questions remain, trusting that clarity—like love itself—is less a destination than a journey we take together.
