yep. it’s true. i have issues.

In my last “note” (or “tirade” if you prefer), I referred to some issues that I had with “The Oaks Talk.” I feel that I ought to clarify this. My issues aren’t with anything that Elder Oaks said; I’m not apostate or anything. I wholeheartedly agree and support what he said. In fact, on the way home from the fireside that night, some of my guy friends stopped by my apartment to tell me that what Elder Oaks had said reminded them of things that I was often lecturing the guys in our ward about. The article by Dr. Chadwick that Elder Oaks mentioned is one that I am very familiar with, as I have often read it, and he presented some of this same information in sociology classes I took from him. (That’s what I got my BS in, for gosh sakes!) I recommend you read it. However, I don’t think that we as the young single adult population to whom these talks were directed are really following their advice in the way that we should, partly because we take things a bit out of context.

So, to explain my issues:

(1) The big thing that we all got from the dating vs. hanging out topic was: go on dates, but don’t hang out. Since the original talk was given, almost two years ago, I have seen an increase in the number of dates I go on and a decrease in the amount of hanging out I do with guys. On the surface one might say that the talk worked, but I don’t agree with this assessment. Prior to this time I went on maybe one date per semester. Now it’s probably close to four. That is of course a significant improvement. However, prior to the talk I hung out with guys all the time; meaning every day whenever I wasn’t at school or work (probably at least 5 hours a day). Now I hang out with guys… maybe after ward prayer on Sundays for an hour or so. So, basically, I go out on dates 4x more often, but I hang out with guys 35x less often. Such being the case, it shouldn’t be hard to believe that I knew the guys I hung out with back then a lot better than I know any of the guys I’ve been on a date with these past couple of years. Not that there’s anything wrong with the handful of guys with whom I’ve been on dates with. Most of them are my friends. But if they won’t hang out with you outside of the one or two dates that you go on over the course of a year or so, how well can you really get to know them compared with someone you see 30 hours a week? Maybe you only know them in a group context instead of one-on-one, but at least you know them.
I see this as the result of a simple misconception on our part: Elder Oaks didn’t say don’t hang out, he said don’t replace dating with hanging out. There is nothing wrong with spending time with your friends in groups as long as you are still regularly going on individual dates! Duh! Or we were just dozing until we heard the word dating, because the previous section in Elder Oaks talk was about the danger of taking good principles to excess. Instead of ending all hanging out and slightly increasing dating, we should have just supplemented the hanging out with a greater amount of individual dates.
Now, my own personal experiences I will admit may not be representative of everyone’s, and could be the result of the fact that about a year and a half ago I moved, and maybe I just live in the evil antisocial land now. Or maybe my roommates have been whacking me with that ugly stick in my sleep again...

(2) Another line that we all like to quote is the part about the three p’s, which is great, except that he didn’t really go into that much detail, especially when it comes to the “planned ahead”. How much advance notice is necessary? Frankly I’m not one of those game-playing “The Rules” reading and following kind of girls who refuse to go out with a guy unless he asks me at least five days in advance, or whatever the guideline is. Plenty of guys have a hard enough time asking at all, and Elder Oaks advised the ladies in this same talk that we should be encouraging and kind. If somebody asks me out the day before, and I don’t have any plans, of course I’ll go; I’ve had shorter notice than that. Just because I’m not playing hard to get doesn’t mean I’m worth less, and any guy who’s dumb enough to think so would never be smart enough to ask me out, so I’m not going to waste my time worrying about it.

(3) Another commonly quoted line, which now hangs on the front door of various apartments here at Alta (btw., props to the guys in 105…) is the whole “will open for individual dates” after having locked the pantry and bolted the front door. However, we were all so busy being determined NOT to feed or hang out with guys, that we missed the fact that Elder Oaks specifically referenced “men who make hanging out their primary interaction with the opposite sex” in making this suggestion.
For example, for years I invited guys over for Sunday dinner every week. My friend Jason was so used to coming over that he wouldn’t wait for the invitation; after church he would just ask, “so, what’s for dinner?” But I had no problem with that because not only did we hang out a lot, but he would cook for us on occasion too, and he took more girls on dates than anyone I think I’ve ever known. He took me out to dinner and/or dates on a variety of occasions, and my sisters and roommates too. He was very generous with us, so why shouldn’t we reciprocate? He didn’t make “hanging out” a substitute for dating, and so there’s no reason why I should lock up the pantry to him, or my other friends who don’t fit the profile of persons to whom Elder Oaks was referring. Besides, I like to cook! But, now we don’t bother inviting anyone over because everyone has heard so many times that guys and girls should go on dates instead of hanging out, and in order to encourage the guys the girls need to stop feeding them all the time. So, now if my apartment invites a guys apartment over for dinner, it means what? Apparently, that we’re apostate and blatantly disregarding the counsel of an apostle. I don’t agree, but in my fear that others do, I have stopped handing out invitations. And I don’t think I’m the only one.

Cumulatively, though, this is really the point: I’ve stopped hanging out with guys, and stopped cooking for them, and now my life is boring because I still don’t go on dates very often, and that sucks. Yep. It turns out I really am just a selfish complainer. But, the whole point of the talk wasn’t “don’t hang out, and single girls shouldn’t feed single boys”. It was about changing our patterns of interaction to include more one-on-one interaction in the form of dating. Frankly, I don’t see that happening. As a sociology major at BYU one of the many research projects I was involved in was specifically about dating. According to the results of the study, about 2/3 of girls would go on at least one date with anyone who asked. Those seem like pretty encouraging odds to me; and yet, some of those girls had never been on a date in their life. In fact, 10% said that in an average year, they weren’t asked on a single date, and 25% said that they were asked on less than one per year. In fact, an analysis of the variable for the frequency of being asked on dates, showed that the mean of the data was more than twice the median, which showed an obvious skew, because in a normal distribution these two would be equal. What does this mean in layman’s terms? A few of the girls reported being asked on dates about twice a week (or 104 times per year). At the other end of the spectrum are girls who have never been on dates, or once per year, once per semester, etc. It would take more than half of the total sample to add up to the number of dates that one girl was asked on. It seems to me that the real problem isn’t that guys aren’t asking girls on dates; it’s that hundreds of guys are constantly asking the same handful of girls on dates, and ignoring the other hundreds of girls they could be going out with.

Of course, asking isn’t going. I should know. I’ve asked out a guy every day this week, and I finally found someone who was available today. Is it against The Oaks Talk for girls to ask guys out? Maybe so, but what’s a girl supposed to do? When the front door stays bolted too long without anyone knocking a girl gets bored, you know.

In fact, I came up with a few variations on the signs that we ladies could try posting on our doors:
“I never locked my pantry, but how would you know since you never asked?”
“I may have shut the pantry door, but I keep all my food in the fridge anyway, so what does it matter?”
“Of course I locked the pantry and bolted the door. You wouldn’t want some other guy stealing all the food I bought for you, now would you?”
“Of course I bolted the door, some other punk might try to come over and steal me away from you.”
“Who cares if I bolt the door? The polite thing is to knock before you enter anyway, so I’m the only one who it affects since I have to get up off my butt to unbolt it for you instead of yelling COME IN.” (sorry if that one’s a bit too vulgar for you)
and my personal favorite: “If you’d just marry me then it would be your pantry too.”

And, I will admit that even with the vast improvement I have seen over the last couple of years, according to the aforementioned dating study I am still below average on the dating frequency spectrum…which strengthens my hypothesis about the ugly stick, but I’ll leave that for another time.

In case you want to review either of these great talks, here are the links:
Elder Oaks:
http://lds.org/library/display/0,4945,538-1-3100-1,00.html
Dr. Chadwick:
http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=600&x=20&y=7