Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game by Jon Birger

Author:Jon Birger [Birger, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Workman Publishing Company
Published: 2015-08-24T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Mormons and Jews

What about values?

It was the question that always came up whenever I’d discuss various theories on marriage rates or the hookup culture with my friends and family.

“Couldn’t it just be that times have changed?” people asked.

Times have changed, and that is a good thing—especially the fading away of cruel taboos that stigmatized women who engaged in premarital sex or who bore children out of wedlock. But much like Guttentag, I cannot accept the idea that times change for no reason. “The values question,” as I called it, seemed to assume that sexual mores loosen inexorably from rigid to liberal. In reality, these values ebb and flow, often in conjunction with prevailing sex ratios.

Of course, tales of scarce men and sexual permissiveness in ancient Sparta are not going to convince everyone, so I began to explore the gender demographics of modern-day religion. I wanted to show that god-fearing folks steeped in old-fashioned values are just as susceptible to the effects of shifting sex ratios as cosmopolitan 20-somethings who frequent Upper East Side wine bars. Eventually I hit pay dirt.

One of my web searches turned up a study from Trinity College’s American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) on the gender demographics of Mormons. 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. I had never read anything about a Mormon marriage crisis, but if these numbers were correct, I knew there had to be one. So on a lark, I emailed my friend Cynthia Bowman,* a devout Mormon who grew up in Salt Lake City and returns there often, and asked her whether Mormon sex ratios are as lopsided as the ARIS study claimed.

Yes, she told me, the ratios are lopsided. And yes, Mormon men take full advantage. “They wait for the next, more perfect woman,” grumbled Bowman, a veterinarian in San Diego. Premarital sex remains taboo for Mormons, but the shortage of Mormon men was pushing some women over the brink. “There might actually be a more promiscuous dating culture than there otherwise would be in the Mormon culture because of this gap,” Bowman said. “I do know women who have had sex with Mormon men because they have thought this might increase their chances of getting the guy to marry them.”

Months later, still neck-deep in Mormon research, I got lucky a second time. I received an email from a hedge fund manager—a friend of a friend—who wanted to talk to me about a job. I called back to thank him for thinking of me but explained that I was busy writing a book. He asked what the book was about. I wound up telling him about the Mormon marriage crisis.

“Wow,” he said, “that sounds a lot like the Shidduch Crisis.”

The Shidduch Crisis? I had never heard of it, but the Shidduch Crisis turned out to be a marriage crisis among Orthodox Jews remarkably similar to the marriage crisis afflicting Mormons.

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