Dubs and Dating
By [SYN], [email protected]
A Catastrophe Waiting To Happen . 1
Only Engaged Couples Should Hold Hands: Some Guidelines . 2
Introduction
Much has been written on this topic, by too many contributors to count without taking off my shoes, but it’s one that recurs again and again. Dubs and Dating is an ideal topic for a short essay – it packs a real punch, and you don’t have to go to great lengths to point out the ridiculous and unbelievable things which the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society has said on the subject. So let’s get started, fine Apostate folk.
A Catastrophe Waiting To Happen
Being a teenaged Jehovah’s Witness (or any Witness currently in a situation where they’d want to consider dating) is not an easy thing by a long shot! Few other religions are so notorious for enforcing ridiculous rules and standards on their followers. Even fewer religions go to such great lengths to make sure the rules are followed. Catholicism forbids sex before marriage, just as an example, but you don’t hear about it much. For Witnesses it’s an entirely different kettle of fish – doing naughty things during dating can land up making Jehovah send squadrons of birds to feed on your carcass at Armageddon. In this way, the Watchtower has found the perfect way of ensuring that people adhere to it’s amazingly backwards doctrines – threaten death, both of the body and soul, if the rules aren’t followed. Even the author cannot think of a more compelling way of making people follow rules to the letter.
Before we go any further, let’s go over a few key code words that are used by Witnesses to identify various forms of “wrongdoing”:
- Adultery – Extracurricular sex where one or more participants are married.
- Fornication – A broad designation, covering virtually every form of sexual contact known to man that can be accomplished outside of marriage, at least to Witnesses. Witnesses excel at redefining the meaning of normal words, and this is a good example. Fornication to a Witness could mean anything from a particularly raunchy kiss up to and including creating dents in walls, whereas your average dictionary defines it simply as “sex outside of a marital bond.”
- Unclean Thoughts – At the core of being a Witness lies the concept that even your very thoughts can result in you being on the wrong end of a budgie flock at an unspecified time in the near future. Even Jesus mentioned this, which means it’s practically set in stone as far as Witnesses are concerned. “Unclean Thoughts” are what happen when you see a particularly fine specimen of the sex you enjoy looking at the most and you consider what you would like to do with them. If what you have considered doing with them deviates in any way at all from planting a bed of rosebushes while discussing last Sunday’s Watchtower Study, you have just had an Unclean Thought.
- Uncleaness – Where Witnesses are too shy or simply too uneducated on alternative forms of sexual expression (homosexuality being a capital example) to describe wrongdoing, this word is the catchall that helps them out. Used as a potent wildcard by Elders who are flummoxed when trying to describe inventive sexual practices on their little disfellowshipping report cards, uncleaness is viewed very seriously, even when it only involves your right hand.
Now that we know how Witnesses categorize wrongdoing (see, we’re doing it already, using Witness codewords!), we can have a more detailed look at how Witnesses are instructed to court. The author has nothing against courting, but the type of courting advocated by the leading figures of the Witness world is not the sort of thing the author would be caught doing dead, just so we’re clear on this.
Only Engaged Couples Should Hold Hands: Some Guidelines
Even the Incredibly Misguided Ones™ who lead the giant flock of 6 million all over the world are not emotionless rocks. Although they have been (successfully) compared to crocodiles and other ancient denizens, which they closely resemble, they are not all turtle all the time. After just over a century of seeing nearly 5 generations of youngsters battling to cope, the Governing Body, famed for their speedy reactions, decided that the time had come for a new book, a book which would have a huge, expensive golden frame and a glass security box placed around it in the Hall of Apostate Infamy: The Youth Book.
Soothing blue in colour, with a very ironic, turtle-like texture to its cover, the Governing Body thought that the Youth Book was just the thing. Released in the 1980s, which means it contains many highly amusing pictures of young people dressed in all sorts of embarrassing clothes, this book was seen by many Elders as a Godsend, although not literally, as Godsend is a Catholic term and is frowned upon by Witnesses.
Featuring many truly enlightening little sections on such sordid topics as “Should I Shoplift?” “Do I Need Powerful Pectoral Muscles To Impress Girls?” and of course my personal favourite “Why Eat Healthily If Armageddon Is Coming Soon?” the Youth Book was a virtual talisman for the author, at a time when hormones, parents, and bizarre hairstyles were colliding and forming a teenager.
By this point you’ve probably realized that I was a pretty confused teenager. Actually, to be honest, I looked very calm and collected on the outside. It’s just that while my thought processes were fairly limited, they were not the usual sort that you found in a Witness community. To quote Pratchett, sometimes my mind wandered so far that it came back with souvenirs.
However, this dastardly little blue book with the turtle-skin cover only made things worse, although parts of me kept whispering that technically I was being naughty by not following it’s ridiculous advice. In it’s way, this little blue book so filled with absurdities was actually one of the most powerful catalysts for launching me out of this horrid religion. When I went to school, I was the kind of quiet boy who would quietly sit at the back of the class and read a book entirely unrelated to what was being done in the classroom at the time. In fact, the only classes I didn’t do this in were the ones I didn’t find stupendously boring, such as geometry and, occasionally, Biology and English. So one day I took the Youth Book with me to read, figuring I could go over the steamy fornication sections a few more times. As a friend of mine once noted, erotica never becomes boring, and the dodgier sections of the Youth Book were about as close to Pr0n as a young Witness boy could get, short of stealing the box containing all the disfellowshipping cards at the Kingdom Hall.
As I was reading this, I was startled by a classmate, who grabbed the book from me. Of course, I tussled with him and eventually managed to retrieve it, but at that moment a dawning realization came upon me: why didn’t I want to let him see this little book?
Was it perhaps because in my deepest inner self, I knew it was an absolutely ridiculous book written by old men severely out of touch with reality and the 1990s? That event changed me, permanently. From then on, I started looking for flaws, looking for a chink in the armour. It came not too long after that. While this has been an interesting trip down memory lane, it hasn’t served the greater purpose of this essay: examing the teachings set down for Dating Witnesses.
One important teaching that has always baffled me, and is in fact counterproductive to the Witness “plan” in general, is the rule that only engaged couples are allowed to peck each other on the cheek and hold hands. It matters not if you’ve been seeing someone “seriously” for years, that’s the rule, and if you so much as brush your partner’s wrist in a Meeting in a suggestive way, you’re in trouble! Now, by “serious dating”, Witnesses don’t mean the sort of thing that involves moving in together and possibly a small, schizophrenic terrier. Not at all! To a Witness, “serious dating” is when you are actually allowed to be alone with your significant other. Up until that point, nobody trusts your fornicating ass, especially not with Sister Hottie (or Brother Hottie, as the case may be).
So how on Earth are Witnesses expected to get to know each other sufficiently for “serious dating” to take place? Simple: Group dating. A practice long espoused by anyone except possibly the Roosevelt Administration and enthusiastic people who watch Touched By An Angel too much, Group Dating is when a Group of Daters goes to a venue, and Dates. How they Date is not defined, and the Group is supposed to invent this as it goes along with the, er, Date. At least, that’s the way it was explained to me by an extremely embarrassed Elder, nearly a decade ago. My, but time flies!
There are humorous pictures in the Youth Book about this very thing. If I recall correctly, they picture young people with classical examples of “big hair” running around at ice-skating rinks and roller-skating together, and if memory serves, wearing stripey clothes. Yes indeed, if you want to go on a Group Date, you’d better have some form of stripey clothing available. This is one of the most important lessons I took away from the Youth Book, in fact. Even to this day, I superstitiously wear red and white striped sailor underwear whenever I go out on a date. At least it’s not as bad as ripping off an innocent rabbit’s foot.
Jokes aside, this is a very unrealistic scenario these people are painting. Especially not if you’re in a Congregation that does not exactly have a glut of friendly young Daters to go out with in a Group. In fact, now that I think about it, in today’s world that sort of thing is far more likely to end in a piss-up and possibly in an orgy, not “wholesome” dating activity. Are you supposed to see how good a partner a person will make based upon their roller-skating prowess? (“I love the way he does that little mini-pirouette and double backflip! I bet he’d make a great Christian Husband! And with all that hair of his he’s nearly taller than me, too!”) And when exactly do you cross that invisible line that says: “OK, y’ll can now start to ‘seriously date’ each other?”
None of this is specified by the Watchtower, which means they are not on top of the situation. If they were in their true, notorious form, they’d probably provide you with a questionaire to help ascertain when exactly you could start seeing someone alone, featuring questions like “Does this person spend a large fraction of their life selling our magazines?” and other telling indications of the person’s Spiritual Health™. Thus, they’ve left the very youngsters they’ve sworn to protect out in the cold – both through the Youth Book and their “strong” Bible-Based child molestation preventation policies, but that’s another topic in itself.
Once you’ve passed this invisible threshold where Group Dating is transformed into “serous dating”, one of the most highly recommended activities is to go out on Field Service together. To put it as bluntly as humanly possible, you are shown that the best way to further your relationship with your significant other is to sell books for the very people who are telling you what to do with your love life. Now, if that isn’t a sweet situation for the people providing the books that tell you to do this, I don’t know what is! Imagine a scam like that.
Eventually, the groom-to-be (all men in “serious relationships” are practically grooms-to-be already, everyone is just waiting for them to get their asses in gear and save up enough money for a wedding ring and a minivan) will pop the question. Usually, unless the Sister has some serious issues, such as a complete lack of any sort of libido whatsoever, she will say yes, and a happy wedding will be arranged.
Now, let’s stop here for a just a moment and analyze my previous statement. Why did I say that thing about having no sex drive? Simple: If you take anything away from this essay, it’s the fact that as a group, all Witnesses will advocate that pre-marital (or in fact, any extra-marital sex) is Wrong and Bad, and will most assuredly end with you becoming hors de’oevres for a vulture any day now. So you have this situation whereby people who are experiencing hormonal surges tantamount to tsunamis are not even allowed to hold hands, let alone do other, more stress-relieving things.
What’s the result? You have people being tricked into thinking that lust is love, which it certainly is not. Lust can form a part of love, but it’s no replacement, as many Witnesses discover when they’re saddled with three kids and a completely changed spouse in a loveless marriage. For many, this is the hardest lesson they will ever learn. I’ve seen this happening so many times that it makes me want to cry. Firstly, you’re meant to choose from a somewhat limited pool of potentials, as dating outside the Society is strongly discouraged (to put it mildly), and then out of that statistically dismal batch of hopefuls, you have to select someone to live with for the rest of your life. Secondly, people are incredibly varied, and the chances that you’ll find someone who will be your ultimate soulmate and who you’ll be able to live with “until death do us part” verge on zero, but still the Society recommends this abhorrent practice.
Conclusions
So that’s about it, in a nutshell. In this essay, we’ve gone through the entire gamut of Witness Dating, and the many pitfalls associated with it. Of course, many important topics haven’t been covered, such as what happens when Witnesses attempt to date people who are not In The Truth (hint: they get disfellowshipped).
All in all, it’s hard not to feel sorry for those poor Witness kids. To my own continuing horror, I would probably still count myself as one of them had it not been for chance and happenstance, as my grandmother would’ve said if she were still with us. So remember, the only thing that separates us from them is a little bit of knowledge and a whole lotta love.
That is all.