Evangelical men and women both have some serious limitations that make relationships difficult for them. But there’s one segment of evangelicals that sounds particularly upset at what’s going on in the evangelical dating world these days. Today, let’s look at the evangelical women who perform a magic trick that to them, at least, is both unexpected and undesirable: They have somehow become invisible to the men they want to marry.
(Related: The Unequally Yoked Club series tag. I recently made sure they’re all tagged correctly since the migration to our own site!)
(This post went live on Patreon on 10/11/2024. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and should be available now to anyone!)
The evangelical women who became invisible
In her 2008 book Where Have All the Good Men Gone, author A.J. Kiesling explored the difficulties evangelical women have in finding husbands. Specifically, she explored her own actual experience in what I’ve come to call the Great Evangelical Husband Hunt. At the time of her book’s publishing, she was middle-aged and a single mother, as were many of her friends. And lately, she reports in the book, all of them face the same basic difficulty.
Though I’ve met many women who feel relief when they realize they’re now invisible to men (and I’m one myself), single evangelical women never like nor want this feeling. It’s also a problem none of them knows how to resolve:
A few years ago, a quiet transition took place in my life as a woman: I became invisible. Some of the women reading this book may already know what I’m talking about. This phenomenon, I’m discovering, is horribly common among the female half of the species. So much so that the mere mention of it can bring tears to a woman’s eyes. [p. 102]
Kiesling attributes her difficulty to a 25-pound weight gain, which she said “had everything to do” with her new invisibility. She complains that men’s standards are simply impossible for women to meet. We’ll circle back around to this bit in a few minutes. Just know for now that a small weight gain was The Big Problem Here.
Evangelical women protest (certain) men’s impossible standards
Kiesling isn’t the only one who suspects that no women can meet those standards:
So many Christian guys are looking for “a supermodel with the heart of Mother Theresa” and are so picky, writes one female respondent [to Kiesling’s various surveys], “that they bypass amazing women right in front of them for some ideal that I’m not even sure exists.” [. . .]
She also observes that in the young-adult groups she’s been a part of, “there are a plethora of amazing, independent, interesting, and attractive women and a plethora of men who have poor social skills and who don’t measure up to what a lot of women want…All the girls are interested in maybe two or three guys, and those guys don’t date anyone until a new young girl comes along whom all the guys want to date.”
That respondent describes something we can call “high demand men.” In fact, her criticism applies to no other men. These men are good-looking, tall, ambitious, charming, family-oriented, and earn enough money to live very comfortably and give their families regular vacations. Oh, and most importantly of all to evangelical women: They’re intensely and fervently religious.
For their own part, many right-wing men who’ve failed to find partners complain about women demanding what they’ve termed the 6-6-6 standard: 6′ tall, 6-pack abs, 6-figure income. Add Jesusing in there, and you’ve got the ideal evangelical quadrifecta. If they lack one or more of those qualities, that’s definitely what they’ll blame for their singleness.
Their counterparts are high-demand women. These women tend to be what evangelical men call “debt-free virgins without tattoos,” as one misogynist-for-Jesus, Lori Alexander, put it in 2018. They also tend to be in their early 20s at the latest as well as conventionally beautiful—or as evangelical men used to say, a smokin’ hot babe.
In almost all churches, high-demand men and women enjoy a great deal of attention from the opposite sex. Low-demand people are simply invisible.
This entire situation isn’t new. It’s been like this for a couple of decades at least. As evangelical women continue to age, though, it’s only intensified. So I’ve had this topic on my mind for a few months now. These women’s accounts described a narrative, though they didn’t realize it.
And as that narrative took form in my mind, I realized it bore some major similarities to a situation that’s been developing lately in the video-game market—and to a great extent, evangelicalism as a whole.
(Related: The love narrative in ‘The Last Unicorn’ and how that narrative hinders the Great Evangelical Husband Hunt.)
Ubisoft’s crash to the bottom
Right now, a major AAA game developer/publisher, Ubisoft, has been plummeting in value and popularity like a wet rock. Its stock price has dropped dramatically in recent months—from $23/share in mid-2018 to $2.21 just a few days ago.
Though one could blame Ubisoft’s troubles at least partially on other factors like management issues, its products simply aren’t selling very well. They’ve got some of the biggest intellectual properties (IP) on the market, like Star Wars, Avatar (as in the blue aliens, not the Airbender), and Assassin’s Creed. But the games they make around these IPs aren’t selling nearly well enough to save the company.
Right now, Epic’s running a steep discount sale on Ubisoft games. So is Steam. And Ubisoft’s own website, too. But I don’t think even an 85% discount is gonna help much.
A YouTube channel called Legendary Drops published a video recently about the Ubisoft situation.
He’s not talking out of his ass, either, and it’s not just Ubisoft’s new samurai game that’s causing their problems. Around the end of September, Ubisoft’s CEO, Yves Guillemot, released a memo to the company about the poor initial sales of their newest Star Wars game, Star Wars: Outlaws. Here are some interesting bits from that memo:
First, Star Wars Outlaws’ initial sales proved softer than expected, despite solid ratings from players that recognized the game’s faithful transcription of the original trilogy’s essence and richness [. . .]
In today’s ultra-competitive market, players expect extraordinary experiences and ultra-polished games on Day 1.
Around the same time, Guillemot said during a conference call with investors: “In today’s challenging market and with gamers expecting extraordinary experiences, delivering solid quality is no longer enough.” I read that and could just about taste his indignation!
Meanwhile, Ubisoft’s Monetization Director, Stevy Chassard, has been keeping busy by infuriating his employer’s target customers [image archive]. A few days ago, he wrote a social media post about feeling “ashamed and sad” about those customers:
…[S]eeing how “gamers” react on social medias, wishing ill-fate to companies and people alike is sad. [. . .] What is even more revolting, is coming on LinkedIn and seeing the same comments from people within the industry. On top of exposing yourself as a clearly non-decent [sic] human being, you are affecting thousands of employees that are already impacted by all the hate despite doing their best to deliver incredible experiences.
What a smorgasbord of self-soothing antiprocess!
- scare quotes around “gamers” like no True Gamers™ would ever reject Ubisoft games
- a weird redefinition of what is very obviously expressions of disappointment in Ubisoft’s offerings as “hate”
- calling disappointed customers and critics “non-decent human beings” for expressing criticism of Ubisoft games
- blaming customers for threatening Ubisoft’s employees’ jobs when it’s Ubisoft that’d be firing them
- turning gamers’ refusal to buy games that don’t interest them into a sign of cruelty to Ubisoft employees who are just “doing their best”
Goodness, that manipulative and poorly-considered post really had a little something for everyone!
In a lot of ways, Ubisoft’s situation sounds a lot like what’s going on in the evangelical dating world—and evangelicalism itself. I can hear them cry out in the night:
How very DARE our customers not line up around the virtual block to buy the products we have created for them. These are awesome products that anyone should be thrilled to buy. WHY ARE THEY NOT BUYING OUR PRODUCTS?
Right now, evangelical women are disadvantaged sellers in a buyer’s market
Recently, I showed you a striking increase in young men getting involved with Reformed/Calvinist flavors of evangelicalism.
Evangelical women would be well-advised not to be delighted at this news. It won’t make the Great Evangelical Husband Hunt any easier. In truth, it’ll likely only make things even more difficult.
Younger women are rightly leaving evangelicalism behind, while younger men remain—and become more hardline. Men involved in such flavors of Christianity are almost always “redpilled” anyway. That means the remaining young men of evangelicalism won’t be interested at all in older women, nor in any women they view as too sexually soiled or encumbered (mostly by previous marriages/children and debts) to ever consider marrying. So greater percentages of women in evangelical churches may slide into invisibility as their church demographics begin to skew younger and male.
Invisible men will continue to be invisible, sure. But high-demand men will likely continue to see their market value rise. That rising value will only make them more selective. It is unlikely that a shortage of young evangelical women will change much there. Men control evangelical culture, and they have decided that marriage is a transaction—one that overwhelmingly favors men.
Evangelical women compete for “buyers” in their extremely transactional culture
One of Ubisoft’s big mistakes was trying to guilt people into buying their products. As we’ve seen already, the gaming world just about exploded over those leaks and social media posts. It all reminded me of a meme that was popular a few years ago:
Of course, video games do and should exist in an extremely transactional culture. Ubisoft keeps trying to act like that’s not the case, and they keep getting smacked down when gamers don’t cooperate with their vision. Nobody is going to give Ubisoft money unless they want something Ubisoft sells. That’s as it should be.
I’ve seen evangelical men talk about marriage in strikingly similar ways. Many of these men don’t see any real benefits to themselves—only hassles, a total lack of free time forever, and eventual divorce costs and child support/alimony. In hardline evangelical men’s spaces online, they often talk about men’s and women’s “marriage market value” and “sexual market value.” Women in that community sometimes seem aware of how both values work. Often, men talk about those values in ways that would look very familiar to anyone keeping an eye on the online gaming world right now. One party—Ubisoft, evangelical recruiters, women—seek to sell something to another: gamers, anybody, high-demand men.
The buyers in all cases don’t need anything on the table. Moreover, they know they don’t. They’ll only buy if they jolly well want to. But they also know that the sellers here desperately need buyers. So the buyers can walk away from the table any time they want.
And often, that’s what high-demand evangelical men do. They have all the time in the world to wait for the right woman. It’s evangelical women who face an inexorable biological deadline.
(Related: How evangelical men try to divorce-proof their marriages.)
Women simply don’t have much negotiating power in the Great Evangelical Husband Hunt
To enhance their appeal, evangelical women keep pushing forward positive qualities about themselves that they want high-demand men to consider in making marital decisions. Sure, they may be (insert low-demand trait here), but look how much they love children! Or how well they can cook! Or how Jesusy they are! Ubisoft did the same thing in acting like their employees’ hard work alone merited sales of their games.
These attempts fail every time for both Ubisoft and evangelical women.
Very few invisible women in evangelicalism understand what their marriage targets want in marriage. They generally tend to oversimplify men’s rejection as being the product of pickiness or wanting the impossible. Worse, they tend to put forward facets of themselves that they think should mitigate the perceived demands of high-demand men—but those facets don’t actually matter at all to the ones they want to marry. High-demand men in this culture don’t care about their wives’ educations, earning power, or travel experience. Often, they even view such factors as negative.
Yes, what I describe is extremely transactional and one-directional. This mindset is and should be repulsive to anybody who values enthusiastic consent and two-way, mutually-fulfilling relationships. But we’re talking about a very transactional culture here. In evangelicalism, women are now disadvantaged sellers in a ridiculously lopsided buyer’s market. Evangelical women are trying to negotiate with high-demand men, but they don’t realize yet that they have zero negotiating power.
Understanding the market is key to success
Despite evangelical women’s grand efforts to present themselves as perfect wife material, though, high-demand men ignore them. As one single evangelical woman, Cassidy Rich, wrote:
I have a friend who started going to my church almost a year after I started going. Within three months of attending the church, she was asked out on dates by two different guys. I was nearly in shock when I heard this. “I’ve been going there for a year and not a single guy has shown interest in me!” I didn’t show it at the time, but I was angry – angry that she clearly had something that I didn’t. She had what guys were looking for.
This young woman doesn’t blame anyone else for her inability to find a husband. That’s good. Alas, she dissolves any potential newfound introspection into a heavy-lifting “maybe” that will likely never be fully examined:
I, on the other hand, clearly didn’t have (and still don’t) whatever it is that guys want in a girl. I’m not the type of girl that guys ask out, I started telling myself. Maybe I just don’t possess what great Christian guys are after.
Like A.J. Kiesling, she can’t move from men at church aren’t asking her out to asking what makes her different from the women they do ask out.
For Kiesling, I suspect she’s unable to recognize that her status as a divorced single mother and her age have much more to do with her invisibility than her weight did. But her choice of matrimonial prey might have even more to do with her frustration. After all, as she tells us in her book, she lost the 25 pounds she was certain were making her invisible.
But 16 years after writing a book about feeling invisible to men, as far as I can ascertain A.J. Kiesling still hasn’t remarried.
The parallel universe that evangelical women inhabit
One thing stands out to me, something very sad and strange about all of the “sellers” we’re talking about today. They all employ the same kinds of self-soothing platitudes about how utterly unreasonable “buyers” are. They try to blame “buyers” for being so intractable and unreasonable.
Again, however, we’re dealing with a very specific end of evangelicalism. There, high-demand men set the prices. If a woman can’t meet those prices, she is simply not recognized as a potential marriage option. She’s invisible to them. She gets filtered out of their mental search results as surely as if they were setting up rejection filters on a dating app. The high-demand level is not one that most evangelicals ever reach. As one evangelical woman wrote in August:
It’s almost like Brett [McCracken, a fairly big name among Millennial Calvinists] and I (and all these other people) inhabit two parallel universes.
In one, Christians have put singleness on some kind of untouchable pedestal, everyone is too nervous to suggest that maybe marriage is a good thing for a single Christian to pursue and, for goodness sake, the last thing anyone in the church needs to do is talk more about singleness.
In the other, single Christians feel isolated, ignored and invisible in their church communities. If they are male, they are regarded with shameful suspicion. If they are female, they are treated with shameful pity. And both are viewed as abnormal, perhaps even aberrant, disciples of Jesus.
But once we dip beneath that level, though, a lot of interesting things start happening.
Obviously, any solution for evangelical women won’t look the same as it does for AAA game publishers
At Ubisoft, its leaders seem to think that gamers keep demanding the absolute impossible of them as a AAA studio: incredible real-world-feeling experiences pumped out annually.
But plenty of games don’t fit that bill and still do very well in the market. As I gaze down my own Steam wishlist, I see
- Stray, an award-winning action game starring a brave orange tabby
- Tiny Glade, an award-winning diorama builder—and its brand-new, evil twin brother Skippy, the very intriguing Dystopika
- Memoriapolis, a Classical-Rome-themed city builder (this entire genre is my kryptonite)
Most of these games are from almost-unknown development studios and publishers. They range in cost from $8 to $25. All have great reviews from players, some “overwhelmingly” so.
It seems like all a studio/publisher needs to do to make sales is understand their market well enough to make games that their market’s consumers will actually buy in huge numbers. As difficult as that ask might be for AAA game studios, it might be even harder for evangelical women to manage.
I don’t know exactly what their solution’s going to be. It’s not “settling,” at least. But I know what it won’t look like. Unless a marriage-minded evangelical woman gets her emotional payoff from blaming high-demand men rather than actually getting married, she doesn’t have a lot of options here. Evangelical men seem to be growing less and less interested in negotiating. Successful Evangelical Husband Hunts will require women to figure out what high-demand men in their culture want and then offer it—or else they’ll need to accept that thousands of lower-demand women are competing with them for every single one of those men, so their chances of success are inevitably much lower.
If you go to any evangelical church and look at the married couples, chances are extremely good that one or both spouses will be overweight—and neither will likely be wealthy. If you want an even more dramatic illustration, then hie thee hither to your local shopping center or megamarket. And remember, around 1/2 to 2/3 of Gen Z still belongs at least nominally to some flavor of Christianity. The couples walking together and holding hands there will similarly destroy that thinking. Most people aren’t rich young supermodels, but many of us eventually find love in a happy, fulfilling relationship.
But those couples, too, are largely invisible to evangelicals on either side of the Great Evangelical Husband Hunt.
NEXT UP: The Unequally Yoked Club gets a (re)boot to the rear end with a minor celebrity Christian’s boneheaded proclamation about mixed-faith marriages. See you soon!
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