The Soloists

What do you see when you peel back the curtain of a dating app? What does the app assume about love, and how you find it? We sat down with Michael Patterson, the president of the Mutual Dating App, to ask how the app envisions the arc from swiping to commitment. Michael was Mutual's first employee, so he has watched the app grow, learn, and improve over time. Though he's seen thousands of couples find love and get married, he's also heard countless complaints about dating apps, from swiping fatigue to safety concerns. 

Michael shares his own love story, in this conversation; he met his wife as a teen and dated only her until they married years later. This means he doesn't have first-hand experience with swiping for love, but he does have wisdom on what commitment is like: you get to a point where other options--no matter how many of them there are  -- simply aren't real to you. Can the rest of us get there, in our tech-enabled dating world, designed to feed us new options endlessly? Michael shares tips on how to maximize the effectiveness of dating apps and, most importantly, not lose sight of what we want along the way.

Unmarried people are less religious than married people on almost every measure, according to Pew's Religious Landscape Survey and further findings from researcher Ryan Burge and an analysis by MIssion . In this episode, we lay out the data and play with one possible explanation: that religion, particularly for Latter-day Saints, is so tightly bundled with family life that singles struggle to see a compelling future there. Latter-day Saint singles are expected to wait until the next life, when marriage will be a guarantee, to socially, sexually, and spiritually develop in ways they were primed to look forward to their whole lives, rather than to pursue these experiences through other lifestyle options.  How many can tolerate that tradeoff? 

Our guest in this episode is the brilliant Jana Reiss, author of the 2019 book The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church. She and her research partner, Benjamin Knoll, have recently conducted a follow-up survey and are working on a book that will specifically focus on the experiences and characteristics of two groups: those who have left the Church, and those who have experienced a faith transition but have chosen to remain members.  Jana is also in an interfaith marriage, and shares from her experience on the topic.

We begin the conversation by reading an excerpt from Nicole Hardy's viral New York Times piece from 2011, "Single, Female, Mormon Alone", a must-read for everyone interested in this topic, and hypothesize why Nicole ends up deciding that she can't develop the way she wants to within the confines of the Church.

What if there were another solution, besides exiting? What if the liminal place that many singles feel themselves in were seen as a rich site for spiritual growth, and that the choices and compromises singles end up making were understood in context? Where do liminal people need more from religious communities; and where can they help a religion remember what it is really about?

Let us know what you think -- what resonates with you, what we missed, and what seems like total quackery. You can join a public conversation on this on our instagram or substack. 

Today we're taking up a topic that will likely be familiar to all of you who have spent more time dating than you thought you would: am I too picky? We invited our friend, Benjamin Harrison--whom both of us have gone on dates with--to join us in the conversation. We discuss some of the reasons, both silly and serious, that none of us pursued second dates with each other. Were we being too picky?

The question tends towards circuitous thinking; the answer is often opaque, and the resulting confusion leads us to wonder if we're doing something wrong. Spencer W. Kimball infamously taught that "almost any good man and any good woman can have happiness and a successful marriage if both are willing to pay the price." What is the price he's referring to, and is it worth it? Are we not good, if we find this difficult to implement?

On the other hand, modern dating culture has us convinced that we can spend all of our youth screening and testing out potential partners with the result that we may spend years of our lives off the mark from where we want to be, forever delaying decisions due to anxious decision-making.

We draw on our own experiences to try to find anchors and guideposts in answering this question, am I too picky?  Let us know what resonates with you by joining the conversation! You can email us at [email protected], or talk to us on instagram, @the.soloists.

This week, we're sharing a conversation we had with Tim and Aubrey Chaves from Faith matters about why we wanted to launch this podcast, The Soloists. It was fun being interviewed by a married couple with kids; we focused the question on how married people sometimes--with the best of intentions--miss the mark when talking to singles in the Church.

We discuss how being single can be an isolating experience, especially in a culture that often views marriage as the ultimate milestone. We share deeply personal stories about what it’s like to navigate a church community where singleness sometimes feels like a problem to be solved rather than a valid and whole way of being, and season or situation of life that all of us, no matter our marital status, can authentically relate to in some way.

We hope you enjoy this conversation, and let us know what you think!

Welcome to the Soloists! We're here to talk about connection and beauty in this lonely world of ours, using the existentially-chaotic experience of being single Mormons as our launch point.

This week, we do a deep dive on the Latter-day Saint singles ward. Love them or hate them, the LDS singles ward might be the most elaborate experiment with singles-exclusive religious community that is out there, anywhere. Since the LDS Church recently raised the age limit for singles wards, now is the perfect time to assess their legacy.

A singles ward is a Latter-day Saint congregation made up only of single people. These wards don’t just provide a religious experience, but also a wrap-around social system for these singles. While it’s not a requirement, it’s  culturally encouraged for all single people, previously between the ages of 18-31 and now between 18-35, to go to a singles ward until they get married or until they age out. Once you’re in this singles system, if you don’t get yourself hitched, you could go a long time without being around married people or children or the elderly at church. The question we’ll be asking in our conversation today is how the constant focus on marital status affects our belonging in the Church community.

Presumably, singles wards help singles feel a sense of belonging during what might be an isolating life phase, especially in such a family-centered church.  But when it comes to belonging, how do you highlight what might be an obstacle to belonging without constantly reminding people that they don't belong? How do you build special venues to support a group without ghettoizing them from the broader community? Is it possible that in shining such a blinding light on marital status, people are made to feel more vulnerable than they might otherwise feel?

To answer these questions, we'll be talking with a scholar--BYU English professor Sharon Harris--who researched and published on the history of singles wards.