She heads up a huge ministry on dating, love, and marriage, and today she’s sharing her thoughts and experience with you! Kait Tomlin of Heart of Dating joins The AllMomDoes Podcast host Julie Lyles Carr with important info you need for equipping your kids or yourself if you’re single for what today’s dating world looks like.
Show Notes:
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Book: School Of Dating
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Transcription:
Julie Lyles Carr:
I’ve got a big deal on the podcast today. Big, big deal. Big deal. My friend Kait Tomlin is on. You probably know her from Heart of Dating. And if you don’t, you need to. Kait, I can’t thank you enough for being on the AllMomDoes podcast today.
Kait Tomlin:
I’m so excited to be here, Julie, and talk all things dating and now being married, and just anything really. I’m excited to be here.
Julie Lyles Carr:
I love it. You and I have been chatting for a while about getting you on the show because one of the things that I hear a lot from our listeners, Kait, is trying to understand what the world of dating looks like today. Whether they are trying to equip their kids or they’re launching teenagers or kids in college and trying to get some kind of feel for what the landscape looks like, or they might be single again and they’re looking for themselves, they’re wanting to make sure that they’re walking in God’s timing and in God’s best.
And this whole new world of dating feels really different. So I know that you are the person, the expert to talk us through all this. But before we get to all that, I want you to tell the listener where you live, who you are, what you do, where you come from, all the stuff.
Kait Tomlin:
Yes. Okay. Well, hey guys, I’m Kait previously Warman, now Tomlin. I got married a year ago. Wow, that’s crazy.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Wow, yeah.
Kait Tomlin:
A year ago to JJ Tomlin who now co-runs Heart of Dating with me. But back up before he existed or he existed, but not in my life. Five and a half years ago, I started the Heart of Dating podcast as a single woman and really God put it on my heart because… And I didn’t want to be that person.
I got to be honest with you. I didn’t want to be the person that shared their story and ventured out as still a single woman. But it was so clear God was leading me to that. And really I started Heart of Dating to bridge that gap of resources that for Christian singles that the church just doesn’t often give us. And that’s not a dog on the church because I love the church.
It’s just the church really, a lot of pastors don’t know how to talk to singles and what to say in our current generation of dating and the online space with social media and dating apps. And then you had COVID and there’s so many things that these pastors, bless them, don’t know what to say. And so I started this podcast to ask the questions that we all have as singles that were not getting answered.
And so that was five and a half years ago. And through Heart of Dating, we now have of course the podcast, but we have a yearly event that we do, yearly conference for singles and dating people. And we also have courses we do, one specifically called The School of Dating. And I wrote a book a few years ago, which is so crazy and just still so surreal.
And the same year my book came out is when I actually met JJ. And so it’s so cool, our story, I’m sure I’ll weave that in today, but he’s definitely not the person I thought I’d end up with. But so God does the unexpected and JJ really was the unexpected. And really in that JJ felt called as well to serve single men. And so he joined me in Heart of Dating, which was a fire that God put on his heart uniquely. Not something that I was like, “Hey, if you’re going to date me, you got to be-”
Julie Lyles Carr:
Got to be part of this.
Kait Tomlin:
… into-. Yeah, “You got to be open to this. Are you cool with that?” No, I really didn’t put that pressure on any guy I ever dated. And I always wanted to be like, “Lord, if that’s something you want them to do and you want for my life with my partner, then put it on their heart.” And that’s something I prayed and God put it on his heart and he brought it to me and I was like, “Let’s do it.” So now we run Heart of Dating together and we live in Southern California with our two little dogs. Well, they’re not that little actually.
Julie Lyles Carr:
They’re not little. I’ve seen those dogs.
Kait Tomlin:
I’m like, “Yeah, what? What did I just say?” We have a goldendoodle. We have a doodle gang, goldendoodle, bernedoodle out here in California and we love getting to run it together. So that’s what I do.
Julie Lyles Carr:
I love it. I have a bernedoodle nephew and I have a goldendoodle niece, so I have all the love-
Kait Tomlin:
Oh, sweet.
Julie Lyles Carr:
… for the doodle gang. Yes, I do. I do.
Kait Tomlin:
We love doodles.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Kait, it’s interesting for me as a mom who when I was dating my husband back a long time ago, I thought dating was complicated enough back then and I was at a Christian university, which frankly when you think about it should be shooting fish in a barrel, right?
Kait Tomlin:
Right.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Everybody was kind of at this small university for some of the same reasons. And there were all these single girls and single guys, and we were all in the same stage of life. And dating felt weird and hard and challenging anyway. And I can remember my mom and dad talking about, “Well, but when we dated, dah, dah, dah, dah, and the guy did this and the girl did that,” and I thought, “Oh, bless your hearts.” Now I weirdly find myself with my own kids who are in those dating ages and stages going, “I’m not really sure how to help because this is a world that is so unique.” Of my four kids who are married, one, one Kait, one met their spouse in youth group and had a friendship-
Kait Tomlin:
Wow.
Julie Lyles Carr:
… for many years and ultimately got married. The other three, two were online, they met online and the other one met at an improv class in Chicago.
Kait Tomlin:
Wow. So cool.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Now this is all a really unique little snapshot I think, of where things are at today. So this is your world of expertise. This is the place where you have spent half a decade really doing the deep dive into what it looks like. Give the listener a snapshot of where things are today from your perspective. What’s changed? What’s coming up? What is different? What are some of the things that we’re navigating that previous generations just simply haven’t had experience with?
Kait Tomlin:
Yeah, great question. It is different today and we need those resources. And so for those listening that have kids that you’re like, “How do I help them?” I’m so glad you’re listening and I do think Heart of Dating will help you too. So the lay of the land right now is that singles are, there are more singles out there than ever before right now in this time in history. And more people are single than they are married currently. Okay? And singles are also getting married later in life statistically these days.
It’s about 29 on average, and that age goes up in bigger cities. So I live close to LA. That age is well into your thirties. I didn’t get married until I was 33, and that is very normal for me and a lot of people my age. And so that’s one thing, people are single way later in life. People are not really meeting and marrying right out of college. And that still is the same even in the Christian world. I know that’s generally for everybody still in the Christian world though.
And not only that, we have so many different means of meeting people, which is blessing in many ways and also can be challenging in many ways because while I’m not necessarily marrying the neighbor down the road in my cul-de-sac these days, and I don’t just have access to the people that live close in proximity to me, now I have access to so many people from across my city that I maybe would never meet and even in other states or other countries. Long distance dating is a huge thing.
And JJ and I actually did that in our relationship. And so you have a lot of people that have a lot of means of dating, which is very confusing because on top of that, it’s great, but it’s also confusing because on top of that, you then add everybody’s different communication style. So while back in the day, people met mainly in person and exchanged numbers in person and had real time conversations, and there was very little ghosting, which is somebody just disappearing out of nowhere.
Because they had commitments and they met them in person where, “I’ll see you for dinner, 6:00 PM at this time.” That was communicated in person, they met up in person. Now all of that’s done online and via text message, and there’s so much that can be misconstrued in messages. Even just thinking of your messages with friends and people that you know. Maybe you are misreading their lack of emoji usage or their lack of expression or maybe their period usage is really profound.
And you’re like, “What do they mean by that? Are they mad at me?” And so there’s a lot of means of miscommunication. And also with that, unfortunately, a lot of people take dating less seriously and make it very casual and easily ghost people and just move on to the next thing. It can be very consumeristic these days, which is really unfortunate.
And instead of people having conversations and saying, “Hey, I really enjoyed you and loved getting to know you, but for me, I’m feeling more of a friendship situation with you and I don’t want to move forward romantically.” Instead of saying that directly, clearly, they are ghosting them or beating around the bush or dragging, stringing them along or doing what I call the fade out, which is just slowly fading out their messaging, slowly fading out their contact. And so technology is a beautiful thing. We can meet more people, but it also has really made dating more confusing and challenging for many people.
Julie Lyles Carr:
It’s interesting to me too, that in this new world of dating, my husband and I meeting that this Christian university, as far as we knew, our paths had never crossed. I didn’t necessarily know his family or anything about them. He didn’t know anything about mine. But Kait, it was wild because when we got together, as it turned out, we did have people in common and we had grown up in very different places in the US, very…
And there was a commonality in a strange way because I’ve known other couples that that was kind of a similar story because if you think about it, we were really running in some of the same social circles. We were really running in some of the same church circles. So this ability to kind of vet him and know who he was and know who some of his people were, that gave me a lot of confidence in moving forward in that relationship, even though it was just kind of wild and felt pretty divinely serendipitous, but still like, “You are kidding me, you know these people and these people know you?”
And today what has been fascinating, particularly in the online space is you have access usually to someone’s social media footprint. You can kind of piece some things together, but a lot of times you’re not getting this connection of these family groups or being raised in a community to where you as the parent might know those parents or you know somebody who is in business with whoever and you can kind of trickle down. And not that those things ever actually ensure you’re dealing with a quality person.
Kait Tomlin:
Right.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Because you just can’t know that.
Kait Tomlin:
Yeah.
Julie Lyles Carr:
But this all feels really broad and really wide, and there is a whole lot of vetting that is really needing to be done specifically in the dating space, and yet dating feels so different. So what are some things that we can be thinking about and looking toward? If we’ve got a million ways to meet people these days, what are some ways that we can be wise about who we’re interacting with?
Kait Tomlin:
Yeah. One of my biggest things, we teach this in our program, The School of Dating, and it doesn’t really matter what age you are, I think this is really valuable. We call it getting a life board of advisors and what that looks like. And we talk about different categories of people you should have on that life board of advisors. And maybe your parents are on it or maybe they’re not, depending on if they’re healthy, if they’re spiritual guides for you or spiritual mentors.
A lot of times we just have our peers and people that are paying attention, but you really also want older, wiser people. Could be your parents or could be a couple that you really admire. You want those people speaking into your life as a single person. That’s really valuable and that should be developed as a single person, but also into your relationship.
You would ideally have a mentor in that lineup of your life board of advisors. You might have a few friends, but they should be friends that know you deeply. They know where you struggle, they know your vulnerabilities, they know where you have maybe not had the best past relationships and maybe your tendencies in relationships and people that you are deeply honest with that will and have permission to call you out. Because there’s different kinds of friends.
There’s the cheerleader friend that’s always going to be on your side that will always have your back and be like, “Kait, that guy sucks. We don’t like him anymore and let’s put that Taylor Swift song on. And he sucks. We’re never ever getting back together.” And love those people, but also that’s not necessarily always what you need in certain circumstances. Sometimes you need somebody who’s going to be like, “Hey, that really hurts and let’s talk about how maybe you showed up in that.
Let’s have an honest conversation about that.” And so you need those people in your life, but especially in dating. And JJ and I did long distance and none of my friends had the opportunity at first to meet him in person. So what I did is I had him have FaceTime calls with some of these board of advisor people.
And I’ll never forget, my best friend Nika got on this call and she had done this with me before. And usually in the past she was really kind to the guys, just sussing them out. But this time she kind of had enough of my heartbreaks and all that I had been through. And so she kind of just rolled up her sleeves and was like, “I don’t care. I’m going at this guy,” as though she did. And I was not prepared, he was not prepared. But the way he handled that and took that with so much grace and wasn’t defensive.
Because she was like, “Hey, can you not tell her you love her until you really know that you do and your actions are willing to back up what those words mean?” Because so many guys had spoken and told me, I love you very preemptively before they really meant those words. And so she was really hard on him, and he was like, one of my favorite lines that he said is like, “Do your worst.
I’m here to stay. Do your worst, say anything you want to me.” And that’s also a telltale sign of a man, speaking of the woman’s side that, “Hey, he is here. His heart is ignited. You can throw anything at him, and he is not going to waver.” He didn’t know he was going to marry me at that point, but he was sure that he wanted to pursue me. He was sure his heart was ignited for me.
And some guys in my past, man, if she had done that to previous boyfriends, which now I wish she had, they would’ve been like, “Who is this girl? What right does she have to ask me some of these questions?” They would’ve been defensive. Their pride and ego would’ve gotten in the way. It would’ve been so apparent. I’m thinking of some specifically where I’m like, “Man, I wish that situation would’ve happened.”
But with JJ, he was like, “No, I hear this and I love knowing this from people that deeply know you and love you and walked you through some of the hardest seasons of your life. I value this so much.” And so just thinking into that situation because about that situation, how valuable it was for our relationship and building trust in my friends and some of my core people that got to see him. Quickly introduced him to my mentor as well, who is very spiritually in tune. And she’s never had good peace about any guy I’ve dated in the past until JJ.
And she was like, “My spirit feels super at peace and I feel really good around him and with him.” And I was like, “This is great.” So again, just peeling back those layers and allowing people, even if it’s long distance, even if he’s not, that person is not in your direct community, still intentionally bringing them into these layers.
Because all that was done virtually, of course, but it still was done with quite intention and done really, really well. And so I would say that’s one thing that you can put in place that is really powerful, both to develop your life as a single, have a life board of advisors, but then bring those people in, my goodness, bring them in to your relationship. Don’t bring everyone in. That’s a mistake.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Right.
Kait Tomlin:
I will say that a hundred percent.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Right.
Kait Tomlin:
Do not bring everyone into your relationship. Bring your close five to seven people. Those are the people you need in from the very beginning of dating.
Julie Lyles Carr:
That is incredibly powerful, and I love that admonition, not everybody, because let’s face it, you get too many voices in your head, it’s hard to know.
Kait Tomlin:
Right.
Julie Lyles Carr:
But I think too, Kait, a guy who’s willing to go through that gauntlet or a guy who’s completely unwilling to go through that gauntlet, those are both really important pieces of information to be able to glean from.
Kait Tomlin:
A hundred percent.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Kait, we have a lot of people becoming parents today who are looking at their kids trying to figure out what they’re going to tell their kids about dating. And this is not in any way to bag on the purity movement or those kind of things, but we do have a generation of parents who are saying that it was very detrimental to them that the messaging they got from it, the way it set things up, the dynamics that went into place.
We also hear from other people who were raised in some intense environments where there was only courting, there was no kind of sort of recreational dating or figuring out what you liked or any of those kinds of things. I know you’ve got to be hearing this a lot from the people that you coach and the people that you minister to.
How are you handling that conversation? Because it would be too simple, right? To say, “Oh, the purity movement was this, and it was all about shame,” but I know some really well-intentioned families who were trying to create a template for healthy dating in a counterculture kind of way that it was not their intention to shame.
Kait Tomlin:
Right.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Was it used for that in certain circumstances? Absolutely. Has it led to a really complicated conversation on the backside? Of course.
Kait Tomlin:
Yeah.
Julie Lyles Carr:
How are you talking through all that, healing that, repairing that, and what does it inform us moving forward about how as Christians we’re to approach some of this dating situation and world?
Kait Tomlin:
So good. For me, that’s part of my story too. I am 34 and kind of right in high school fell into that purity culture movement and was literally given, had a boyfriend at 16 and the youth group or the community I was in found out, and they were like, “What? You can’t date without permission.” And I was like, “Oh, I didn’t know that. Okay.” They brought us into the leader’s office and he gave us a list of rules that we had to agree to sign.
It was things like, “You’ll only be together in groups. You have to sit with two pillows between you at all times. Your faces cannot be more than a foot apart. They have to be more than a foot apart at all times. Just never use blankets.” All these different things I had to sign. And then we had to agree to go to premarital counseling every two weeks because of course-
Julie Lyles Carr:
At 16.
Kait Tomlin:
… if you are going to date, the only reason to date at 16 is if you’re going to marry that person. It’s like, whoa. So it was a lot, and that was really, really tough for me. And I share more of that full story in my book. But I do believe that the purity culture movement had really good intentions and it just had bad results in a lot of ways. I think people were trying to get the community of believers, of singles to really date intentionally, but what they did was create a lot of fear around dating and put way too much pressure on dating and then of course add in a lot of shame, especially for our bodies in that time period.
And I think what we need to do today is I actually think for so many people, especially if you’re a parent listening to this [inaudible 00:20:18], I can only imagine. I’d be probably freaked out about my kid dating in this world of dating at the moment. But I do think one thing that purity culture didn’t do that I try to do is we need to make, we’re not going to casual dating like the world says. The secular world is all about hookup culture, casual.
It doesn’t really matter. We’re not going there, but we need to find a middle ground of serious hyper intentionality, need to know in the first date if I’m going to marry this person, go to premarital counseling and hookup culture, super casual dating. There’s got to be this middle ground. And so for dating, and if you’re a parent listening to this, I really believe in taking dating one date at a time in the very beginning of the process.
And I actually separate dating into four different phases from the journey of singleness to marriage. It should be, in my opinion, single, dating, relationship, engaged, married. And the reason why throwing in relationship separates and changes the game is it says that dating is that time where you’re figuring out if you want to be in a relationship.
Julie Lyles Carr:
A relationship.
Kait Tomlin:
Committed.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Yeah.
Kait Tomlin:
To someone. Versus dating has just been this catchall word that means it could mean courting, it could mean just casually getting to know someone. It could mean I’m in a relationship with someone. Dating has become this catchall world in the Christian world especially that it’s like, it means all these things and nobody knows what it means. So we have to redefine these things. So in my definition, what we teach people is dating is that time where you should get to know someone a little more casually.
You’re asking intentional questions, but you’re not holding hands, you’re not making out. You are just getting to know their character, building friendship and seeing through a period of maybe 60 to 90 days if you want to be in a relationship with somebody. Because I do see what the purity culture movement did is it forced two people together and made them really serious about each other when they didn’t even really know each other.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Know each other, yeah.
Kait Tomlin:
They didn’t even know if they really wanted to be with each other at all. And then if you’re already thrown into that, you’re like, “Well, how do I get out of this if I decide a few months down the line, this is not really the person I want to be with, but it’s so serious already?” And so if you date with the intention of, “Hey, this is just a first date, it’s just a second date. I’m not going to go on a weekend trip with them. I’m not going to spend eight hours or a long day date with them.
I’m going to keep it 60 to 90 minutes. I’m going to ask intentional questions. I’m going to have some fun with them and create memories. I’m going to get to know them on a friendship level over a period of time and assess out their character a bit more, and then decide if I want to be in a relationship with that person.” And in that time is also when I suggest you bring in some of those wise counsel. Not on the first, second or third date, but as you’re getting more into that dating, you’re like, “Okay, I’m actually really liking this person.
Some things are checking out. I might want to bring them around my people to see, is this somebody I want to commit to in a relationship.” And then you might go to church together in a relationship and showcase that you’re in a relationship. But you should not be doing that after the second, third, or fourth date when you’re just getting to know someone.
And I think that’s kind of what the purity culture movement missed in the dating realm is they were like, “Let’s be hyper intentional and make it all about marriage.” And yes, we do want to date for marriage, but the first date should not be thinking if you’re going to marry this person because you don’t know them yet. You need to get to know them before you decide that.
And so another just point on that is some of the work I had to do personally is I really had to rewire my thinking and get a lot of healing for the things that happened to me, what I thought about myself, what I thought about dating, what I thought about my body. There’s a lot of sexual shame mixed in with all of that. And the Lord wants to heal all of those spaces. And I would just say, if you are a parent who went through that and you have a child, I really urge you to go through that healing journey because the last thing you ever want to do, of course, is repeat the same experience for your child.
And I get it. I would understand that you would be probably very protective of them as somebody you love, but get that healing for yourself. And I think this model of dating I’m suggesting works for many ages of dating. It shouldn’t be skipped over. And I think even girls and guys in college, this is the model they should look after even more so .be friends and go and get to know them before you mix any deeper romantic feelings into all of that.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Right. Get really clear on what’s going on. Absolutely.
Kait Tomlin:
Yeah.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Part of what it makes me think about too is I think as a Christian culture, we still are struggling with how to really help guide people. And in this way, we… I can remember when I was in college and here we all were. We’d been sent to this private Christian university kind of in the hopes I think of a lot of our parents that we would, it was kind of the genetic inbreeding program for our denomination. Right? We wanted all meet somebody who’d been raised in the same kind of environment and the same values and all that kind of thing. And what was ironic was, I can remember when I got to school people pointing out Emily and saying, “Oh yeah, she’s just here for her MRS degree.”
Kait Tomlin:
Oh, right. Yeah.
Julie Lyles Carr:
“Oh yeah, she’s just here for our MRS degree.”
Kait Tomlin:
Ring by spring. MRS, yeah.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Ring by spring, all of these phrases that we say. And it was said, honestly, Kait, with a lot of derision towards someone like that, like, “Oh, [inaudible 00:26:06].” And yet we were also a group of people who said that we wanted to walk our lives out according to a certain set of standards. And in Christianity, and not just in Christianity, in a lot of different world religions. There are very clear sexual ethics about being part of a certain faith system, not the least of which is treating others as you want to be treated.
Kait Tomlin:
Right.
Julie Lyles Carr:
The question of using people for your own gratification all the while knowing that you have no intention of moving forward in relationship or whatever, that ethos has nothing to do with shaming the body, that has everything to do with how are we treating our fellow humans. In all of that I feel like we still have a lot of confliction because the other thing that I hear from a lot of people is, “Man, I feel like I got married too young” or “I didn’t know enough about myself.”
Or, “I’ve told my kids I don’t want them getting married until they’ve got the down payment for the house and until the master’s degree is done” and on and on. We’re expecting a radical level of purity in a culture that is saturated in sensuality, while at the same time asking that same group of people to hold off, hold off, hold off until they get these “Cultural-”
Kait Tomlin:
Right.
Julie Lyles Carr:
… structures in place because we think it will make marriage easier, will make the decision better, all of these different things. How do we as women of faith, either raising kids or going back into the dating pool, how do we navigate all of those complexities and those contrasting opinions and the ways in which we currently are handling dating? Because I’m seeing, I know you in your line of work are seeing it too. People completely taking their hands off the wheel and going, “Explore, run, be wild, and then you’ll circle back,” all the way to parents getting even more worried and freaked out and on lockdown with their kids. So-
Kait Tomlin:
Right.
Julie Lyles Carr:
… how do we parse through all of that?
Kait Tomlin:
Yeah. It’s a good question, man. It’s a tough one. I think ultimately, this may sound cheesy, but God can work through anybody who he calls to get married at any point in time. If he calls a couple to get married at 21 out of college, he’s going to work through that marriage. And I’m sure there’s going to be awesome things that they have to learn together that is going to make them on a hyper trajectory of growth potentially.
And especially if they have kids earlier on versus the couple that, or the person who’s 30 or 35 or 40 or divorced who is dating and still trying to find someone in a healthy way. That person has lived a lot of life. They’ve lived hopefully in a thriving, beautiful way in their singleness, and they hopefully have their life together and their career together and their finances together, and there’s benefits to that as well.
I think God can use that immensely and beautifully as well. So I think right now with where we’re at, it should be a really hyper personal thing on, where am I in my life? If you’re a parent, where’s your kid in their life? What are they working through? Is there trauma they’re working through? Is there healing they need to do, which also needs to be owned by them and not you forcing them to get that kind of healing, right? But it needs to be very personal.
I know somebody, literally, I went to Israel in 2019 with this amazing young girl. At the time, she was 18, and I was so wildly impressed by her. She was more spiritually sound than so many people I knew who were 40. And she just loved God, purely, fiercely, preached the word of God. She’s a speaker, just amazing. And she got married maybe at 20, maybe 21, a few years later, not too long ago. And I’m like, “She’s really young,” but she was ready for marriage.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Right.
Kait Tomlin:
She was ready and super healthy and sound, and together their mission as a young couple, as next gen leaders together is thriving. They are doing ministry together, and they are reaching the next generation and the Gen Z, and that is so phenomenal. And for her, and now she’s pregnant and she’s really young. For me, I’m 10, 12, 13, 14 years at a different place than her. And but I’m looking at that and saying, “Wow, she was ready for all of that.” God called her into that very uniquely and distinctly, and she was definitely ready for that in her life.
Whereas for me, if I got married at that age, woo. Julie, I’m telling you, for me, that would’ve been bad because when I was in my early twenties, I was in an abusive relationship. If I got married to that person, oh my goodness, I can’t imagine the havoc that would’ve happened if I had got married to that person. The amount of insecurity I had, the amount of self-hatred that I had, the amount of lack of healing that I had done in my life from trauma that had happened in my life was so insurmountable in my early twenties.
I needed the rest of my twenties personally to heal and sort through those things. And I needed singleness because a lot of my journey was dating from the age of 14 to 24, nonstop dating. I needed a season of no dating, no men, figuring out who Kait was outside of men and dating and all of those things. So I really think it really has to be very personalized. And that comes to the individual even as a young individual, 18, 19, 20 saying, “Where does God have me right now?
What is he calling me into? Do I know myself? Do I truly love the person that God has uniquely formed and fashioned me to be? Do I have an inkling of what my calling might be?” You might not know but, “Am I moving towards it? Am I seeking that out?” And I think it just also has to be so personal because Gabrielle, my friend, she was ready at early twenties. Me, Kait Warman at the time, not ready at all. And so it’s so different depending on every person’s unique story, what they’ve been through, how close they are to the Lord, deeply and uniquely. And so, yeah, it’s such a nuanced question, but that’s kind of what I would answer, I guess, as best as I can.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Well, I think that’s great because one of the questions I frequently get is, “When did you and Mike start letting your kids date?” And there is no set answer. I know that in many ways, as parents, we want somebody to say, “Here’s the template, and you just lay it right over ages and stages, and this is exactly how it should work.” And yet, to your point, we had kids who were interested in dating at a younger age. They were ready for it.
We had kids who weren’t interested really at all. We had kids who it was like, maybe give it a little bit, let’s get a little more seated in who we are and who you are as an individual. And so this notion that, “Well, my kids aren’t going to date until they’re 16,” or “My kids aren’t going to date until they’re…” or, “My kids can start dating at 13” or whatever, it isn’t a one size fits all issue.
And I think that’s where we really, sometimes, particularly as Christian parents, get a little confused, I find between some of the parents that I talk to in the Christian space versus parents I talk to, not necessarily in faith circles, man, Christian parents seem to have a real fascination with, “Give me the age.”
Kait Tomlin:
Right.
Julie Lyles Carr:
“The age for the cell phone, the age for this, the age for that.” And it doesn’t really honor anyone’s individual development and maturity level and what they need to do from that point forward. So I think it’s-
Kait Tomlin:
I agree with you on that.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Really appreciate your wisdom on that.
