Yesterday, my wife, baby, and I joined my English department for our usual Christmas lunch/get-together. As on other occasions, we were confronted with some frustrated single female millennials. They repeated their claim that they just can’t find a good guy and lamented their fate.
For a while now, I’ve wondered whether the problem lies in the finding part, as in there are few occasions to meet single men in their 20s, or in the good guy part, as in all the men available are losers–or maybe just normal, but losers in the eyes of these girls who rate themselves too highly.
More and more, I’m thinking it’s the first problem of actually meeting some single men. These girls are not religious, nor have their parents made much effort to introduce them to various social circles that include similarly aged men. What options do they have then to meet a guy? College, work, clubs/bars, or online.
Even though college is probably the best bet for a suitable spouse, most students are too immature and deluded to consider dating to find a spouse. And, these girls are already a few years removed from college, so this option’s already off the table.
Meeting a guy at work could work—that is, if unmarried young men are actually present. Unfortunately, in a workplace dominated by women, there are not many young men; only a few married men like myself working on their admin certification so they can make more money and have more authority. Besides, courtship at a job (and I’ve witnessed a few botched attempts) often ends badly with hurt feelings metastasizing into career-threatening gossip and scandal.
This leaves clubbing and online surfing to find a guy. The former is fraught with all sorts of hazards to the woman, who must keep her head up among a loud raucous crowd of strangers surfeited with alcohol. The latter, while possibly leading to a good guy, also requires a fair amount of patience and judgment from the girl who must sift through hundreds of losers and knaves. Religious-based websites like Catholic Match and Catholic Singles help a little bit with filtering, but even these sites feature more than a few guys loaded down with serious baggage.
The lack of opportunities to meet a guy mostly results in women changing their standards to see the guys they do encounter as good guys even if they’re feckless cads. And of course there are many compromises on the chastity front, deluding these girls further and making them much less attractive to any possible eligible men.
As this article puts it, it’s foolish for Christians to tut-tut these young women for not finding a good man at church, seeing that churches do next to nothing to bring young people together in marriage. Teenagers hear the chastity talks, consider marriage a far-off adult thing, and proceed to play around for the next decade and a half with the opposite sex. Their parents encourage this romantic limbo for their children who are originally eager to have a spouse that will support them as they venture into independent adulthood. What we’re left with is a bunch of aging single people opposed to family and religion and prospective death of a culture (see Western Europe).
Sadly, I have little advice to give beyond trying to make oneself more attractive and less stuck on man-children. Even then, the trek to finding a spouse is a tough one, something married people need to recognize. Single people need much more support so that they can continue a pursuit that becomes more difficult with age. Moreover, as the article suggests, churches and parents need to do more to introduce young people to one another and teach them how to date one another properly.
For the lonely young people, it’s a wasteland out there. Married Christians have a responsibility to pick up the pieces and clean up the place. Otherwise, they have only themselves to blame when they become marginalized and disliked.