Let me take you with me for a minute into a Relief Society meeting recently held in a BYU singles ward. My husband Scot and I were teaching and we asked a question that everybody wanted to answer. The young women were clamoring to be called on and the answers spilled out quickly.
We asked them what is most stressful to you in your current life-and almost to a person, they said dating and boys. Then we went on. They exploded with answers.
“Being in a singles ward sometimes feels like a meat competing with everyone for the boy’s attention. I am always wondering if I look good enough or am what boys would want. It makes me feel like I’m always on the line and I have to second guess myself to fit into what the boys would find attractive.”
This idea puts so much weight on dating, that people avoid it all together, until they find a person that they think might fill that bill
“I feel like I have to look and say and do everything just right to get a date, and if I do, I am self-conscious that I won’t get asked out again unless I live up to his idea of what a girl should be like. It makes it hard to be natural.”
“It is difficult to get to know boys. If I talk to a boy as a friend, he thinks I am flirting with him hoping he will ask me out.”
“I know how important it is to choose the right person to marry, and that weighs heavily upon me. How can I know that someone is right? It also means dating is a very weighty thing for me, because I know so much of my happiness depends upon it-and it doesn’t seem to be happening.”
“I feel like I can’t plan my life because if I move for school or a job to someplace where there aren’t a lot of Latter-day Saint guys, will I ever meet anyone? Should I stay in Provo to be where there are many guys?”
“I am not the kind of girl boys like because I am too (ambitious, smart, career-minded, shy, over weight) fill in the blank. Guys only seem to go for one kind of girl.”
In a world where you have school and finances and big decisions before you, why is dating the most stressful thing?
The women also told us that too many of the boys are not living the kind of lives they would want in a husband. Pornography has taken a toll on family formation amongst the Latter-day Saints.
Now, of course, these comments were all from the women’s perspective because it was a Relief Society meeting, but the men in our ward have similar feelings-that they are under great pressure to do the dating thing just right.
One of the biggest surprises to me, working with both the men and women young single adults is how little they date. Wonderful men say, “I can’t get a girl to give me a second date.” Wonderful women say, “I can’t remember going on a date.”
Here are four bad ideas that I think are inhibiting dating at BYU-and perhaps across the Latter-day Saints singles scene in general.
Somehow this culture has grown up around young Latter-day Saint singles. If I date someone once, I am considering them as a spouse. If we go enda Nya Zeelands kvinnor för dejting out twice, we are probably a couple. Three times and you are practically engaged.
It used to be that people dated for fun, for the social camaraderie, for the chance to meet new people and share an experience or two together. They had opportunities to interact with and get to know many, many people. Dating was simply a form of social life, without overly heavy baggage attached. Consequently many singles dated often and with many people before they began to even consider marriage. That is just not the case today.