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Japanese The Bible does not say. Its marriages were arranged through families and betrothal, and dating never comes up, so there is no rule about friends first. Many couples start that way: in seven studies of nearly 1,900 people, two thirds said their romance began as a friendship, and university students named it the best way to meet a partner.
What the Bible does show is how much it matters to know the person. Boaz knew Ruth by what she had done for Naomi before he married her. A friendship is one good way to come to that kind of knowing, and Scripture leaves room for others.
What does the Bible say about being friends before dating?
Nothing directly. Dating as a custom does not appear in Scripture. The marriages it records were usually arranged through the couple’s families, and some couples met only when they were betrothed. Abraham’s servant brought Rebekah from Mesopotamia to a man she had never seen, and Genesis says that Isaac “took Rebekah, and she became his wife, and he loved her” (Genesis 24:67). Jacob knew Rachel for seven years before their wedding, but he spent them working for her father as the price of marrying her: “So Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her” (Genesis 29:20).
Boaz knew Ruth’s character before he married her, though Scripture describes no friendship between them. He had heard how she cared for Naomi: “All that you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband has been fully told to me” (Ruth 2:11). When she asked him to marry her, he answered, “all my fellow townsmen know that you are a worthy woman” (Ruth 3:11).
Scripture does praise friendship, and it joins friendship and love in marriage. “A friend loves at all times” (Proverbs 17:17). The bride in the Song of Solomon says of her husband, “This is my beloved and this is my friend” (Song of Solomon 5:16). None of these passages says whether the friendship should come before the romance.
Church teaching on friendship and courtship
Neither the Catechism of the Catholic Church nor the Westminster Confession, the main Presbyterian standard, requires a couple to be friends before they date or sets a length for courtship. The Catechism speaks well of friendship between men and women. It says, “The virtue of chastity blossoms in friendship,” and adds, “Whether it develops between persons of the same or opposite sex, friendship represents a great good for all” (2347).
Pope Francis wrote in Amoris Laetitia (2016) that couples should come to know each other before the wedding: “Sadly, many couples marry without really knowing one another. They have enjoyed each other’s company and done things together, but without facing the challenge of revealing themselves and coming to know who the other person truly is” (210). The passage does not say how a couple should meet.
Is it better to be friends first?
It is the most common way to begin. In a study published in 2021, the psychologists Danu Anthony Stinson, Jessica Cameron and Lisa Hoplock pooled seven samples of university students and other adults, 1,897 people in all. Two thirds said they had been friends with a current or past partner before the romance began. In one of those samples, 298 introductory psychology students, 47.4 percent chose a friendship turning romantic as the best way to meet a partner, far ahead of any other answer.
Research has not shown that friends-first couples end up happier. In a 2007 study of 137 married or cohabiting couples in the Netherlands, Dick Barelds and Pieternel Barelds-Dijkstra of the University of Groningen found that partners who fell in love at first sight became involved more quickly than couples who grew together gradually, and were less alike in some personality traits, but they “did not report lower relationship quality.”
How long should you be friends before dating?
Scripture sets no length of time. In the 2021 study, the 210 students who had been friends with a partner first had known each other as friends for an average of 21.9 months before the romance began. The median was 12 months, and the range ran from 1 month to 15 years. Most had not set out to date: 70.3 percent said they “just became friends and then became attracted/romantically interested after getting to know each other.” About 30 percent said that one of the two had started the friendship because of an attraction.
What if it does not work out?
A friendship may not return to what it was after a romance ends. In a 2000 study, Carl Schneider and David Kenny compared people’s friendships with former partners to their friendships with people they had never dated. The friendships with former partners were rated lower on positive qualities and higher on negative ones, and they carried more romantic desire.
However a couple begins, by a friendship or by a first meeting, the hope is to marry someone we truly know and who truly knows us. Ruth heard it in Boaz’s answer to her: “all my fellow townsmen know that you are a worthy woman” (Ruth 3:11).
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