Back to the Dating Drawing Board
by Barb Ernster in Family on Friday, June 26, 2009 6:00 AM
Gina Zaccagnini laughs at the thought of her first date. She was in high school. Her little brother had to come along to the movie.
Today, the 25-year-old college grad appreciates her parents’ protective measures. They helped her navigate the insecurities of teenage dating — and steer clear of the college “hook-up” scene that’s par for the course on so many campuses today.
Unspoken Messages
“Where I went to school, a guy would call a girl he met the night before and invite her to a party or a bar. That was considered a date,” says Zaccagnini, adding that men don’t take women out on courtship-style dates like they once did. The not-so-subtle message co-eds get, she adds, is that men reject women who don’t “give them something.”
Zaccagnini made chastity one of her unshakeable morals at an eighth-grade retreat and has kept that promise. In college, when her dorm mates started calling her “Virgin Gina,” Zaccagnini recognized that her friends’ sarcasm largely stemmed from regret over their own poor choices. Envy, after all, often expresses itself as peer pressure.
And she held fast to her mother’s wise words of encouragement: “You could easily be like them, but they can never be like you.”
Her mother was smart, says Dr. Meg Meeker, a pediatric-adolescent specialist and counselor in Traverse City, Mich. A mother of three grown daughters and one teenage son, Meeker has appeared on numerous national TV shows to talk about her best-seller Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters
Parents have far more influence on their kids than the culture, says Meeker. And, contrary to conventional wisdom, kids want guidance and boundaries.
Prepared for Pressure
Boys need guidance, too. Girls are using suggestive language at earlier ages, says Meeker, and many boys don’t know what to do with this. “They either respond (in kind) or run fast the other way. This might be happening to our boys at an early age, and we don’t know it.”
“Talk to your boys about the fact that some girls are more aggressive and they’re not necessarily the girls they want to date,” she adds, noting that the pushy girls are often “looking for attention from anybody — not just your son.”
College life isn’t any easier than high school for most, and freshman year is the toughest, says Meeker. She’s often called in to help young people deal with the unfortunate results of the hook-up lifestyle — depression, anxiety, an ever-expanding slew of communicable but easily avoidable diseases.
True Love Commits
Chris Spellman, 23, a graduate student at Boston College, didn’t date much in high school or college, but says he also didn’t get much direction on the subject from his parents. After joining Opus Dei while at the University of Notre Dame, he received some good formation on dating and started thinking about marriage.
Spellman met his fiancée, Cassandra Miller, on CatholicSingles.com.
“I realized what dating was all about, and I think that was the biggest influence on me,” he recalls. “Dating really is for marriage, so it can’t just be about having fun and not going anywhere.”
Miller, 24, a student at St. Bernard’s School of Theology and Ministry in Rochester, N.Y., says too many people think the physical aspect of the relationship will foster love, but it’s the emotional and spiritual relationship that really make love grow.
God at Work
In the face of ubiquitous sources of pressure urging young people to go along with the cultural flow, God is working very hard on college campuses. That’s the observation of Zaccagnini.
In fact, she suggests, a new-fashioned but rightly ordered form of courtship might be making a comeback among Catholics.
At UC-Boulder, she sees men waking up early to pray the Rosary for the women and vice versa, along with dating couples attending Mass together, and faith-centered activities and relationships. She knows several women from a former Bible study group who went on a six-month dating fast and met their husbands soon after.
For her own part, as part of her first year as a missionary, Zaccagnini was on a dating “fast” and says it has been one of the best experiences she’s ever had.
“I’ve been able to give my whole heart to God, and I thought I had done that already,” she says. “If God doesn’t have my whole heart in the first place, no man will ever be able to have it.”
—Barb Ernster writes from Fridley, Minnesota
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