Religious Dating: The Ultimate Guide to Faith-Based Relationships & Sites
Religious dating done right! Find love that shares your faith and values. Explore top dating sites and expert tips for faith-based relationships now!
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If faith is a core part of your life, opting for religious dating might be your best choice. At the end of the day, faith can directly inform the way you interact with the world, and provides social context for many of your reactions. Here, we’re going to talk about what religious dating is, and how you can make it work for you. This is a great starting point if you want to explore the best religious dating sites — read our expert reviews!
Why Religious Dating is Different (And Why It Matters)
Religious dating includes several different checks and balances compared to a regular approach to dating. The reason is simple: religious dating is a way of dating with intent to marry. Rather than engaging in modern hook-up culture or aiming for several short-term relationships, you’re prioritising the faith-based life you want for yourself.
To get that faith-based life, you need to find someone with the same values that you have. That way, you can much more easily trust that they’ll make decisions you agree with, and be made happy by the same things that make you happy. To find someone with the same values as you, religion is a wise place to start. Religious dating, therefore, can help you find a partner that shares your worldview in their core.
When you forge that connection with your partner, you can be sure that you’re on the road to stronger, more fulfilling relationships that you otherwise might be. Religious dating can pave the way to that future you’ve envisioned for decades.
The Importance of Religious Dating
Finding someone that shares your faith can lead to an intimate, delicate connection that helps you both shine brighter than you would alone.
Why Shared Faith Strengthens Romantic Relationships
Faith can be defined in several ways by different people, but most would agree that it defines us. It determines how we see the world and, therefore, how we interact with each other and other people around us. By sharing the same worldview as your partner, you can share the same life with equal joy.
The Science Behind Faith-Based Compatibility
There’s a lot of science around relationships, and how they can be made better or worse by the world around us. From work stress to a joint midnight feast, tiny things can influence the complex connection with your partner. If tiny things can have a huge impact, something as huge as your faith can definitely have an impact.
Essentially, much of the science boils down to whether you and your partner are compatible. The term compatible here is an interesting one — it’s not a case of whether you and your partner perfectly match one another, but whether your needs are complementary. For instance, if you get home from work and need silence to decompress, your partner can react in two ways. A compatible person might give you a hug, and then go for a short walk to give you some time in perfect silence alone in your home. An incompatible person might continue to play music that they were listening to, or start vacuuming the house.
This complement factor is something to consider in religious traditions, too. When doing religious dating, consider what traditions you want to include in your life. For instance, Logan Ury, writing for The Gottman Institute, mentioned that she found regular Shabbat dinners to be a comforting part of her childhood. Therefore, as an adult, she found someone who would happily do that with her. In turn, both partners can find comfort in this faith-based tradition.
Why Couples Who Share Religious Values Have Higher Relationship Success Rates
Relationship success in the short term is relatively easy to achieve. If you find one another attractive and willing to be kind and compromise on a few key things, you’re pretty much set. However, when religious dating, relationship success can be harder to achieve but more rewarding in the long term.
In Christian dating, a couple might chat about their impressions of the most recent Sunday service. This calm chat lets people learn how their partner interpreted the priest’s words. Absorbing this impression means they can learn more about their partner’s mindset. They may discover that they agree or disagree, but they are informed about their partner’s worldview either way.
Learning about one another regularly is a core part of building a relationship. Although it can be complicated and confusing, learning your partner’s needs is key to relationship success. When you learn about your partner’s religious views, and find that you share them, you know that you’re with someone who understands you personally. This understanding leads to relationship success.
The Importance of Spiritual Alignment in Building Trust and Commitment
Building trust and commitment is vital to every relationship. The difficulty, though, is that those words can be quite hard to define for each individual. We would argue that “trust” is another way of saying that you believe a person will carry out a certain action. “Commitment” is another way of saying that a person will continue to hold themselves to a certain standard or rule.
Those definitions may seem nitpicky, but defining them is a worthwhile exercise in religious dating. Building trust and commitment in any relationship involves seeing your partner carry out a certain action or hold themselves to a certain standard. Sound familiar?
By finding someone aligning with your spiritual beliefs, you know they’re holding themselves to a predetermined set of standards. This trust in your partner’s actions because of their faith is a great bedrock to build romantic trust. You already know they’re trustworthy across the religious standards they hold themselves to, so why wouldn’t they be trustworthy in other aspects?
Why Religious Singles Struggle to Find Like-Minded Partners
Religious singles can feel like they just can’t track down partners that align with their beliefs. Finding partners based on their faith can help you immerse yourself in the religious community when doing religious dating.
The Decline of Traditional Matchmaking within Religious Communities
Of course, the majority of the biggest religions in the world have existed for a long time. In these thousands of years of history, there were many years over which dating apps didn’t exist. It’s only in the last twenty or so that dating apps have been around, and even fewer since religion-specific apps have been on the scene.
Therefore, religious dating wasn’t determined by an algorithm, but rather by a matchmaker. This role is more prominent in some cultures than others, and it can vary between a single person who exists as a dedicated matchmaker and just a member of a certain congregation that happens to have an eye for matching people up.
Over the years, this has decreased as more people have experienced an increase in the number of people they know. This is most commonly notable with the rise in women getting jobs following the Second World War—all of a sudden, women (religious or not) had wider social circles that included those they worked alongside. With a wider social circle comes more potential matches, and the need for a matchmaker decreases greatly.
In the modern world, matchmakers are very rare indeed. However, some religious people consider God to have matched them and their partner up. As Jessica Klein Levebrown wrote for chabad.org, her marriage seemed to have been orchestrated by “a cosmic matchmaker”. Coming from a Jewish family, her father instilled in her a belief that God was responsible for coincidences. Therefore, when she coincidentally met her now-husband on J-date, she believed God is to thank for that connection.
All this to say something quite simple — the role of a matchmaker in a religious community has decreased. With people having wider social circles, and the internet connecting vast swathes of people, it’s easier than ever to experience modern dating and religious dating.
Why Mainstream Dating Apps Aren’t Built for Faith-Based Connections
Mainstream dating apps are complex, with the algorithms behind them working hard to unite people based on different things. In this arena, religious dating can be really tough. The most popular dating app, Tinder, brings people together based on little more than proximity. When looking for someone that matches your religious needs, proximity might not be enough.
The Challenge of Balancing Faith with Modern Dating Expectations
Modern dating expectations can seem quite shallow. On the face of it, several dating apps prioritise meeting someone based on what you initially think of their profile picture, and perhaps a quick scan of their bio. When you’re deliberately religious dating to increase the chances you’ll track down someone compatible, photos and a single sentence don’t offer you enough information.
Many people have found their own ways to manage this, such as prominently including their faith in their bio. However, there’s no accounting for how other people interact with the app. Even if you list a Bible verse front and center in your bio, someone may ignore it in favor of scanning your pictures and swiping.
Navigating Religious Dating Successfully
Religious dating is a great way to approach the modern dating world — dating with the intent of finding someone that matches your needs. Navigating this world can be tricky, especially when dates are often arranged knowing little about one another. With a little time and patience, you can approach religious dating with a successful mindset.
How to Choose the Right Religious Dating Site
There are a great many dating sites and apps out there, and they all offer different things. This may be both a good and bad thing. Say you’re a Christian who wants to do religious dating. There are several Christian dating apps out there, but are they worth your time and effort? Selecting the ideal site can be tough, but it’s worth it.
A Comparison of Dating Sites for Different Religions
Here, we will run through the front-runners among dating apps for different religions. Is it worth your time to do religious dating on these platforms, or would you be better served by a secular app?
Christianity
The biggest Christian dating site is, without a doubt, Christian Mingle. It’s a fairly straightforward site, but it has served many Christians well, and is generally considered good. The biggest plus point is the site’s sheer size — it’s very well known, which means plenty of people are on it. On top of this, women outnumber men on the site, which can be a refreshing change compared to other apps. It also has a reputation for having people who are serious about their faith, and want a similarly serious partner — that’s the core of religious dating.
There are a couple of downsides, however. Some people have reported that the dating pool is quite limited unless you live in a city, and you must be a paid member to respond to messages. This paid member messaging feature could also be considered beneficial: you can set yourself up for free and see what the site is like, and you only have to pay if you actually want to talk to people.
Islam
Having launched in 2015 as the brainchild of a Muslim-American tech professional, MuzMatch is an exceptionally popular dating app for muslims. In fact, it markets itself as being “the best free Muslim marriage app”, since it has reportedly facilitated over 60,000 marriages. It’s hard to argue with that number.
A core feature of the app is that it asks set questions about Islam, such as whether the user is a revert or convert, how often they pray, and whether they only eat halal food. Users can also see their matches’ responses to these questions when filtering through matches. This is a great way to find people who have the same approach to their faith as you do.
Judaism
J-Date is the biggest Jewish dating site out there, and it’s been around for a fairly long time. This large size and age means that there’s a huge user base there, and the Jewish community is diverse, too. On top of this, J-Date has a reputation for having an extensive list of different options and selections you can make when customizing your profile. Given the diversity in the international Jewish community, this feature can help people to highlight exactly how they express their faith.
However, when considering religious dating as a Jew, J-Date does have a couple of drawbacks. Firstly, there are some non-Jewish users on the site, and matching with those people would obviously not be ideal for someone looking for a Jewish partner. Furthermore, the extensive questions can include some Jewish practices that might be outdated in our modern world. As such, it has a reputation for not being as accessible for younger Jews compared to other sites.
Sikhism
Sikh dating apps are a little rarer, with only two main options: Sikhing and YourLaavan. Sikhing is the more popular of the two, though it’s not very popular compared to other dating apps and sites. The main reason is that users are simply unhappy with their experience. The app’s free version is very limited, and the site has several inactive profiles. On top of this, even the paid version of the app has a limit on the number of messages you can send in a day.
For this reason, it may be worth considering secular dating apps that allow you to filter matches by religion and ethnicity. Of course, this does leave you open to having more secular matches, but Bumble, Hinge, and Tinder all feature the filter as a key way to boost your religious dating experience.
Buddhism and Other Religions
Buddhism is a very popular religion, but there’s no dating app or site out there that’s specifically tailored toward Buddhism. The closest option would be Dharmamatch, which encourages Buddhist members, but this is a suggestion rather than a rule.
Unfortunately, this is the case for several religions outside of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Thankfully, there are some secular apps that offer filters that can allow you to only match with compatibly religious people, including the biggest apps out there, like Tinder and Hinge. By looking at these options, you may be able to find like-minded singles on Tinder — sign up now!
Key Features to Look for in a Faith-based Dating App
When considering religious dating on an app, there are a few things that you should keep an eye out for. They can help you to ensure you match up well with your potential partner, and that you are heading for the faith-based relationship you want.
- Sect Filtering: Being able to find other members of your religion that you may be interested in having a relationship with is wonderful, but big religions can have separate sects. If you’re a protestant, you may not want to date a catholic, for instance. Look for a site that offers specific tailoring to different sects of religions.
- Place of Worship: While this may seem odd, offering a user a place to enter their place of worship could be a great way to show dedication to worship. By openly sharing which mosque they attend, a muslim could open the doors to a safe, friendly meeting in that public place.
- Faith as a Core Bio Element: Part of religious dating is keeping your potential matches’ faith at the forefront of your mind. This means that having faith kept behind personal details can be disadvantageous. Instead, a favourite bible verse featured prominently can help you to understand what kind of faith a person has.
Avoiding Scams and Fake Profiles on Religious Dating Sites
When you get involved with a faith-based app or site, it can be hard to determine whether the person you’re speaking with is actually interested in a date, or is trying to scam you. This is uncomfortable, of course, but you can avoid it by bearing some key things in mind.
- Inconsistencies: When speaking with someone on a religious dating site, or any dating site, you’ll tell one another core facts and stories about your life. This can even be simple things, like how your day’s been or your favourite ice cream flavor. When you notice an inconsistency in someone’s stories, or a mistake, it can be a sign that they’re lying to you. Of course, they may also be forgetful, so check to see if this is a pattern before coming to conclusions.
- Generic Profile: Setting up a dating profile is personal, and including your faith as a core part of it makes it even more personal. If someone’s profile seems a little plain or simplistic, it may be because it’s not a true representation of them.
- Asking for Money: This might seem a little obvious, but when it happens to people, they’re often too involved in the perceived emergency to process what’s actually happening to them. Consider how you might react if you were in a financial emergency — who would you turn to for help? Most people likely wouldn’t turn to a match on a dating site. If someone asks for money, it’s often a sign that they’re dishonest.
How to Balance Modern Dating with Religious Values
To stay true to ourselves, many people feel that they have to strike a balance between the traditional values of their religion and the modern world around them. This might seem tough, but through clear communication, it’s entirely possible.
Setting Personal Dating Boundaries Based on Faith
Setting boundaries for yourself and your partners can be very wise when doing religious dating. You might construct these barriers to stay in keeping with a core tenet of your faith, such as no sex before marriage. You may also construct these boundaries to steer yourself toward the faith-based relationship you’re aiming for in the long term.
When you’re in a relationship, especially in the early days of one, your partner won’t know you as well as you know yourself. By setting a clear boundary and telling them that you won’t tolerate a certain behaviour, you can allow bad partners to self-select out of your life. 18Doors.org, a website dedicated to helping interfaith couples in which one partner is Jewish, uses the example of antisemitism as an obvious boundary that you should draw.
Managing Physical Boundaries, Courtship, and Long-Term Goals
Managing physical boundaries can be much more difficult than managing spoken ones. This is because of the temptation to give in to desires that you may feel. When managing a boundary around physical intimacy, it may be easier to create a somewhat “overkill” boundary. If you know that you’ll be tempted to do something that you’d regret later on, setting a boundary like “no kissing for the first few dates” removes the chance of you being tempted entirely.
When creating these boundaries, it can feel like you’re cutting yourself off from the modern dating scene. While it’s true that you’re not engaging with it in the way that most people are, bear in mind that by creating these lines in the sand, you’re ensuring your long-term happiness. For many people, dating is about the next few hours at first, then the next few days, weeks, and months. In religious dating, you may be dating with the next few decades in mind, so setting strict boundaries with yourself can help you reach that goal.
How to Respect Religious Customs While Dating in a Modern World
If you’re doing religious dating with secular people, then you may often run into their expectations for your date based on their modern dating experience. For instance, they may expect some level of physical intimacy earlier in the relationship than you would be comfortable with. You’re not wrong to say that’s something you don’t want: you’re just prioritizing your needs in an undoubtedly intimate and personal situation.
A good way to respect religious customs in a modern dating world is to go on dates that adhere to the rules you aim to follow. For example, if you don’t want to drink alcohol on any of your dates, going somewhere where alcohol is served would make that harder. Thankfully, there are many other options that someone doing religious dating could opt for.
Draw up a list of what you would and wouldn’t want to do while on a date. Your list could include: “no drinking”, “no physical touching”, or “no eating non-kosher foods.” After you’ve constructed the list of things to avoid, you can plan a date that adheres to them. This may seem a little tricky, but don’t be afraid to get creative: a unique experience is fun for all involved, whether in religious dating or otherwise.
How to Overcome Cultural & Family Expectations in Religious Dating
Often, our families are a tricky part of dating. It can be tough to know that you’re meeting someone that (if all goes well) you’ll one day bring home to meet your parents, not to mention other, potentially more religious family members. However, you can manage family expectations well with kindness and patience from both you and your prospective partner.
Understanding Family and Community Expectations in Religious Relationships
The Pew Research Center carried out surveys around how connected to their faith modern populations of Asian Americans feel. A core finding of the research was that almost all participants, even if not very religious, considered themselves part of a “cultural religion”. By this, participants generally meant that even if they didn’t mind if their partner was the same faith as them, they still felt some cultural pressure to track down someone that was.
With this in mind, you may discover that you have a clear goal of the person your family hopes you’ll marry. Consider this mental picture and how well it matches the person you want to marry. When religious dating, the best person for you often falls into the center of that Venn diagram: generally pious as your family would want, while having the modern worldview you might want.
How to Communicate Faith-Based Dating Goals with Family
As always with communication, clear words and honesty are the best way forward. Here are some good ways to handle this communication with your family.
- Have a Set of Notes: It will likely help to have a set of your faith-based dating goals to discuss what you want out of religious dating. By clearly communicating what you want and why you want it, your goal is to help your family understand your desires.
- Don’t Shut Down: Often, when we speak with our parents about serious topics, we can find that we slip back into the dynamic of being told what to do when we were kids. Don’t forget: you’re an adult now, with your own voice. It’s not rude to calmly and politely voice your concerns and desires.
- Be Patient: If your faith-based desires don’t perfectly align with your family’s thoughts, they may perceive this as an attack on your shared faith, or how they instilled faith in you. If they start to get defensive, take the time to assure them that this isn’t an attack. The goal is to understand, not change one another’s minds.
- Be Curious: When your parents express their desire for you, be curious about why they’re saying it. Even if you don’t want something, ask them why they think it would benefit you. While it can be tempting to assume they just want to control you, they may have a good point to share that you haven’t considered. At the end of the day, they’ve been married before, and you haven’t.
The Role of Matchmakers, Family Introductions, and Religious Leaders
When religious dating, finding someone in your faith who shares your values can be hard. This can be especially hard in our diverse society — there’s a greater chance that your colleagues and friends are not in your faith than in the past.
However, by consulting with someone at the center of your faith, you open yourself up to a greater range of faith-focused people. A classic example of this would be to speak with a religious leader. For instance, if you speak with your imam, you can be sure that they know more people that come to the mosque than you do. They will also know people who come to the same mosque but at different times than you and will have ties in the community that allow them to reach out to a wide range of people. There’s every chance that your imam may already know of singles looking for faith-based matches, and may offer to put you in touch.
Of course, it doesn’t just have to be a religious leader that makes the connection. While the online dating world has decreased the number of traditional matchmakers, they still exist. It may be worth asking your community if anyone knows an appropriate matchmaker to aid religious dating. The matchmaker themselves could even be someone in your family, even if they don’t do the work professionally. Consider asking your parents if you have relatives that attend other congregations, and explore your real life social network in this way.
Ensuring Long-Term Success in Faith-Based Dating
Religious dating can often lead to long term success, since members of the same faith often want similar things out of life and marriage. How can you ensure you find someone that wants exactly what you want?
What to Expect When Dating Within Your Faith
When dating within your faith, you may have certain expectations about what partners may be like. How can you manage these expectations and balance them against reality?
How Different Faith-Based Relationships Progress Toward Marriage
Depending on your faith, you may see that your relationship progresses in different ways, and this can even be the case in sects of the same religion. To take a Christian-focussed view of religious dating for a moment, a protestant relationship and a catholic relationship may proceed at different rates, and with different milestones.
The truth is that all relationships progress at different rates. You may find yourselves falling head over heels for one another and getting married in a week, or you may experience a slow burn that leads to a long dating period before marriage. The only way to find out which you’ll get is to dive in — engage in new relationships and dates in good faith, and be honest about what you’re looking for. Don’t only share what you want during the religious dating phase, but how long you want that phase to last.
Common Challenges and How to Navigate Interfaith Dating
Interfaith dating can be tricky, especially if the person you’re with isn’t as familiar with your faith as they could be. Here are some common challenges of interfaith religious dating, and how you might navigate them.
- Mismatched Expectations: When dating, mismatched expectations can upset either partner. This can be especially keenly felt if your partner doesn’t realize a certain faith-based milestone or celebration occurs. To avoid this, encourage your partner to learn about your faith and put in the work on their own back. After all, Wikipedia is free.
- Cultural Faux Pas: A faux pas can be either religious or more generally cultural, but certain behaviours might be considered normal by some or offensive by others. For instance, in very religious muslim households, physical contact between unrelated people may be strongly discouraged. Therefore, parents may be offended if a potential partner goes in for a hug after dinner. These finer points of social etiquette can be tough to track down through independent research, and are different for everyone. To be on the safe side, talk to your partner ahead of time if there’s something you especially want them to avoid doing.
- Misunderstanding The Importance of Faith: If you’re navigating an interfaith relationship with an atheist, for instance, they may underestimate how important your faith is to you. If this happens, it can feel like a betrayal, even when it may only be an honest mistake. Clearly voice how important your faith is to you, and how you prioritise it as a core part of your life.
The most important thing to remember when religious dating is to return to your care and empathy for one another. Understand that it’s extremely unlikely your partner would actively try to hurt you, and speak with them with honesty and sympathy to understand the challenges you’re both dealing with. Islamic Finder, a site focused on guiding people through halal religious dating, suggests this care as a core tenet of marriage. Showing your partner care and empathy makes all problems easier to weather.
The Role of Faith Based Pre-Marital Counseling and Mentorship
Pre-marital counseling and mentorship may sound scary. Perhaps the main reason for this is that marriage counselling has a reputation as something that couples who are on the rocks do. However, engaging with counseling and mentorship in a calm and deliberate way can allow you to build a strong bedrock while in that final phase of religious dating.
Experience is the best teacher, so when considering your wedding as well as your marriage, it’s sensible to speak with someone that’s already done these things. Focus on the Family suggests “buddying up” with an already-married couple when you’re engaged, and asking them for some help and guidance during this stressful time. As with all communication, speak with them with good faith and curiosity — their guidance is based on their experience, and is aimed at helping you achieve marital success. If they suggest something you wouldn’t expect, be curious and ask why they made that suggestion.
What Are the Red Flags in Religious Dating?
When religious dating, there can be many things that could set alarm bells ringing. Perhaps your potential partner doesn’t align with the same religious values you do, or ascribes to a different sect of your faith. Let’s discuss how you can manage this tricky situation.
Signs that Someone Isn’t Truly Committed to Faith-Based Dating
Faith-based dating, at its core, is a religious dating method that you’re using to ensure you get the faith-focused life you want. When dating with that mindset, it can be jarring to think that other people aren’t doing that. Here are some signs to consider when dating with your faith in mind.
- Deliberately Poor Communication: When speaking with someone to arrange a date, or even while on the date, their words can tell you a lot about their mindset. If you find that they routinely use language to imply they consider faith more guidelines than rules, then you can understand their approach to religion is perhaps less deliberate and devout than you might want.
- Pressuring You: Someone may say all the right things to make you believe they’re engaging in religious dating on purpose. However, they may also not align entirely with this purported faith, instead picking and choosing different elements to follow. If they pressure you to follow this selective approach when you don’t want to, that’s a red flag.
- Not Engaging In Good Faith: Part of deliberately doing religious dating is that you must follow your core goals and see if the faith-based matches you get are right for you. If a prospective partner isn’t following their goals, then they’re not engaging with the process properly, and may not be an ideal choice for you.
Recognizing Love Bombing, Manipulation, and Mismatched Expectations
Recognizing dangerous behaviours at an early stage in a relationship can be tough, but it’s very important to save yourself the heartbreak you might otherwise experience. The best way to keep an eye on potentially damaging behaviours is to look out for inconsistencies and deflection when your partner is speaking.
For example, if you’re a jew looking for a Jewish partner, you might have a discussion early on in your religious dating journey about the shared elements of your faith. This could range from fairly normal details like where they worship to more fun details like what kind of bar mitzvah party they had. If you speak with your partner about this again at a later date and notice an inconsistency in their story, then you might have picked up on a lie that they’re telling. These little inconsistencies can be signs that they’re misleading you in some way — have an honest and frank conversation with your partner to discuss the confusion you might be feeling.
Mismatched expectations can also be a complex language problem to resolve. For instance, many people may carefully word dating profiles to imply a greater level of faith or spirituality than they actually possess. Massimo Pigliucci wrote for Psychology Today that people often mark themselves as “spiritual but not religious” on dating sites rather than writing “atheist”. When religious dating, these small misleading comments can be easy to overlook, with you finding yourself on a second or third date with this person. To avoid this frustrating miscommunication, ask about unclear phrases from their profile when you date them. The conversation may be awkward, but getting it out in the open is better than heartbreak later on.
How to Differentiate Genuine Connections from Transactional Relationships
In modern dating, it can be surprisingly common for people to want to form a transactional relationship. Whether the transaction is based around physical intimacy or even loneliness varies from couple to couple, but you can seek out genuine connections by looking for key things.
- Starting the Conversation: In a transactional relationship, it can often feel like only one of you initiates conversations at any time. Consider the split between the two of you: which one starts more conversations, and what do they want to talk about? Ideally, the split should be roughly equal.
- Talking About the Future: A genuine connection can settle into our minds and gently change how we expect our lives to go. Finding your partner or yourself talking about a future with each other in a positive, almost accidental way can be a sign that religious dating has led to you forging a great bond.
- How They Make You Feel: Whether religious dating or regular dating, understanding how your partner makes you feel is a great barometer for how good a partner they may be. If you leave dates feeling excited and energised, then that’s the way they may make you feel in the long term too. If you leave dates feeling drained, that won’t lead to a healthy dynamic.
- Gently Testing Them: Although testing someone can feel dishonest, asking a small question about how they see you can inform you about how they view the relationship. Plus, it’s only dishonest if you’re deliberately misleading your partner — openly asking how they feel about your relationship isn’t misleading.
What’s Next? Taking Faith-Based Dating to the Next Level
When you’re edging toward the finish line of your religious dating journey, you may wonder what’s next. If you smoothly discuss your wants and needs with your partner, you can carve the ideal path for yourself.
How to Transition from Dating to Engagement/Marriage
The transition from dating to marriage sounds exceptionally daunting, but it’s often not as concerning as you might think. After all, many of your friends and family members have likely already made the transition. They’d make a wise first port of call to ask for advice and guidance in a tricky time.
At the heart of the transition, though, should be you and your new partner deciding what you want for your relationship. Together, you can be honest with one another about the next steps you’d like to take. For instance, would you like to live together before marriage? If that’s the case, would you be happy to share a bed, or would you rather sleep separately to avoid the temptation of physical intimacy?
It may be helpful to draw up three lists of what you’d like the next steps in your religious dating relationship to be. Start off with you and your partner can each writing a list of what you would personally like the next steps to be. Don’t be afraid to be bold and excited — this is an exciting time in your life! After that, write a third list: what practices and steps your faith would suggest you should take.
After you’re completed, you can compare the three lists, and work together to compromise where necessary. While your list may be the ideal world, the real world solution will likely be somewhere between all three lists. With time and patience, you can plan out a smooth path that will take you from religious dating to marriage.
Setting Expectations for Faith, Family, and Spiritual Growth Together
As part of a thought-out approach to religious dating, you’ve likely already considered your expectations for the future. In an ideal world, your partner will have done this too, and you can work together to define what the best future possible would look like for both of you. Having these conversations with your partner can be both daunting and exciting. Suddenly, long-term goals about children and home ownership become much more solid, and you can see the gears turning as you work toward them.
Ensure you and your partner are gelling regarding your plans for the future. While the conversation can be quick, it’s worth making sure it’s complex and complete, including the small details, so that you can prevent conflicts in the future by resolving them now.
Where to Find Additional Resources for Long-Term Success in Religious Dating
There’s a huge variety of different sources out there that you might use for long-term success in religious dating. The internet is packed with resources, testimonials, and advice from people across a broad range of faiths. However, you may find that the best advice for you comes from close to home.
Consider speaking with your parents or other family members as a first port of call. Life can be difficult and messy, and those older than you will understand that — they’ve had their fair share of messiness. If you need help or other advice, there’s no shame in asking for it.
Religious dating can be complicated, from matchmaking to interfaith relationships. However, by calmly understanding what you want, you can take a mindful approach to the dating world. This mindful approach can get you all the way to the faith-focused future you want, one step at a time.
