There are only three types of relationships (arguably only 1 & 3):
And since one of the most important presuppositions the bible declares about marriage is the connection of marriage and the church in many passages, particularly Ephesians 5. Then the transition of "second phase" between single and married is supposed to be a “predestined” election. Similar to the way that God the father selected the bride for Christ:
"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as He chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love"
Ephesians 1:3-4
But because as John G. Paton says; “...for there are not many Godly fathers...”, this means that we won’t always have the high quality structures God designed to help us (eg good civil government etc). Another good example of this is the institution of adoption. Kids are designed to be inside the designed family and parent model, but orphans still exist. And just like how we were adopted in to the family of God because of sin and death, we may not be able to benefit from a perfect omniscient father who can arrange a perfect bride.
So although “dating”, or the evaluation being done by the prospects themselves doesn’t seem to be the normative biblical model, it sometimes seems to be a necessary backup. And because dating = evaluation, when it’s necessary for the prospects to participate, it should be done carefully and intentionally.
“Carefully“ because it’s easy to miss big things during that evaluation. Particularly because romanticism and emotionalism are dangers to quality evaluation.
“Intentionally“ because the higher quality the evaluation, it does correlate to the higher quality the marriage.