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Is there anything in doctrine, or from conference talks etc that I can turn to for information on this. I have been dating a girl for about 3 months now (I was baptised 7 months ago, she was born into the church). I don’t understand the pressure for us to be engaged. Everybody seems to be anticipating it happening soon. I don’t feel that way at all yet. Her family love me and would love for us to marry ASAP. How did the fast dating, engagement and marriage thing come about? Isn’t it better to take things much more slowly.
One word – Hormones My wife and I met and were engaged 10 weeks. We were married 13 weeks after that. Let’s just say that we
barelymade it to the temple. 
The simple answer is tradition. It is not doctrine or policy. However, there is this idea/assumption among members that if you’re dating/engaged for a long period of time you must be having sex because that’s “the way of the world.” It is entirely possible for two mature adults to control themselves. Don’t succumb to the pressure – it’s your business and not anyone else’s. DarkJedi wrote:The simple answer is tradition. It is not doctrine or policy. However, there is this idea/assumption among members that if you’re dating/engaged for a long period of time you must be having sex because that’s “the way of the world.” It is entirely possible for two mature adults to control themselves. Don’t succumb to the pressure – it’s your business and not anyone else’s.
Well, I definitely was not mature at the time. I will second what DarkJedi says.
I know two young couples who had sex the night before their temple marriage – at least for them they didn’t wait. The bishops of both of these couples told them to get married in the temple anyways (two different bishops – I don’t know if they asked all 4 bishops). I dated for 8 weeks and was engaged for 8 weeks before I got married in the temple and like azguy said we also barely made it. I think people just want to have sex
andget married in the temple. The only way to do both for some is to get married quickly. I think it’s basic human nature to want to be intimate. Because girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Roadrunner wrote:I dated for 8 weeks and was engaged for 8 weeks before I got married in the temple and like azguy said we also barely made it. I think people just want to have sex and get married in the temple. The only way to do both for some is to get married quickly. I think it’s basic human nature to want to be intimate.
I concur with this. DW and I were engaged for almost six months. It was a long distance engagement. DW was finishing her degree at BYU and I was beginning my career in a nearby state. We did not want DW to drop out and it didn’t seem right for us to get married and then go our separate ways so… we waited. We got to see each other about once a month and we could not keep our hands off of each other.
I also believe that for LDS there can be a mindset that dating is for finding an eternal companion. The focus is on marriage and not hanging out or even getting to know you better. The sentiment exists that if you feel that the person you are dating is compatible to you then you should get on with the job of marriage, children, and family life. I personally have been in a few meetings/firesides where the young adult men are made to feel selfish for “putting off” these responsibilities. From this perspective, if you are not compatible then you should break up, stop wasting each other’s time, and get back out there to the meat market. I once saw a longtime girlfriend (dating over a year) deliver such an ultimatum to her boyfriend from the pulpit in my old YSA ward. “Marry me or move on!”
I recommend the talk “What I wish I knew when I was single” by John Bytheway. John addresses some of the cultural push to get engaged to anyone who fits the bill. He gives his listeners permission to wait for the right one. I still remember my favorite quote from his talk, “The wrong one is the right one, to lead you to the best one.”
I was in a singles ward for a year. It was… different. Sit next to the same person for two consecutive Sundays and the rumor mill starts, everyone else hears wedding bells before the couple even hears them. People are probably jumping to those kind of conclusions based off observed behavior. 
Biology is biology and when marriage is put up as a brick wall to put a halt to things everyone becomes the Kool-Aid Man. Oh Yeah!
The common phrase I often hear in church when marriage timing gets brought up is in reference to the long worldly engagements and people use the ever so lovely phrase “Why buy a cow when you can get milk for free?” Meaning people outside the church don’t feel the need to get married right away because they are already enjoying the one benefit associated with marriage that they care about. That’s right, filing a joint tax return. I wonder how accelerated the world’s courting process would be if everyone cared about abstaining from premarital sex as much as the church does?
Everyone’s story is different.
I know three (maybe more) different couples that married
less than a monthfrom when the groom-to-be returned from his mission. Of course the couple had known each other before and had waited a long, long two years. Still that frightens me. People change over the course of two years, especially at that age. Love is love though. I also know many people that started dating and were married within 6 months. Again, frightening to me. It worked out for them though.
I dated about 4 months and married 6 months after that but in my case we had known each other for a good 5 years and were friends before we were attracted to one another physically. Being friends first and having a long distance relationship helped keep biology in check.
I get what you mean thought. Despite being friends with DW for a long time the actual dating to marriage was only 10 months and even then I was so steeped in the culture that I felt like I was delaying things. I’m a worrier. Where will the money come from, where will we live, what if this? What if that? I want to get married but what about the unknown??!?! Looking back it’s funny. Maybe I’m the kind of guy the leaders like to:
Roy wrote:I personally have been in a few meetings/firesides where the young adult men are made to feel selfish for “putting off” these responsibilities.
I wasn’t out there trying to be a playa, which is what I think leaders imagine unmarried people are doing, I was just a scaredy cat.
Again, everyone is different. Nature and circumstance will dictate.
I agree with the thoughts about chastity playing a major role. I also think that the church’s ever-pressing message that CELESTIAL MARRIAGE IS YOUR PURPOSE factors into it as well. The way it’s taught today by the general authorities, it’s practically, “Temple marriage is your ticket to heaven.” I think this was touched on a lot in a thread I posted asking about why people think the church speaks out about “delaying marriage” so much. Also, may I offer another thought? Generally, in conservative cultures, in which it is believed that the “woman’s role” is to be a wife and mother, courtships are quick. In such societies, women often have limited access to education, career opportunities, and chances to be a financially sound, safe, independent adult. I think the LDS culture in the US and other Western societies is actually quite liberal compared to much of the world, but is still on the conservative spectrum. I’m glad that the Church encourages education for women…but still, it only goes so far. I’ll give an example: an LDS YSA woman wants to go to medical school and become a doctor. These are the responses she will probably be familiar with from other LDS YSA women,
“So that’s your backup plan?”
“Backup plan?”
“You know, for if you don’t get married?”
Or worse:
“Oh, that’s well and great, but what about getting married?”
I’ve seen this happen. Sometimes I’ve gotten similar responses, as well.
nibbler wrote:The common phrase I often hear in church when marriage timing gets brought up is in reference to the long worldly engagements and people use the ever so lovely phrase “Why buy a cow when you can get milk for free?”
Ah, yes. I got this a lot in Young Women’s. Along with the modesty/chastity metaphors, “Really nice cars don’t need to advertise themselves” and “Don’t be a cupcake that’s had a bite taken out of it” or the even better, “The kind of man you want to marry isn’t going to buy a used car.” I’ve grown annoyed with church-lingo equating women to objects for men to purchase or consume. I think they’re going to dwindle, down, though. After Elizabeth Smart spoke out about it, I’ve noticed more LDS friends (male and female) doing the same.
On another level, the non-LDS friends I have that are in long-term, committed relationships, can’t fathom the LDS speed-marriage courtship, and they attribute it to sex. They too, take marriage very seriously, but in a different way. They want to invest the time into getting to know the person before they make that kind of commitment. Outside of my LDS circle, there’s almost a new courtship norm: a period of non-exclusive dating, followed by a period of exclusive dating, and then a one year plus living together situation, followed by the engagement period, and then finally, marriage. I also think there is a popular myth that men are the ones getting dragged into marriages in these types of situations, especially in the longterm co-habitation one. I have rarely found that to be the case. In almost all the instances outside of the LDS dating scenes, I’ve seen the man actually wants to jump into marriage, or even just an exclusive relationship, before the woman does and she drags her feet. But maybe that’s just the kind of company I keep
🙂 Quote:University wrote:
In almost all the instances outside of the LDS dating scenes, I’ve seen the man actually wants to jump into marriage, or even just an exclusive relationship, before the woman does and she drags her feet.
That was my experience dating in and out of the church. Men were always totally focused on an exclusive relationship and then immediately talking about marriage. I assume it was the type of peeps I was hanging with .. We must hang with similar peeps. But .. When those guys marry .. Who is left? Hmmmm.
When my friend got back from her mission, her (stake? mission?) president or bishop, somebody, told her ‘it doesn’t matter who you marry as long as you both have your focus on becoming Christ-like, things will work out’. That sounds so wrong to me. That’s leaving out the fact that people change over time and may have other issues like addictions or anger issues or all sorts of other things that can’t easily disappear just because someone wants to be Christ-like. They can be fixed but it would take a long time and will be hard work. I kind of get the gist of it, but she told me this to justify someone in our ward marrying a girl only 3 months after his mission and he’d only just met her when he came home. That sounds like such HUGE a risk to me. You can’t really know someone in 3 months. He had just gotten back from a mission too and it just seems like he had been girl deprived and she was beautiful and Mormon so ‘Hey! Let’s get married! Right now!’ People jumping in head first like that really worries me. I feel like it is a very risky idea I recall seeing a study that had a VERY strong correlation between marrying young and an increased chance of divorce. Of course there are exceptions – and guess what – those are the ones we see. You may not realize that a couple you see now were previously divorced. When I was in the bishopric in a previous ward, we had a couple talk on marriage in sacrament meeting. They did a reasonably good TBM covering of the topic. Afterwards the bishop confided that he was a bit disappointed that neither of them mentioned they had both been divorced. Given their age and the age of their kids, they had to have both married quite young. So many of those failed early marriages are sometimes covered up – or those folks are more likely to be inactive (since they are told they are less-than due to “failing” at marriage”). I have told my sons and daughters coming back from their mission that as their father I admonish them to take it slow and don’t rush it. I tell them I know their MP and SP and Bishop are probably telling them different, but I explain why I am saying it.
AlwaysThinking, you are so very right. But please don’t judge too harshly. Those fast relationships seem to work out about as often as the slow relationships.
I dated a lot. Had many chances to marry and I never had an interest in the institution. I dated some really wonderful guys, I just wasn’t interested in anything long term. Then I met this one guy. He was a few years older than me and already through graduate school. We dated, talked about marriage within TWO weeks. We were married 4 months later. The quick marriage had a lot to do with my graduation date and his new position out of state. We knew we would marry and it didn’t really matter whether it was sooner or later.
If my kids told me they planned to marry someone they had just met, I would come unglued. And yet, I did that.
We have been married a really long time. And he is still really wonderful. He completes me.
@ amateur I definitely know it can work out. I had a member in my ward once who’s husband asked her to marry him the day they met! It took her 20 days for him to convince her to agree and they’ve been married around 30 years. So I do know it can work, and I always hope it does work. I just worry about people who get married too fast in general, because it IS a risk. I think it’s amazing when the marriages work out though! I’m glad you and your husband were able to make it work 
Always Thinking wrote:When my friend got back from her mission, her (stake? mission?) president or bishop, somebody, told her ‘it doesn’t matter who you marry as long as you both have your focus on becoming Christ-like, things will work out’. That sounds so wrong to me. That’s leaving out the fact that people change over time and may have other issues like addictions or anger issues or all sorts of other things that can’t easily disappear just because someone wants to be Christ-like. They can be fixed but it would take a long time and will be hard work. I kind of get the gist of it, but she told me this to justify someone in our ward marrying a girl only 3 months after his mission and he’d only just met her when he came home. That sounds like such HUGE a risk to me. You can’t really know someone in 3 months. He had just gotten back from a mission too and it just seems like he had been girl deprived and she was beautiful and Mormon so ‘Hey! Let’s get married! Right now!’ People jumping in head first like that really worries me. I feel like it is a very risky idea
I agree it’s risky. It may not have totally come from ETB, but I remember him saying a very similar thing to “it doesn’t matter who you marry” when I was single – and being offended. I was looking for a specific kind of woman, one who had a testimony of her own, that I could carry on an intelligent conversation with, and who wasn’t “needy.” I found her – but I was 30 when we married (she was 25 and a graduate of BYU). We started dating in December, engaged in May, and married in November – and our non-member families thought that was fast.
I get the whole hormone/chastity thing and we kept the law of chastity (as we both had prior to meeting). Isn’t it LDS theology that part of our purpose here is to learn to control our passions? I don’t mean any disrespect to those of you who have admitted you struggled, and I won’t say we didn’t have challenges as well – but it can be done. FWIW we also lived in neighboring wards and I worked an evening shift (she worked days) so we didn’t spend every waking minute together.
On a related note, I think the resistance to changing the temple waiting period policy is rooted in this same idea – that if you married outside the temple to begin with there is an assumption there must have been an issue with chastity.
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