Critical Thinking Skills

I was going to title this, "Critical Thinking Skills --Essential for the Dating Process", but as my life illustrates, if you use critical thinking skills you frequently end up with NO dating process at all. As the two readers of our blog will know, Lola and I expressed a difference in perspective this last month. Lola feels (rightly) that we need to accept each other's quirks and differences in order to date and find good people. I feel that you should carefully evaluate before you start into a relationship and make sure you know what you are getting into. There is a middle ground here, but she and I haven't found it yet. Theoretically we can agree it's there, but in practicality, it's....not there.

So I thought I would present my side, with an example from my life. I just spent three years in graduate school in a city that has few members of the church. In three years I did not meet one man in the church who was between 30 and 45, and single. Not a single one. Not ONE. If any single men did appear, they were snatched up by the women who grew up in that area and had connections (like brothers) who hooked them up, and by the time I knew someone had moved into the stake he was already engaged/ married. It was bizarre. My dating choices were limited to things like the director of my program, who hit on me in my first interview with him. So I didn't date.

Anyway, I complained about this to a friend of mine. She and her husband grew up in the area, and they knew a guy they wanted to set me up with. Great. The night we are to meet up, I'm nervous because I'm meeting a man who is a member, and I want to make a good impression because I really know how rare that is, so I dress very carefully. The four of us meet up at my friends' house. Let me give you a first impression of "Dave". Dave is my age, 34. He is shorter than I am (not a problem), a fair bit overweight (it's OK), and has a lot of facial hair (not OK, but fixable). His clothes, again, are fixable. I'm no fashion model and grad school and moving past the age of 30 means that I'm not exactly on top of my game either. So I look past all this and see how good he is with my friend's little boy. I put a tick on the positive side of the column, and settle in to extract as much information as I possibly can about him.

I find out that he thinks school is not very valuable, and too hard to stick with (this to a grad student doing two degrees simultaneously), so he gave up on his undergraduate degree. He hates his job but it's easy, so he has no intention of doing something he likes that might require effort. One thing he does like is to go play paintball.

He also likes to cook. I like to cook too, so I ask him about it and then (as he goes on and on about how he once tried the medieval dish of stuffing a turkey with a chicken, stuffed with a duck) realize I would prefer to marry a man who does not cook, but merely eats what I put in front of him and is amazed that I can make so many things. But this is an aside.

Next we find out that he doesn't attend church, and hasn't for the past three years or so. I maneuver my friend into the kitchen and hiss in her ear, "I thought you told me he was a member!" She insists that he is. I insist he isn't and then drop it and return to the living room. All I can say is three years of non-attendance = no tithes, no temple recommend, no calling....and I'd like to say that this to me means, choosing not to be a member. We still disagree over my definition but I know I'm right.

The evening moves on, and he makes it clear he thinks I'm very attractive by staring at me like a lovestruck puppy. I restrain the urge to kick him. We play cards. He cheats. We play a board game he brought. He sets it up so that he wins. I leave. As the door closes behind me, he says to our mutual friends, "I guess I didn't make a very good impression."

No, Dave. You didn't. Does that surprise you?

So here is what my critical assessment of the situation is. Yes, I could have dated this guy, telling myself that maybe I could coerce him into getting his act together. If I had done that, I would have wound up exactly nowhere. This is a person who thinks that things that are hard are not worth doing, and so he has given up on living by the church standards. Marriage is hard--extremely hard, from what I've observed--so why would he want to put in the work, when he won't work hard in any area of his life? And cheating at cards. What does that say about a person's mentality? I chose not to date him, because I saw these things as red flags. Maybe one day he'll meet a woman who will see them as quirks and get past them to know the nice person I am sure he is, and value that. I'm sure she'll think that I am a fool.