Some people believe that getting remarried after a divorce is adultery and a sin. This would have to include dating. Yet, it seems that some people who believe remarriage is a sin might excuse dating as acceptable by creating artificial and legalistic “technicalities” in order to justify their personal desires to justify dating as long as they do not get remarried? This however is a display of hypocrisy in order to bend artificial rules created by personal legalism and lack of control.

If remarriage is a sin, then dating must be included as a sin in such a belief. The Hebrew Prophets and Jesus always called the people to the heart of the law rather than the legalistic letter of the law. For example Jesus equated the entertaining of adulterously imaginative thoughts about another woman as equal to the physical act of adultery. In the same manner, Emotional adultery by which a man or woman seeks the fulfillment of emotional and spiritual needs through a member of the opposite sex other than their spouse is as guilty as one who commits physical adultery, because it is the heart which displays the true character of a person and which leads to the physical action, and the physical action does not occur unless the heart is already in position to do so. Therefore dating is emotional and spiritual form of intimacy and union by which one mirrors the emotional and spiritual union of marriage even without the physical union with another person. To hold to the belief that remarriage after divorce is adultery and sin, but to excuse dating on the technicality that it is ok as long as one does not physically remarry is nothing more than legalistic hypocrisy motivated by self-interest and lack of self-control.