What the Bible Says About Relationships With Boyfriend
The short answer
When people search for guidance about dating, they often want a list of rules. Proverbs offers something better: a picture of what love actually does. In Proverbs 3, alongside the famous call to "trust in Yahweh with all your heart," there is a quieter instruction: "Don't devise evil against your neighbor," because that neighbor "dwells securely by you." Someone has let their guard down around you. They are counting on you. Proverbs says you must never turn that openness into an opportunity to harm them.
That is a remarkably useful way to think about a romantic relationship. Trust is the whole substance of it. When you date someone, you are each choosing to live "trustingly" alongside another person — sharing your time, your feelings, your vulnerabilities. The question Proverbs presses is simple: is this relationship a place where each of you is safe? Does he protect what you have entrusted to him, or use it against you? And can he count on the same from you?
But Proverbs is not naive. The same book that celebrates trust also spends chapter after chapter urging discernment — warning against flatterers, against people whose words and lives don't match, against giving your heart to someone who hasn't shown they can hold it carefully. Trust, in Proverbs, is not something you owe everyone equally. It is something people demonstrate they can carry.
So the wisdom here runs in two directions at once. Be the kind of person a boyfriend can safely trust: honest, steady, incapable of scheming against someone who has opened up to you. And be wise about where you place your own trust: watch how he treats your vulnerability, not just how he talks about it. A relationship built on both — trustworthiness and discernment — is the kind Proverbs would call wise.
What scholars say
Here John Goldingay draws out why Proverbs treats trust as central not only to our relationship with God but to our relationships with other people — offering a definition of love as "making the world safe" for someone, illustrated warmly from his own family's mix of trusting and cautious temperaments.
“The other reference to trust comes when it talks about the neighbor who is living trustingly with you; you’re not to make some plan against him. One definition of love is making the world safe for the other person, who can then know it’s possible to count on you to do so. So trust isn’t only key to our relationships with God but key to relationships with other people. My father was a trusting person, and my mother sometimes despaired at the risks he would take in connection with other people. I follow my father, whereas my wife is like my mother. The complementarity in both marriages is good; Proverbs has already given good reason for discernment about whom you trust.”
What it means for you
Try turning this into a practical question about your relationship: does being with him make your world safer, or more precarious? Safety here isn't about excitement or its absence — it's about whether you can be fully known without fear that it will be used against you. Notice patterns, not promises. Does he guard your confidences? Does his behavior match his words over time?
Then turn the question around. Trustworthiness is something you practice, not just something you look for. Keep his confidences, tell him the truth, be reliable in small things. Two people quietly making the world safe for each other is a sturdier foundation than any amount of romantic intensity.
In context
Proverbs opens with extended speeches from a parent to a young adult (chapters 1–9), preparing them for life's biggest decisions — including whom to love and whom to avoid. Proverbs 3 sits at the heart of this section. It begins with trusting God rather than leaning on your own understanding, then moves outward to how you treat the people near you: don't withhold good from them, don't plot against a neighbor who lives securely beside you. The chapter deliberately connects vertical trust (toward God) with horizontal trust (toward people), and the surrounding chapters repeatedly urge discernment about whose influence you accept.