Dating and Partner Finding
A common misconception about the traditional model of marriage we use in the West is that it is but one of several ways a relationship might be successfully structured that just happens to have caught on due to the expansion of European civilization. The truth is, while cultures throughout history have tried thousands upon thousands of ways of structuring sexuality and relationships, the same one or two configurations keep “winning” over and over again—not because they are morally better, but because they most effectively increase the fitness of their cultures. There are both many more ways to structure relationships than most people would think and far fewer “viable” structures at an intergenerational level.
The only two stable relationship structures that have existed in large societies are:
- Strict monogamy
- Strict monogamy for most, but limited polygyny (many women one man) for wealthy or high-status men
Note: You may be thinking: “But don’t groups like some Muslims and Yeminite Jews demonstrate that a culture can last a long time, be prolific, and be generally polygynous?” Actually, these cultures show the opposite: In both Muslim and Yeminite Jewish cultures, it is fairly rare for a man to have more than one wife. In Saudi Arabia, only 12.41% of men have more than one wife[[73]](#_ftn73) and among the Yeminite Jews, only 1% have more than one wife.[[74]](#_ftn74) Cultures like the early Mormons, which saw as much as 20% to 30% of men marry multiple wives, simply don’t survive very long in that state.[[75]](#_ftn75)
A great peek into some of the “weirder” sexuality and marriage structures that went extinct is offered through religious prohibitions. While Islam features a fairly “vanilla” form of polygyny, it managed to capture some of the older structures it was replacing in amber through the specific bans the Prophet Muhammad placed on them.
One example of this is Nikah ijtimaa. In this form of partnering, multiple men would have intercourse with a woman, and if she bore a child, she would choose one of the men to be the father of the child. Another is Nikah Istibdaa. In this practice, a wife goes to live with a higher-status man than her husband and has sexual relations with him while being prohibited from having sexual relations with her husband. Once she becomes pregnant, she returns to her husband. The purpose of this practice was to obtain a child of “noble breed.” Yet another pre-Islamic tradition was Nikā*ḥ Shighār, in which two men would exchange their daughters, sisters, or other close women for marriage without paying the bride price. So yes: The world did* feature a broad array of partnering practices, however they were outcompeted independently by models similar to one of the two above.
Another common misconception is that the new, progressive direction our society is taking in relation to dating is a more “evolved” mindset when contrasted with more traditional cultural models. We go over the statistics on this topic in detail in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships and The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, but in short, societies’ current “partner-finding” practices are, by almost every metric, utterly bankrupt. People in modern dating markets are less likely to find love than those entering arranged marriages[[76]](#_ftn76) and less likely to find a life partner than more traditional partnering methods. Even rates of casual sex are crashing: The number of men who have not had sex in the last year has gone up almost threefold in the last decade, with 28% of men reporting no sex for the past 12 months by 2018, a stark increase from around 10% in 2008 (while women reported a similar but less dramatic increase).[[77]](#_ftn77)
Society got into this depressing state after a fairly functional dating system—that had evolved over thousands of years—was fundamentally changed by the advent of birth control (which removed many negative incentives around casual sex) and a simultaneous, society-wide drive toward equality between men and women. These two developments forced the dating market to orient itself around a new, inherently unstable axis. The axis in turn was completely thrown off with the advent and popularity of Tinder-style dating, which removed most of the costly social ritual around partner screening. The question now being: If a person can choose any partner(s) they want however they want, what is the best way to structure that search?
First, let’s dig a bit deeper into why the existing system works so poorly. Data consistently shows women are much more likely to sort for only the best partners available to them than men are.[[78]](#_ftn78) This means if you give an average woman a large pool of men to choose from, she will only be interested in the top five or so. When women are making date selections through a swipe-based app like Tinder, this means the median man on the app (as judged by how many interest-signaling right swipes he gets) is right-swiped by less than 1% of women.[[79]](#_ftn79) That means that half of men are being chosen by well under 1% of women. (So no, it’s not just that there are more men on dating apps.) In addition, women’s perception of the “average” man is well off, with women rating 80% of men as below average.[[80]](#_ftn80) The few men with whom women meet therefore have a long line of other women to choose from if their current partner does not slave over them (and even if they do, there is little cost to losing the woman due to her replaceability, so why not cheat?).
While most men are severely disadvantaged by this new dynamic, most women are suffering, too. Suppose you are a successful woman who wants to date an “equal.” (Yes, it is not just a stereotype that women are much more likely than men to limit their dating pool to those financially or educationally better off.)[[81]](#_ftn81) In today’s relationship markets, you will have very few to no viable options for a partner. Most of the men who are your “equals” economically speaking won’t mind dating down and so will be choosing between you and dozens of other options, making it very easy for them to devalue any relationship they form with you. This was one of the problems culturally enforced monogamy starting at a young age evolved to fix.
People who want to find a spouse are not helped by the current pop cultural belief that if you just sleep with or date enough people, it will eventually become “obvious” which one you should marry. This general belief encourages popular tools that facilitate dating, like Tinder, to optimize around sheer numerical exposure rather than strengthening your conviction toward a partner you have already met.
In contrast, consider how culturally-evolved mechanisms that build conviction work. A traditional matchmaker in some Indian cultures will use divination to determine who is a good match for a young person or whether their current partner is a good match for them. What actually happens quite a lot in these scenarios is young couples use these matchmakers to endorse their relationship, enabling the couple to get buy-in from parents and grandparents while increasing the social cost associated with a breakup.
Even recently, our society still had some cultural mechanisms similar to the above system—this system involved a couple becoming “Facebook official.” Because for a time Facebook became the primary portal for online social signaling, and because an individual could choose one and only one person to mark as a relationship partner on the platform, they would have to deal with social consequences from everyone in their friend network if they were unfaithful to that person or if they broke up with them (as Facebook would notify everyone in their network when that happened). Sadly, said system died with the rise of Boomer Book.
To increase relationship quality, Western society would benefit profoundly from the development of robust cultural mechanisms that deepen casual relationships once they’ve been subject to careful thought or social approval from a trusted personal network. Counterintuitively, this is actually more important than fixing present matchmaking mechanisms pervasive in developed Western countries.
Our prescription would be different for many non-Western cultures, of course. For example, in many East Asian cultures, matchmaking mechanisms stand at the core of the problem, along with gender norms that are incompatible with dual-income couples. For a more thorough investigation of issues at play in non-Western cultures, check out The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships, in which we explore some of these issues through the lens of dating in South Korea.
There may be a biological reason why most relationships in modern Western society last for a fairly short time (between one and three years). It could be that our brains have some mechanism in them that subconsciously estimates the fertility of our partner (it would be kind of weird of it not to) and that after a few years of dating without kids (something very normal in our society), a part of our brain begins to assume they are infertile and we need to look for a new one.
The LDS Church represents one culture that has grown quite adept at addressing such challenges (to the extent that we know at least one person who converted just to find a husband … and it worked!). When looking for spouses, Mormons leverage local church subcommunities called “Young Single Adult Wards” (aka YSA or Singles Wards). Essentially these can be thought of as weekly church services where everyone who attends is single and around your age. It is a common cultural practice for members of these groups to conduct activities similar to Mormon “Family Home Evenings” in which two of the singles take on the role of “mom” and “dad” and entertain the other singles for an evening.
Singles Wards therefore succeed not only in providing young, single Mormons with an easy way to meaningfully interact with potential partners in an environment that imposes a social cost for breaking up (so you don’t end up with the Tinder problem), but also in allowing them to deepen their relationships by temporarily assuming a “married with kids” role should a new couple choose to host singles in their ward for an evening.
We, personally, aim to leverage our House’s culture to circumvent some of mainstream society’s top dating market failures by encouraging members to practice dating and relationships at a fairly early life stage, treating young age as something of a “sandbox mode” that ends about one year into college. After that point, our culture sets an expectation that one should be looking for a lifelong partner. Singles at this second stage of partner-finding will be culturally shamed if they attend family events without serious candidates. This encourages House members to more quickly escalate college-and-beyond relationships by inviting partners to “meet the parents” (a common relationship escalation mechanism) more quickly. This social pressure also invites members’ prospective partners to engage with our (admittedly odd) culture.
At family events attended by prospective partners, parents will pull the young couple aside at some point and ask pre-marriage compatibility questions from The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships (asking them about their future together in detail, why they are a good match, what they like about each other, etc.). While this will be awkward, discomfort can be reduced by ritualizing the process into a cultural practice. The great thing about this tradition is that because young members and their dates know that they will be quizzed on the underpinnings of their relationship, they will likely practice their answers before the actual event, which will either deepen their relationship or make it clear it was never meant to be.
Gender Ratio Crises
On the topic of the LDS Church, let’s talk about the Mormon gender ratio crisis and the near-identical Shidduch crisis (a problem in the extremely orthodox Jewish community). Obviously a culture will encounter problems if one gender literally can’t find a partner even if everyone within that culture were to be matched on a one-to-one basis.
The Shidduch crisis is often blamed on the constantly growing rate of the extreme Orthodox Jewish community (due to their high birth rate), meaning that because men marry younger women, some women will always be left without a partner. To illustrate this dynamic: If you had a generation of 10 30-year-olds and 12 25-year-olds and on average men marry women five years younger than them, then one woman will be left over.
However, the related Mormon gender ratio crisis points to another potential cause behind unfavorable gender ratios: Men both deconvert from hard cultures at higher rates than women and are more likely to marry someone from outside their culture than women, as most patriarchal cultures make it easier for a woman to convert into a cultivar under the assumption the family will follow the man’s cultural traditions.
All of the above will be problems if our culture is successful. The best strategy to counter the above is to create systems that make it easier for women in our culture to more easily marry outsiders and convert them into the culture. In general, any culture that is adept at converting outsiders via marriage will not only be less subject to instability resulting from uneven gender ratios among existing adherents, but it will also augment its overall growth (and while we are typically dubious about the staying power of religious and cultural conversion, conversion as part of marriage is uniquely strong).