A Modest Marriage Proposal

A beautiful piece of fiction.

(To be honest, though, McKinley is more likely to find her Grant at Utah State.)

What this sends up is how obsessed we have become with status and striving.

I notice that in both cases, the girls are put into environments where they aren’t competing with the men at what the men are excellent at.

I wish to weigh in. I married someone outside my major *on purpose.* The couple of times I tried having relationships with men in my major didn’t turn out very well. I wasn’t content to be second best to whomever I was dating, and the resulting competition didn’t do anything healthy to the relationship. When I met my now-husband, who was in a completely different field entirely, I was drawn to him because there was nothing to compete against. I could be happy having my field of expertise and let him have his.

That said, I don’t like how in your scenario it’s the women who have to adjust and make concessions to find their happiness. I could write something very similar about how men found their perfect mate when they stopped asking out only the girls who fit conventional standards of beauty.

If it had been written from the male perspective, I think you would find that expectations were similarly adjusted.

That being said, you should definitely write that story about “conventional standards of beauty.”

It wasn’t until after I wrote this that I asked myself why I had written it from the perspective of the women. The answer is probably that I wanted to narrate it from a neutral perspective, and writing it from the view of the men would have made that hard.

> I don’t like how in your scenario it’s the women who have to adjust and make concessions to find their happiness.

I don’t think that MC actually had Paul’s counsel to the Ephesians ringing in his ears when he wrote this. But let’s suppose that being the good Christian man that he is, very well could have had that counsel explicitly in mind as he wrote this. The fictional accounts he gives us fit well within that scriptural counsel. It’s hard counsel, I grant you. I grant you also that our traditional understanding of that counsel may be at variance with the Lord’s intent for how we are to live it today. Still, granting that, MC’s scenarios are not wild misapplications of Paul’s counsel for wives to submit to their husbands.

Ephesians 5 (with apologies to MC for citing the ESV):

22 Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. 28 In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, 30 because we are members of his body. 31 “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. 33 However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

Any resemblance between Paul’s counsel and this story is purely coincidental, except to the extent that it helped form the author’s entire worldview.

Happy Wife,

your marriage plan was smart.

I didn’t read the same story you did. The story I read wasn’t about women submitting to men. It was about upper-middle class people “submitting” or adapting to their lower-middle class spouses. McKinley embraces her husband’s blue-collar lifestyle. Whereas Brikendry tells Ben to shut up about politics and careers and money and he does. What does she want to talk about instead? Kids. And now they have a swarm of kids. And instead of using her husband’s money for instagram vacations or political causes, they use it to pay for little league.

I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better. Vitamin pills, indeed.

” I could write something very similar about how men found their perfect mate when they stopped asking out only the girls who fit conventional standards of beauty.”

Yes, please do! (But try not to make it too much like Johnny Lingo.)

Upon reflection, I could not improve upon the “think beyond conventional standards of beauty” essay that Bruce Lindsay wrote in his book: https://www.amazon.com/HOMETOWN-WEEKLY-AUDIO-Good-Change/dp/B0025GB664

Basic premise: Short, unattractive Half-blind guy has difficulty attracting a mate until J. Golden Kimball convinces him that a girl whose face is horribly disfigured by burns is actually the most beautiful girl in all of Utah. They live happily ever after.

Been mulling this over all day. Each stake has a Stake Patriarch who gives fatherly blessings of guidance and council. Why not a Stake Matriarch who’s calling is essentially stake matchmaker? Would it work? Pros and cons?

Other than the clever parallelism between Patriarch and Matriarch that makes it sound a bit like a priesthood office, I think it’s a great idea.

apropos:

https://postsecretdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/11.family.jpg?w=526&h=393

The link won’t last, so save the image.

@ Will,
Honestly, that wouldn’t be a bad idea, especially in YSA stakes. I know my mother and father got together largely because of the machinations of a group of elderly ladies who lived in the ward and thought they’d make a good couple . . .

Will and EC, maybe a church sponsored dating website, with some form of “ecclesiastical endorsement.”

The church’s official “Singles Program” of FHEs, firesides, conferences, temple trips, is workable, if one is willing to put in the time and effort, and travel a little. Those are prime opportunities to mingle. Most stake or mutli-stake singles groups have email lists, Facebook pages, etc.

There are three age groups, last I looked: YSA 18-30, Mid-Singles 31-44, Singles 31-99.

YSA has a lot of resources devoted to it. Older singles programs are kind of hit and miss, depending on the stake.

The purpose of YSA is clear: marry ’em off.

But the purpose of older Singles groups is muddled. Some singles see it only as a prospecting opportunity. Some show up, scout around, and if they don’t see anyone they might like, they leave right away.

But, I think it’s also supposed to serve the social needs of those who don’t have serious marriage prospects; it can be like a secondary family.

From my experience in a “midsingles” program, you are right it’s a muddle. A terrible, terrible muddle that does little to help people get married or be social.

It’s mostly run by married people who got married at the “right” time (young, in college) and who think that what “midsingles” need to do is replicate the college scene.

So, we got a lot of “top 40 music in a darkened room” type dances and little else. It was terrible, honestly.

[…] at Jr. Ganymede MC has posted an interesting modest proposal.  I don’t have much to say about the content itself, but I want to draw attention to […]

Developing our own form of a Shadchan sounds nice in practice, but I’m not sure it can actually be effective with where we are at culturally.

To be effective, the stake Matriarch would need to be quite familiar with not just the personalities of the potentials, but have a general idea of what their families are like, how they were raised, how their parents treated each other, who their friends were in high school, and so on. The people who I have seen successfully matched were done so by a mutual friend who knew them both very well and had a decent grasp on a lot of those items.

Nowadays, we are way to transient for this to be type of knowledge to be assembled. Take my own case as an example….the overwhelming majority of the Latter-day Saints I grew up with no longer live in my hometown (as in I can’t think of a single one off the top of my head). Of those of us who are married, I can only think of one who married someone from the area. I’m not from Utah though, so perhaps my experience is only anecdotal.

If you were to really twist my arm, I guess I could imagine a network of Matriarchs who are tapped for mating advice when necessary. The stake Matriarch sees two young bucks and thinks they may be compatible (in my hypothetical world, the stake Matriarch calling makes the need for singles wards unnecessary). She calls up the Matriarchs from the two peoples stake of origin and the three of them have a good old fashioned gab fest with the fourth person of the group being the Holy Spirit. Then, after a confirming prayer, the match making Matriarch can either set them up, or not.

Without the communicative network, I don’t really see there being any more success then an informal system such as what happens already.

Transience is one of the biggest problems we’ve got as far as matchmaking goes, along with young people working hours too long to date. It’s part of our lifecycle though, with so many marriages found at BYUs, and with YSAs in many places being, in consequence, support groups for losers who didn’t make it getting married there.

Flesh-and-blood contact is essential, but good travel that allows that is limited while bad travel that prevents it is mandatory.

[], perhaps you’re being a bit harsh on YSAs who did not go to BYU.

– There are not enough admission slots available at BYU for all those who are qualified and want to go. And the church grows faster than the BYU system, so an ever smaller percentage end up making it in.

– Not all want to go to BYU anyway. Both for academic reasons (needing more/less/other than what BYU offers), and social/cultural reasons.

YSA units and CES classes are primarily what the church offers 20-somethings in college towns and metropolitan areas, no?

There are also lots of people, men and women, who just aren’t ready/qualified/eligible for marriage until their late 20’s or even much later. And it’s often not a matter of choice/procrastination or sin.

There really seems to be an uptick in things like autism-spectrum and other inborn psych conditions that hinder good relationships.

And then consider all sorts of negative family situations such as divorce, trauma/abuse, and just plain bad examples on the part of parents.

And then add in all the negative societal infuences coming in from media, peers, and the culture at large.

It’s so bad that even the young people who want to get married often don’t have a sufficient mental picture of how to build/maintain a marriage, let alone go about finding a prospective spouse.

No matter what the church teaches in the classrooms and over the pulpit about marriage, all that is dwarfed by the examples of one’s own parents.

Oh, I’m not trying to be harsh, I didn’t go to BYU. I have a problem with YSA programs being treated as those support groups, is what I was saying.

In general I don’t believe our YSA programs are doing all they can to promote marriage.

What I’ve taken away from the conversation is that most older people are still living in a fantasy world where conventional courtship practices are still possible. The radicalness of the solutions necessary to live in a morally inverted society hasn’t dawned on most members yet.

Carter, I am curious about what radical solutions you’re thinking of (not rhetorical, I really am).

I’m in my late 30s, been married since my early 20s, and I’m under no illusion that the current state of affairs is working. I think that a return to “conventional courtship practices” could work (it worked before), but as you note, it may not be possible. I guess the question is why isn’t it possible?

What is keeping boys from asking girls out, or girls from inducing boys to ask them out (it takes two)? Is it a general millennial fecklessness where a change of tactics wouldn’t mean much, or are they simply ill-suited for the traditional dating system? And what sort of courtship practices are they well-suited for?

“I am curious about what radical solutions you’re thinking of (not rhetorical, I really am).”
The one I’m thinking of is arranged marriages. This option is unlikely to work as parents will in most cases choose not to cooperate, out of desire to “give the kids freedom” (an excuse for parents to abdicate their responsibilities).
“What is keeping boys from asking girls out, or girls from inducing boys to ask them out (it takes two)?”
They’ve been taught that falling in love is something that happens spontaneously, without effort. They also know that waiting around for someone to spontaneously fall in love with them is the most risk-free option compared to proactive approaches, which are a great way to get harassment charges. They have not ever been taught what to do in order to find sexual partners. “Eligibility” has been presented to them as a set of criteria relating to careers (being rich) and behavior (being non-threatening) that they can’t actually satisfy by any meaningful action of their own; subsequently they spend their whole lives pursuing objectives that never bring them any closer to getting married.

Gentile society is anti-sex. This comes back to the irresponsibility of parents: most parents’ idea of helping their children find partners is to encourage them to be successful in Gentile society. This works out great for the parents: either the boys get into the careers they were instructed to, or they fail, which is just the boys’ fault; either the girls find the rare husband who has all the qualities the parents recommended, or they fail, which is just the girls’ terrible luck. No consequences for the parents, besides the eventual extinction of their descendants.

“And what sort of courtship practices are they well-suited for?”
Increasingly, none. The kids are not suited for courtship and the world they live in more and more does not allow courtship. In time it will be actively punished.

I come from a family with seven siblings, and I’m the only one that went to BYU. Most of the others have managed to maintain successful marriages (so far), often without help from a YSA ward or institute program. Those places are great for giving single members a target-rich environment in which they can find a good marriage partner, but most of that finding rests on individual initiative and responsibility.

I don’t know how different things at BYU are nowadays, but when I was there I recall the ratio of married students was somewhere around 50% for male graduate students, 33% for male undergraduates, and a bit lower than that for their female peers. No, they don’t reimburse tuition for girls who graduate without an Mrs. It’s still a great place for people to meet who have similar values but diverse locations, but it’s not a panacea for the Church’s matchmaking needs. (Missions also turn out to be a good environment for people to meet each other, even though such things are discouraged by mission leadership.)

I’m a bit leery about the idea of having an officially called stake matriarch (or even a ward matriarch), if only because whenever a match didn’t work out, everyone would blame the matriarch (and the Church) for the couple’s failures. And, the single members would have one less reason for taking responsibility for their own growth and development. With all the emphasis the Church places on personal revelation, outsourcing that to such a position, especially for something as important as marriage, seems a step in the wrong direction.

I’m really gonna try to arrange my kids’ marriages.

I am proud enough to steady the ark, but if asked how to fix this, I can only gibber incoherently. I was 15 years a single father and I know how dysfunctional a dating system is out there.

I think a lot of middle singles are using online dating, which I consider a fantastic waste of time. It only works for a very few.

While I think matchmaking has real possibilities, at some point, we are going to have to make a hard break with the World on matters of culture, harder than we have yet. We will have to make our own culture.

I love this story. I dated lots of “academic” types because I was that type myself, I guess. But it never clicked–they were all so…self-important? Pompous? Weird? Maybe I was too, I don’t know. My dad went to Harvard (before that was a total waste of money–PhD in Physics) and even though he was a very humble, unassuming man, I’d grown up thinking higher education was next to godliness. Then I started dating my husband, who’d been working since age 16, and had never taken the ACT or set foot in college. It was jarring to me—he was wonderful, but WHAT ABOUT HIS DEGREE? After we got married I told him I thought he should go to college–just so he could tell our kids he had. He did math packets at home, took night classes, community college, then transferred eventually to a 4-year college. Now he’s a professor at BYU, which thing we had never supposed. And he loves it and is wonderful. And he really values his time in college–says it humbled him and helped him progress as a professional. But I’m not trying to say that the moral is “academic life is better after all!” I think it’s something more like…I didn’t know what I wanted/needed. But God did. And the particular mix of academic/practical/spiritual that is my husband seems now, to me, the pinnacle of a well-rounded person. 🙂 Certainly watching him has helped ME be a better person as well!

Individual initiative and responsibility is also the responsibility of the church, the parents, and society. If the parents and individuals are absolutely stellar they might be able to outweigh the ball and chain of society, but remember that today’s generation of young people were the ones pressured into college, that have potentially Depression-causing debt because of that, that were drugged in school even before that happened, there were a LOT of landmines to avoid and not everybody could.

Courtship requires taking steps into the unknown, which is good and necessary, and the cowards that refuse to step into the unknown deserve to be alone, or at least need to work on that courage first. Our problem is there are extra steps into the unknown to take, which increases risk, which decreases total marriages.

Ideally, a young man would move into a new YSA unit, or go to a regional activity, or just be holy enough to have a perfect wife show up in a family ward, he would walk right up to her after church and ask her on a date, she would accept, they would hold long phone conversations, get engaged, move on. Or if they decided they weren’t right for each other he would move on.

This is not a difficult concept, but it’s not seeming to happen much. Part of it is that the real alpha studs that can demonstrate this best already got married and vanished into family wards (“turned into sausage” as one companion put it), leaving no examples for the timid dudes except for the fake and probably gay pseudo-alphas that just hang out with the girls.

And the girls hang out. Is our young man to walk up to the gaggle, address one by name, and ask her out? With her friends watching? High risk. High reward, yes, but high risk, and maybe he’s better off waiting till she’s alone, then he’s 31. If he were confident, sure, but then he would’ve been married three weeks off the plane. If he had a wingman, it would be much easier, but will he? YSA elders’ quorums are notoriously dull, and it can be as hard to really connect with the guys as it is to ask out a girl.

If you even know her name. You see her:
on Sunday, sitting with her friends in Sacrament, every other week sitting with her friends in Sunday school, occasionally sitting at a girls’ table at linger longer. If she is in your FHE group you might play a board game with her once a month. She is an acquaintance at best. Do you risk your ego, already bruised by your crushing entry-level job and history of dating failure, on the chance she won’t have “something else going on” and be “sooooo sorry?” Or do you wait, maybe another month or two, until you know the ward better.

I remember talking to an elegant young lady who had graduated BYU Mrs.-free and pretty much given up on marriage. To her, marriage was something you look for after six or seven months in a YSA unit, to get to know everyone, and if Mr. Right isn’t there tough luck.

There has to be a better way. “But brackets you just put a lot of words down to say it’s the individual’s responsibility and you should just be yourself and go up and talk to her!” The fear of being “that guy” who unsuccessfully asked out every girl in the ward is potent and chilling and I do not want to abandon my brothers to it. There are a lot of solutions we can come up with if we put our minds to it, but we need to be aware of the problem and extend some charity to those people who for whatever reason got left behind without a spouse.

idk maybe a blind date box

I think it’s instructive that the Baby Boom happened after the sexes were *separated* for a long time, rather than together.

College feminizes men and masculinizes women.

I said “college” but I meant YSA wards.

Anon for this,
wonderful. All of our best comments are by ‘anon for this.

—-
Gosh, reading about the howling waste that is modern dating depresses me no end.

The ratio of active Latter-day Saint men to active Latter-day Saint women also does not help matters.

Which might not be a problem for those who are already happily married but should be a concern to those of you who have daughters.

I’ve pretty much given up hope for myself at this point but if there is anyway I could help my nieces and nephews have a better time of it, I would gladly do so.

The institutional church is trying to be more female-friendly, not more male-friendly.

“The institutional church is trying to be more female-friendly, not more male-friendly.”

This reminds me of the economists’ adage – (something like) “That which you subsidise, you get more of”.

If you make a church more ‘friendly’ to (orientated around the wishes of) single women – you will get more of them.

Examples abound.

In general it seems to me that the CJCLDS in the West has reached the limit of what can be achieved while working in harmony with the mainstream society (the ‘compact’, or compromise, that ran from c1900 for about the next century); and indeed is now being rolled-back by the secular liberal society; ultimately due to the church and members multiple economic, legal, educational and many other links.

(This bureaucratic assimilation is the relentless, increasing, pressure for ‘convergence’. Bureaucracy needs to be recognised as the prime mechanism for implementing evil in this era.)

Delayed marriage, lower marriage rates, increased average age having first child, reducing total fertility getting closer to subfertility… all these are demographic signs of something that has happened *already*.

That said, I don’t like how in your scenario it’s the women who have to adjust and make concessions to find their happiness. I could write something very similar about how men found their perfect mate when they stopped asking out only the girls who fit conventional standards of beauty.

In our current cultural climate, it truly is more likely -particularly from a material lifestyle standpoint- a young woman today is more likely to find herself making financial concessions different from her original vision in order to marry.

That said, I am aware of at least one very handsome young man who recently married a young woman, who although cute, was nowhere near as universally attractive as the young women he had dated before her. Actually, it just occurs to me that my own husband did the exact same thing way back when.

So it happens. The idea of a marriage where no concessions are made on either side is a marriage that is doomed unless some serious maturing takes place in the first 10 years.

To the author:

Interesting post and food for thought.

If all my blogging has ever achieved has been to bring Elspeth over to Jr. G, it will have been worth it.

Many thanks, Elspeth.

If all my blogging has ever achieved has been to bring Elspeth over to Jr. G, it will have been worth it.

You are very kind, seriouslypleasedropit.

I don’t expect I’ll be around enough to wear out my welcome, but I appreciated the opportunity to think about this subject from a different angle.

You’re welcome, MC