A Totally Different Way to Date with JP Pokluda
March 04, 2021
Jennie Allen
Bible teacher, founder of IF:Gathering
Chloe has had to hold me off from having JP on and us doing a little mini-series on dating because I feel like this is something that is so difficult these days. It feels like there needs to be a complete makeover when it comes to dating with Christians. We need a new way to do it! JP and I talk about this offline a lot. If you don't know JP, you are going to get to know him today and appreciate him, because my husband and I always say about JP that he is a voice to this next generation. He can say and address things that need to be addressed in such a clear, simple, Biblical way. He's talking about marriage and dating in his new book, Outdated. He was a leader at The Porch which is largely a 20-something gathering of singles that come together. It's 3,000+ that come together in Dallas, TX. He has earned his stripes when it comes to counseling people in the middle of dating and giving them advice.
You know, I don't think it was ever easy, but for you and I and the generations behind us, it was easier. It's gotten complicated. We have complicated this deal. Anything I can do to just show the dummy tax that I've paid and the lessons I've learned from watching tens of thousands of other young people navigate this. My heart is just to help people, so I pray this resource is helpful.
WHY IS DATING SO HARD FOR THIS GENERATION?
Well let's just get into it and talk about what you see that is so broken. Where have we gotten this so wrong?
We've digitized the whole process. You have guys living in fear - they won't ask girls out. They feel like girls standards are so high that they always know if somebody does ask them out they'll say no. So we're sliding into DMs, we're ghosting, we don't have the dignity to follow up and say where it's gone wrong. If I don't want to see you anymore, I just won't respond to your text messages. There's no love your neighbor as yourself in that. Everybody is walking around wounded and confused. Those are the two words that mark the dating culture in the 21st century: wounded and confused. People are getting married later and less. The marriages that are happening are failing more often. So all of the statistics are telling us that we're in the middle of this epidemic. This is a real challenge in the world of relationships. The divorce rate sits somewhere between 45-55%, then on the other side of that you have all these people who stay married, but they don't love each other. They're roommates. They're not happy. The reality is that the vast majority of marriages fail. But we have more tools and resources and information to help us than we've ever had before. So I was just at this place scratching my head and asking myself where we went so wrong with this. How do we help the next generation find the love that lasts? How do they find something meaningful? One thing it comes down to is just expectations. Making sure that everybody has the same expectations. Hollywood, the movies, the magazines, the media, they've really botched that for us. We have been listening to the wrong coaches. We have been taking dating advice from the people with the highest divorce rates, the biggest relationship failure rates, and those are the people we've turned to as the experts and said, "teach me more about what love looks like" rather than going to the author and perfecter and originator of love - the one who is love - and returning to his word to see what his desire in relationships are.
I know some of the things you talk about in the book - one of them I've heard you say a lot is dating isn't in the Bible. Even beginning this conversation is kind of loaded and difficult, and I even know you're doing an arranged marriage which is how a lot of generations before us did it. Their parents picked their spouse. Sign me up for that - I want to pick my kids' spouses! But talk about some of the history and how this generation is so different than how it was done in the past.
You're correct, dating is nowhere in the Bible. If we took everything out that spoke to relationships, romantic relationships in general, it's not a lot. It's a very minority section of the scripture. But it does have these really clear and compelling instructions that we can apply. The way relationships were formed then was arranged marriages - I am doing that contest which raises lots of questions. It's not because I don't value the covenant of marriage. It's quite the opposite. I really value the covenant of marriage. What I see in Song of Solomon 1:4 is he says, "their friends and their family praise their love more than wine." Which is to say, those around them praise what they have more than the party, more than the wedding dress, more than the cake, colors, and flowers. Everyone agreed upon this couple. There's a really fine line between an arranged marriage and a blind date. I don't have any desire to force somebody to get married, and I'm not going to, but I can certainly meet with people and say, "if you understand the commitment you're about to make, I think you two would make an amazing husband and wife." But dating is only about 120 years old. It didn't exist prior to 120 years ago. When it enters the English language, it is a euphemism for prostitution. To go on a date meant to pay for sex. This is the origin of this method we use to figure out who to spend the rest of our lives with. It's born out of prosuttition. It's to exchange an experience for sexual favors. Fast forward in the 21st century and it honestly hasn't evolved all that much. While we still use it as a tool to find a spouse, from a worldly perspective, someone will exchange an experience for sexual favors. The Christian culture has adopted this idea and said, we want to use this cultural idea and how can we redeem it? What does that look like? I want to be clear up front: I'm not trying to kiss dating goodbye. That's not my heart. I'm not saying let's do away with dating, it's of the Devil, we need courting, let's play some word games. That's not my heart either. But I am asking what is God's desire for relationships and how can we do this in a way that is loving? How can I talk to the men out there - guys ask me all the time what it means to lead in a relationship. Anybody can lead! It looks like removing confusion, being honest, being authentic, communicating quickly where your heart's at, and this is where I hope it goes. And you can be intentional. There's a way to be intentional without being intense. Without being that weird Christian guy that wants to plan out the next 5 years of our life together on the 1st date. You don't have to do that. Biut you can say, "hey this is where I see this going. This is how I hope you feel. This is how I feel right now. I'm not going to leave you hanging - I'm going to call you tomorrow afternoon. I'd love to see you again." Clarity is kindness and I think this is one area that my single friends can grow in today. Just be clear with each other.
Do you think there has been a devaluing of a desire to even get married? Have you seen that that has waned for guys? Because I know for girls it hasn't, but yet they're not getting married in their 20s.
For Christian girls it hasn't. And I think because of the way God made us and wired us, there has been this deep desire inside of us, and for some people deeper than others, to spend the rest of our life with someone. The message of the god of this air, the prince of this world, is that you don't need marriage. You can have all the benefits of marriage in friends with benefits and friend-ationships. I do see this movement as we continue to take our cues from Hollywood and the people that haven't figured this out, there is a devaluation of marriage. Like why would you get married? There's no shame in having kids outside of marriage. You don't have to have a wedding. You don't have to wait to have sex. You have all the benefits of marriage today without the commitment. We're adverse to commitment. If I'm going to speak to the next generation on any topic of my choosing, it's usually on the topic of commitment. Making the right commitments and keeping them. That started in my generation - we're adverse to commitment. Marriage being a really high and lofty commitment, we're out on that. How do I know? What if I change? I think this comes down to making feelings our God. The biggest question we ask when making decisions is "how do I feel" or "what do I feel like doing" then it's reasonable to look at marriage and say that's really scary, because what if my feelings change? My message to the next generation is your feelings will change! They're going to change! You have to have something that carries you forward when your feelings change. That's why every relationship you've been in, if you're a single person, none of them have worked out! So what's to make you believe this relationship is going to work out? The last thing I would say about the devaluation of marriage is that we came after the divorced generation. All we've seen is broken marriages. All we've seen is things not work out. We had this rope swing in our front yard and my kids LOVED it. They would swing and the neighbors would come over and play and everybody loved this swing. I was so glad we put it in the front yard because it kind of brought the neighborhood together. One day, this kid was over and he was a little older and a little bigger and he jumped on this rope swing and it broke. All the kids were around there and saw it break. What I did is I made sure he was okay and I fixed the swing and told the kids they could play on it again. But they didn't want to anymore. I kept trying to tell them it was fine and I fixed it, but my kids were like no, I just saw it break. We know that it can break. We're afraid of it because one day we thought it was permanent and could hold us and was strong, but now we see that it can break and we're afraid of it. All we see is marriages breaking. This thing that was meant to be permanent and meant to be solid, this thing that was meant to last for a lifetime, all we see is broken marriages. So we don't want any part of that. We don't want something that's breakable. So we kind of avoid it.
There also has been an overvaluation of marriage. I think a lot of single women I know would say it feels like they don't even have a place in the church. This conversation is just about getting married, but yet Paul is very clear that it is good to remain single. So talk just a little bit to the women who can't control it - they wish they were married but that's not their place right now. How do they walk through this in a Biblical way? They would love to be the initiator and the pursuer in that position, but for whatever reason, they feel convicted that that's not the place they're in. They're kind of just waiting for these guys to come. That's a lot of who I talk to.
I'm going to say three very important things on this topic. 1. There's nothing wrong with you that you desire marriage. More than likely, you're probably going to get married statistically speaking. It's a good thing to desire marriage! Don't make it your god, because marriage is a miserable god. You don't want to feed that desire so much that it grows to an idol. You know what an idol is. You obsess about it. You wake up thinking about it, go to bed thinking about it, and then every hour of the day in between you're thinking about it. A really wise friend of mine coined this phrase "get out of your head." But I would also say you're not JV as a single person. Singleness isn't JV to Varsity marriage. That's an unbiblical idea and I can't tell someone if marriage is promised to them, but I can tell someone if they have the gift of singleness. In fact, I can tell somebody a 100% accuracy of any person I've ever met whether they have the gift of singleness or not. I just have to ask one question: did you wake up single today? If yes, then you have the gift of singleness. Not chronically, but today you have that gift. You might get married in the future, but that's the gift you have today. The Bible doesn't talk about the gift of singleness as permanent until you referenced the Paul in 1 Corinthians 7 which says, "I wish all of you were single as I am, but some of you have that gift and others of you have this gift." He calls singleness a gift. But Paul is really just plagiarizing the words of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior. In Matthew 19, he talks about people who are celibate for the sake of the kingdom and he says, "not everyone can accept it, but those who can should." Jesus is the most complete human being that has ever walked the earth. He says it's good to be single, but he also puts his life behind that statement. Jesus could've married anybody he wanted, but he remained single for the sake of ministry. For someone to be single and use their gift, they have to ask, "how can I use this gift to build the kingdom today?" I think that's an incredible perspective. The last thing I'll say on this topic that you may want to edit out, it may be controversial, but I think girls feel completely and totally helpless in this and they don't know what to do. Girls ask me all the time, if I'm interested in a guy, how can I let them know? I would just say yes! Nothing in the scripture forbids you from letting a guy know you're interested in him. There's no "thou shalt not make the first move." I don't even like the "make the first move" language, because Romans 12:9 says love must be sincere. Under the banner of sincerity, if you have feelings for somebody. Assuming they're in a healthy relationship with Jesus and you're in a healthy relationship with Jesus. I don't want my lady friends to feel completely, absolutely helpless and waiting for something to happen. Be careful with that because I do think you can start to put all your hopes and dreams on that ask and initiation, and that's not healthy either. But there are some things to think through. To desire marriage is to desire a good thing. It's not bad. There's nothing wrong with you that you want that. Paul, the greatest missionary that has ever lived, and Jesus, both of these guys were single the majority of their life. They did incredible ministry out of that singleness. The Bible allows you to initiate, so you're not just left waiting.
WHAT ROLE DOES ATTRACTION PLAY IN DATING?
I know you and I agree on this a little bit, and this might be controversial to a lot of you, but how much do you think attraction needs to play a role in this?
Attraction does exactly what the name says - it attracts. Single friends, lean in on this. Hear me out. Your world is going to be rocked a little bit. Forward this to your friends and you guys can debate it. Attraction attracts. So attraction causes you to have a conversation across the room - you saw them, they caught your eye, and now you're in that conversation. Proverbs 31:30 says, "charm is deceitful and beauty is fleeting." So what the Bible tells us about physical looks is that it's fleeting, it's going away, it's a depreciating asset. Here's another way to say that: we're all getting uglier. How many 80 year olds are you physically attracted to? How many 75 year olds are you looking at and saying, "wow, those wrinkles really do it for me." We're all going that way! Gravity is taking its toll on our body. I just hit 40 and I look back on our honeymoon pictures and I'm like, "who are those people? We're not them anymore." My wife is very beautiful, but in reality, we are all moving toward returning back to dust. To marry someone or to choose a permanent partner based on a depreciating asset that is fleeting and changing is extremely foolish. In 1 Samuel 16, God says to Samuel, "I don't look at what man looks at. I look at the heart." So you want to ask God to help you be attracted to what he's attracted to. Which is not the outward appearance. The scripture is very clear on this. What God values most in a person is not what they look like on the outside. If you only value a person based on what they look like on the outside, then we're not attracted to what God is attracted to. I'm not saying that you need to go be a martyr and find the ugliest person you can and ask them to marry you, but what I am saying is beauty is fleeting. It's fleeting in a lot of ways. What do you do if you marry a guy who has 6 pack abs and a beautiful face and everything is where it should be and then you go on the honeymoon and you get in a wreck and he slides 100 yards on his face and now he's a quadrapalegic for the rest of his life, you're changing diapers for the rest of your life. Do you say, "God must have made a mistake. I made a mistake. I need to divorce him. This isn't in the cards for me." I know that's such a morbid thought, but I go to that extreme example to make the point that there has to be something in the covenant love that we make with somebody in a marriage that goes beyond what they look like, because looks change. People change. I would just say physical attraction attracts - it attracts two people and allows them to have a conversation, but it's not a whole lot more beneficial beyond that.
HOW PORNOGRAPHY IS RUINING MARRIAGES BEFORE THEY EVEN START
Let's talk about this idea that pornography has somewhat corrupted dating and marriage - it certainly has. This is why we believe in you so much for this generation is because you're very open about your own struggles and you've seen it wreck havoc on both sides of it. It's not just guys - girls struggle with it too. How would you say that's playing into the brokenness of dating and marriage?
Take 70% of the guys you know and understand that they have recently looked at explicit images of people they're not married to. Then take the entire pipeline of the internet - the freeway of the internet - and understand that half of all of that traffic is pornography. Then you understand that 1 in every 3 viewers of pornography are female, so it's not just a male problem. It's also a female problem. You better believe that when we have trained ourselves to be serial adulterers that it's going to impact the marriage age, marriage rate, our view of sex, our view of the opposite sex - it's changing all of these things. For me, as you alluded to, I became a Christian later in my life and I experimented with drugs, cocaine, ecstasy, alcohol, love the party. I became a Christian at 21. Different vices have gripped my heart, but nothing owned my life like pornography. I was so addicted to pornography I would take off of work so I could go home and binge on porn. Then I became a Christian, gave my life to Jesus, and I got accountability. I sought healing and freedom and I got married and I said this insanely naive prayer just after the alter - I held my wife in my arms in the foyer of the chapel and I said, "God, thank you for allowing me to escape the consequences of my sin." Specifically I meant my sexual sin and even more specifically, I meant my addiction to pornography. Two years into marriage I realized how naive that prayer was, because I had methodically trained my mind for polygamy. I had no idea how to operate in the land of monogamy. I didn't know how to do that! An addiction to porn is not an addiction to sex - it's an addiction to variety. I don't say this to create insecurities in your listeners. I'm telling you as a man who has a really healthy marriage - we just celebrated 16 years together and I love my wife, we're committed to each other, and Jesus is at the center of what we do. I have found healing and freedom and there is hope for you, but you want to pursue that healing. If you're dating someone that's addicted to porn or you're considering marrying someone who was addicted to porn, you just want to make sure they've found freedom and healing and have a committed relationship with Jesus Christ. It has changed what we're attracted to, if you look through the evolution of what people have found attractive, there's lots of different variations through time. But more and more, I'll speak for guys, we're attracted to the porn star shape and image. We've exchanged what is real for counterfeit. I think it's C.S. Lewis that said if you sneak over the fence to steal the fruit, it doesn't taste as good as if you just went through the gate. That's what I see more and more in marriage counseling - people who can't enjoy the gift of intimacy because they have conditioned themselves to the counterfeit option of pornography. I used the word epidemic earlier - that's an epidemic.
It's making me so nauseous listening to this, because I know this is behind a lot of the frustrations that people are feeling. It's not talked about enough. We can't move on from this - we had Mike Todd on the podcast before talking about this and he shared a similar message in this. What I want to do is give everybody a chance to understand the first step. If you are dating somebody that you think is addicted to pornography or maybe they've said it, if you're married to somebody who's addicted, or you yourself are addicted right now, what would you say the next first step needs to be?
Romans 6 talks about being dead in sin and when I think about someone who's addicted to pornography, I think about somebody who's flatlined on the table and they're dying. The thing that comes to mind is they need CPR. C: confess. You need to confess and bring it to the light. James 5:16 says, "confess your sins to one another and pray for each other because the prayers of a righteous person are powerful and effective." We need to bring it to the light. The enemy is going to eat our lunch in the darkness. The roaring lion is going to get the best of us if we keep this to ourself. You have to bring it to the light and confess it to someone who loves Jesus and is going to help you. P: Prayer. That's not a one-time prayer. When I found healing from pornography, it was because I prayed like my life depended on it. Every morning I would pray, "You have to help me God. Control my thoughts, replace my thoughts, help turn this into a healthy activity." So that's the second part of that James 5:16 verse - "pray for each other because the prayers of a righteous person are powerful and effective." They help you find healing. R: remove access. You want to audit how you're accessing porn - your phone, the internet, laptop, magazines, netflix, what is it? How are you accessing it? Whatever it is, remove it from your life. Get rid of your phone or laptop. People are like man, that sounds legalistic. Jesus says in Matthew 5, "if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out. If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off." Jesus is not a legalistic - he just knows how deadly sin is and how much it wants to kill you and rob you of a healthy marriage and keep you in a perpetual dissatisfied state with your sexuality. He's just saying do whatever it takes to get rid of how you're accessing this. I've heard someone say, "I know no greater way to overcome sin than to find a superior satisfaction in Jesus." We have to be discipled. Everyone who is listening to this should have a mature follower of Jesus that's investing in them, teaching them the Bible, pouring into them, and teaching them to enjoy the things of God. I think as you replace that unhealthy activity or habit with the healthy habit of pursuing Christ, you will truly find freedom. So remember CPR - confess, pray, remove access. Pursue a healthy relationship with Jesus.
NAVIGATING THE WORLD OF ONLINE DATING
Okay we've talked about a lot. And I love every subject. I came in with a list of things we have to hit, and the last one is online dating. It seems to me that it's the way a lot of people are starting to meet and date these days. What do you think about it?
We talked about dating being this relatively new phenomenon. So of course the Bible doesn't address online dating, because the internet didn't even exist yet. It's a method and I think it's also C.S. Lewis who says (and I'm paraphrasing), "however great something's potential for good, equally great is its potential for evil." That's how I feel about all things online and specifically online dating. I've done weddings of people who've met through apps, met through online dating. Granted, you can't judge obedience by the outcome, but I don't see anything in the scripture that directly prohibits online dating. I'm just a simple guy who teaches the Bible. I've found wisdom in the source God has given us - his scriptures. If God doesn't forbid it, I'm really slow to forbid it. But there's some things you should go in with eyes wide open and understand about online dating. 1. Profiles lie. People can be whoever they want to be behind a screen. So you have 0 reason to trust that someone is a Christian just because they say they are, even if they've memorized some verses or they're telling you where they go to church. I think you have to be more skeptical - and I don't like being skeptical, I want to be an optimist - but I think in the world of online dating you need to proceed with caution. My much more preferred method of finding a spouse is an arranged marriage and here's what I mean by that: what I mean by an arranged marriage is other people around you saying you know what? I think that you would be great with him. I think that you would be great with her. Y'all should meet. I'm gonna send y'all on a date. Having your community or your church family or your immediate family, believers around you, speaking into that. That's the deficit that I see in this generation. We just don't have people pouring into us at that level to where they can say, "this is where I think you could really thrive." I don't think it's a sin to use online dating platforms, I just hate that we have to. I think it's a symptom, I don't think it's a sin, but I think it's a symptom of something unhealthy in our dating culture and relationship-building culture. That we don't have believers around us saying, "y'all two need to go on a date. You should spend time together. I could really see that being a strengthening of ministry - the two of you coming together and forming an union. Y'all should go do that." Again, you can date online, but I hate that it's necessary and you need to do so with a lot of caution. I'm not a big fan of even going on a date with strangers personally. Meaning where you just show up and nobody's vouched for that person, you don't know them, you don't know where they're from, or anything. Someone asked me recently, "how do I find out if the person I'm dating is a Christian?" I would just say I hope you found that out way before you committed time to them. That's a big rock. That's really, really important.
We just did this for a friend - we chased down a lead. She was online dating and this guy seemed really great and they had had several conversations and they were about to meet and we saw the little town he was from and we started looking for friends there and sure enough, it was not somebody she needed to be with. She listened to us and walked away. I do think there are ways to do it, it just takes a lot more work. I can't agree more with what you're saying right now. Here's the deal guys - this is hard. This is messy and I don't know that either of us sitting here talking about this can fully appreciate how hard this is. I got married young, but I'm watching it play out with a lot of people I love and it's true. This is just hard. The more you have community, like JP is saying, who can walk through it with you. I mean this is the book I'm writing right now about village life and how we're some of the first generation and only people alive on earth that don't live in a village context. Where everyone knows each other - like Gilmore Girls where everybody lived in this little bitty town and knew each other and if somebody comes in from the outside, the whole town will protect Rory. This is the way most every generation has lived - so visible, so seen. Building that into your life right now if you are single is so important - committing to a small group, committing to be accountable to people, that is part of the way we've got to choose to live and be really intentional. I do think about my friend Jen when you're telling that about community and asking your friends. That's exactly what she did. She basically told every married friend she had that she wanted to date and get married, would you introduce me to anybody you think would be a good fit. Sure enough, one of her friend's friends is who she ended up on a date with and they worked out and are married happily several years in.
People would think, "oh gosh that sounds so desperate. She sounds desperate." No! That sounds so healthy! That sounds like the ask of a healthy young woman. I'm not trying to shame anybody in this - but less desperate than online dating. To go to your friends and say hey, this is a desire of my heart, can you help me find someone?
I've heard this from my single friends - they assume we're looking out for them, but the truth is a lot of us have a lot of single friends. When somebody intentionally comes to you and says hey, I would really love in this season of my life, I have strong community, I'm happy serving God in this context, but I would love a partner to do it with - would you introduce me to anybody you know? All the sudden they just moved to the top of my list to think about the people I know and would anybody be a good fit for them? I just encourage you guys to do it - ask old married couples! They have nephews and single friends. Ask people, not just your young 20-something friends. Ask anyone you would respect and love. I appreciate you JP and I appreciate you going to the hard places. I'm really praying that this catalyzes a new way for guys and girls to date and interact, because man, it is needed. Thank you so much for writing the book, being on the podcast, AND giving dating advice to my kids. They always text and ask you questions!
You have great kids. I love the Allens and I'm so thankful for the way God is using you. Thanks for having me on friend!