You’ll Be a Man, My Son

I had the worst time dating, but I am just glad I am out of it now, and with a wonderful woman.

I am as flummoxed as I ever was on this matter, but I do have two thoughts.

We have outsourced our culture to the World and that just isn’t workable any more, if it ever was. We need to create an alternative to the World, including in Culture. Disney movies are not going to be sufficient! Trying to make our out-sourced culture work for us, is a bit like teaching hippos to fly. Even if we could get them to do it, they aren’t interested. The World never was moving in the same direction as we were. And it has never been more diametrically opposed. We must confront that reality. Our current worldly culture is actively opposed to us. That isn’t going to give us what we need. Never will.

Second, I think the experience of Abraham looking for wife for Isaac, and Jacob looking for a wife, are important and underappreciated stories and doctrines. This is every bit a matter of prayer as learning the Book of Mormon is true, is. And it is just as important to rely on the Lord here, and even pray for miracles, as it is in any other important area of our lives. God is probably more interested in your Dating Life, than you are!

There is more than enough blame to go around in this case. This problem is more than we can solve by ourselves. We NEED and REQUIRE divine inspiration.

If Nephi could have a miracle and divine direction for finding food, then this is no less important.

“young men are encountering catastrophic motivation failure”

Yeah, that modern women aren’t worst persuing. How is it motivating to have only the possibility of women who are trying to be men and have no femininity? And women who other men have already had. Plus knowing they will divorce you and have you put in jail for inability to pay absurd alimony requirements. Yeah, I’d say there is a “catastrophic motivation failure” but thinking young men can just conjure forth motivation from the ether using magic like some Harry Potter is absurd. You have to fix the laws and raise up a generation of women who actually act female.

As I said, there is more than enough blame to go around.
It is easy to put all the blame on others, especially as any criticism feels unusually personal here.

We would all do well to understand each other’s problems and frustrations. Because neither of us have it easy.

But I certainly hope the problem is not entirely with women, because that would leave me utterly powerless and unable to act. I can’t solve women. But I can at least try to solve men’s errors.

Why put in the effort to pursue a female and risk rejection or worse when you can play video games and look at porn all night long?

One can be a filthy, obese pig living in his mom’s house and mooching off of her internet, and the women in your fantasy worlds will still accept you.

Edit: the women in *his* fantasy worlds will still accept *him*.

Oh they’ll accept me too, the general “you” is still appropriate.

We have a generation of men and women who are completely unsuitable for each other. The men were socialized through school to be defective women, the women were socialized through the workplace to be defective men. Satan has won a great victory. Perhaps we can rely on the threshing floor of Darwin to pound out a righteous remnant – not everyone’s been affected this way! It’ll stabilize sooner or later, maybe with 50,000 righteous families on the Snake River, it’s been worse. If that’s God’s plan that’s cold comfort for the rest of us though.

How do you pry a parasitic culture out of the hearts of a generation? Through ?????. We will only be saved in catastrophe. Catastrophe forces communities together, it forces traditional roles, it forces acceptance of responsibility, where our current system is streamlined to squeeze responsibility to where it can’t hurt anyone.

But there is our problem, we can’t instigate catastrophe in this field white and ready to be burned, only God can – as far as the scholars’ interpretations of scripture I’m aware of say. Our system is excellent at blunting catastrophe, or has been, and in worst case will continue to be, and we will continue to dwindle.

Perhaps it is time to stop praying for peace.

Some might be interested in this column. It’s a few years old, but one of the things I drew from it was that for the average American man, finishing his schooling and getting established in a career is his “rite of passage.” And, the average age of marriage for men tends to come about five years after their schooling ends.

https://www.today.com/health/reason-why-men-marry-some-women-not-others-t74671

I got to hear John Rhys-Davies when he visited Salt Lake a few years ago, and he commented on how remarkable it was that missions serve as a rite of passage for young men in the Church. Looking at marriage trends among Latter-day Saints, it seems that we do indeed consider a mission to be our rite of passage instead of schooling (Brigham Young’s apocryphal statement that a single man over 26 is a menace to society plays into that as well).

It doesn’t surprise me that 50% of missionaries are now sisters instead of elders. My wife was 20 when she married me, and all three of my sisters were 20 when they married. After President Monson announced the lowered mission ages in 2012, I polled the women in my ward and only two of them were married before turning 19. Times were that a woman’s main reason for going on a mission was that she hadn’t gotten married yet; now, if a woman hasn’t gone on a mission it’s just as likely that the reason for not going is because she doesn’t want to go, as opposed to a lack of other options.

Of course, over 50% of college graduates are women as well, and that’s been true for a long time. President Hinckley often encouraged women to get as much education as they could, and other Church leaders since then have said the same thing.

All that being said, I don’t see any point in thinking that a mission, or schooling, or any other “rite of passage” should be regarded as something exclusive to men. Some male-only spaces are appropriate (and female-only spaces too!), but I don’t know of any easy solutions for large populations.

One thing that comes to mind for me is seeing things as they really are. The world has gone a long time enforcing gender stereotypes, whether they were appropriate or not, and then gone the other way by insisting there are no differences between genders (ironically, the trans movement has gone to another extreme by making people believe their sex is determined by stereotypes rather than biology). The category of things that are exclusive to one sex or the other isn’t nearly as large as old worldly traditional notions would have had us believe, but some differences do exist. It seems we need to do better at identifying those differences (childbirth being exclusive to females would be the first thing on my list) and celebrating those, while also keeping things off the list that either sex is capable of doing well.

There are still plenty of good men and good women out there. The problem is that there are also plenty of duds, which has made the search costs so high that the market often isn’t clearing.

“while also keeping things off the list that either sex is capable of doing well.”

I do not believe this to be true.

Gary’s comment is apt IMO, it echoes most of the concerns guys share with me, though we shouldn’t underestimate just “the economy” as a weeding force for high conscientious men. Not only are men not motivated towards women, but they’re also not motivated towards a career when no matter what field they pick it doesn’t guarantee even the ability to provide for a family, let alone buy a house. More and more men are resigned to being poor forever, and the logic goes “If I am to be a hundred dollars poor or one hundred fifty, what difference does it make, really?” and this applies to many more aspects of masculinity than just money. And I don’t think porn would go away if the environment was just better, but I do think this principle is responsible for a large part of its sticking power.

There is the problem of dating, and the problem of staying married, and the problem of having children, but also the problem of finding, and to my knowledge there aren’t any realistic market solutions for any of them. Mutual appears to be the best offering, I know several couples who got married off of it, but most agree the offerings on it are pretty bleak.

Broadly speaking you can find people at church, school, work, online, or on your mission, but the success rates for these can vary pretty wildly. While there are many good men and women, the *recognizing* of them as such seems to me the part that is most grievously malfunctioned. I don’t think a lot of guys really know what would make a good wife (is this porn? Is this poor parental example? I don’t know), and it seems a lot of women really don’t know what would make a good husband. The ways people try to signal that they are these things are all messed up, so nobody can find each other.

It is like the pheromone-soaked environment of the tree moth

I think Bobaduck’s point in the article is relevant and important, that this is (despite debauchery everywhere) the generation of men AND women with the least experience with the opposite sex. Neither one knows how to talk to each other.

But we see similar problems with loneliness in general. Men can’t even find men to hang with! let alone women.

We see problems with the current generation unable to commit to a job.

We see record levels of despair and mental unhealth.

If this were a disease, we would call it the Bubonic Plague.

I recommend partner dancing. Make it a regular part of the culture and of how teens are socialized. There’s all sorts of things about it that instill reflexes and habits that are specific to how to dance well but exetend to many other areas of social behavior and understanding the person you’re with and interacting with them productively.

It was a part of our culture for thousands of years. In the past half-century it was nearly totally abandoned and replaced with free-form nightclub butt-shaking, which is significantly more difficult to do well (and thus discourages most people), does not teach any of the useful things formal dancing does, lacks the structure and thus civilizing aspect of formal dance moves, and skips right over the low-key initial emotional and physical closeness of the dance.

The fact that any formalized partner dance has specific positions and handholds and a limited number of methods to switch from one to another and/or moves to do in any given position makes it a simple and solvable puzzle, very appropriate for guys used to figuring out ideal chains of combat moves in video games, and much easier to pick up than the overwhelming choice in rules-less nightclub “dancing”. The fact that he has to focus on keeping time and constantly thinking three or so moves ahead while holding a woman close the whole time trains him to be less nervous around women. The fact that the beauty of her face has zero bearing on how well she can follow his lead or execute her part of the dance means he’s judging her on a basis other than the superficial. And she picks up on this, and it makes him more interesting to her. Also, since the man is the one leading the dance, she has to get used to responding to what he does rather than trying to guess and charging ahead on her own (and every woman I’ve spent any length of time dancing with has commented that she’s terribly glad she doesn’t have to do the leading).

When a guy takes a woman out on the dance floor and successfully leads her through something she had no idea how to do – and makes her look good in the process – it really impresses her. It shakes her free of all sorts of preconceived notions. She looks at him with new eyes, and he knows it, and it makes him feel great. As a foundation and a model for life, you could do a lot worse.

@ not a mormon,
My brother does country swing with his now-wife. They tore up the dance floor at their wedding, and had great fun doing it. I can dance ballroom and swing, and it’s actually a decently well-supported pastime in our area, but there are so many creeps at dances that I lost the desire to go after a while.

That said, you’re not wrong. Partner dancing is a great way to socialize, for all the reasons you articulated.

“When a guy takes a woman out on the dance floor and successfully leads her through something she had no idea how to do – and makes her look good in the process – it really impresses her.”

I agree. My experience dancing with women reminds me of Wigner describing an aspect of von Neumann’s brillance. When discussing an idea one-on-one with someone, von Neumann would ask, “Do you know this theorem? Do you know that theorem?” He would start from whatever the other person knew and minimally bridge the gaps as needed to bring the person he was talking with into conversation about the idea of interest.

For a man, a dance with a new woman starts with leading in clear and simple ways that the woman can start to trust. If she has little experience with this, this can be an exciting thing for her. “Wow, I’m really dancing.” I continue solid leading that doesn’t push beyond what she can follow, and as her experience with and confidence in my posture and motion and her response to it increases, little flourishes such as spins can be added; these surprise her that in following my lead, she does something that looks and feels fun with a bit of skill and flash.

And now I am remembering a Saturday night a few weeks ago. My family and my new daughter-in-law’s family dined together at a hot pot restaurant, twelve of us together. Thoroughly full after a couple hours, we were all ready to go, but outside on the sidewalk I heard music. A young man with a guitar and a voice was on an outdoor stage. The rest of the family left, but my wife and I went over to the astroturf before the stage where a couple dozen others were listening. My wife sat, and I lay and rest a bit. The young musician was quite good, and after a couple songs, I was ready to take further advantage of our fortune. I rose to my feet and invited my wife to dance. For the last four songs of the night we crossed back and forth the open space before the stage. I don’t know why we were the only ones doing that. My wife, also a musician, had a nice chat with the young man as he packed his equipment.

I have been told that at some FSY dances this summer partner dances have been banned, due to same-sex pairs making a show out of it.

That is easy to believe. If we cannot even preserve a proper regard for sexuality and spaces for the expression of it within a completely church-run setting, we are hypocrites to be complain about disregard for such things in the wider world.