(I recorded an audio version of this article above for those who prefer to listen rather than read. You’ll immediately know that the audio was recorded in my “world-class” sound studio, with the only finest audio equipment available.)
In April, I laid out my 4 rules of dating, reasoning that the current dating scene is so awful today because there’s no common relational language between the sexes. It’s the Wild West out there for both men and women, and so we shouldn’t be surprised if they end up dying of thirst in the dating desert.
And of course, this is hardly their fault.
Boys and girls, men and women are not born from the womb knowing how to find a spouse. This is something that their parents, their community, their culture is supposed to teach them. To the extent dating and marriage are hard for “the kids”, the adults in the room have failed at their job of getting them ready to find and sustain a marriage relationship.
Dating & Marriage Are Not A Start Up
Most people like the idea of being an entrepreneur, but find it too overwhelming to ever take action. After all, an entrepreneur must:
be his own boss
bet big on an unproven idea
pay all the bills
find customers
likely take on debt or other great risks
It’s hard and so the guys who do this successfully are usually seen as impressive and inspiring; “Wow you started your own company?” “You quit your job and now you’re a go-zillionaire!?”
Just as nearly everyone aspires to own their own business, nearly everyone also aspires to a successful romantic relationship. While the former is risky, the latter should be easy.
Romance isn’t a startup. Getting married is not Elon Musk going to Mars, nor is it Steve Jobs thinking different. The path to marriage should never be a solo mission into a Darwinian maze, survived only by the most obsessed.
Instead, finding a wife should be easy; it should be the lowest risk, safest, simplest option for a young man to pursue. It should be “here’s how you do it kid” and “here’s a binder full of women who are looking for exactly what we’ve prepared you for.”
100 years ago, nearly 90% of people were married by age 40; and this remained largely the case until the start of the 21st Century. But now, among Gen Z that number is trending toward 65%. And with dating growing less and less coherent, would it be a shock to anyone if the next generation after them dips even lower?
Some of those people 100 years ago were a lot stupider, less interesting, poorer, lazier and uglier than the average single guy today. How did that guy 100 years ago still find his way to the marriage altar?
Because the altar was the easiest thing in the world to get to. They probably couldn’t even tell you how they did it, they just did it.
The job of a young man or woman is to find the altar. But making the alter easy to find is not their job - that’s the responsibility of parents, culture, community and the adults at their church.
It’s Not Kind To Lie
Even today, many who have married happily and raised children don’t often understand how we ourselves found the altar: it was not just through our own ambition and cleverness. Especially if our dating years were decades ago, we might not realize that we had lots of help from a more pro-family past.
And this can lead to unintentionally hiding the altar from view and causing younger generations to take action which is far removed from reality. As psychiatrist M. Scott Peck once said:
Truth or reality is avoided when it is painful. We must always hold truth, as best as we can determine it, to be more important than our comfort. Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.”
It’s not kind to help others avoid reality even if it’s comfortable. Here are a few of the ways we unintentionally obscure reality, and the marriage altar, for younger generations:
1. Leave it to pornography and other mass media to represent the truth of how men and women relate to each other. When the adults in the room are not intentional about showing their younger generation how and what they are to do to be married, a void is created. Young people will still desperately crave guidance on romance and so if necessary they’ll fill this void with whatever is trending amongst peers and media. Families and churches do themselves a great disservice if they outsource this instruction to cultural competitors.
2. Believe that the 1950s stereotype is either the ideal we should return to or the enemy we should fight against. The stereotype of a man who works and comes home to a wife who has done the all cleaning and cooking and is ready to fetch his loafers so he can rest with his pipe was a flash in the pan cultural phenomenon. The 50s are now used either as the modern equivalent of the “lost cause” which we must eternally mourn or the feminist version of “waving the bloody shirt” warning us to never again go back1. In reality, this is a false choice.
3. Talk about marriage as if it was only a single generation arrangement. In pro-family cultures, romantic relationships exist on two planes. First the “X-axis” of the couple themselves; the day to day present of their relationship. And then there’s the Y-axis: all the family who came before them and all who will come after them as a result of the marriage. This two dimensional shape of marriage is reality but it’s a painful one for young people to confront within the culture we’ve handed them. It’s hardly their fault if they’re reluctant to marry when we tell them to prize self-actualization and fail to convey the reality of the Y-axis; commitment, sacrifice, yes and also a fulfillment that goes beyond themselves.
As Michael Novak, a 20th century Catholic theologian said:
“Marriage is an assault upon the lonely, atomic ego. Marriage is a threat to the solitary individual. Marriage does impose grueling, humbling, baffling, and frustrating responsibilities. Yet if one supposes that precisely such things are the preconditions for all true liberation, marriage is not the enemy of moral development in adults. Quite the opposite. Being married and having children has impressed on my mind certain lessons, for whose learning I cannot help being grateful. Most are lessons of difficulty and duress. Most of what I am forced to learn about myself is not pleasant. . . . My dignity as a human being depends perhaps more on what sort of husband and parent I am, than on any professional work I am called on to do. My bonds to my family hold me back (and my wife even more) from many sorts of opportunities. And yet these do not feel like bonds. They are, I know, my liberation. They force me to be a different sort of human being, in a way in which I want and need to be forced.”
Marriage is Communal
Over the years, I’ve joked with many other parents about the idea of arranged marriages. And as the dating stories from the frontlines become more hellish, many of them increasingly joke back with “well, maybe…” and we have a good laugh.
I’m not necessarily advocating for any arranged marriages here but it’s obvious that the younger generations need rescuing. They need the adults to remember that dating and marriage are by their very nature communal, not individual acts.
There’s a missionary-oriented verse of Latter-day Saint scripture which says that many are kept from living the truth of the Gospel of Christ not because they’re evil or stupid, but simply because they “know not where to find it”.
I believe this applies to more than missionary work and the good news of the Gospel. It also applies to right living and in our time, I believe it applies to marriage. Good men and women who would like to be married and have a family but are left without a map. As fewer and fewer people marry in each generation, the fire of “knowing not where to find it” will inevitably spread to your family tree.
While it’s still considered culturally acceptable to guide or even push your child to pursue academic excellence, financial security or a good career, most parents today seem very reluctant to say much of anything about marriage and family. It’s more of a “hey you do you, kid, whatever makes you happy.”
Parents must reject this bizarre hands-off approach to dating and marriage. In my next post I’ll outline how parents can fulfill their natural role as matchmakers and get their kids married. And married well.
“waving the bloody shirt” refers to what some Northern politicians did in the aftermath of the American Civil War to gain support among those who had a desire for revenge from the war itself; essentially saying to voters: “remember the war? remember how bad it was? Vote for me and I’ll make them pay for it.”
What’s Next?
Most “Build The Village” articles will always be free because I want as many people as possible to read and contribute. But going forward, I will make certain articles and features available for paid subscribers only. I do this because I greatly appreciate and feel indebted to the support paid subscribers give to me and my family of 8 and to this effort of rebuilding connection and community in our lives.
In the near future, I’ll begin to create:
more how-to descriptions for men and their families
interviews with other “pioneers” and success stories
deep dives into topics of interest
Q&A’s
and whatever else makes sense along this journey
If you want to support this work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It’s cheaper and will impact your life way more than any streaming service. As a thank you, I’ll send annual subscribers a signed copy of my book, “Only the Weird Will Survive”.
Additionally, I know there’s something special about coming together to discuss your vision with someone else: energy that creates clarity, action and commitment.
To that end, I’m available to consult with you on the specifics of building your fraternity.
Your post highlights one of the most vital practical issues for parents.
One could very abstractly describe the "old courtship procedures" as follows, keeping in mind that all of these steps were expressly understood by the participants as directed at a decision on marriage:
1. couple interacts at public events (some created partially to afford opportunities for this)
2. couple interacts with both families
3. couple interacts privately
4. young man and young woman consult with their own families
5. families consult with each other
6. both couple and families decide for or against marriage
A decision for or against marriage was possible at each step, with this becoming increasingly explicit as the couple stepped through the process. Of course, these customs weren't universal, nor were all of them always followed in this order. Elopement represents the couple overriding the families' consensus at the last step, or omits the steps involving the familes (as in a "secret love"). Our dating customs devolved from courtship, especially in the postwar United States.
Arranged marriage, the other prevalent set of matchmaking customs, starts with the "families consult" step first, considers the others optional, and excludes decisions from the couple. Kidnapping and conquest, which were historically common ways of forming marriages, we can leave aside, as not really forms of "matchmaking," though in some societies (e.g., among the Bedouin), the distinction between elopement and kidnapping was fuzzy.
The central problem is the absence of a real community. There are vanishingly few public events, such as festivals, at which all or most households and age cohorts would be present and participating. There is only the weakest residual expectation that the members of the couple will interact with the other family, much less that the families will consult with each other. (In the degree-holding managerial class, all of these people are likely to be hundreds of miles apart.)
If one has a real community already, then these problems are readily solvable: inculcate the expecations that marriages will be endogamous, that families are involved in the decision on marriage, and that social interactions between young men and women are directed at this decision. If one lacks a real community, as the vast majority of the United States does, then it would seem that they aren't.
This is a fascinating post. Would love to have more conversations on the issue. I am totally opposed to dating (and courtship) but agree that the current system is totally broken.