Dating

There, I said it. I'm going there. Because Friedrich Nietzsche said we should face that which we fear and loathe the most, so I am going shout into the oceanic noise of the internet about dating.

Because my Aunt noted recently that people seem to be marrying older, which is true but odd because most people I know don't seem to be happy with that, which naturally begs the question of why this phenomenon that nobody wants exists in the first place.

When I first moved to Utah 2 years ago, my two non-LDS roommates were baffled to see freshmen with wedding rings-out east where they came from, people held off till 30, or at least till they were financially secure, to marry (in Victorian England, actually, Tennyson didn't marry his fiance till middle-age, when he was finally financially secure). So maybe there's an actual outside influence upon the bubble of Mormondom in postponing commitment, but that doesn't seem to get to the heart of it, especially since the bubble seems so impervious to so many other outside trends.

Dallin H. Oaks gave his now-famous "Don't Hang Out-Date" talk to the Church's YSA 5 years ago, and while I agree with his prognosis, I don't think it is reducible down to mere "too much hanging out" either--hanging out feels the symptom, not the root.

The influence of romantic-comedies and pornography in warping our sense of healthy relationships? Maybe, but again those feel like a symptom, an outgrowth, a self-feeding recursive cycle, rather than a point of origin.

Fall-out from the 60s and counter-culture free love and aversion to monogamy and responsibility and familial commitments? Certainly we are still dealing with the fall-out of the 60s in yet another self-feeding recursive loop, but again I hold that the 60s were a result, a reaction against, rather than a cause.

The loss of proper rituals of courtship? Sure, they may have felt overly formalized, but at least their was a structure, a scaffolding, within which to situate ourselves when dating, a frame which we have lost. But why did we discard it? Again, just saying "the 60s" doesn't explain why the 60s happened.

More dead-beat guys and/or intimidating professional women? My rule of thumb is if a dating trend like this is purported by a major news outlet and the entertainment industry, be even more suspicious than claims of WMDs in oil-rich countries.

Psychological damage from the increased rates of divorce and children of broken homes? That feels just a tad too reductive for my tastes.

A friend of mine who just graduated in psychology hypothesizes that perhaps the problem is we have too much choice--through out most of human history, our romantic options have been exceedingly limited to the people in our village, tribe, or aristocratic circle, and that when the marriages haven't been arranged (as they still are in many places today). He cites research (which I have not seen) stating that arranged marriages, in say, India, tend to be happier, because both parties are more committed to ensuring the relationship functions. He points to the easy example of In-n-Out Burger, with it's severely limited menu, because people are actually happier when they don't have as much choice.

Simple analogy could be drawn to democracy itself--there's plenty of valid complaint about how U.S. Congress never seems to get anything done; but as more than one commentator has pointed out, we never get things done precisely because we disagree. We are a politically diverse society where dissenting voices are acknowledged. Widespread disagreement is a sign of a healthy democracy; sure, the govt. could get more done if we lived under a dictator (that in fact was the real appeal of fascism 80 years ago), but I think most Americans would rather live under a clumsy democracy than an efficient tyrant. As Winston Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst possible system of govt., except when compared to all the others."

It's the price we pay for freedom; and in this modern era of wide-spread romantic freedom, paralysis and indecision and greater anxiety in our relationships are the price we pay as well. Such in fact was Alexis de Tocqueville's specific critique of America, that our greater mobility (social, geographic, economic, romantic, etc) and freedom of choice causes us greater anxiety from the "what ifs" in our lives (it was an American, after all, who wrote "The Road Less Traveled"), leading to greater despair and madness among us than among the oppressed peasants of old.

And especially in this era of easy world travel, globalization, and the internet, we have as about a diverse and wide pool of romantic possibilities to choose from as history has ever seen. The amount of choice we have now is, according to my friend's thesis, paralyzing.

But that's just what he thinks. I've been mulling this over and all I've come to conclude thus far is that we are all somehow collectively skirting the issue, and we're not even quite sure what the issue is. What do you, my non-existent audience, think?