Numbers don't tell the whole story

A Time magazine article has been circulating.  To explain the modern dating crisis, Jon Birger wrote a book and then an article for Time magazine to promote that book.  The lengthy article like his book concludes on observations of two religious communities: Latter-day Saints and Jews.

His main conclusion?  Many ladies are single simply because the numbers are stacked against them.  According to Birger, demographics is the real problem.

Some LDS singles will instantly believe Birger.  “Yeah,” they’ll say, “it’s not my fault.  There just aren’t enough guys to go around.”

I have a different perspective, mostly because what Birger describes doesn’t match my experience of being single for the past 20 years.  Birger has laced his argument with faulty assumptions and erroneous logic.

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Your probability of success can increase

Let's start here:

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.

“There are so many options for the men, it’s no wonder it’s hard for them to settle down,” said Deena Cox, a single, 34-year-old office manager who lives in Salt Lake City.

Seriously?  That assumes the ladies will always say yes.  I haven’t been single for 20 years because they always said yes.

The sex ratio is especially lopsided among Mormon singles. Many individual LDS churches—known as “wards”—are organized by marital status, with families attending different Sunday services from single people. Parley’s Seventh, one of Salt Lake City’s singles wards, had 429 women on its rolls in 2013 versus only 264 men, according to an article in the Salt Lake Tribune newspaper.

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.”

Again, not entirely true.  At 37, you probably won’t have six biological kids, but you could still have some.  The rest could come by adoption or marrying someone who already has them.

Successful people accept the world as they find it, not as they wish it would be.  Accept the demographics, yes, but then find a way to the other side of your obstacle.  

We need to reformat ourselves with new thinking and then reboot!  Don’t just lay down and stop looking for the way forward in your eternal journey.  True Latter-day Saints keep on trying.

So if your numbers are stacked against you, change your thinking and broaden your approach:

•     Try competing better for the fewer men in your own backyard.  How are you offering what they want?  If you can’t make that case sufficiently, change yourself to make it.  Reformat and reboot.
•     Pursue active LDS men elsewhere.  Online searching has many perils but also many possibilities that increase your probability of success when used appropriately.
•     Activate a less active single man.  This doesn’t mean surrendering your standards for temple marriage.  It just means the one you seek may not now be worthy but could be worthy and ready for you with some assistance.  Flirt to convert!
•     Flirt to convert also applies outside the Church.  The man with whom you seek to make a marriage covenant may have yet to make any covenants.

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You make the difference

Birger doesn’t recognize any interplay between possibility and probability.  To him, single LDS men are single because they have too many choices.  If you’re a single LDS woman, well, you’re just screwed — and not in the good way.  And there’s nothing you can do about it.

Single BYU men are keenly aware of the lopsided numbers, said Wheelwright, who is a leader of Ordain Women, a feminist organization seeking the appointment of women to the LDS priesthood. “In the dating market, the men have all the power,” Wheelwright said. “Men have all these options, and the women spend hours getting ready for dates because their eternal salvation and exultation depends on marrying a righteous, priesthood-holding man.”

Seriously?  You’re going to Ordain Women to make your point?  Yeah, they’re, like, totally mainstream LDS .... NOT!

The numbers don’t make the difference.  The difference you choose to make in the lives of others does.  Making that difference consistently makes you a more attractive prospect.  Period.

Faulty assumptions feed false conclusions

Birger saves his wildest and most entertaining assertion for last.

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. . . .

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.’”

Birger erroneously assumes that Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake are no different than Latter-day Saints everywhere.  As an outsider, all he sees is conformity.  So it’s easy for him to think we’re all the same.

But we’re not.  There’s a very different culture in Utah, and Salt Lake City especially, that makes living there very different from living anywhere else in the country.

The vast majority of the single LDS women I’ve known all over the country don’t do plastic surgery.  Birger generalized his observation to “prove” his conclusions.  But faulty assumptions never produce sound conclusions.

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We tell our story

If you want to believe Birger that your single status is not your fault, go ahead.  See how well that works out for you.  Believing you’re the powerless victim of demographic statistics serves more to keep you single than to get you married.

You can have a worthy temple marriage, but you need to face your truth.  Demographics describes only the playing field, not how you play the game!

You can choose to change yourself to influence others to decide in your favor.  And you can choose to find new opportunities for your blessings, opportunities God anxiously wants to give you because He loves you immensely.

Numbers don’t tell the whole story.  We tell the whole story by our choices.  I choose to believe God when He promises.  I choose to look for opportunities to come into my life.  And I choose to open myself to new and unexpected ways those opportunities will appear.

Living this way doesn’t bring me instantly the blessings I’ve yearned after these past 20 years.  But living this way is certainly much more enjoyable than the alternative.  And that’s the most meaningful statistic of all.

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