As a Christian man, you are called to a higher standard of living than your non Christian peers. You want to be sure that your dating relationship is honorable.

Is it wrong to hold hands? To kiss your date goodnight?

That depends. Are you in a position where you can’t take intimacy any further than that? Without roadblocks, even the most moral of men can fail to keep his convictions.

If you don’t avoid ways to cross certain boundaries, then you take a risk. Without safety perimeters even the most experienced of rock climbers can fall. It doesn’t matter what your spiritual maturity level is, temptation is pretty powerful and can hit you when your guard is down.

If you’re not in a place where you can cross a line, then even if temptation does hit, you won’t be anywhere you can do anything about it. It would be awfully hard to cross boundaries in front of hundreds of other say ice skaters or sports fans than it would be if you were sitting alone in your place or hers.

Does the Bible forbid kissing and hand holding?

No, it doesn’t. But what happens in many Christian dating relationships is that the physical starts out as a simple kiss or a holding of hands. It then progresses from there. It’s the progress from one step to the next that you have to be careful about. You can end up in a situation you never intended to get into.

Telling yourself she’s the one and you know you’re in a committed relationship doesn’t matter when it comes to intimacy. You can’t see the future. You don’t know with one hundred percent clarity that you’ll end up with this woman. If you do, great.

But what if you don’t? You might see her again down the road as someone else’s girlfriend or wife. How would you feel then knowing you’d been intimate with her? Any kind of intimacy creates a link between two people. The further you go, the stronger the link.

If you do engage in intimacy while dating and end up marrying the woman, you’ve still set a pattern that bases the relationship on the physical attraction rather than basing it on the spiritual side. You want to start out right so that it ends right.