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The minor rantings of a single LDS male, flailing through eternity

The Biggest Mistake Made by Single Mormons Poll

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:

Take 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?

Take the Poll

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 13th, 2009 at 11:03 pm and is filed under Love and Sex, Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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5 Responses to “The Biggest Mistake Made by Single Mormons Poll”

  1. SaritaChan Says:

    August 14th, 2009 at 9:47 am

    The link to take the poll didn’t work…hhhmmmm..not sure why.

  2. gurustump Says:

    August 14th, 2009 at 9:55 am

    If anyone else is having trouble accessing the poll, please let me know via my contact form at http://www.gurustump.com/contact

  3. Michaelbrent Says:

    August 14th, 2009 at 10:06 am

    Good article, good poll.

    One quibble. The people who are telling you marriage sucks either a) are trying to spare your feelings (in a stupid way) or b) don’t have good marriages. Either way, they’re NOT the right kind of people to go to for this kind of advice. Find some “marrieds” who smile and actually hold hands once in a while, and find out what they did and how it worked for them.

  4. Mike Says:

    August 17th, 2009 at 10:47 am

    Is there a way to see the results without signing up for the poll monkey site?

  5. gurustump Says:

    August 17th, 2009 at 11:09 am

    The results will be published on this blog once I have enough respondents. I’m currently at 38, and hoping that a few more people will respond before I compile the answers.

    Since this is an essay question type of survey, the only way I could show the results anyway would be to post every last person’s response. I’m not sure if anyone would want to read through all that, and I’m not sure that the respondents would even want it, as it might conflict with their anonymity. So my plan is just to group the responses into types and then rank them by popularity, with some of the juicier ones quoted.

    Look for the results this weekend. :)

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