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"How do they all do it?" my friend "Noelle" asked as we sat at a trendy Cuban restaurant enjoying dinner on a Friday night last summer. She was motioning to all the couples around us, obviously on dates. They, no doubt, had been drawn to the restaurant's romantic atmosphere. We, on the other hand, had been drawn there by the yummy entrees that accommodated Noelle's recent conversion to the South Beach Diet.
I knew exactly what Noelle, a fellow never-married 30something, was getting at. We were a deserted island of single datelessness in a sea of coupledom. Again.
We compared notes about the months, nay years, since our last date. And when we recounted the social lives (or lack thereof) of our other single female friends, we saw a depressing pattern emerge. I looked across the table at Noelle, a college professor, a strong woman of faith, and a petite, blue-eyed brunette, and thought, If she can't get a date, we're all doomed!
As much as I know singleness is about so much more than dating, I was troubled by what appeared to be a dating dearth. But what really clinched this as a full-on trend was when I addressed this topic in the column I write for ChristianSinglesToday.com (a section on TCW's parent website, ChristianityToday.com), and I received more than 250 e-mails from singles across the country pouring out their frustrated, heartbroken, or simply perplexed stories of datelessness. An informal poll taken on the site shortly thereafter revealed that 54 percent of single respondents hadn't been on a date in more than two years.
While I was comforted that my friends and I weren't trapped in some odd dateless vortex, I was disturbed by one vexing question: Why? In a society where singles make up 40 percent of the adult population and in which most of the singles I know desire to be married at some point, why were so many of us having such a difficult time getting a date?
No Man's LandThe million-dollar question on the minds of most single women seems to be, Where do I find quality men? In fact, the popularity of new books such as Why There Are No Good Men Left and Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School points to the universality of this heart cry. For believers, the searching-for-a-needle-in-a-haystack feeling intensifies because we're looking for quality Christian men. And this is no easy task. In our singles- and relationship-oriented mainstream circles, it's easy to find other singles, just not Christian singles. In our family-centric churches, it's just the opposite—lots of Christians, but where are the singles?
"Since becoming a Christian two years ago, I've been on zero dates," explains Margaret, a ChristianSinglesToday.com reader. "I simply don't get asked out because our churches and Christian circles are horribly void of eligible men. No matter where I go—Bible study, church, singles groups—it's 90 percent women. Why isn't Christianity attracting single men?"
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