President Oaks Says It Out Loud

“Lock your heart Elder! But get that Sister missionary’s address and look her up when you get home.”

We need a term for abstinence that is taken to enough of an extreme, that it inhibits healthy dating and marriage and making babies. Perhaps Courtship Inhibition? I might say Erotic Underdevelopment, but that is too easily misunderstood. Relational Arrest? Not bad. Hyper-Neutralization? Over-extended Abstinence?

In the modern world, we go to extremes, of necessity. And we do need to be extremely virtuous. Virtue is what supports and sustains the Family, and unvirtue is what destroys it or destroys its foundations.

Prudery. Or excessive prudery. Prudish inhibition.

Mush together apathy, ecstasy, ascetic, and aesthetic.

frigidity

Those were both words that I initially considered and rejected, but perhaps they are right. It isn’t that they were born prudes, but our oversexualized environment makes only the extremes possible, nymphomaniacs and prudes. But we need to be extreme in virtue, not abstinence.

The doctrine of chastity is not the doctrine of lowering or suppressing the libido.

The greater the libido, the greater the chastity

Before Pres. Oaks revealed out loud the plan to get the elders and the sisters acquainted on their missions, the situation brought to mind “The Fantasticks.” That’s a musical centered on a boy and a girl living next door to one another whose fathers have successfully conspired to set them up together by pretending that they (the fathers) don’t like each other and want their children to stay away from one another.

In one sense, the changes cut against romance and pairing, as have most of the changes in the mission program over the last decades. Romance relies on le differance–unisex is death to romance and this is a change in the direction of being more unisex. Girls also like to feel they are marrying up in some sense and that their guy has accomplished some notable masculine deed, which this also cuts against. This is why the old model of freshmen and sophomore girls at college marrying RMs worked so well. BUT that old model is broken for a number of reasons.

In favor is proximity. Proximity is always very helpful. Given proximity, biology will find a way. Which is why hobbies and student wards and such are great for courtship. Zoomers just seem to have a really hard time making occasions to be proximate, and not vegging out on a phone when they are, so the proximity piece is strong here. As far as I can tell, that is the point that JM and Elder Oaks are making.

Aristotle once said that male friendships have to be centered around some purpose or activity, which is just another way of saying that men are bad at friendships. So are zoomers, so having the proximity occur in the context of a shared purpose or goal helps a lot. It reduces the awkwardness of being together, which they need. The mission is redolent with purpose.

Finally, there is a lot of research and experience suggesting that changing location and social environment dramatically makes people much more willing to entertain major life changes. There are an outsize number of converts who joined after moving. You would expect this would be true of dating and falling in love also.

I still think that the major purpose of this announcement is to combat the number of girls falling away after high school, and the secondary purpose is to address falling missionary numbers (our birthrates have been declining for 2+ decades), but sparking some courtship seems like a strong tertiary purpose. I expect it will work.

It would work even better if there were a little institutional encouragement or structure for it, but that’s hard to pull off, because the ‘shared purpose’ piece only works if the focus remains pretty solidly on missionary work. Go to far in the direction of encouraging romance and its self-defeating. At minimum probably just some teaching from time to time that as missionaries they are preaching the importance of families and eternal life and need to make plans and commitments to honor those principles in their own life when the time arises.
Anything else, dunno. Dances with the next mission over? Highly encouraged three-month missions for girls the summer after their junior year in high school?

Lol @ your last paragraph. And yet, given the seriousness of the marriage/birth rate problem, I think the program/auxillary scaffolding of the church could be re-thought and re-invented to solve it. We used to do a lot things we don’t do now, even though we believe the same doctrine.

Three month missions – that is actually an incredible idea.
Especially if pared with working with the outgoing elders!

I submit that the reason the church has the FSY programs is at least half for the young adult leaders. They all work together for months at a time, earning money, guiding youth along the gospel path, and getting to know one another. It is essentially a three month mission, paid, with more interaction between the sexes.

There’s a real problem developing around sexuality. Some kids being oversexed. Others not interested and bizarrely adopting this term asexual.

It’s all a function of our broken understanding of procreation and sexual reproduction, brought on by fornicators, rapists, and pedophiles running the cultural levers of power; and sadly all to often enabled or overlooked by good people with their head in the sand.

Regarding three-month missions, they actually do short-term performing missions at Church historical sites (mostly Nauvoo) for young people. Or at least, they did back in the 90s. I was on vacation there with my family the summer before my own mission, and I recognized one of the young sister missionaries there as a girl from my high school. We talked to her after their presentation and she explained the short-term nature of what she was doing.

As for missionaries marrying each other, I’m all for it.

My own parents (both from Salt Lake) met each other as missionaries in Georgia. The president’s wife would remind the sisters not to “fraternize with the elders,” but after my dad got home they started exchanging letters and he proposed to her when she returned.

I also had a bishop who met his wife when they were missionaries. In their case she went home first, and at Christmastime he called her at home. Her dad spoke to him first, and when the call ended he told his daughter, “When he comes home he’s going to ask you to marry him, and you’d better decide what your answer is going to be.”

There were probably a half-dozen couples who got married from my mission after they met each other in the field. One of my companions was a bit bothered by that; as we talked about it one evening he wondered out loud whether our mission president ever felt like a matchmaker. Being the product of such a couple myself, I couldn’t feel the same consternation about it.

In my MTC group we had five elders and three (later four) sisters, and one thing that surprised me was how much the girls felt like peers to me, despite knowing intellectually that they were at least two years older. We were doing the same things together every day, which I suspect went a long way toward that equalizing effect.

But if couples can form from missions where the age gaps were somewhat built in, with the boys often younger than the girls, having everyone now at about the same age (and a higher ratio of girls than there used to be) can only stack the odds even more toward attraction and marriage.

I can’t think of a better word to replace “dating” with, either. “Courting” sounds too old-fashioned, and a lot of the other single-word terms people use these days sound too non-committal.

Eric, which years were you a missionary?

There is also the old “meet a girl who lives where you are serving” scenario. That one worries a lot of people, but can also be properly managed. One friend recognized the feelings that were developing between himself and his future wife as he served in her ward, and he told his mission president.

“Is this going to be a problem, Elder?” “No.” I guess the president knew with that missionary there would not be a problem, and he continued serving in the area.

I served from 1998-2000.

Now that you mention it, my wife’s grandfather actually was one of those missionaries who met his wife in the field. He went to Fort Wayne, Indiana, and his future wife was one of the people he baptized. After his mission ended he came back, they got married, and then went to Utah to get sealed and stayed in Tremonton until she died from cancer when my mother-in-law was ten.

My mission president met his wife in the field. He a former Catholic altar boy from Price Utah. She a Chinese Tahitian girl with a beautiful singing voice from Tahiti. The Lord works in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform!