What Two Religions Tell Us About the Modern Dating Crisis - TIME

This article is so interesting to me, and seems to touch on so many different aspects of our current culture, both secular and non.

I have no objection to cosmetic surgery. I've had both lasik eye surgery and liposuction over the years -- the former an equal measure of laziness and vanity, the latter pure vanity. I'd hated that little spare tire since I was 6 years old and so one day I had it delightfully sucked right out of me!

But the stories over the years about the enormous amount of plastic surgery -- particularly breast augmentations -- performed in Utah have been eye-catching (not the least of which because the Church frowns so heavily on other much-less-invasive violations of the body-is-a-temple principle, like tattoos and multiple ear-piercings in an earlobe).

When we were still friends, the husband of my old roommate continually pushed her to get a 'boob job' because everyone else in their ward had gotten one and he wanted her to have bigger breasts. I admit that that shocked me: not breast augmentation but the idea of having my husband continually push me to get surgery so that my body would better suit his tastes instead of my own.

Suddenly, in the context of the gender ratio in LDS society, the plastic surgery boom takes on a new light. And of course, given the Ashley Madison revelations, it's obviously not just single women but married women too feeling the need to 'compete' in the romantic 'marketplace.'

Also, the reasons given for the gender imbalance in Mormonism -- the intense focus on serving a mission drives a lot of young men from the Church -- are fascinating to me, but just as fascinating is the examination of the marriage crisis among Orthodox Jews.

Multiple studies show that college-educated Americans are increasingly reluctant to marry those lacking a college degree. This bias is having a devastating impact on the dating market for college-educated women. Why? According to 2012 population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, there are 5.5 million college-educated women in the U.S. between the ages of 22 and 29 versus 4.1 million such men. That’s four women for every three men. Among college grads age 30 to 39, there are 7.4 million women versus 6.0 million men—five women for every four men. It’s not that He’s Just Not That Into You—it’s that There Just Aren’t Enough of Him.

Lopsided gender ratios don’t just make it statistically harder for college-educated women to find a match. They change behavior too. According to sociologists, economists and psychologists who have studied sex ratios throughout history, the culture is less likely to emphasize courtship and monogamy when women are in oversupply. Heterosexual men are more likely to play the field, and heterosexual women must compete for men’s attention. ...

According to the ARIS study, there are now 150 Mormon women for every 100 Mormon men in the state of Utah—a 50 percent oversupply of women. ... In fact, the root cause of both the Shidduch Crisis and the Mormon marriage crisis is demographics. The fact is that there are more marriage-age women than men both in the Orthodox Jewish community and in the Utah LDS church. And just as I predicted, lopsided gender ratios affect conservative religious communities in much the same way they affect secular ones. ...

So why are there so many more Mormon women than Mormon men? The simple answer is that over the past twenty-five years, Utah men have been quitting the LDS church in unusually large numbers. ARIS’s Cragun, a sociology professor at the University of Tampa who is ex-LDS himself, said the growing exodus of men from the LDS church is an unexpected by-product of the growing importance of the mission in Mormon life. Serving a mission used to be elective; now it’s a prerequisite for leadership.

Contrary to popular belief, the majority of Mormon men do not go on missions, which typically entail a mix of community service and proselytizing. Mormon men are being asked to serve missions at precisely the time in their lives—late teens and early twenties—when sociologists say men are most susceptible to dropping out of organized religion. Cragun believed the dropout problem among men is the real reason why, in 2012, the LDS church lowered the age at which Mormon men can start serving missions from 19 to 18: "I think they were losing too many men who would go off to college or get a job before they turned nineteen and then realize they didn’t want to stop and serve a mission."

Lowering the mission age seems to be having the intended effect: Between 2012 and 2014, the number of Mormons serving missions increased from 58,000 a year to 83,000, according to the LDS website. If this trend continues, the lowered mission age should reduce the Mormon gender gap and ease the Mormon marriage crisis over time. Of course, that is cold comfort for today’s single Mormon women, as the loss of men has affected not only the supply of men, but men’s conduct too. ...

"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." ...

"Women’s bodies are up for debate," Wheelwright said. 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. ...

Anorexia has become a quiet scourge of the Orthodox Jewish community. A report on the National Eating Disorders Association website described the intense pressure that single Orthodox women feel to stay thin during the matchmaking process. NEDA cited a study by eating disorder specialist Dr. Ira Sacker, who found that one in nineteen girls in one Orthodox community had been diagnosed with an eating disorder—a rate 50 percent above the national average.

One cultural by-product of the Shidduch Crisis that has not been hushed up is the ever-larger dowries that Orthodox brides and their families are now expected to pay for the privilege of getting married. These dowries are financial promises made by the bride’s parents to help support the young family for the three or four or however-long-it-takes years that their future son-in-law may spend studying at a Jewish seminary. The fact that these dowries keep increasing demonstrates both the market power men possess as well as the desperation felt by young women and their parents. "It was never like this before," said Salamon. "There was always a dowry, but it was pillowcases and things of that nature—not $50,000." ...

Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen, a well-known Jewish scholar and lecturer told the story of his attempt to arrange a marriage for his daughter: "When I contacted the head of a prestigious American yeshiva [an Orthodox Jewish seminary] to ask if he might have a shidduch for my daughter, he asked me 'what level boy' I was interested in. Unsure what he meant, I asked for clarification. 'Top boys go for $100,000 a year, but we also have boys for $70,000 a year and even $50,000 a year.' He said that if I was ready to make the commitment, he could begin making recommendations immediately."