Kunle Hamilton Teaches Gen. Z, Millennials: Valentine Is Not Transactional But Sacrificial, Advocates Non-Exclusive Dating Except…
By Oki Samson, Trek Africa Newspaper
The month of February is a month filled with a buzz about sharing love, giving gifts, and going the extra mile for loved ones due to St. Valentine’s Day. The practice is especially common among youths within Nigeria and globally. This celebration has led to many misdemeanors and mistakes among youths which has become a lifetime of regrets for some, Trek Africa Newspaper can report. This is why clergymen, marriage counselors, and other relationship coaches avail themselves the opportunity to teach youths and young adults the truths about love.
Trek Africa Newspaper can report that, this Year 2025, the popular Shepherd of the Celestial Church of Christ (CCC), Praiseville Lagos, Dr. Kunle Hamilton, and the Founder/CEO of Virgin Consulting expounded the topic of love at a special event organized by CCC Praiseville tagged: ‘Midweek Showers’ with the Theme: ‘Love of Self and Others’ to discuss love in the church.
The PR Expert who specializes in mass communication with church elocution, public and media relations, and online messaging educated millennials and Gen Z’s. ‘There are five practical stages of relationship that end in marriage. They are friendship, dating, courtship, wedding, which is a ceremony, and marriage. Anyone, any Christian who diligently goes from stage one and grows towards stage five prayerfully ends up in better marriages than those who are not aware of this. The truth is that when I was a young man trying to get married, I didn’t know the steps myself. So, I don’t blame a lot of young people for not knowing the steps. I can’t even blame pastors for not being able to teach the steps in their relationship messages. It is what each person knows that they share.’
‘But this is what has worked for us in our ministry for more than 20 years. You see, the first stage, friendship, anybody who marries a stranger, they live to regret it. People think that marriage is a seal that brings happiness. It does not, unless you marry right. Friendship is the greatest ingredient needed in marriage. Friends tend to stay together, primary school, secondary school, polytechnic, university, for a lifetime, because they have built trust, knowing each other. They know their excesses. So, when you marry a friend, you live in less shock. When it is from the pool of genuine friends that you choose whom to date, you reduce the number of accidents you have in that relationship.’
On dating, the relationship coach and perception management consultant, Dr. Hamilton advocated that youths should not engage in exclusive dating except when they are clear that this 1 person is the person who loves and wants to marry them. This is to avoid wasting precious time in relationships. He said: ‘Assuming that you are able to start dating a friend, my position is that dating is a fact-finding mission. But people enter exclusive dating from the very beginning. They jump over the dating period. When you are seeing only one lady or seeing only one man, that’s exclusive dating and then you can date with that intention of marriage. It’s not regular dating.’
‘Dating is sacrificing your time to spend it with somebody else, whether it is to sit down and talk on the phone, a phone date, or go to a restaurant, or go to a wedding party, or go to a funeral, or go to a cinema, or go to the pool. The decision that I will spend the next hour or three or four hours with some person, that is dating. The question is, what do you discover about that person in the time you are dating? But people let the euphoria of dating deprive them of the character knowledge and character discovery of who they are dating. In that time, you want to know the other person. And if that person is also wise, he or she is seeking to know you, asking all the right questions, reading your body language, and putting you to the test.’
‘I advise that a Lady should date multiple men but without sex. Yes, it makes sense! The fact is this. You spend 2-3 years dating Jide as a sister, it doesn’t work. Then you spend another 2-3 years dating Ibrahim, it still does not work. 5-6 years are gone. Then you spend another 3 years dating Bolaji, hoping this time you will get it right. It still doesn’t work. You’ve wasted 9 years. But if you dated Bolaji, John and Tunji at the same time, if it is not going to work, it will not work in 2 years, not 9 years. It makes sense.’
‘But the lacuna is, unfortunately, with the millennials and the Gen Z generation around the world is that their dating comes with sex. Real Christian values are not looking at whether you are Gen Z or millennial. The Bible is the same for everybody. The Bible says no sex without marriage, that sex is only honorable in marriage. So, if something doesn’t work between you and another person, you don’t regret it because you have not lost anything. But when you allow that person to take the best of you which is having sex, hoping that it will lead to marriage, it does not. You feel hurt. And sometimes it leads to depression.’
‘Now, when you successfully move from stage two to stage three, you’re going to let go dating other men. You must demand that your partner whom you want to start a serious life journey with also stops dating any other woman. This is exclusive dating. If you don’t get that at courtship level, you will not get it in marriage. If you cannot handle your partner’s phone and look through it without him being jittery, and he can’t look through yours without being jittery, then that’s what you will have to live with in marriage. But people, Christians especially, are so naive. We waste those opportunities of finding out the real person, and then we start crying wolf when that same real person that showed you shege in courtship is still showing you shege in marriage.’
‘Another thing that stops people from knowing what to do is that they tend to love the other person more than they see the other person love them back. So many people marry because of what they feel for that person, rather than marry because of what that person feels and has demonstrated for them. It is too risky when you marry who you love. It is better when you marry someone who loves you.’
On the truth about St. Valentine’s Day, the life coach and inspirational speaker, Dr. Hamilton shared: ‘People take advantage of other people’s feelings on Valentine. The real story of Valentine is somebody who martyred himself out of love. He gave his life for love. He is a French guy called Valentine.’
‘If we go by the spirit of that sacrifice, then it means that if I choose to date her, I should naturally be the one who wants to make sacrifices for her. But what usually happen is I choose to date her and I expect her to make all the sacrifices for me. It is stupid. It is wrong. It is against the grain of nature. So, what is right is that Valentine is an opportunity to celebrate love and celebrate it genuinely. If you want to spend money, spend it not because you want something in return. Spend it because it is a sacrifice you are making for the other person. And if that person chooses to spend Valentine’s Day with you, and he or she is also sincere about making a sacrifice for this friend, then both of you have a genuine opportunity to take that relationship beyond February 14. But if it is about transactional business, everything ends on February 14 either with joy or with sorrow.’
‘Love is more than a feeling. It is possible to meet somebody and then from that point you can’t sleep anymore and you want to see that person again. But there is something that should draw the two of you together, not necessarily sex and not necessarily marriage. What if that person is just destined to be in your life for portions of success in your life. When you now introduce sex, you create an accident in something that was not meant to be an accident.’
‘So, investigate it. That thing you are feeling, is it love? Is it lust? Is it infatuation? I tell young Christians, especially ladies, a guy that you see and you love for whatever reason, he touches you and you are vibrating all over. Is that love? No. You just have body chemistry. It can be very useful in marriage. But is it everybody that touches you and you vibrate that automatically qualifies as wife or husband?
‘Whether Christian, Muslim or Pagan, if marriage is meant for a lifetime and sex is your main pool, you will find out that no matter how much both of you love sex, in five years and you are still not very old, you are fed up with the sex. So, what else will hold that union? So, what we call love at first sight can be a scam! But when you investigate it, you will know whether what you have labelled love is just body chemistry, lust or infatuation’, the author and media trainer concluded.
