I pranked my boyfriend and he dumped me

Hi

I just turned 26. Now tell me if I did something wrong by testing the man who I claimed to be my boyfriend. I told him that I was pregnant. He started behaving weirdly and finally went mute. I'm glad he did; seems he was just another deadbeat dad-to-be.

That's a very expensive way of testing a man. To prank somebody with pregnancy, you need to have gone as far as sleeping with them first. How many people will you test like that?

You're at the prime age to date with focus and find your life partner fastest, but I'm surprised that you're hanging yourself so low.

When you call people boyfriends, you're giving them titles and titles bring entitlement. They will ask for their boyfriend's allowance, which will mean sleeping with you before marriage.

You may be surprised that terms like boyfriend and girlfriend are not in any holy book. Not the Bible or Quran. They're very recent inventions. Since times immemorial, people would aim for marriage itself, and they didn't have these arrangements we call love relationships.

I'm saying this to advise that you change what you look for in dating. Do not look for a serious relationship. That's just a trap. Look for marriage itself. You may not skip directly from being strangers to getting married, of course. But it changes the focus of your conversations from asking if this person would make a good boyfriend to asking if they would make a good husband.

It changes your view from short term to long term and this changes everything.

The things you look at change and the values you look for also shift.

Most importantly, you check for sexual discipline and commitment to delayed gratification, qualities a good marriage partner must have but a mere boyfriend many never have.

When you focus on a relationship, you come under pressure to keep your partner entertained. You need to keep the relationship engaging rather than boring, or else you'll drift apart. That's why sex becomes almost the only form of entertainment.

If you date for marriage, however, there's a bigger end goal in mind, and all your dating time is preoccupied with preparations and build-up. There's no empty time or boredom.

On the issue of pranks and testing people's motives through setups, you should avoid them. When someone plays with your mind through lies, you feel offended. They feel like you don't trust them or that you made a fool of them.

It's possible that your boyfriend left because he felt disrespected. The rule is that when you play with people's feelings, you may win the game, but you lose the person for good.

There's a place for playful teasing for purposes of humour, but lying to test people's reactions is a different story. They begin to wonder what else you may be lying about and what they can or cannot trust.

Nobody wants to be in a position where they don't know what's real and what's not.

Pranks may seem like a simple way to check people's motives, but they're an expensive shortcut. You should only surprise people with good things, not cruel lies.

A better way to test people's character is analysis. Ask for their opinions in hypothetical cases or their advice in matters that concern other people. Listen to their beliefs about different subjects of life, and you'll understand their heart.

If you pay attention, people always tell on themselves.

There will be times when you need to set a test for people. When you do, make sure they don't know that it's a test. Try to use real-life situations by letting them give their input or watching them handle a situation.

If you manufactured the situation yourself, like running late to test their patience or not initiating conversations to see if they'll do it, let them never know that you were testing them.

Remember the story of the noisy hornbill? In the fable, a mischievous bird used to scream for help just to play with the neighbours. With time, people came to get tired of its fake cries of distress. One day, it got into a real problem. By this time, however, nobody would come when it called. That's how the habit of pranking its neighbours cost the bird its life.

Generally, make your dating a series of interviews rather than emotional investments. Learn people with no strings attached. When you find the one with whom you seem to rhyme, undertake the process of courtship while observing the right sexual boundaries.

This will both filter away jokers and also maintain your mental clarity to discern subtle red flags along the way. Dating has two stages: external dating when you're meeting different people and you're not committed to any of them, and internal dating, when you find the person you'd like to marry. During courtship or internal dating, you get to see the person's inner life and how they live their life. You observe things for yourself as opposed to the first stage, where you mainly depend on what they tell you.

You need to maintain sexual boundaries during this stage as well because that's when you may unearth red flags and character flaws that were invisible in the first stage.