A few years ago, The Institute for Family Studies published a report about why unmarried American young adults have remained single. Even among those with lower incomes, only a quarter of unmarried adults cited economic reasons for singleness. Instead, 58% of unmarried adults gave this as a reason:
“It is hard to find the right person to marry.”
We don’t live in a culture of arranged marriages, so the responsibility usually falls on young adults themselves to “figure things out.” And unfortunately, the way our world is, you often have to make the biggest decisions of your life when you have the least amount of wisdom. It’s rare to find a young adult with the wisdom and self-control to navigate the course without capsizing at some point.
But in today’s tech-savvy world, many young adults are turning to the internet to help them find a spouse. According to another article published by IFS, about 30% of young adults (married, dating, or cohabiting) say they met online. Various lesser percentages met via seven other means: school, friends, work, parties/events, family, bars/restaurants, and church/religious activities.
Yet you’ll notice a very curious phenomenon if you scroll farther down this article.
According to the data from IFS, even though online connections topped the popularity charts, the resultant marriages did not. In fact, there’s somewhat of a negative correlation — marriages from online connections gave the second-worst levels of marital satisfaction, with only 61% of young adults who met online saying they are “very happy” with their marriage.
Only relationships begun in bars and restaurants scored lower.
Contrast this, though, with the report’s least popular method of finding a spouse. Only 5% of young adults (married, dating, or cohabiting) say they met their partner at church or a religious activity. While this avenue of finding a spouse was the least common, the relationships formed this way were the most satisfactory. Seventy-six percent of married young adults who met this way say they are “very happy” with their marriage.
It’s reassuring to see secular social research confirm what we could have guessed by searching the pages of Scripture.
Marriage is a sacred institution, not a secular one. If you and your potential spouse met because you share a commitment to the Lord, your relationship is much more likely to flourish. Sure, this isn’t true of everyone who “met at a religious activity,” but it probably is true of a lot more than those who met at a party or merely online.
If you met because you both hung out in the same bar, the odds aren’t exactly in your favor anymore.
Additionally, while seeking a spouse online is a popular approach, it just doesn’t seem to be hitting the mark as well as an in-person connection, especially one oriented around God. God created us to seek Him in community with each other — embodied, physical community. That’s the environment where relationships naturally flourish.
Of course, it’s not wrong to use the internet to find a spouse, and there are certainly Christian matchmaking sites out there. Christian men and women have indeed sometimes used them successfully to begin happy marriages. But IFS’s studies should still give us something to think about, nonetheless.
All in all, Christ is the foundation of any successful marriage, because He is the Lord of any successful life.
His glory is the proper object of ultimate devotion for any husband and any wife. His act of redemption for the church is the model for the sacrificial love that marriage requires. And Scripture invokes His relationship with the church as a teaching tool for both husbands and wives to imitate (Eph 5:22–33).
It’s no surprise, then, that meeting your spouse at church or a religious activity has a better track record than the latest dating apps.
