Dating With Purpose

If you come into a dating relationship with a past, a past that you've never shared with your current boyfriend or girlfriend, and that relationship starts heading toward marriage, do you tell them about your past?

And how much do you tell? Here's how Marshall Siegel answers that question. I think the gospel frees us. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. The gospel frees us to be honest about our failures, our weaknesses, our flaws. And if we're not willing to be that with someone that we're dating, that's probably not going to change just because you make promises at the altar. And nothing is more important in marriage, apart from Christ, than trust and honesty in those things. So I think it's really helpful.

And it's a way of cultivating in dating the kind of honesty, transparency, trust that marriage runs on. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson.

I'm Bob Lapine. We're going to talk about the challenges facing people who are not yet married today. That's the title of a book by Marshall Siegel, who joins us. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. So you have a lot of not yet married at Kensington Church? We have a lot of them.

Do you? I think we hear it quite often. Like, you know, because one of the things Ann and I do regularly is a marriage series. And the singles will say, hey, you know, what about us?

So, yeah, you hear that. Although we think, hey, this is for you. But often they don't see it that way. I think often the singles in our church can feel forgotten. Yeah.

And not addressed. When you planted the church 30 years ago, I'm guessing that the singles were younger singles and they're older singles today. Would that be right? Yeah, I think we have I think we have an array of all different ages, 20s to 60s. You know, I'm laughing because I think we were sold. We don't remember. But yeah, when we started, we had 43 people.

So that means there was somebody was single because you got a number, of course, that counted dogs, cats, trees, bushes, everything, you know. But yeah, it's a it's an eclectic group still today, but they're a dominant force. And that's why I'm excited to talk about an important force.

They are an important force. And we've got Marshall Siegel here to talk with us about it today. Marshall, welcome to Family Life Today. Thank you for having me.

Excited to be here. Marshall is a writer and managing editor at DesiringGod.org, which many of us appreciate and have benefited from and are so grateful for the huge archive of books and sermons and articles and videos. I love the Ask Pastor John videos you guys make available. So thanks for all you do. Well, thank you. Praise God. It's great to get to hear what God's doing through the resources.

We're thankful. Marshall has written a book called Not Yet Married, The Pursuit of Joy in Singleness and Dating. You're married. So did this come out of years of singleness for you?

Yes, absolutely. I say in the introduction that it's strange. The book came out after I was married. So people questioned not yet married.

Yeah, but you are already are. And it did. It came from really a decade of reflection, starting right as I was graduating from college all the way up until getting married. And then after I finished writing the book after I got married and so just reflecting on what I felt God was doing over those years back into the teen years, high school, college after college and what he was teaching me. And so as I started to write those lessons out, the process was long. It was five years, probably in the making. So the book did come out after I was after I was married.

But I'm really grateful, actually, because I think it put some closure on that season for me in a way that I could look back and really feel like I could put the book forward in a way that feels like I could close that chapter and try to explain what God had done. Let me ask you about that season. As you look back on the start of high school to I do. Yep. OK. Give yourself a number grade one to 10. And if you were saying here's how those years were for me and I'm thinking in terms of if you could do it again. Yeah.

And that would be a 10. How would you say you did during your single years? Yeah. Thanks for asking. I can't give a number from that whole range, but I could say high school would have been two or three.

Yeah. College, three or four. And then after college, there was a really big awakening for me in my pursuit of the Lord, discovering what it meant to enjoy Jesus, treasure him, find him as my greatest satisfaction, look to him for happiness and significance and love. So from there on out, it got a lot stronger, fast and then deepened as eventually I met Faye. And as we walked through some of the lessons I had learned and I got to learn a lot from her in the process, too.

So I don't know how to rank that season. I look at it real fondly, getting to meet her and get to know her. The trajectory was good from high school all the way. You were moving in the right direction. It didn't get worse. Yeah, that's good.

Didn't get as much better as I would have hoped. Why were the numbers so low in high school and college? I jumped into dating really early, really in middle school was what I would consider a first serious relationship. I can sixth grade.

Serious? Yeah, I can look back and remember calling a girl regularly. We said we were boyfriend and girlfriend. We never went on a date. But and I'm not even sure what my parents at the time knew about that relationship. They knew we were friends.

They probably didn't think much of it. But then from there on out, a serious girlfriend a year, seventh grade, eighth grade, ninth grade, tenth grade, different girls each time and varying levels of unhealth in those relationships. But immaturity, I mean, I just I say in the book, I don't think people should date until they can marry, at least within a reasonable time. And that's because we're just not ready in terms of life. And so falling into all kinds of traps that there are for dating, dating too early, staying in relationships too long, treating a young woman's heart cavalierly, experimenting physically, sexual immorality. The trend through was that my heart wasn't yet anchored in Christ in a way that would allow me to selflessly love somebody else. Is this what you found with other not yet married people? A similar journey?

Yeah. I mean, there are remarkably mature young people who meet their significant other in high school and date faithfully under the structure of a healthy church or a healthy family and get married. And it goes really well. But my experience in counseling high school students, I did Young Life for eight years and then being involved with college and post college students when I was in Minneapolis. My experience over and over again is that it feels harmless to dive in early and to experiment and to to think maybe I'll marry this person. And more often than not, what ends up happening is that you leave a trail of relationships, broken relationships, none of which really had the potential for marriage. And all of which leave you with instead of leading you to love, it ends up leading you to shame and regret that you carry and then are dealing with in your early 20s and late 20s. As you get more serious, I've had this thought that I'm kind of hoping that in eternity that we get a chance to see how junior high and high school would have been if we had known Jesus and been walking with him. You know, to be able to go back and redo junior high and high school today, knowing what I know today, I'd love to be able to redeem what was broken in in all of those years. But you said we're not emotionally mature.

Most of us aren't spiritually mature during that season. Relationally, nobody had ever coached me in junior high or high school about here's what what a relationship should look like. Here's what boundaries should look like. Here's what is right to say and do. So I'm getting my coaching from the movies and from my peer group. I remember I was out at the movies with my friend Denny, and we were out with two girls from our class. I want to know what movie. I can't imagine.

I think I could be wrong. I think it was Patton that we went to see. Oh, yeah, that's intense. Right. But a really great date movie.

It really did not matter what the movie was. It was Denny and Cindy and Nancy and me. So you're on a date. Well, see, it was just Denny and me and these two girls.

It didn't just show up. No, I didn't. We all went together. OK, but Denny, I think it was Denny said, hey, why don't you and I go to the movies with Cindy and Nancy? It wasn't like, why don't you bring Nancy? Nancy wasn't my girlfriend as far as I knew, Cindy wasn't Denny's girlfriend.

And I thought, yeah, that'd be cool. So we all go to the movies together. Well, halfway through the movies, this is ninth grade, halfway through the movies, Denny puts his arm around Cindy and she starts kind of cuddling up to him. And I'm sitting there going, is that what I'm supposed to do with Nancy now? Because Nancy wasn't like my girlfriend or anything. But I'm just thinking, I guess this is where I'm getting my cues from. And then I'm thinking, well, it'd be nice to have a girlfriend.

It'd be nice to have somebody who around school, like there's a girl who thinks I'm really special. It was all about me. It was nothing about her. And peer pressure.

Yeah, exactly. It was all of that. And I did put my arm around Nancy. And later she kind of explained that she didn't like me in that way. And I was like, well, but I didn't like her in that way either. It was just like, OK, well, that's fine. I just thought, you know, we were supposed to.

It wasn't like my heart was broken. It was like, I'm just trying to learn the rules here. Yeah. Right.

And I was learning it from ninth graders, which is the mistake. And that's a great question. So for parents that are listening, how do we coach our kids that are too young and they're not emotionally mature and they're not spiritually mature? You're a young dad. What are you going to say?

And how will you coach your son? Yeah, I'm glad I don't have to answer that question quite yet. I've got 10 or so years, I hope, to learn.

Before I answer that question, it's a good question. I just want to say one more thing about that, just in terms of ranking your past, because I know a lot of people listening will be thinking about high school years, college years, years that they are ashamed of. And I'm ashamed of the way that I treated some young women in those years.

And as Faye and I have processed this, and I write about it in the book, there's a day. So we started dating May 1st, 2013. We had dated for a year long distance. So long distance, it takes longer to get to know each other. How old were you?

So I would have been 26. A year later, I had decided I needed to explain, share more of my history with her before we moved forward anymore. So I could tell there was things developing in the relationship. And I was having affections for her and falling in love with her and wanting to marry her and wanting her to love me and marry me. But I knew that if we were going to trust each other, I needed to be really clear and honest about things in the past so that we could process that together and give her an opportunity to say, I can't trust you in light of those things. And so May 1st, we started dating 2013, May 2nd, 2014.

So almost exactly a year later, I'm visiting in California. And I talk about this in the book, but I can remember I could take you to the place on the beach where we had this conversation. It took me 30 minutes to try to get the umbrella into the sand to stick in the sand.

I couldn't do it. I was so nervous already about the conversation. And then it was windy.

So I eventually just laid it down on the ground, a white flag, a surrender. But then I proceeded to share about, you know, the last 10 years or so, 10 or 15 years, just the layers of brokenness and ways that I had sinned against her long before I even knew her, but ways that I felt intensely now knowing her and admiring her and falling in love with her and practicing sexual purity with her. I knew that she needed to know these things. And so I shared about it and it fell really heavily on her. I could feel the emotion of it that we had talked in vague terms that there was a past, but never in specifics. And so as I brought the specifics out, I could feel how heavily it weighed on her.

And yet she'll describe it today if people ask her about it. She just felt a wave, like unlike she'd ever felt before, a wave of grace come over her. And she was able through tears in that moment to extend a forgiveness that has endured to this day. So to this day, despite us having to work through some of the pain and the consequences of sin, sin always hurts, always has consequences.

So we still have to, to this day, we're still working through some of those things. But never have I felt that she's withheld the forgiveness that she granted me that day. And so when we talk about the past, I talk about it in two ways, and I think it's true to talk about in two ways. One, someone will ask, if you go back and do it again, just like you were talking about, would you do it again differently?

Absolutely. No question in my mind, if I could go back again, knowing what I know now about Christ, about the Bible, about heaven and hell, about my joy in him, about Faye. If I could go back now and do those years knowing you're going to meet this woman, you're going to love this woman, you're going to spend the rest of your life with this woman, I would do almost everything differently in my dating life. But if you ask Faye, do you wish she did it differently? She would say, yes, but I wouldn't trade any of it.

I wouldn't trade any of it. She believes that we, and we believe that we have experienced more of God on this road, the road that we've walked, including my broken past, than we would have experienced any other way. It wasn't a plan B for God, that there would have been a plan A, a better version where we would have experienced more of him if I would have done things differently.

So both need to be said. If you have not made the mistakes that I've made in relationships, I plead with the Lord that you wouldn't, that he would rescue you from that, that you wouldn't be drawn into the things that so many are drawn into in dating. But if you have a past, don't for a second believe Satan and think that those years were wasted, that God can't purpose those for ways for you to make you a better spouse, a better husband, a better wife, a better father or mother, that he can't use that in some way, because scripture is filled with testimonies of broken people who God repurposed for some significant way, for his glory and for the good of others.

And so I just want to say, if you're ashamed of your past, that's OK. We should feel that. There's a godly guilt that we feel. Micah 7, one of my favorite verses, this was if I had to pinpoint where my 1 to 10 turned. Micah 7 says, Rejoice not over me, O my enemy, when I fall, I shall rise. When I sit in darkness, the Lord will be a light to me. I shall bear the indignation of the Lord. That's a terrifying verse, a terrifying phrase in there.

So when I fall, I will rise. I will bear the indignation of the Lord because I've sinned against him until he pleads my cause and executes judgment for me, not against me. He will bring me out into the light.

I shall look upon his vindication. That was life changing for me because it didn't brush away the past. It didn't brush away the guilt. But it created a world in which I could live with hope despite my past and believe that God was working that.

He's bringing me out into the light and he's using that in a way for my good, for Faye's good, for our son's good, for those that I serve in ministry, for their good. And so I think it's really important how we deal with sexual history, broken past and dating or any other area of life. It's the beauty from ashes principle and that's what God delights in doing. And I think it's important for listeners to know you may be looking at your past and going, there's so much I'm ashamed of and there's so much I've made such a mess of whatever. And the truth of the gospel is God takes whatever the mess is and makes something glorious out of it when we surrender to him. And the scary thing is God does that. But there's a fear and wondering, will this person do that as well?

Will they offer that much grace? How did you know this was the time when people are dating? When do you bring that up?

Yeah, that's a great question. I've been through both experiences, so I've been through a dating relationship where a young woman said, I can't, I can't go on. And that was one of the darkest days that I can remember. And the Lord used it in such a loving way in my heart to show me the depth and seriousness of sin. I don't think I felt it enough until I looked at her face and saw how devastated she was. And yet that had to bring fear as you were about to tell Faye. Absolutely.

You've already been here and it was rejection. Wow. Yeah. And Philippians 2 says, work out your salvation with fear and trembling. And so I think that the fear and trembling, maybe not all of it, there may have been some fear of man in it, but the fear and trembling I felt on May 2nd, 2014, as we're walking out on the beach, I believe a lot of that was holy, that it was coming from a place of, I know the seriousness of sin. I know how devastating it can be against God first and foremost, but in someone else's life. And I don't take it lightly anymore.

And I took it lightly a lot of times in the past. And so walking into the relationship with Faye, I had no idea, flip a coin. Is she going to say, yes, I forgive you. I love you and I want to walk forward with you. Or I love you as a brother. Thank you for telling me and being honest.

I can't go on right now. And I just want to say, if someone has that conversation with you and you don't feel ready, like if that same wave of grace doesn't come to you immediately, you're not compelled because you love Christ to say, I forgive you, I accept you, let's keep dating. I don't think that's the healthy response in that case.

Sometimes it'll mean, I think we should take a break for a month, where I want some time to process this in my community and I want to make sure that you're real. And if we take a break for six months and then we come back and we start the relationship again, there'll be some trust that's been built over that time. I thought that was really wise. I never would have thought of that in high school or college. I never would have thought, take a break to try to prepare for trusting each other.

I just wouldn't have ever thought of that. So your question, when do you know when to share that information? I would say it's not helpful right out of the gate. There's not any relationship built, no trust built. It is a subjective thing. I wouldn't say one year or six weeks or six months because some relationships just operate on very different timelines. But I would say my principle for questions like these is lean hard on those who know you best, love you most, and are willing to tell you when you're wrong. That's the principle I use.

And obviously I'm assuming that they love Christ. But I would lean hard on a few people in your life who are willing to say the hard thing to you to say, I know I need to be honest with this person eventually about my past. Do you think now is a good time to be honest with them or do you think I should wait longer? And what do you think the wisdom is on the what question? So you just talked about when. What do you share? How much, how detailed, how do you answer that question?

Yeah. Again, it's going to be a subjective thing. But I went into the conversation with Fay saying, I don't want anything to come up after we're married that would surprise her. So I want to share enough detail that if the scrolls are unrolled before her, when we're in marriage, that she wouldn't say, oh, you never told me about that. So I don't think that means a gratuitous amount of detail. I don't think you have to go back and explain every interaction.

But frequency and kind of offense, whatever it might be. And there could be a whole host of different things that might come up here in terms of brokenness in the way that could be about communication. Obviously, it could be about physical intimacy and sexual morality. I think the gospel frees us. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. The gospel frees us to be honest about our failures, our weaknesses, our flaws. And if we're not willing to be that with someone that we're dating, that's probably not going to change just because you make promises at the altar. And nothing is more important in marriage apart from Christ than trust and honesty in those things. So it's a way of cultivating in dating the kind of honesty, transparency, trust that that marriage runs on under the Lord. You know, I wouldn't want to with my teenage boys or girls, I wouldn't want to try to project some level of future shame on them.

Like, say, if you make mistakes during high school and college, you sin during those years, you kind of transgress at a level where there is no grace or forgiveness for you. I wouldn't want to do that. But I wonder about sitting down with a 14-year-old and saying, there's going to be a day on the beach when you're going to want to propose to somebody. And the question will be, on that day, can you look at that person and say, I made a commitment to save myself to be yours alone?

Or will you have to say, look, before I ask you this, there's some stuff I have to tell you? And again, there's grace in those moments, but that's one of those things that you'd like to think somebody going to, I wish somebody had said to me at 14, you're going to find yourself at some point with the one. So maybe you ought to just prepare for that day and be thinking about that day and just have that in the back of your mind as you make decisions about who you date and about what happens in your dates and how you've handled things. I had girls in high school that I've gone back to and asked for forgiveness from what happened in our relationship.

But I said, I'm just under conviction on this stuff, I just need to ask you to forgive me for how I mistreated you during our dating years. And I think it's hard for all of us, and especially those not yet married, to have the long view like that. That requires a perspective that says, I'm going to think forward. And as part of what you're almost saying is like, man, if you're not able to do that, you're probably not ready to date. Because it requires a little bit of maturity to be able to go, I'm going to make decisions now with a long view.

And if I'm not willing or able to do that, and again, they're going to say, I'm going to date anyway because that's the immaturity there. But it should be a sign to go, I probably need to wait. Right.

Yeah, I think that's right. And I think your thought raised two things for me. One, I would really discourage anyone from having the honesty about your past conversation with your ring in the pocket.

Right. That is a very bad proposal plan. For all kinds of reasons. I knew that needed to happen well in advance, like I would say weeks, months in advance of a proposal. Because you want to give someone a real honest opportunity to process that information. And you can't deal with all the consequences of it before you get married, but you can deal with a lot. And especially if you draw in some godly married people to say, here's what we're walking through. Here's the obstacles that are in front of us.

So I would just say, separate those two if at all possible. How many weeks was it for you before the actual proposal? Six months. Okay, six months.

Let me ask you real quick, and I know you want to say something else, but before we leave it. Faye experienced this wave of grace, which I love the term. Did that ever like dissipate?

Like did a week or two like, you know. And that's why I would say there have been days in dating and then especially in marriage. You're so much more vulnerable to each other in marriage. There have been days in marriage where my past is very hard for her, and she's honest about that. And I've encouraged her, anytime you feel that, I want to hear it. It hurts me because sin hurts.

You're not abusing me by doing that. And we're not afraid of that in our house. We're just not afraid to talk about hard things in the past that are affecting us now. Because we think if you're drawing those things into the light, talking about them together, creating a rhythm of rehearsing the gospel in your home, praying together, going to the Lord with that, that over time he's going to continue to heal and build where those things are. So it comes up regularly in our home.

Yeah. I mean, I say regularly. I mean, not infrequently that she'll say, I'm tempted right now to think about your past and not trust you in this moment. But I want to say that out loud so that we can talk about it. She needed reassurance. She needs reassurance. Yeah, of your love. And Satan wants you to just quiet that. Exactly.

Say, oh, I don't, I trust him. I don't. And I just think God loves when we bear our hearts to him in prayer, mainly, but then to each other in ways that allow us to stir each other up towards love and good works. And so for me to be able to say in advance, thank you so much for forgiving me the way you did.

It was the most tangible expression of the gospel I've ever experienced that afternoon on the beach. And she remembers that and she remembers what it feels like for the wave of grace to fall over her. And this moment, instead of becoming a pulling of the thread of our marriage and the trust in our marriage, we're weaving together instead.

So it's adding to the the quilt that we're that we're making. My other thought on that was that I think a lot of people say, don't do things now you'll regret in marriage, which I agree. I just think a lot of young people I know for me, they always knew that I said it to other people and yet I was doing it. So I think one thing is that we all we all love the idea, for instance, of sexual purity, the kind of people who are listening and leaning in and reading their Bibles and loving Jesus. No one's saying, oh, I just sexual impurity is something they're not drawn to it as a concept. And in most of our moments, 99 percent, it's like, oh, absolutely not.

I want to be sexually pure. I don't want to go there. Then these moments of weakness where you you put yourself in a bad situation, you're tired, temptation comes. And then all of a sudden you're falling into something that 99 percent of the time you're like, I don't want any part of that. So where I want to bring that back to is we talk about don't do something now that you'll regret in marriage, which I think is a pretty vague, abstract thing for a lot of young people. Something that they and I practice that was super helpful was that we talked to each other in ways that assumed we were going to marry somebody else.

Oh, what do you mean? What that look like? So, for instance, there would be conversations that we would have or if there was any temptation into sexual impurity or anything like that. We might talk about like she might talk about her husband. I'm not going to do that because I'm I'm reserving that for my husband or I don't want to talk about that until I know that a man's going to be my husband. So see how she's not saying that you're going to be my husband. Yes, because I think we all as we start to date every single relationship I was in, I said, this is the one. Right. I'm going to marry her.

I'm 11 years old. I was convinced in my mind I'm building a future, figuring out what kind of home we're going to have and how many kids and and what life's going to be like. We build that dream out. And so then we say, OK, this is going to be my husband or this is going to be my wife unless we break up. And I think if you turn it and say, this is not my husband, this is not my wife, my husband and my wife are waiting at the altar. And you are not that person until you are that person, until you make those promises with me at the altar. And so for us, that third person was a really helpful tool for us in making it more concrete that that you're going to have to tell a husband, a wife about this relationship one day.

And that helped us a lot. And now we are 20, you know, 27, 28, 29. So we're not a teenager. But already, as I think about my son, that's something I want to start practicing really early is to say, don't assume that this person is your husband.

You know, I've never heard that explained that way. It's a really good way to think. I was thinking even now as a married man and a dad, think the same way and make new decisions for my son. I'm making decisions for my grandkids, you know, and not just for me. It adds a gravitas to the decision. I don't want to stand in front of my wife and kids and explain some bad decision.

I want to stand before him and say, I was thinking of you when I stayed pure, when I made this decision. I think it's clear that every 11 year old in America needs to read Not Yet Married. I mean, that's who you wrote it for, right? The 11 year old? I hope some 11 year old is reading. It would be good for high school kids to read this or college kids or for moms and dads to take a high school son or daughter through this.

Go through it together. The first half of the book is about being not yet married. The second half of the book is about when the not yet marrieds meet and you begin your journey toward a possible marriage. We're making Marshall's book available this week to Family Life Today listeners who can help support this program with a donation.

And you may be thinking, well, this isn't a book that I need necessarily, but I bet you can think of somebody you could give this book to as a gift. When you make a donation today to support the work of Family Life Today, you can request Marshall Siegel's book Not Yet Married. You can donate online.

Go to our website, familylifetoday.com to donate or call 1-800-FL-TODAY. Let me just say your donations are what make Family Life Today possible. In fact, it makes possible all that we do here at Family Life. What you're actually giving to is the health and strength of marriages and families not just across the country but around the world. Every day there are hundreds of thousands of listeners, people online who are interacting with us who are benefiting from what's available through the ministry of Family Life Today. And you make all of that possible every time you donate. So if God has used Family Life Today in your own life, in your own marriage, your own family, you can pay it forward for others when you make a donation today. And again, we'll send you a copy of Marshall Siegel's book Not Yet Married when you make your donation today.

Donate online at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-358-6329, that's 1-800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today to make your donation. David Robbins, who is the president of Family Life, is here with us. And you've talked with a lot of young couples who have had to think through, am I going to have this conversation, what do I say, what's the right time, and how much do I share, right? Yeah, it was an ever-increasing conversation with 20-something couples that we were working with. But really, this conversation today, I'm listening to it just going, oh my word, I remember my conversation with Meg.

And I remember the restaurant and the table we were sitting at. And as Marshall said, our relationship, enough time had been there for some significant trust to happen. And we were at a turning point thinking about the future.

And the Holy Spirit really began a season of prompting me to go there with some of the mistakes in my own life. And we set up the conversation. We know we're going to talk about it. And Meg jumped in and she said, I'll go first. And so she goes first and she's there crying in tears over telling one boy in her lifetime that she loves him and she kissed him a little too much. And I just go, I love your sincerity, but oh, man, here I go. You know, it's my turn. You've got to carry on and I've got a footlocker, right?

Exactly. And, you know, it can be fair to say I never fell off a cliff of where I didn't want to go ultimately by the grace of God. But I brought a lot more in my locker to the table. And as I went there and shared some of the things that really just was shame and, you know, secret things that I had held on to, I encountered the grace of God through Meg that day and forgiveness in a way that I had really never experienced. I mean, I experienced First John one seven in a real way that if we walk in the light as he is in the light and we have fellowship with one another, the blood of Jesus, his son cleanses us from all sin. And the most important thing that happened that day is that it set the pattern of keeping things in the light, a pattern of trusting God and believing, running to the light as soon as possible in marriage. And that that is always worth it. And it was set that day.

The pattern was set. Those conversations can be very hard conversations to have. But as I've heard David and Wilson say, there is deeper intimacy on the other side of those conversations. That's good counsel.

Thank you, David. Now, tomorrow, we want to talk to those not yet marrieds who are in a lonely season because they'd like to be in a relationship. They'd like to be married, but nothing seems to be happening right now.

How do you find joy in your status as a not yet married person? We're going to talk with Marshall Siegel about that tomorrow. Hope you can tune in for that. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch. We got some help from Bruce Goff, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, David and Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back tomorrow for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.