What Two Religions Tell Us About the Modern Dating Crisis (from TIME)
This article (see link to it much farther below) primarily focuses on Jews and Mormons, but it is still very interesting, and I think has things to say about other religious types.
I have done previous posts about the shortage of single adult men among Mormons (Link): here.
There is an interactive map on the page (the TIME article linked to below), where, if you run your mouse over it, right above it, it will tell you the ratio of men to women in your city.
One thing I think that is contributing to why Baptist, evangelical, and other Christian women are staying single so long – among the ones who want to marry – is the Christian belief in “equally yoked,” where Christians pressure Christian women to marry only Christian men.
I’ve already chucked that teaching aside a few years ago, but am not ready to date just yet. Whenever I do start dating again, this time, I am fully open and prepare to date Non-Christian men.
There really are no Christian men to date, and many of the ones who are self professing believers are creeps – serial rapists, killers, etc. (see (Link): this list on my blog for examples). If a Christian woman wants to marry these days, she will really have no choice BUT to marry an atheist or some other sort of Non-Christian.
(Link): Sorry, ladies, there really is a man shortage (New York Post)
(Link): What Two Religions Tell Us About the Modern Dating Crisis (from TIME) by J. Birger
Believe it or not, the rise in Mormon breast implants and $100,000 Jewish dowries can explain why you’re alone on Friday night
Values.
That’s the one thing that always came up when I’d discuss theories on declining marriage rates or the rise of the hookup culture with my friends or family.
“Couldn’t it just be that times have changed?” people would ask.
Times have changed, and that is a good thing—especially the fading-away of cruel taboos that once stigmatized women who engaged in premarital sex or bore children out of wedlock.
Thing is, times change for a reason. The values question assumes that sexual mores loosen naturally from conservative to liberal. In reality, these values have ebbed and flowed throughout history, often in conjunction with prevailing sex ratios.
Today, mainstream dating guides tell the everything-going-for-her career woman it’s her fault she’s still single—she just needs to play hard to get or follow a few simple rules to snag Mr. Right. But the problem is a demographic one.
Multiple studies show that college-educated Americans are increasingly reluctant to marry those lacking a college degree. This bias is having a devastating impact on the dating market for college-educated women. Why?
According to 2012 population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, there are 5.5 million college-educated women in the U.S. between the ages of 22 and 29 versus 4.1 million such men. That’s four women for every three men. Among college grads age 30 to 39, there are 7.4 million women versus 6.0 million men—five women for every four men.
It’s not that He’s Just Not That Into You—it’s that There Just Aren’t Enough of Him.
Lopsided gender ratios don’t just make it statistically harder for college-educated women to find a match. They change behavior too. According to sociologists, economists and psychologists who have studied sex ratios throughout history, the culture is less likely to emphasize courtship and monogamy when women are in oversupply. Heterosexual men are more likely to play the field, and heterosexual women must compete for men’s attention.
Of course, tales of scarce men and sexual permissiveness in ancient Sparta won’t convince everyone, so I began to explore the demographics of modern religion. I wanted to show that god-fearing folks steeped in old-fashioned values are just as susceptible to the effects of shifting sex ratios as cosmopolitan, hookup-happy 20-somethings who frequent Upper East Side wine bars.
Eventually I hit pay dirt.
One of my web searches turned up a study from Trinity College’s American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) on the demographics of Mormons. According to the ARIS study, there are now 150 Mormon women for every 100 Mormon men in the state of Utah—a 50 percent oversupply of women.
On a lark, I emailed my friend Cynthia Bowman,* a devout Mormon who grew up in Salt Lake City and returns there often, and asked her whether Mormon sex ratios are as lopsided as the ARIS study claimed. [Editor’s note: “Cynthia Bowman” is a pseudonym, as are other names denoted with an asterisk. Some biographical details have been altered to hide their identities.]
Yes, she told me, the ratios are lopsided. And yes, Mormon men take full advantage. “They wait for the next, more perfect woman,” grumbled Bowman, a veterinarian in San Diego. Premarital sex remains taboo for Mormons, but the shortage of Mormon men was pushing some women over the brink. “There might actually be a more promiscuous dating culture than there otherwise would be in the Mormon culture because of this gap.”
Months later, still neck-deep in Mormon research, I got lucky again. I received an email from a hedge fund manager who wanted to talk to me about a job. I called back to thank him but explained I was busy writing a book. He asked what the book was about, and I wound up telling him about the Mormon marriage crisis.
“Wow,” he said, “that sounds a lot like the Shidduch Crisis.” I had never heard of it, but the Shidduch Crisis turned out to be a marriage crisis among Orthodox Jews remarkably similar to the one afflicting Mormons.
Both of these socially conservative communities are suffering from marriage crises that are testing not only their faiths but social norms as well. “You have no idea how big a problem this is,” said Tristen Ure Hunt, founder of the Mormon Matchmaker, a Salt Lake City dating agency.
Hunt, a 35-year-old who only recently got married herself, told me she has three times more single women than single men in her matchmaking database.
She shared stories of devout Mormon women who wound up marrying outside the religion—officially known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints—simply because they had no other options. She has ten friends—“all good LDS girls!”—who gave up on finding a husband and decided to have children on their own. Said Hunt, “My heartstrings are pulled daily.”
Two thousand miles away in New York City, Lisa Elefant knows exactly what Hunt is feeling. “I don’t sleep at night anymore,” said Elefant, a shadchan—or Jewish matchmaker—affiliated with the Ohr Naava: Women’s Torah Center in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn. “My own sister is thirty-seven, educated, accomplished, attractive, and single. I told her to freeze her eggs.”
Secular-style dating is rare in the Orthodox community in which Elefant lives.
Most marriages are loosely arranged—“guided” is probably a better word—by matchmakers such as Elefant.
The shadchan’s job has been made exceedingly difficult, she said, by a mysterious increase in the number of unmarried women within the Orthodox community.
When Elefant attended Jewish high school 30 years ago, “there were maybe three girls that didn’t get married by the time they were twenty or twenty-one,” she said. “Today, if you look at the girls who graduated five years ago, there are probably thirty girls who are not yet married. Overall, there are thousands of unmarried girls in their late twenties. It’s total chaos.”
For Orthodox Jewish women, as for Mormon ones, getting married and having children is more than a lifestyle choice. Marriage and motherhood are essentially spiritual obligations, which is why the Orthodox marriage crisis is so hotly debated and why it has earned its own moniker.
Shidduch is the Hebrew word for a marriage match, and Orthodox Jews (including the more assimilated Modern Orthodox) now refer to the excess supply of unmarried women in their communities as the Shidduch Crisis.
Mormon and Orthodox Jewish leaders alike fear that their respective marriage crises reflect some failure to instill proper values in young people. Perhaps young people are too self-absorbed? Maybe the men are just too picky? Or maybe it’s the women who are holding out for the Mormon or Jewish George Clooney?
In fact, the root causes of both the Shidduch Crisis and the Mormon marriage crisis have little to do with culture or religion. The true culprit in both cases is demographics.
The fact is that there are more marriage-age women than men both in the Orthodox Jewish community and in the Utah LDS church. And just as I predicted, lopsided gender ratios affect conservative religious communities in much the same way they affect secular ones.
At first glance, the state of Utah—60 percent Mormon and home of the LDS church—looks like the wrong place to study what I like to call the man deficit. Like several other western states, Utah actually has more men than women.
Utah’s ratio of men to women across all age groups is the fifth highest in the nation. But lurking beneath the Census data is a demographic anomaly that makes Utah a textbook example of how shifting gender ratios alter behavior. The LDS church actually has one of the most lopsided gender ratios of any religion in the United States.
… According to the Pew Research Center, 67 percent of self-described atheists are men. Statistically speaking, an atheist meeting may be one of the best places for single women to meet available men.
…Kelly Blake* is painfully aware of the horrible odds. A single Mormon in her late thirties, Blake is a reporter for a Salt Lake City television station. When Blake attends singles events for Mormons, she said there are often two women for every one man. As a result, Blake rarely meets suitable men in these settings and often winds up spending most of her time chatting with other women. “I’ll go on a [Mormon] singles cruise and come away with no dates but all these incredible new girlfriends,” Blake told me.
The lopsided numbers encourage Mormon men to hold out for the perfect wife, Blake said. “I call it the paradox of choice,” she explained. “For men, there are so many choices that choices are not made. The dream for the Mormon man is to get married and have six kids. As he ages, his dream never changes. But when you’re a thirty-seven-year-old woman, you’ve already aged out of that dream.”
…There is ample evidence that Mormon men are delaying marriage. News articles on this topic tend to be filled with tales of Mormon women who want to marry but cannot find a good Mormon man.
..The Tribune story cited a survey of Mormon college students in which men expressed a belief that age 30 is now the right age to get married.
The finding was unexpected, given that most Utah Mormons marry by their early twenties. In the same article, Brigham Young University professor David Dollahite complained of a “market mentality” among men at the LDS-dominated campus.
When it came to dating, BYU men seemed paralyzed by indecision. “The young men think, ‘I am dating a 9.7, but if I wait, maybe I could get a 9.9,’” Dollahite told the Tribune.
Based on enrollment figures, BYU men should not be so picky. In 2013, the gender ratio among BYU undergrads was actually 54:46 male to female. With 17 percent more men than women on campus, it is the BYU women who should be the choosy ones.
But because social life at BYU is so atypical, the campus-wide enrollment figures don’t reflect the true dating market.
Yes, there are more male undergrads overall, but BYU’s freshman class in 2013 was actually 62 percent female—or three women for every two men. The change in the mission age probably exaggerated the freshman gender gap for 2013, but according to data available on the BYU website, BYU’s freshman class has been majority female every year since at least 1997. In 1997, for instance, BYU’s freshman class was 59 percent women.
..To be sure, the Mormon dating scene at BYU—or in Utah in general—will never be confused with Sex and the City. As I said, premarital sex is still taboo for Mormons. Yet, just as Bowman suggested, the undersupply of men does seem to be loosening Mormon sexual mores. “At BYU, a lot of Mormons my age don’t consider oral sex to be sex,” said Wheelwright.
Psychologists Marcia Guttentag and Paul Secord argued in Too Many Women?— the pioneering book on lopsided gender ratios—that women are more likely to be treated as sex objects whenever men are scarce. That is precisely what Mormon women now experience.
“Women’s bodies are up for debate,” Wheelwright complained.
Mormon men have become much more demanding about women’s looks, which in turn has made women obsessed with standing out from the competition.
One consequence: A culture of plastic surgery has taken root among Mormon women.
“I have seen more outrageous boob jobs and facial plastic surgery in Utah than almost anywhere in the country—especially among Mormon women,” said Bowman. “They may claim chastity as a virtue overall, but that’s not stopping anyone from getting a set of double-Ds.”
..In this cosmetic arms race, the big guns are Botox, liposuction, and breast augmentation. “There are so many attractive girls here, the guys get choosy,” explained Dr. Kimball Crofts, a Salt Lake City plastic surgeon. (He speaks from experience. Mormon himself, Crofts did not marry till his forties.)
Crofts said his office has college-age women coming in for Botox injections. The day I interviewed him, Crofts had just finished a consultation with an attractive woman in her twenties seeking a breast augmentation: “She says to me, ‘I don’t want them too big, but my boyfriend would really like them bigger.’”
…Wheelwright believed allowing women a leadership role in the teaching of LDS gospel is important. As things stand now, getting married and having kids is the Mormon woman’s primary responsibility within the LDS faith, she said.
The lopsided gender ratios feed preexisting disillusionment among Mormon women by making their core duty—getting married—difficult, degrading, or even impossible
Said Wheelwright, “In a religion where women are already unnecessary to the essential structure of the church, having a gender imbalance where you have too many women just compounds that effect.”
As with the Mormon marriage crisis, the Shidduch Crisis has become a source of enormous heartache for Orthodox Jews, especially older single women and their parents. (Among Orthodox Jews, “older” often starts at 21.)
The Letters to the Editor section of The 5 Towns Jewish Times, a weekly newspaper for the Orthodox community in suburban New York, has become a receptacle for Shidduch Crisis–related angst and sadness. “An absolute tragedy,” is how one mother described the situation. It is “what we as a family and I as the mother of a 27-year-old ‘older single girl’ go through every moment of my life, every breathing second of every day. And believe me, sometimes it hurts to do just that—i.e., to breathe.”
The statistical explanation for why Orthodox men are in short supply is different from the one for the shortage of Mormon men. Orthodox men are not abandoning their faith in large numbers and leaving Orthodox women behind.
According to a recent Pew Research study, only 2 percent of Orthodox Jews are married to non-Jews, and the attrition rate from the Orthodox movement to the more mainstream Reform or Conservative branches of Judaism has actually been declining.
…The bottom line: According to a 2013 article in the Jewish weekly Ami Magazine, there are now 3,000 unmarried Orthodox women between the ages of 25 and 40 in the New York City metro area and another 500 over 40.
That’s a huge number when you consider that New York’s Yeshivish Orthodox—the segment of the Orthodox community most affected by the Shidduch Crisis—has a total population of 97,000, according to the Jewish Community Study of New York published by the UJA-Federation of New York in 2012.
That is the Shidduch Crisis in a nutshell.
Unfortunately, relatively few Orthodox Jews realize that the Shidduch Crisis boils down to a math problem.
Most explanations for the Shidduch Crisis blame cultural influences for causing men to delay marriage. “Those of us who’ve tossed and turned with this, we don’tnecessarily believe that there are more girls than boys,” said Elefant. “We believe God created everybody, and God created a match for everybody.”
….There is, however, one major cultural difference between the two groups: Hasidic men marry women their own age, whereas Yeshivish men typically marry women a three or four years their junior.
“In the Hasidic world, it would be very weird for a man to marry a woman two years younger than him,” said Alexander Rapaport, a Hasidic father of six and the executive director of Masbia, a kosher soup kitchen in Brooklyn. Both Rapaport and his wife were 36 when I interviewed him.
When I asked Rapaport about the Shidduch Crisis, he seemed perplexed. “I’ve heard of it,” he said, “but I’m not sure I understand what it’s all about.”
In fact, there is no Shidduch Crisis in the Hasidic community.
…“The girls have it made in the Hasidic world,” Friedman said. “They’re the ones in demand.” Friedman’s explanation for the absence of a Shidduch Crisis among Hasidic Jews is that there are more Hasidic boys than girls—a perception that I suspect is inaccurate but nonetheless reflects how different the marriage market is for Hasidic versus non-Hasidic Orthodox Jews.
…The seeming immunity of Hasidic Jews to the Shidduch Crisis has not been lost on some Yeshivish rabbis.
In 2012, a dozen American and Israeli Orthodox rabbis signed letters urging young men and their parents to begin their matchmaking process earlier than age 22 or 23. [Aside from Christian Pundit: this is very similar to Southern Baptists and evangelicals pressuring Christian children and teens into “early marriage”]
The rabbis noted that their community “finds itself in an increasingly difficult situation,” with “thousands” of single Jewish women struggling to find husbands.
“[I]t has become clear that the primary cause of this is that [men] generally marry girls who are a number of years younger,” read one of the letters. “Since the population increases every year and there are more girls entering shidduchim than boys, many girls are left unmarried. Clearly, the way to remedy this terrible situation is to reduce the age disparity in shidduchim. Many [Hasidic] communities who do not have age disparities in shidduchim are not facing this tragic situation of numerous unmarried girls.”
The suggestion that the true origin of the Shidduch Crisis lies in demographics has not sat well with those who staked their reputations on alternative explanations. “This fancy cocktail of demography, sociology, mathematics, and mythology is really nothing more than a Ponzi scheme,” American Rabbi Chananya Weissman wrote in The Jerusalem Post.
Weissman runs an organization called End The Madness, which aims to reform the Orthodox matchmaking system. Weissman places much of the blame for the Shidduch Crisis on the women themselves.
As he wrote on TheYeshivaWorld.com website, women are too focused on “non-Halachic externalities” (i.e., attributes not valued by Jewish law or tradition) when evaluating prospective husbands: “I would posit that feminism and un-Jewish values have had a devastating effect on the shidduch world… The same women who are supposedly just desperate to get married, who want nothing more than to meet a nice guy who doesn’t drool all over himself, categorically reject the vast majority of men they come across without batting an eyelash—and then say the problem is there aren’t any good guys.”
[Aside from Christian Pundit: and so it’s the same among Christians. Some of them blame the women or blame feminism for why there are so many unmarried women. The women are not to blame, nor do they have too-high expectations]
Weissman’s solution is for Orthodox Jews to rely less on matchmakers and more on singles events where young people can mingle and get to know each other in more natural settings. Of course, there’s plenty of natural interaction between college-educated men and women in New York City, and that hasn’t solved the too-many-women problem in the secular world.
[Aside: note the following is also true of Christians: often times, Christians will assume a woman is still single because she is fat or ugly, even though this is not true]
….Here Halberstam [Yitta Halberstam, coauthor of the best-selling Small Miracles series of books.] went off the rails. She went on to describe attending a community event where single women were introduced to mothers of single men—and being “jolted” by the subpar looks of the girls.
“Yes,” she wrote, “spiritual beauty makes a woman’s eyes glow and casts a luminous sheen over her face; there is no beauty like a pure soul. Makeup, however, goes a long way in both correcting facial flaws and accentuating one’s assets, and if my cursory inspection was indeed accurate (and I apologize if the girls used such natural makeup that I simply couldn’t tell), barely any of these girls seemed to have made a huge effort to deck themselves out.”
In other words, the real reason these young women were still unmarried was because they were homely. Halberstam then doubled down on heartlessness, suggesting that a visit to the plastic surgeon might be in order for some of these Plain Janes: “Mothers, this is my plea to you: There is no reason in today’s day and age with the panoply of cosmetic and surgical procedures available, why any girl can’t be transformed into a swan. Borrow the money if you have to; it’s an investment in your daughter’s future, her life.”
Of the 648 mostly shocked and outraged comments posted to The Jewish Press website, one stood out: “Dear Mrs. Halberstam, I am also a Jewish mother,” it began. “But I no longer share your joyful anticipation of walking my child down to the chuppa [the Jewish wedding canopy]. She died last year, of anorexia.
“It all began six years ago, when, at the age of 21, a shadchan who professed to be as well-meaning as you do suggested that she lose a few pounds (she was a size 6 at the time) in order to make herself more ‘marketable’ (that is the term she used then). What followed was a nightmare for her, me, and our whole family that I can only hope you will never know from.
If you have a modicum of rachmunus [pity] in your Jewish neshama [soul] I beg you to retract this article and apologize for your deeply, dangerously misguided advice.
I am crying now as I write this and think of what my daughter had to suffer because of exactly the type of things that you have written here, and I am just so afraid for all the other impressionable young girls who will read your words and reach the same end.
This is not a joke, and it is not funny at all. You could literally be killing people by making these suggestions and perpetuating the ethos that underlies them.”
Anorexia has become a quiet scourge of the Orthodox Jewish community. A report on the National Eating Disorders Association website described the intense pressure that single Orthodox women feel to stay thin during the matchmaking process.
…One cultural by-product of the Shidduch Crisis that has not been hushed up is the ever-larger dowries that Orthodox brides and their families are now expected to pay for the privilege of getting married.
These dowries are financial promises made by the bride’s parents to help support the young family for the three or four or however-long-it-takes years that their future son-in-law may spend studying at a Jewish seminary.
The fact that these dowries keep increasing demonstrates both the market power men possess as well as the desperation felt by young women and their parents. “It was never like this before,” said Salamon. “There was always a dowry, but it was pillowcases and things of that nature—not $50,000.”
…The Orthodox Union’s executive vice president, Rabbi Steven Weil, told me he believed a backlash to the increasingly outlandish dowries was brewing. “You don’t marry for money,” Weil said. “This is not our religion.”
Weil is right, of course. It is not his religion. It is his religion’s demographics.
Related Posts:
(Link): Men with ‘Golden Penis Syndrome’ Are Ruining Sex and Dating for Women
(Link): China: The Men Who Are Single And the Women Who Don’t Want Kids
(Link): How the Dating Scene Became Stacked Against Women – via CT, by Gina Dalfonzo
(Link): What Christians Really Think About the Church’s Relationship Advice by Anna Broadway
(Link): Man / Husband Shortage in Hong Kong – just like in American Christian circles
(Link): Unmarried and Childless Women Are the Happiest, Happiness Expert Claims (2019 Study)
(Link): China’s Brutal One-Child Policy Ruins Men’s Marriage Prospects, Resulting in Human Trafficking
(Link): Does God Require Singles to Be Perfect Before He Will Send Them a Spouse
(Link): Following the Usual Advice Won’t Get You Dates or Married – Even Celebrities Have A Hard Time
(Link): Depressing Testimony: “I Was A Stripper but Jesus Sent Me A Great Christian Husband”
(Link): Five Things Single Women Hate to Hear
The Annoying, Weird, Sexist Preoccupation by Many Christian Males with Female Looks and Sexuality
(Link): List of Christian Singlehood Annoyances, Part 1
(Link): Single woman frustrated in a religious community (letter to advice columnist)
(Link): Topics Preachers Should or Shouldn’t Mention When Discussing Singlehood
(Link): Lies The Church Tells Single Women (by Sue Bohlin)
(Link): Sick of Being Single / I Am So Sick and Tired of Being Single Alone Unmarried Lonely
(Link): Is Interfaith Marriage Always Wrong, Given that the Bible Teaches Us Not to Be ‘Unequally Yoked’?
(Link): Forget About Being ‘Equally Yoked’ – Article: ‘My Abusive ‘Christian’ Marriage’
(Link): The Nauseating Push by Evangelicals for Early Marriage
Christian Pundit 
I think the female to male ratio in the LDS community is why they want to get polygamy legalized. One solution to too many women.
I almost developed an ED in my Christian college. With nearly 3 girls for every guy I could not compete. No guy would give me the time of day. The numbers were against me from the start.