What is good about matchmaking instead of dating

Views expressed do not necessarily represent the official teachings of University Bible Fellowship nor any other current or ex member of University Bible Fellowships point of view

The current dating system in the mainstream Western culture creates a lot of problems.  It makes consent vague.  People tend to touch each other with unclear boundaries and no explicit agreement stated before a community to have physical relations so that people can clearly know their physical relations were consensual.

Dating creates a vague situation that can lead to false rape accusations.  Alternatively, formally announcing marriage makes a implication before the community that people are agreeing to have physical relations with each other.

Dating also may put men and women at risk for date rape.  Yes men can be raped by women also not just the one way around.

In some cases there is no reason for men to date while going to college when some men can not be financially ready to marry until after they graduate from college and achieve a certain job status based on their college degree and work experience.  If they actually found someone before achieving this financial status they could not responsibly marry them.  Furthermore spending time dating may just delay their graduation and work promotions, preventing them from marrying the very person they found while dating or delaying their marriage to that person.  Alternatively if they found them by  dating that person after getting a high enough salary job and not before that financial status was achieved or if they were matched with that person voluntarily after getting a high enough salary job they could actually marry them earlier and in a more finacially stable situation and with better health then if they started dating too early.

Matchmaking may be used to avoid those problems with dating

Additionally matchmaking can have a screening mechanism if an entire community knew how someone behaved all their life where as in dating you might meet someone as a new person without knowing how they behaved in the past when you were not around to observe them which maybe important because some people behave better when they are with someone they are dating to make a good impression with them even though they actually behave very badly the rest of the time and may revert to their old ways after marriage or after they seduced that person or took their finances or achieved some other goal.

Matchmaking can also be abused in many ways but I am not discussing them here and if you want examples of matchmaking gone bad just do a internet search about problems with arranged marriages on your own.

I just want to say something positive about University Bible Fellowship pairing people instead of only negative things about it.  I do not believe their method would be all bad if at least one change was made that I will describe later.  

I hope University Bible Fellowship does not switch into making dating or courtship the only options when people realize about the marriage by faith fraud but allow students to date, court or have a matchmaker.

My problem with marriage by faith is not the idea to use matchmakers instead of dating but that they are not open and up front about what they are really doing.  It is dishonest and it is really marriage by fraud.

I used to support marriage by faith when I thought it was matchmaking someone to marry someone where they never dated but I realized that is not what it really is after I examed it further, however it took me years to comprehend it.

I originally did not even know marriage by faith was matchmaking and at that time I supported it also but what I was supporting was not what marriage by faith really was.

That is the problem it is an ever changing label one layer in fraud wrapped in another.

Please do not abandon matchmaking just abandon the lack of transparency and honesty about it.

The one minimum change would be to actually tell people what they are doing instead of telling people they are doing something else instead.

Since you can not necessarily tell people everything about the organization the first time you do a Bible study, you could at the very least put such information on the UBF official websites and have brochures available in the Church for anyone who wants to take one.

There could be a pamphlet entitled, "Why does UBF support matchmaking instead of dating" and another pamphlet entitled, "How does the UBF matchmaking process work"

These pamphlets should actually tell the truth about the organizations policies and not something else that is not true but is what they think people want to hear in order to come back.