Being Buddhist and dating. It’s been a bit of an adventure at times.

Buddhists, at least Nichiren Buddhists like me, don’t really have any big prohibitions against dating outside of the faith. This is a good thing since there aren’t tons of us around here. The odds are very good that a young single person in the SGI is going to wind up dating someone who is NOT in the SGI, so dealing with it is something we all have to learn how to do.

I’d have to say that in the long run, it’s not really all that different than dating was before I joined. I think it’s partly the part of the country I live in. The Pacific Northwest, which is one of the least religious parts of the United States, is a place where lots of people wind up in relationships with someone who’s outside of their own faith.

When a Christian, say a Catholic, winds up with another Christian (say, a Lutheran) at least there’s a certain base level. They both know and share the basics of the faith, the history and backstory. Heck, in the United States, it’s common even for non-believers to at least know the simplest stuff about the ideas behind Christianity- Jesus was born from a virgin, he died for our sins, thanks to him we can get to heaven, etc.

But when a Christian hooks up with a non-Christian of another faith, like a Buddhist, there is a bit of a learning curve. Typically the Christian is the one with the deficit, at least in my own situation. Since I grew up Lutheran and still even think of myself as “Christian” in the sense of “someone who thinks Jesus was on the ball with his message of ‘be good to one another’”, the odds are that I’ve got a handle on where they’re coming from.

I’ve been lucky, I guess, in that most of the gals that I’ve dated have been either curious enough to want to learn, or tolerant enough that the difference in faith wasn’t an issue. Of course, I supposed that had they been intolerant, I wouldn’t have been attracted to them at all in the first place!

I do sometimes see a bit of education flowing back the other way. The SGI, my Buddhist group, is Japanese in origin; I learned about Buddhism from a Japanese immigrant to the US, and many people in the group (at least in the Seattle area) are Japanese.

Growing up in Japan, often as “fortune babies” (people who are born into the Nichiren Buddhist faith and SGI are thought to be very fortunate), they naturally don’t have the same cultural knowlege that people have in the States. You’d probably be surprised by how often a Buddhist discussion meeting winds up with the converted US member teaching about Christianity!

It’s all good; our faith promotes and believes in dialogue as a way for people to connect and get to know each other. Personally, I believe in this, too.

But it does add a layer of complication to dating. Maybe I’ll ponder more on this over time…