L.O.V.E

                                       

I decided I needed a picture this week... blog posts are just so boring without pictures. So I typed in 'dating pictures' to google and I just love that this was the first one to come up. 'ahh, it's just so romantic, us holding this rose and smelling it together. And don't forget the wind blowing my hair.'
           Needless to say, this week we talked about falling in love and dating. And it was interesting to talk about some of the 'ideals' of dating and courtship... some of which this picture suggests. Often we grow up thinking it's all roses and love songs and staring into each others eyes. But our class discussion obviously brought up more than just googlie eyes when you are considering dating and/or marrying someone. We talked of course about finances, religion, family backgrounds, personalities, etc. There are just so many aspects to forming a lasting relationship with someone. So it is interesting to me that anyone actually finds someone to settle down with, with all these things to find someone with whom you are compatible. It's like you could go on forever, searching for the perfect person. So it just catches my interest that although there are all these things to look for and agree upon, people still find each other every day and end up happy. (Which doesn't mean they avoid conflict...)
     One of the most interesting things that I thought from this week's discussion is that our textbook encourages couples to be financially and personally secure before entering into a marriage. This advice, however, is in direct conflict with revelation we have received from God. Through His prophets God has  told us that we need to do things on His time schedule and things will work out. Anyone read any talks by President Kimball lately? Well, technically I haven't either... ;)... but I do know that he often talks about the issues of young couples waiting to get married or start a family until they are financially and otherwise stable. Now obviously those things are very personal choices that we each make with the Lord, but I just was interested that according to these professionals, we should be waiting to get married. Good thing we have a direct line to the Lord to know His will, huh?
      The other point I found interesting was that research done on cohabiting couples shows that they have higher divorce rates, lower sexual satisfaction, higher instances of abuse, and higher costs on substance abuse. Crazy, huh? I feel like everyone is pushing the whole 'try living together first, it's smarter' thing when in reality, marriage is better for a lot of reasons. Which, again, isn't news to us, but I am always fascinated with science finally catches up with revelation. I guess it's the process of faith... you have faith in something until you have a sure knowledge. And with some of these things, like believing marriage is better than living together (not that I ever questioned this, mind you, I'm just sayin...), you just have faith that what the prophets tell you is true, don't live together, make that commitment and get married first. Well in about the 80's, social scientists were telling people to cohabit first, it was the way to lower divorce rates. But the prophets always spoke the mind of the Lord and of course we are commanded against doing such things, even if the research seems to suggest we should. And then, what do you know, several years later, research catches up and we find a lot of negative consequences to cohabiting. I just love when this happens :) It happened with the word of wisdom and even with fasting--medical researchers have found that it is good for your body to go without food or drink for a day, once a month, to kind of help reset the system. Isn't the gospel great stuff??? Love it!