The Church, Dating & Mental Health

This is a scary place to find a date. Probably because it's haunted. [Photo by A Quiverful of Fotos]

I wanted to write a brief (or maybe not so brief) companion piece to my "Undateable" series about the complexities of mental health within the context of church dating.

Let's say you are a Christian and you want to date someone who shares your beliefs. Are you more likely to end up dating someone with a personality disorder (or other mental disorder) if you choose to date within the context of a church?

To be clear, I am not saying that suffering from depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, OCD, or any other mental disorder or illness disqualifies anyone for dating or makes a person undateable. I do not believe this at all.

Nor am I saying that a person must have resolved all of their emotional issues before dating. If that were case, no one would ever date, myself included.

Disclaimers aside, I think there are certain personality disorders that might make a person more likely to cause harm to others within the context of dating. And those who have these personality disorders may be predisposed to attend church.

In my "Undateable" series, I write about different attributes I've encountered dating (or not dating) Christian men--things like misogyny, cowardice, racism and not taking "No" for an answer.

Although these attributes are not necessarily related to mental health, in some cases, I feel like they are caused by or co-occur with a personality disorder.

[This is not to take away from the fact that a person with a personality disorder is fully human and fully worthy of love, respect and acceptance, but never at the expense of another person's safety.]

Some examples of potentially damaging behavior within the context of dating include physical and emotional abuse, stalking, obsessive pursuit, disrespect of communicated boundaries and rigid gender roles.

I want to be careful here--diagnosing anyone with a personality disorder is obviously not something I am qualified to do.

However, I can hypothesize that in some cases, mental health is the issue. I would also argue that the culture of dating within the church is inherently dysfunctional, and thus encourages dysfunctional behavior and ways of relating to the opposite sex.

So, to make the point I came here to make:

I think that racist or sexist remarks can be a sign that the person you are dating has a personality disorder, particularly if they make little sense within the existing social context (i.e., the surrounding social group is usually neither blatantly racist nor sexist).

Also, racist or sexist jokes or statements can be a precursor to abuse. It might be worth thinking more about our collective tolerance for hateful or devaluing statements about the Other and whether or not we are encouraging or enabling an abusive dynamic to take place between the church and the culture, as well as between one individual and another.

To what extent does the church tolerate sexism, racism and homophobia and to what extent does this tolerance contribute to abuse, particularly of those who are the most spiritually and emotionally vulnerable?

Perhaps we could love and accept the broken (all of us, according to Christian theology) while also being wholly intolerant of anything that devalues another human being.