The Religious Dating Game

The dating process in America is often a disorganized experiment. Singles typically repeat the date/break-up cycle into their late 20s or early 30s, until they pick up the skills to select the right mate.  The system seems designed to instill caution: a marriage proposal before two or more years of dating is considered reckless and cohabitation before engagement is often viewed a mandatory step to test the couple’s ability to live together.  The ideal is to become an educated consumer and to avoid making a lifelong mistake.

Not suprisingly, religious communities are deeply suspicious of this system. Adolescent dating may teach singles how to hook a mate, but it also creates an environment that encourages premarital sex, which, according to just about every traditional western religion, cheapens marriage. The most reliable way to solve this problem is to strongly discourage dating before singles are ready for marriage. But by doing so the traditional religious communities sabotage the social skills singles need to land a husband or wife on their own.  So what’s a religious culture to do?

Evangelical Protestants, Catholics, Mormons and Orthodox Jews share roughly the same traditional ideal of marriage, but each has radically different ways of pairing off:  Mormons and Orthodox Jews have developed alternative ways to engineer marriages, while Catholic and evangelical Christian singles are often stuck fending for themselves.

The Veteran Minorities

Mormons and Orthodox Jews are the furthest from the mainstream norm; both groups are also veteran embattled minorities who’ve struggled for generations to avoid melting into the surrounding culture.

The Mormon community has an extremely structured way of marrying off their singles.  After returning from their mission, single Mormons are encouraged to worship in “singles wards” along with every other unmarried under-30 Mormon in the area.  The Mormon Church, which places a heavy theological emphasis on marriage, sets the wards up as dating pools under the supervision of a Bishop who often sees pairing off his charges as a primary goal. 

Singles are under massive societal pressure to marry--and marry early.  As one Mormon man who was raised in Provo, Utah and attended BYU told me, “When I got married at 26, I was made to feel old and people were starting to wonder whether I was gay.”  Dating in this environment is exclusively marriage-centered and it is not uncommon for couples to get engaged after only knowing each other for a few weeks.   

The Mormon system also presents a hopeful paradox.  Nationally, a young age of marriage is linked to significantly higher divorce rates. Yet Mormons have both a young age of marriage and some of the lowest rates of divorce in the nation. 

Orthodox Jews have a less formal way of dealing with the problem. Matchmaking is practically the unofficial pastime, with blind dates arranged on a massive scale.The Orthodox Jewish community of Baltimore has even gone to the extreme of offering $2,500 bounties to anyone who successfully sets up a marriage for a girl from their city.

The more traditional end of the Orthodox Jewish world maintains a strict separation between men and women in order to discourage premarital sex.  By relying on professional and amateur matchmakers they solve the problem of adolescents needing to develop sexual social skills and increase the importance of non-physical factors in marriage matches. This community also tends to set engagements as quickly as any Mormon.

Ideally, matchmaking filters partners for compatibility and spiritual factors before physical attraction even comes into play.  Judith Pieprz, who became an Orthodox Jew after being raised in a more secular home thinks the system produces healthier marriages, “Even though the two [singles] have nothing in common except physical attraction, you fool yourselves into staying together," says Pieprz. "In religious dating, you start square one with the basic things in common.” 

However, the Orthodox Jewish matchmaking system has its problems. Anecdotal reports of higher divorce rates among couples who marry young lead many critics to blame the lack of life experience and their matchmakers’ focus on credentials over compatibility.