As a particularly irritating characteristic, one has to be extremely careful not to give members of the opposite sex the wrong idea, so much so that the pressure to date and find a partner leads to considerable amount of outright incivility.

The second thing is that unless you have some other basis for friendship, one will be fortunate in many cases if someone you have asked out on a date will so much as speak to you after it becomes clear there will not be a second.

In other words, the fastest way to destroy even a semblance of friendship is to ask someone on a date. One might well wonder why LDS one-on-one dating is on the decline…

Your quotation:

Brigham maintained that in New York, for example, he “doubts whether there is one man in three who has a wife”

is very similar to something written by a New York lawyer in an 1890 utopian novel. You can go to my post (linked above) for the full context, but here’s the relevant quote from the novel (they are spoken by a prostitute discussing a politician who attacked Mormons in order to get votes):

“Well, there was one; and he is the worst man in the city; a worse than Mormon. But what I was going to say is, the real question is, not whether Mormonism will destroy civilization by increasing the number of men having more than one wife; for the tendency isn’t that way. The question is, will bachelors destroy it through having no wives, but one or no wife, is what should come before the country as a serious question. You have no idea of the utter loneliness of the good and virtuous but poor woman in this city. They live lives of constant temptations; struggle on with the utmost heroism, year after year, and with no sign of getting their natural rewards for it; for husbands are not forthcoming.”

So, Brigham was, I think, repeating conventional wisdom of the era, rather than making a uniquely Mormon critique of society.

Whether that addresses the central concern of this post or not, I leave to others.

You do have a point about dating as a structure, and I agree that there’s a fixation there. The perpetual counsel to date and marry gets amplified by sexual tensions and immaturity until it takes over. Implied in that counsel is an understanding that dating and marriage proceed on a foundation of deep concern for and about individuals and individual relationships. Unfortunately that’s an implication that we too often miss.

Russell, your #9 brings up interesting points, I think more compelling than the initial round of evidence. But I still think that this is a kind of case of confusing correlation with causation. Just because we see behavior patterns that are somehow similar to polygamist days, doesn’t mean that one was inherited from the other. I see no chain of provenance between them.

The manic emphasis on dating can be explained by: (1) chastity until marriage, (2) the fact that we are increasingly diaspora-like, and many people view BYU as their last/best unique opportunity to land a spouse because of the high concentration of potential mates, (3) they are constantly told getting a great spouse is the Most Important Thing Ever by church leaders, (4) we tend to marry young so adding to the urgency is a sense that the good ones are fast running out as time passes, especially for women due to demographics of church being greater percent of women.

Polygamist times would have had different causes for the same manic behavior, for example the sense of “good ones are fast running out” in this case is caused by the opposite demographic problem–more than 1 woman per man means women are a scarce resource. So we have similar results from different circumstances.

Fair points…but also having emerged from BYU’s smoldering masses recently, I saw rampant serial monogamy with on-again, off-again engagements pervading the campus. Read the chapter in God on the Quad about BYU to get an outsider’s perspective on it.

While this might sound like typical college life, the difference here is that folks took their prospects seriously and (generally speaking) not as random hook-ups. True, we cannot dismiss the elephant of suppressed desires; however, I am convinced that Latter-day Saints take dating as a structure so seriously that we view the individuals we are dating as less important than the fact that we are dating. The abundance of choices at BYU leads to the devaluation of individual relationships. It’s precisely the same phenomenon that took place in pioneer Utah where men would marry women several years their senior who didn’t speak English if only just so they could marry. In other cases, men would marry or get engaged rather recklessly (whether due to outside pressure or perceived revelation) to women they did not love, believing that they could find a favorite wife later on.

Second, what about the effect on people now of learning about our polygamous past? Perhaps the link between polygamy and the BYU dating scene (NICMO…) is not so much an unconscious passed-down societal pattern thing as a result of young men learning that polygamy used to be OK and concluding that life really is about hooking up with as many girls as possible or something like that. So instead of the past itself affecting the present indirectly, teaching about the past affects the present directly.