Navigating Prayer in a Catholic Dating Relationship
/HANNAH HOLLCRAFT
We rightly want to entrust all of our relationships to the Lord, our dating relationships included but figuring out what that looks like with your significant other can be difficult.
PHOTOGRAPHY: GINA BALLINTYN PHOTOGRAPHY
One key element to praying together while dating is to keep things simple. As a dating relationship naturally progresses, entrusting your relationship to the Lord together should also follow that progression. Just as we are prudent with our physical bodies and emotional needs, we should also be virtuous with the intimate parts of our spirituality.
With this in mind we should be conscious of how we are weaving our prayer lives together with someone we are dating. Our focus should be our own relationship with Jesus and the way he is speaking to our hearts about the relationship and our own faith journey. When we spend too much time intimately in prayer with someone we are dating, it can be confusing and make it more difficult to make decisions about the relationship from a place of clarity.
Dating is one big lesson in discernment and as such it is a time to really focus on the Lord’s voice in your own personal prayer life.
The more you are spending time with Him the more you will know and recognize the way he is inviting you to move forward in your relationship or the possibility that he is inviting you away from the relationship because he has greater plans for your life.
When you first begin going on dates with someone, before you’ve stepped into a relationship with them, I would suggest just lifting up your date and that person to the Lord simply from your own heart.
Once you enter an exclusive dating relationship, an easy way to introduce prayer is to choose a memorized prayer you both like and pray that together at the beginning or end of spending time together. Maybe a Memorarae, a Hail Mary or Our Father, or any other prayer you both know and love. This is a good way to take time to entrust your relationship to God, thank him for the joy you find in spending time together, and surrender your desires to his will.
As your relationship gets more serious and you are discerning engagement your prayer together can grow accordingly. One thing my now-husband and I integrated into our dating life at this stage was a daily mass and breakfast date once a week. Sometimes we would talk about the readings or the feast day/memorial over breakfast, but mostly it was just a simple way to come to Jesus together in prayer and offer him our discernment. We also occasionally attended confession or Sunday Mass together.
This helped us both to picture what living our Catholic faith together might look like in marriage but kept our own personal relationships with the Lord at the forefront. A simple prayer routine that follows the natural progression of the relationship at this stage should do exactly that. It should help you to imagine what living your Catholic faith alongside one another might look like in marriage, remind you that you are each seeking the will of God rather than your own desires, and keep your individual relationships with the Lord the primary place of prayer.
Praying with someone you are dating will appear different from couple to couple. But whatever that might look like, when we allow our prayer to progress prudently it prepares us to move forward in whatever way God is calling us towards vocation, be that engagement and marriage, a different relationship, or towards religious life. While there is a lot that can be said on this topic, I hope that each of you can find peace in this area of dating that doesn't need to be over-complicated.
About the Author: Hannah lives in Northern California with her husband Joshua and their daughter. She studied Theology and Business in school and has worked in ministry since graduating. Hannah’s Catholic faith is rooted in a deep love for the Eucharist and Our Blessed Mother. She is passionate about beauty, adventure, and living abundantly. Hannah loves warm weather, gardening, a good dance party and hiking in the mountains or visiting the ocean with her husband.