“He who finds a wife finds a good thing.”
“Yeah, but how do I find a wife?”
This question confounds many young men today. I cannot offer a 10-step plan or magic formula to follow that will end with you watching your pretty young bride walking down the aisle toward you. But I can tell you how I managed to find a wife as a Zoomer and offer some encouragement to those struggling with both the mission itself and the burden of discouragement.
My Story
I married my wife in the Fall of 2020. I was 21 and she was 19. We had begun dating just shy of two years before our wedding day, and had been engaged for five months. We met when my parents and I visited a Baptist church in Plymouth, Minnesota, the same one she had been attending since she was a little girl. I thought she was cute when I first met her, but it was a few years before I thought seriously about pursuing a relationship. When I finally did ask her out, it was after a few months of getting to know her more closely.
Dating was filled with the kinds of delights and difficulties to be expected from two young people learning how to play the game of romance. When engagement finally came, five months felt about four and a half months too long.
By God’s grace, I’ve found a good thing, and I want all of the young men who are yearning for marriage to have it for themselves as well. I want to offer what insight and encouragement I can for those who are close to despairing of the same goal. If God has ordained for you to pursue marriage (which He probably has), then by definition, you can attain it.
God does not give His sons duties without giving them the power to fulfill them.
Dating
One thing that set me up for success was that I didn’t start looking for a girlfriend until I was in a position to get married. If you’re already in your twenties, that might not be helpful, but if you’re sixteen, take it as a sign that, while it’s good to be preparing yourself for romance, you would likely do well to not start seriously pursuing a girl for a few years. Except for some youthful infatuations as a younger teenager, I did not fully enter the fray of dating until I was 19. At the time, I was still living at home, but I had recently started a decent-paying job in a construction apprenticeship.
When I finally decided to start dating, I asked out girls I already knew. In my case, that meant those who were in theatre with me. After being turned down a few times, one girl said yes, and we went on two dates before I decided I wasn’t interested in taking things any further. After that, I wised up and asked out the cute girl from youth group, and the rest is history.
Online, one of the complaints that is frequently made by young men who are frustrated with modern dating is that there are far too few good girls around. In response, these young men are often advised to go where the girls are – places like Hobby Lobby and the Christian book store are frequently mentioned. In that same vein, I highly recommend getting involved in something like the local community theatre, especially if there is one in your area that is self-consciously Christian. That’s the kind of place where the ratio of gals to guys is about three-to-one and you will literally be paired up with pretty girls and taught how to dance. You can’t lose. Sure, not every girl you meet is going to be the kind you want to marry, but the concentration of marriageable young ladies is much higher in artistic venues than it is in the group chat or even your church’s young adults group.
True, I ended up marrying the girl from youth group, but even when we first began to bond over theatre, and the last show I ever did, I did with her.
For you, maybe it’s swing dancing or a crochet club. If you have to do a few extra pushups to avoid losing too many masculinity points, so be it. Joining in activities where the male-to-female ratio is weighted in your favor might provide more dating opportunities, especially if that activity is being organized by Christians. In the absolute worst case, you could end up with a few dance steps to impress the girl you do end up marrying or a handmade scarf to give your mom next Christmas. Again, you can’t lose.
That’s how I found girls to date, including my wife. The next step was deciding whether or not to pop the question or to move on.
Into the Fray
The first girl was perfectly nice. I didn’t discontinue the relationship because she spouted off some feminist screed or confessed a heresy. It was as simple as not being interested – we didn’t make each other laugh very much.
Because she was the first girl I had ever dated, there was a temptation to keep things going just to avoid being perpetually single. But at the end of the day, I knew that I was looking for a wife, not a girlfriend, and I would have been sabotaging my long-term goal by continuing to date a girl I wasn’t interested in building a lifelong future with. So we parted ways.
After that, it was a few weeks before I asked my wife out. I didn’t even plan on it, really. We were talking after an evening service one Sunday, and she seemed upset. Because we had recently grown closer, I felt comfortable asking if she wanted to grab a cup of coffee and talk. A couple of hours later, after I listened to her talk about what had been troubling her, we were sipping lukewarm coffee and holding hands across the table at a local diner. I called her mother the next day and told her I wanted to date her daughter. The following Sunday, I went to their home after church and, after answering a few questions, was permitted to date my darling wife.
It took two years for us to get to our wedding day. Pressures from her family and the fact that she was still in high school when I confessed my marital intentions prolonged our wedding, but I had seen everything I needed to see to know that I wanted to live with her forever and have her raise my children. She was pretty and sweet. We made each other laugh. She showed me sincere respect and deference. I knew with confidence that we shared priorities and a vision for what a life together ought to look like. After that, the rest was just jumping through hoops.
At this point, it may be worth mentioning that I had an advantage that many young people do not: I had a stable, Christian family. By the time I was dating, my parents had been happily married for about thirty years and had always taken my siblings and me to a Bible-preaching church. According to some voices online, this would disqualify me from speaking into the current dating and marriage situation. But there was ample dysfunction on my wife’s side, and it didn’t prevent us from getting married and building a good life together.
My wife’s parents were divorced and had both remarried by the time we started dating. Her parents had had a turbulent marriage, and the lessons my wife learned from the subsequent remarriages manifested in the way she related to me, especially early in our marriage. Because of my wife’s negative experiences, we needed certain things from each other to be confident about building a life together. For my part, I needed to see her demonstrate she could follow my lead and trust me, despite her bad experiences – that she could tell me honestly what was on her mind, even if she thought I wouldn’t like it. From me, she needed the kind of stability she never had, and not only in the material sense. She married me poor, and things have remained financially tight for us to one degree or another. She needed me not to be volatile in my personality and character. She needed to see that, if I was angry, I wouldn’t lash out, and if I was disappointed, I wouldn’t walk away. She needed to see that I wasn’t flighty in my personality, my beliefs, or my career.
The last great hurdle was to get the family on board. My parents never discouraged me from marrying her, but they did want to make sure I had considered the difficulties that might arise from marrying into a family that was a little messier than my own. Once they were satisfied that I was not walking into that scenario blindly, they approved. My wife’s parents were concerned about her getting married without first being able to take care of herself. This led to her living with roommates for a year and enrolling in community college to start a nursing program. We ended up pulling her out of college shortly after getting married because she was totally uninterested in pursuing a career outside the home.
Five months later, we were married. Five years after that, we are happily raising two beautiful children and still attending the church where we met.
A Few Pieces of Advice
Without pretending to have wide-ranging expertise in marriage, I want to address some common threads I’ve seen in online discourse about relationships and offer the best perspective I can based on my experience.
Don’t wait for the most conservative girl in your county to be available. If you plan to be the leader of your home, the dating relationship is a good time to practice leading your girlfriend into more conservative views and practices. That doesn’t mean you should date the girl who wears the Ruth Bader-Ginsburg t-shirt and goes to the Unitarian Universalist church. Still, it does mean you can date a girl you might think of as a “normie evangelical” and lead her into becoming just as much of a “far-right-theocratic-fascist as you are.”
If you’re currently consuming pornography, stop. One of my greatest regrets in life is that I did not confess, repent, and eliminate this particular sin from my life long before my wedding. By God’s grace, my wife and I have overcome it, but it would have been much better if I had done the right thing before I proposed. If you do have that sin in your life and you’re not sure what to do, now is the time to reach out to a godly man in your life and ask for help. Accountability, prayer, and practical action steps of obedience with the guidance of men more mature than you are only way you’re going to overcome this sin. But you can overcome it with God’s grace, and you must for the sake of your soul and marriage.
Some influencers seem to completely forbid marrying a woman who is in debt, and while I disagree with making that some kind of absolute standard, having no debt was greatly beneficial to me and my wife. If you can minimize or avoid it, you should. For the fellas, that might mean entering a trade rather than college like I did, but if you are going to pursue college, do everything in your power to reduce the debt burden. When I was deciding whether or not to go to college, my brother gave me a book called Thousand Dollar Hour that outlines how to apply for little-known scholarships. The book’s author raised nearly $100,000 doing just that, so I recommend checking out that method if you want to go to college. For the ladies, that might mean foregoing college altogether and jumping into the deep end of homemaking.
Once you find the right girl, don’t dilly dally. Propose and have a short engagement. Four more months of marriage will always be better than having the wedding in your favorite month.
Family dysfunction does not disqualify you or the lady who catches your eye from being successful in a relationship, even though it introduces particular hurdles. For the guys, whether or not you are the one coming from an unstable background, you should strive to be the most stable one in the relationship, because that’s what your lady needs from you. For the ladies, whether or not you are the one coming from a stable family, you need to be able to communicate clearly and calmly to your man the kind of stability you need to see from him. If he’s faltering at some point, you can point that out in a way that is loving and encouraging. Done properly, not only are you not being disrespectful or discouraging, but you are providing your man with an opportunity to be your hero. If you both are able to stay on the same page in those scenarios, there is a way to make both of you happy and better off for having had a slightly unpleasant conversation.
Conclusion
One man’s story isn’t enough to lead to a long and happy life with the perfect girl, but I hope it provides some encouragement that, just because of the evils of our day, it’s not impossible to find a wife. What God ordains for His children, the devil cannot thwart. Have faith, seek wisdom from God’s Word and from faithful believers in your life, and go find a cute girl.
