What about the word or term courting? I don't use it myself, but I have heard this term used before.![]()
I'm not sure what courting consisted of in generations long since gone but it sounds an archaic term for the most part. What I do know is that when I was a Christian teen there was a huge courtship / purity movement that basically put many of us under a lot of pressure and no where to turn because the way it was explained to us courting was like preparing for marriage and it could easily put young people under a pressure of sort of making a decision about whether to get engaged / married before they were even allowed to go on a date.
So some of us have a bad taste in our mouths with that word and others just don't have a good concept of going on a date apart from being in an exclusive relationship as often those terms were used almost interchangeably. And of course current trends outside the church don't help us figure out a godly way to do romance either.