Here's a letter giving advice to a young woman about falling in love, dating and all of the joys and hazards it holds. 

Now, regarding dating: aw the mystery, the misery and the excitement! The challenge is to keep it spiritual, and a difficult challenge it is. We continually think God will bring us some great person if we think they are cute enough or even more so, if they flatter our ego and make us swell up with blushes and gushes. (That's kinda funny isn't it?) Anyway, one reason God connected us is to look to your future. The end game is always important, and dating is one of the most important things you will do. It can be a defining moment in many ways, for good or for ill. It can bring into our life a person that may share the rest of it!

Or, on the flip side, it has means to bring many evil and destructive things. For example, sexual intimacy, with all of it's joys and passions, can also bring life-long disease, life changing pregnancy, and layers of guilt and shame that can be so soul penetrating, though subtle. It can bring great friendships, soul connection with exhilarating and intoxicating feelings, as well as heartaches and tears, which seem as though they will never dry.

  So, you and I are close because we are open and honest, our relationship is deep but not sexual, and you can let the little girl as well as the daughter out without fear. And it will be the same, when you meet the right man.

You will find him, not in a response to being flattered or flirted with, but some circumstance will bring you to his soul, and if He has some of Christ there, it will progress and migrate into something deeper than neon lights, high fashion, plucked and primped faces and intoxication, by way of spirits or ego.

 But you are 24, filled with hormones, curiosities, longing for adventure and discovery in matters of love. How will you avoid disappointment when so few do, and the land mines are everywhere?

My hope and prayer, is you will remember what is great that we share and will pursue that and not be distracted by the whelming flood of culture, hormones, curiosity, and blood that runs through your veins at a hundred miles an hour at times!

But I have hope, because even burdened with a 24 year olds bodily system, with all of its raging desires, you are also equipped with a keen understanding of what in life truly matters; you have not thrown your body to the mongrels and jackals, you are divided, but have resolve, you take to the table tops, but come down to reality like few I've known.

You know in your heart that Christ has His call on you, even when the devil dresses his advances in the most fashionable attire. But, "wherever the carcass is, (our trust in sensual things) the vultures (people with intent on feasting on your flesh) will gather."

  We all have naughty thoughts, some are driven by them, have given themselves wholly to them, this cannot be your end. The vultures darken the sky with their numbers, I know that life at your age comes like pelting rain, fast and furious, but happiness and contentment will not be found there.

  Now if I say you should find a nice Christian guy in church, and your soul recoils from the thought, you have drifted into danger. That is a signpost, to be feared. Life-long commitments are woven in the soul, not the flesh.

And of course, everything in me wants you to find a soul connection that will now stimulate your mind and soul, and if it progresses to marriage, your body as well.

 So, that's my take, I know it's old fashioned, but it is where the gold is found.