I Kissed Dating Goodbye worked for Ly, and it worked for many others. It worked too for author Joshua Harris, who married at 23 and wrote a follow-up book about his courtship with his wife. But that’s not the story of many other readers who followed the book’s ideas and now, years later, voice disappointment and regret. Some have called the book “legalism at its finest” and claim it “ruined lives.” Some say it engendered a culture of judgmentalism, pressured inexperienced people into marrying the first person they dated, and caused them to fear intimacy of any kind with the opposite sex.
Back when the book topped the bestseller list, many of its readers were in their teenage years—a stage typically marked by raging hormones and dating experiments, when peers were trembling over their first kiss and parading their first official boyfriend or girlfriend in school. Kids broke love vows, lost their virginity, broke hearts. Those who adhered to the no-dating rules of the courtship movement avoided those messy experiences for something they hoped would be bigger and better.
Now most of these individuals are in their 30s—a different season in life, when they’re paying their own bills. Some say they’re ready for marriage, yet have been unable to find a mate through the means of courtship. Others have married yet now have negative feelings about the impact of I Kissed Dating Goodbye. If you ask young Christians to explain how the book shaped their views on dating and marriage—as I did for this story—some will tout the benefits. But many others will claim it did them more harm than good.
DONNA ROSS’ COPY of I Kissed Dating Goodbye is dog-eared and marked with highlights and annotations. As a homeschooled teenager in Florida, Ross attended Harris’ book tours, bought the cassette tapes of his speeches, even tacked a poster of his face up on her bedroom wall (“What, he was cute!”). She bought extra copies of I Kissed Dating Goodbye and passed them out to her friends: “I wanted everyone to see this vision of a beautiful community, of heaven. I thought if everyone was doing this same thing, no one would get their hearts broken.”
Ross’ parents were divorced, and she didn’t want that to happen to her or anyone else. The idea of dating also terrified her: What if she never got picked? What if the relationship didn’t work out? How would she deal with that gallows of rejection? I Kissed Dating Goodbye, with its admonitions against casual dating, gave her enormous relief: “I thought if I abided by these rules, God will bless me with the perfect man.”
But Ross started questioning I Kissed Dating Goodbye during her college years. Though she had hoped to find her life partner by graduation, she quickly realized she didn’t know how to express or reciprocate interest in a man, because for so long she had associated that with “emotional fornication.” Anytime she made prolonged eye contact, initiated a conversation, or smiled too much with a man, guilt shut her down. It took about 10 years, Ross said, before she was able to disentangle from those deeply ingrained thoughts. By then, she was 30 and still single.
Comments
Chrisi56
Posted: Fri, 02/02/2018 06:29 pmPeople tend to blame anything but themselves for their problems. I think the book is great and like anything, you glean what works for you and separate out what doesn't. God expects us to use discernment we gain from knowing Scripture as a filter and not take what any author says about anything as gospel truth. It's not fair to put that burden on Josh Harris when it belongs on the reader.
MTJanet
Posted: Tue, 02/13/2018 11:39 amAmen. Have not ever read a book by a human author that I agreed with in every way - we are too fallible. Take the good and discard the rest. Think about how many words we use in a day - sure hope people are able to filter our conversations!
William Peck 1958
Posted: Fri, 02/02/2018 08:40 pmit's tricky. To me the opposite of this book is sexual and relationship chaos. If you get into a steady relationship, there's only two outcomes - pain or marriage. Or painful marriage? jk.
To be fair, there should be a longitudinal study on those who DIDN'T follow the principles of IKDG. And one of the big problems with these unmarried or late married women is not their purity, but the lack of it from the boys - who are taking a false salve for their hormones - clicking around all over the Internet. Men don't need marriage for sex, so that's the real killer. Now the dolls are even "lifelike".
Generally speaking, boys are afraid of girls. Both sides need to be taught how to interact, the role of each sex, the role of sex, etc.
I like Chrisi56's comment above, and I don't think the "blame" for these unmarried girls rests with their purity!!! Painful yes, but causality? I really don't think so. Joshua Harris shouldn't be so quick to apologize for advocating purity.
TxAgEngr
Posted: Fri, 02/09/2018 08:36 pmI must say that I am surprised. This article has been up for a week and there are only two comments. I thought for sure the bitter homeschooled Millennials would have posted a couple of hundred negative comments by now.
Chrisi56 is right.
There are a couple of questions you can ask yourself in troubled times.
1. Who did this to me?
2. What did I do wrong?
The first question leads to self-pity and failure and the second question leads to self-help and success.
The Christian parents of teens when this book was published had been through the recreational dating scene of the 1970s (date, break-up, repeat, repeat, repeat) and they knew that experience was very problematic and they wanted a better path for their kids. And to compound their anxiety, recreational dating had moved to recreational sex and now there were only 38 varieties of venereal diseases out there to ruin your life, including AIDS, which was deadly.
Granted, the book was radical, but at least it forced a conversation on why, how and when to pursue a relationship that could end in a marriage.
I think Mr. Harris did us all a great favor.
AE
Posted: Mon, 02/12/2018 04:51 pmI read this book when I was a teenager. It helped me a lot and had a lot of Godly counsel in its pages. I did not treat it is as the Bible, however. I knew it was written by a man. Should we only listen to Godly counsel that we can reduce to a formula so that we don't need to take each of these decisions up in our personal relationship with Christ? Perhaps the real problem is that people read the book and then put it in a place in their lives it never should have been...
JACKIE PARFET
Posted: Mon, 02/12/2018 05:14 pmIntriguing to me is the fact that Josh was very plain and up front in I Kissed Dating Goodbye that he did not think he had all the answers. I think anyone who read the book as a definitive guide put way too much stock in Josh's explorations and recommendations on a deep and challenging subject, for which he admitted he did not have all the answers.
Greg Eades
Posted: Mon, 02/12/2018 05:57 pmI'm glad to read these comments, because I had a fairly negative reaction to this article and am relieved that others shared some of my thoughts. Although the pain that some of these people feel is vaid and real, it does seem unfair to direct so much of the fault/blame to Josh and this book. I read it with my adolescent sons a few years ago and do not remember it having the rigid, legalistic bent that this article seems to attribute to it. As ParfetFamily reminded us, Josh actually admitted in the book to not having all the answers. I wonder if the environment/community/family influence of the readers may have been more significant than the book.
Sophie: just a gentle suggestion that this article seemed a little biased to me. Just as one small example, you seemed to imply that it was a problem that the young man froze when he was about to kiss his bride, which seems to imply that he should have practiced beforehand. I wouldn't say that no-kissing-before-marriage is a rule that everyone should follow, but I commend those who do and think it's a beautiful and sacred thing if they're a little nervous or intimidated when it comes to that part of the ceremony. Maybe he regrets doing it that way. If so, then you stating that would've seemed unbiased, rather than seeming to assume that freezing at that moment was a problem. Thanks for yoru consideration.
AlanE
Posted: Mon, 02/12/2018 09:20 pmA good, thought-provoking article. A few thoughts come to mind. Joshua Harris, at age 21, was probably a bit young to be writing a book like I Kissed Dating Goodbye. The thought of wanting to write a book that would change the world is, left unguided, a dangerous thought in the mind of a young man. Most of us at that age feel (felt) pretty confident we have (had) the solutions to most of the world's problems. Life experience has a way of disabusing us of that notion. As at least a partial corrective, older people in the church need to step up their mentoring game for ambitious (and I mean that in a positive way) young leaders like Joshua Harris, tempering their largely unfettered enthusiam with wise counsel. To the young belong great energy and great visions. To the older belongs years of experience. We need both--working together. It's a matter of concern that communication across generations seems to be getting harder, not easier, to come by.
jsm
Posted: Tue, 02/13/2018 08:05 amAlan,
I've never read this book, just the article in World. I find your comment to be very valuable. Thanks for this observation.
OlderMom
Posted: Mon, 02/12/2018 11:55 pmI also read the book as a single, liked it, and found it not completely applicable to my situation so I used what was applicable. I kissed my husband for the first time after our wedding, and that idea came from Elisabeth Elliott, long before this book.
One problem with criticizing this book is, what exactly was the alternative - dating chaos? I think one of the main problems with dating when I was single, which has if anything gotten worse, is that before you can date, court, or anything else, you have to have a discussion about what each of you mean by any of these words. There is the tendency to decide, before you even have a chance to get to know each other, that the person is the wrong person if they even have a different idea of how to get to know each other! It would be a relief to have one standard cultural way of doing things, even for the purpose of deciding to do thing differently than the standard.
AlanE has a good point about the wisdom of age, but, other than Passion and Purity, I can't think of any comparable books on this subject written by wise older people that were available at that time. In fact, are there any now?
AlanE
Posted: Tue, 02/13/2018 09:55 amI don't consider myself in the least well-informed on the topic of books on dating, so I don't know the answer to your question. I just look around me and I see young people with all sorts of energy and ideas but little in the way of intentional guidance from the church. And I see older Christians who want to spend their time traveling, playing golf, and the like.
I listen to contemporary Christian music and often think something along the lines of, "I wish they'd put all this effort and originality in but had paused somewhere along the way to pass the lyrics through the filter of a few thoughtful older Christians first."
I do think the the youth group concept is an issue where communication between generations of Christians is concerned. Youth groups do tend to become ideological echo chambers. They are not well fitted to the goal of passing the wisdom of older generations to the younger, but youth groups are what parents tend to look for in a church. Older Christians who have no clear understanding of the issues the current generation of teens and early 20s Christians face is an equally stubborn problem.
We need to think about the fact that the one place we incorporate the youth of the church with the older adults--the Sunday morning worship service--is a place devoid of conversation.
KP
Posted: Tue, 02/13/2018 09:28 amI am plesantly surprised by the comments. This book isn't the Bible. And we, as Christians, like Chrisi56 pointed out, need to be discerning and not turn it into a formula for "righteous living" or dating rather. I'm reading a parenting book right now, written by a very respectible Christian man, and there are things in the book that I very much disagree with, not because they are unbiblical, but because they aren't ideas that are helpful for my family. I'm chewing the meat, and spitting the bone, so to speak. The problem isn't this book and books like them, so much as it is our view of Bible. The Bible is God's Word. It is our Breath of Life. It is where we go for wisdom and where me measure any other wisdom. We treat books like I Kissed Dating Goodbye, that have many good ideas (and some not so good for me ideas), like the Bible. I'm certain that Mr. Harris never intended that to be so and frankly can't be responsible for immature young (and old) believers who treated it as such.
VISTA48
Posted: Tue, 02/13/2018 09:37 amMy wife and I raised 6 children. We never saw the need to sign on to all the Christian fads as they came along, mainly because we don't believe in one-size-fits-all solutions. Jesus is the only path to salvation, but outside of that we have choices.
We didn't allow our kids to date until they were 16. We didn't spend years agonizing over it in prayer, it just seemed to be reasonable and the kids understood and accepted it. For the most part, we preferred guiding them towards good choices (self-control) over passing legislation. But children can't learn good choices without actually MAKING choices. If you put them under total control from birth to 18, don't be surprised if they go berserk when they get outside of the fence.
With all of our children, dialogue was the key. They all had their periods of rebellion to varying degrees, and we weren't perfect either, but we managed to keep talking to each other through it all.
We are all individuals and should be treated as such. Books like I Kissed Dating Goodbye should come with a disclaimer similar to a mutual fund: "Past performance does not guarantee future results".
AE
Posted: Thu, 02/22/2018 11:57 amI think his book kinda did. Did you read the book?