"So how'd you make it out of BYU still single?" and other Mormondomisms

“So how’d you make it out of BYU still single?” I was asked yesterday.

“Well, it was super hard. I had to fight off boys like King Leonidas had to fight off the Persian Empire…want to see my battle scars?” Is what I should have said, but instead I just shrugged, “I dunno.” Then I started wondering if I should take his question as a compliment or an insult. His question either implied, “What’s wrong with you?” or “Wow, you are so amazingly awesome, I am just so perplexed as to why you didn’t get snatched up!” hopefully he meant the latter.

At my specific college graduation ceremony the speaker announced proudly that, “60% graduated married.” Granted that my specific college happened to be ‘Family, Home, and Social Sciences’ so the whole ‘Family and Home’ part kinda indicates what type of people it attracts (yes the girls seeking their MRS degree). I’m pretty sure the 40% of us in that college who made it out alive, err…I mean single, consisted of mainly the Anthropology majors and Neuroscience majors.

So how did I make it out of BYU still single? I get that question quite frequently. The question that immediately follows is “so are you going to go on a mission?” First of all, a mission shouldn’t be a backup plan, and secondly—no.

In Mormondom (note: Mormondom is the cultural concoction resulting from combining LDS ideals and LDS humans) we have a cultural standard checklist to insure homogeneity--including but not limited to:go to BYU, go on a mission, get married immediately thereafter, and reproduce like bunnies (order depends on gender).

The truth of the matter is that life happens and sometimes you don’t always get to check off the quintessential list of cultural demands. While discussing Utah’s status as the most depressed state in the US, my professor recounted that only 18 percent of Mormons actually live up to the standard of so-called perfection that we impose upon ourselves. The numbers of “perfection” are slim but they are pervasively impactful. Comparing ourselves to a standard of the ideal, we presume to be on the tail-end of a left-skewed graph while in actuality the graph is significantly right-skewed—plot yourself accordingly.


How we perceive other Mormons (left-skewed graph mentioned above):


This is more like it (right-skewed graph mentioned above):

*x-axis: colloquial Mormondom status categories

*By "average Mormon" I don't mean "average" in the statistical sense--I mean it in the "I'm just trying to do the best I can" sense.