Fences…
Copyright Armando Heredia. 2009
Because it’s so easy to progress from one stage of a relationship to another, being a preteen/young teen, it is probably better for you to keep your guard up when it comes to any kind of physical touch with your perspective boyfriend/girlfriend.
Look at it this way, in your life is a series of fences. Each fence is set a little further away from your heart. The way a relationship should work is that first you have the person on the outside of the furthest fence. You get to know each other more through talking, texting, emailing about general things and you will either realize that you really don’t have as much in common as you thought and move on or that you have a lot in common and want to bring the relationship closer to your heart. A person’s conversation can give you an understanding of the direction they want to take your heart.
So, you open the gate to the next fence and allow the person to come closer to your heart through different things. You begin to talk about things that are more important to you and not so general, you begin to share feelings, dreams and hurts. Simply put you allow your heart to trust him a little more. If that trust isn’t broken then you will usually open the next gate and allow him closer to your heart again.
Intimate: (of an association, knowledge, understanding, etc.) arising from close personal connection or familiar experience. From the Latin intim(us) – a close friend
This is where a lot of people begin to call each other boyfriend and girlfriend. In other words, I promise to be in an exclusive relationship with you. No other guy or girl is going to have access to my heart while we are in this relationship. This should take some time. Don’t feel like you have to rush this at all.
Exclusive: disposed to resist the admission of outsiders to association, intimacy, etc. from the Latin exclūdere to shut out, cut off
If you’ve read this far you’ll realize that there has been no physical contact. This is important because the basis for allowing anybody to touch you in any way has to be trust. Trust that they don’t have the wrong motive, that they aren’t selfish or aren’t going to try and hurt you or take advantage of you and that they understand your moral stand when it comes to purity. This fence doesn’t need to be opened for a long time.
The mistake that people make (especially in our society) is they jump straight to this fence, climbing over or tearing down the most important ones which are based in knowledge that leads to trust. So they go off of assumption.
Assume: to take for granted or without proof; suppose; postulate; posit:
Once this fence has been opened it is very hard to close. Many young people (and even adults) have opened this fence too early and ended up getting into trouble because they never built the trust and understanding with their boyfriend/girlfriend they needed to guard their heart.
This is where “at my age” is very important. At your age you haven’t had the time you need to completely understand yourself and set up all of the fences your going to need to protect your heart and that goes for the person you may have thought about even holding hands with. It’s also important for you to shy away from getting into relationships with people older than you, because they may be too advanced in these areas and have opened fences in their lives you haven’t even put up yet.
Remember, once you’ve opened the fence of physical contact the next fence is intimate contact (kissing, hugging and other things), and those fences can almost seem like they open by themselves and they are very hard to control and almost impossible to close again.
As crazy as it sounds you waiting to hold hands is going to make it much easier to guard your heart and that will help shape your future.
Here’s a scripture:
Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life.
Proverbs 4:23 NLT