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This week we teamed up with our beloved friend Rebbie Brassfield who runs the up-and-coming Mormons in Media Instagram (now a podcast!). As we enter another kind of "mormon moment" as the world fixates on Latter-day Saint lifestyle influencers, Rebbie leads the public in watching closely all the references to Mormonism in media, tracking where representation is going, and making a case for more diverse media portrayals. 

We also get into a fun discussion of Stehanie Myer's Twilight series, and how that shaped our perspective on relationships grow up.

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This week, we sat down to talk with our friend and writer Kristine Haglund about the envying lives we don't have, and particularly people whose family situations look simpler or more functional than our own.

Kristine has had a longstanding, studied fascination with Mormon mommy bloggers, the forerunners to today's Mormon lifestyle influencers--sometimes called "trad wives"--that have by now captured the world's attention. A student of American religious history, Kristine helps us set this in the context of the rise of television, print, and digital media that often does the thinking for us of what family should look like. Even the Church has leaned into producing images of the family that can obscure what family is about. 

How do we get past these images to remember the real purpose of family? How do we appreciate the friction and sometimes chaos that real relationships bring, and not feel discouraged if they don't look a certain way? How do we work through feelings of envy, and the illusory versions of family that social media can produce? 

We discuss this and more in this episode, and would love to hear what you think. You can email us at [email protected] with feedback or topic suggestions.

BTW, Kristine sent over a book recommendation for anyone who wants to dig deeper into these questions: "Till We Have Faces," by C.S. Lewis. Kristine says, "It's completely unlike his other books, and touches on questions of beauty, ugliness, envy, and idolatry. If I had to name one book that has shaped my understanding of faith most profoundly, this might be it."

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"Dating is the only thing... that gets harder with practice." This is how Faith Hill, writer for The Atlantic, summarized modern romantic pursuits in the August 2024 article, "Should I Quit Dating?" This week, Mallory and Diana chat with their friend Haymitch St. Stephen about this article and another one from The Cut, entitled, "How Much Work Should Dating Be?" Listen in to hear how we approach dating at this point in our lives, and how to value yourself and stay close to your values even as you put yourself up for public scrutiny. We hope you enjoy. 

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We told you we wanted to talk about sex on this podcast, and this is where we wanted to start -- with a talk about not having sex. 

We had a conversation with with Fr. Patrick Briscoe, a Catholic Dominican Friar, and Sara Perla, a single Catholic woman, about the purpose of celibacy for Catholics and how they support a large group of adults committed to it. Catholics take as doctrine Jesus’ statement that “at the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage” and thus that singleness allows one to live as Jesus lived, and as all of us will live in heaven. Following the Apostle Paul, they consider marriage a holy vocation but acknowledge that it requires one to care for “things that are of the world.” Singleness, meanwhile, allows one to care with an undivided heart for “things that are of the Lord.” 

Celibacy isn't considered easy for Catholics, but it is deeply meaningful: it's an opportunity to channel one's individual  passions into a universal, Christlike love, and to share that with the world.

Single Latter-day Saints do not take vows of celibacy so much as vows (or covenants) that imply celibacy, given marital status. The Church’s teachings simply demand “sexual relations to be reserved for marriage between a man and a woman.” Almost nothing is said about erotic and sexual desires prior to marriage. We don't see a distinct theological purpose to nor do we seem to think seriously about how to provide practical, communal support people who live this way.

What would it look like to see singleness, and celibacy, not as a sad circumstance of not ever having married, but as a dignified life path? What if we saw, in restraint around sexual and romantic relationships, an opportunity to deepen our sensitivity to the unending loneliness of humanity? Has our pro-sex, family-centric theology caused us to overlook the ways we might care for each other through non-family structures? 

We can't wait to hear what you think. Email us at [email protected] or join our conversation on instagram @the.soloists

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In this episode we brought on political scientist and philosopher Ryan Davis to talk about his muse and favorite teaching resource: the one and only Taylor Swift. Ryan believes that Taylor's discography, more than  a catalog account of her romantic failures, is an evolving exploration about what it means to be good. Though she may have hoped her life would follow the trajectory of the song "love story", instead she's allowed her romantic disappointments to turn her into a philosopher. Each experience gives her more to learn from and to turn into beautiful music, which is part of how she redeems them. Ryan also took some time at the beginning to ask some questions about what we're going for with this new project, the Soloists. We hope this conversation helps you articulate and find meaning in some of your own wild trajectory towards love and—what might be even higher for Taylor Swift—goodness.

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This wild, funny, and revelatory episode felt like  an off-road excursion from Ted Talks in India to the vortexes of Sedona, Arizona and places in between. The topic is interfaith marriage: we sat down with McArthur and Ved Krishna to understand how a Latter-day Saint woman living in Washington DC and an Indian man living in rural India ended up marrying each other. We hit all the questions you'd expect on this topic: how did they get the courage and confidence to enter an unconventional marriage? How did they decide to raise their children? How did they bring their separate cultures and religions together? But this is also a conversation about the insights, growth, and even miracles that come from listening closely to what God, or the universe, has to teach us. We hope you enjoy and can't wait to hear what you think!

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In a recent interview with The New York Times, Actress Chloe Sevigny said, "I think aging is really one of the worst things of all time." In this episode, we chat with our guest Lisa Valentine Clark about the inevitable loss, grief, and change that aging brings. We know though, that the joy of the gospel comes from being anchored in our present reality. How do we stay anchored in reality, and anchored in joy, as we live in a culture that celebrates youth and fears aging? 

Lisa is an actress, comedian, and host of the funny, warm, and upliftingThe Lisa Show. She is also a widow who lovingly cared for her husband of 25 years during the last years of his life as he suffered from ALS. She talks to us about what it was like to pop into the hyper-visible spotlight of the dating market at an age and stage of life when many hope to have put dating far behind them. Her late husband's challenge to her resonates with this question of age: we honor life not by clinging to what is gone, but by moving on and embracing what we have. 

We were so honored to spend time with Lisa, and love her advice that we should live full, gorgeous lives and "invite others to the party."

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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.

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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. 

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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 is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thesoloists.substack.com