I’m getting close to the point where I tally the results of this survey. If you haven’t responded yet but want to be included, now’s the time. If you don’t want to read the explanation, you can just click here and go straight to the poll:
Single Mormons seem to spend a lot of time and energy thinking about how single they are, especially as they try to devise a way to stop being single. I’m one of them, and this problem is a central preoccupation of mine.
Now that I’m getting older, though, and interacting with more people who are already married or have previously been married, I’m finding different attitudes. It seems that every time a single person complains about their singleness, there’s a married person nearby waiting to tell them that being married isn’t all that great. Mormons tend to say something like “it’s a lot of hard work.” If you translate this out of “politically-correct” and into “English” it comes out as “it sucks.”
So I’m finding myself surrounded by people who either want to get married, or long for the days when they were blissfully single. Given that I still belong to the former group, I romantically cling to the notion that “hard work” doesn’t necessarily “suck,” and that there is happiness to be had in marriage. However, given that so many around me seem unable to get at this happiness (myself included), I have to conclude that we’re doing something wrong.
I have some notions about what the wrong is that we’re doing, but I am curious to have some alternative points of view. So I have decided to conduct a poll. I’m hosting the poll on a site called surveymonkey.com. Anyone who wants can respond to it, and all respondents will remain anonymous.
There are only five questions on the poll: the first three just ask your sex, marital status, and whether you are LDS. The other two questions are: “what is the biggest mistake made by single Mormon men?” and “what is the biggest mistake made by single Mormon women?”
I’ve left the last two questions very broad because I imagine some people will want to respond more in terms of the mistakes we make that keep us single, while others will want to talk about the mistakes we make that mess up our eventual marriages.
Whatever your angle, please click on the link below to take the poll. Feel free to be as brief, wordy, insightful, superficial, funny, or grave as you like. The poll will accept 100 respondents. When that number is hit (or when I realize that no one is ever going to take my stupid poll and just give up waiting), I’ll collect the results and publish a summary of them on this blog. I’ll try to include the most entertaining snippets from your answers and point out any interesting trends that I find.
So what are you waiting for?