Secrecy

I got to thinking about secrecy recently. Especially in the area of romance. You see, a number of my friends are in or beginning romantic relationships. I'm at that age where we start wanting to settle down, get married, and have children. (Actually, I've been at that age since I was two or so). Our church practices a version of the courtship model. Except we run into a major problem.

Most of our parents are overseas.

So they thought of a solution. Everyone has a shepherd, a person more spiritually mature than you (of the same gender) responsible for your spiritual growth, who can offer you advice when you get interested in each other, and generally act the role of a parent in the whole thing.

Except this results in massive differences. My shepherd has said that she will give me advice, but never actually stop me from choosing who I want. My friend however, is "not-seeing" a boy whose shepherd has said that they can't go out. No real reason, even though both sets of parents are fine with it (and are actually very cross that it isn't going ahead). One of these parents is a pastor and a marriage counsellor. So they are allowed to spend time together, as long as they don't act like a couple in public.

It's a very bad idea, and neither of them like it. There are so many things wrong with this that I can't begin to say. And more of my friends are beginning to enter into relationships that they are also being told need to be kept under wraps. It's very, very dangerous.

Obviously, one of the biggest issues with this is that you aren't being accountable to anyone. You could be doing all sorts of things, and no one would know. The boy's shepherd literally doesn't want to know. He would rather it all go away. They've been "not-seeing" each other for more than A YEAR. It's not going to go away.

When one thing is a secret lots of things soon also become secret. If you are keeping the fact that you are seeing each other secret, soon you're keeping that you're kissing secret and that this is secret and that (and actually, the main couple I'm talking about are NOT KISSING - the girl is telling me things so that she remains reasonably accountable) and it is a very slippery slope.

The other big thing is availability. Because their relationship is being kept under wraps, other people don't know. (Duh.) But my friend has several boys who are a bit more chatty than she would like, and because they aren't being direct she can't tell them to go away, but at the same time, she can't drop the "my boyfriend" in the conversation. It's doubly bad for her, because not only does she feel bad about being secretive, but she feels like she's leading these boys on, even though she doesn't want to.

So yeah. Secrecy. It's a bad thing. Don't do it.