On numbers and the dating market

Here's a curious observation that I've recently thought about.  I spent a day recently as one of the two "priesthood guys" at Girls Camp.  For the most part, I like our young women.  Which is good.  I have two young men of my own who are friends, and potentially dating partners, for them, so I better like at least some of them.  But the experience brought a few things up.  I had this conversation with a few of the other camp leaders, many of whom are ward level young women's presidency members, stake level young women presidency members, or sometimes just moms of young women.  Let's see if I can recreate the gist of it.

What was the sex ratio of our recent youth conference? About 3:2, or in other words, there were half again as many girls who came as boys.  Has anyone been to an EFY recently or seen their registration numbers?  I haven't seen their official count, but I've been told repeatedly that it's pretty close to 2:1.  When they do the escort to dinner routine, each boy essentially has two girls with him, one on each arm.  I get similar reports about BYU, BYU-Hawaii, BYU-Idaho and SVU.  In fact, some of them sound even more grim if you're the parent of a girl; I've had reports of 3:1, 4:1 and even as high as 6:1.  I suspect those higher numbers are just exaggerated perceptions of people who don't really know what they're talking about.  But even being conservative, it's pretty fair to say that in the dating and marriage market for active LDS kids and young adults, there are a good three girls for every two boys.  That is, I don't think, a very controversial statement, and I expect that someone with better info than me might likely find that my estimate, handwavey and deliberately simplified as it is, is probably too conservative.  It might be a higher differential.  Math is math.  So far, no interpretation, speculation, or otherwise anything controversial, even if this is data that people may not want to face.  But where this gets interesting, of course, is when we start trying to figure out what does this all mean?

The obvious is that a lot of girls are going to go off to school, many if not most of them hoping to come back married, and they're not going to get married unless polygamy comes back.  The pool of available suitors is smaller than the pool of available girls, so the math simply doesn't allow for any other result.  While this isn't necessarily disastrous, anyone who pays any attention to how the real world works should admit two things: 1) the longer a woman waits to get married, in general, the less attractive as a potential spouse she becomes.  I don't mean necessarily less physically attractive (although obviously that does happen) but she becomes less enticing to potential suitors.  Who are even fewer and farther between once out of the college environment.  Which segues into 2) once out of the college environment, opportunities to meet, date and court potential suitors becomes drastically more sparse and difficult than it is in the college environment.  Now, I found that pointing out that women get less attractive as potential suitors was maybe a controversial statement to women who don't want to hear that while having some of these discussions at girls camp.  But it was obvious what was going on there; and I don't think at this point that we've delved into material that's not obviously true. Unpleasant, maybe.  But not controversial.  Of course, it gets worse (at least from the perspective of girls and women), and we have to confront some things that are obviously true, yet even more unpleasant to face.  Nephi says that the wicked take the truth to be hard, but in my experience, everyone takes the truth to be hard, especially if it contradicts some pet idea that you believe and don't want to give up for emotional or personal reasons.

So, let's dig a little deeper.  What does that mean?  Well, first off, let me make a small digression.  I see a growing trend among the women and girls of western civilization (which includes many members of the church, although some aspects of our unique subculture and doctrine serve as a mitigating factor which makes this less prevalent than it otherwise would be) where girls think that they can be whatever they want to be.  While not necessarily an adverse concept in it's own right, it has some dysgenic and dyscivil side effects, which can be devastating to the individual.  Because honestly, much of this is couched in feminist propaganda.  Women can do whatever men can do.  It's sexist to assume that women should embrace traditionally feminine qualities, or pursue traditionally feminine pursuits like cooking, home-making, child-rearing, etc.  Women no longer think that it's important to offer pleasant conversation and companionship, because they can be witty, sharp, sarcastic, demanding, pushy, bossy, dramatic, etc. with no brakes or filters on what they say and do.  The world now encourages this.  "You be you" is the refrain in a Diet Coke commercial that we see every time we go to the movies, which often gets translated in practice to rejecting the commandment that the Lord gave us through King Benjamin in Mosiah chapter 3 to put off the natural man rather than to embrace it.  You be you means doing what comes natural to you.  Reverting to the mean, if you will, your default behavior, not what you should be doing.

This suite of behavior: bossy, pushy, abrasive, entitled, often lazy and unmotived, etc. together creates a personality profile that I sometimes call "bratty princess syndrome" and I know a lot of girls (and fully grown women, for that matter) who exhibit it.  So, it's not really any of my business if anyone other than my wife, sister, daughter, or someone else in my immediate family has this problem, although I'll certainly tell my sons to keep an eye open for it.  But c'mon, girls—what do you think happens when you act like that?  How attractive do you think that makes you as a potential suitor to the guys you'll meet?  Yeah, it will reduce your attractiveness a ton.  The reality is that being pleasant, loyal and nice to be around is extremely high on the list of attractive qualities for most guys (second only to actually being physically attractive—although few guys will accept a trophy wife that is physically very attractive but not very pleasant to be around.)

And it gets even worse.  Because so many girls are conditioned by society to behave as if they are the scarce commodity in the dating market, many guys are either intimidated, frustrated, or demoralized by the whole affair of dealing with women who act like they actively don't want to date anyone or be taken seriously as a potential suitor.  They voluntarily basically drop out of the market, participate very little, if at all, and will only themselves be successful in finding and marrying someone if some girl who's a little more astute than others and able to mine markets that her competitors won't, can coax him back into the game by encouraging him that she's not like those other girls. By the way, this is a great way to not only find a guy for which there isn't a lot of active competition, but it will also engender in him a much higher than normal loyalty early on—it's not a bad strategy at all.  But in order to make it work, you actually have to not be like those other girls that turned him off in the first place.   Because if you can't tap into this market, your already badly lopsided pool of available suitors is now even worse because of this voluntary dropping out that many men will do because they have been burned, intimidated, or otherwise turned off by the harrowing hazards of navigating the modern dating/marriage market.

When my oldest son started dating his future wife, he would tell some kind of funny yet mostly kind of sad stories about his interactions with her room-mates out there in Rexburg.  And I'm paraphrasing my impression of several conversations I had with him a year ago now; I'm not sure that the details hold up 100%, but the gist of it absolutely does.  They frequently lamented and were in fact kind of bitter that they were coming up on the end of their school careers, and yet had had no success finding someone "like him."  One of them even rather clumsily made a half-hearted attempt to peel him off and see if he'd rather date her (not at all.)  They were resentful.  They were frustrated.  And they were scared.  Because reality had caught up with them.  Because what my son noticed (and said) was quite honestly that if they wanted to attract a guy "like him" then they had done absolutely nothing to make of themselves the kind of girl that a guy like him would find attractive.  Some of them didn't even meet the minimum threshold of demonstrating that living the Gospel was a priority to them, and even those who did had various stages of bratty princess syndrome.  There really wasn't any way that a guy like him was ever going to take them seriously as potential suitors.  And as that reality was starting to sink in, probably too late for most of them to change in time to take advantage of the opportunities that they had quite literally (albeit unconsciously) spurned while being students at BYU-I, they realized that what had already been a difficult task was about to get an order of magnitude more difficult.  Although probably not consciously, at some level they thought all they had to do was show up and Prince Charming would ride immediately to her side, flash a big smile and invite her to hop in his car so they could swing by the temple on their way towards riding into the sunset.  They were starting to realize that unless something happened soon, they could actually be facing the reality that they weren't going to find anyone to marry them that they considered an eligible suitor.

This is true of men and boys too, of course.  If you want to marry a certain kind of girl, you have to be a certain kind of man.  But boys are told that all the time.  It's not new news to boys.  And the odds aren't unfavorable to boys either.  If it's important for boys, it's probably much more important for girls.  I don't understand why in the world a girl or young woman, facing already odds that are not good, would deliberately make them even worse by engaging in bratty princess syndrome behavior, and generally acting like they don't want to be taken seriously as wife material.  But many, many of them do.  I guess people buy lottery tickets too and actually think that they may win.  Maybe they are in denial about the math and think that they will be the exceptions.  Good luck with that.

There are three things that I personally would encourage anyone who asks my advice to do.  First, get close to the Spirit.  Invite it into your life and make sure that it stays there by being as worthy and righteous as you can.  Statistics are all well and good, but the Lord can certainly make the statistically improbable happen without too much trouble if he wants to.

Secondly, pray to find an eternal companion.  Getting blessings from the Lord is not like walking onto a car lot, where pushy salesmen come up and follow you around asking you if they can help you.  The scriptures command you to ask if you want to receive and knock if you want it to be opened, not just wander around in the neighborhood hoping that things will fall into place for you.  Fast and pray specifically to find a worthy companion that you can marry.

And thirdly (and I don't know that this order means anything, because they are all about equally important) be the kind of girl that would attract the kind of man you want to attract.  You can't have a weak testimony that you make no effort to grow and expect to marry a spiritual giant who will carry you spiritually.  You can't be abrasive and demanding and expect to marry a man who is thoughtful and accommodating.  You can't have demonstrated no interest in developing skills that will make you a successful wife and mother if you expect to marry a man who has skills that will make him a successful husband and father.

Reject bratty princess syndrome.  Be humble.  Be thoughtful.  Be pleasant and fun to be around.  You do that, and you'll find that opportunities will come your way repeatedly that your brattier, more entitled sisters simply will not get.  Not only that, you'll be a better person, a better wife, a better mother, and happier in every respect anyway.