The quest of dating-to-marry within the faith in the 21st century

Even with interfaith marriages rising and general religiosity declining, committed believers often still want to marry within their own faith — whether it is an observant Jew who wants to marry another observant Jew, a Catholic who wants to go to Mass with her husband and children, or one of many devout Christians who simply want to marry someone else who centers their life on Christ.

My brother Caleb, a single, early-30s Latter-day Saint working in Los Angeles, wants to marry within his faith because “marriage is a big deal, where you effectively fuse two lives together into a single unit. Faith is a critical component of determining what your values are and where you are moving in life.”

While in some traditions marrying within the faith is merely encouraged, in others it is taken as a given. For example, marriage within Orthodox Judaism has always been strongly emphasized to help maintain the consistency of faith and community from generation to generation. While other faiths likewise encourage within-faith courting and marriage, the Orthodox Jewish community “presumes” marriage within the faith “as a basic element of the structure of the community.” This is “a basic fact of life,” according to Dr. Moshe Krakowski, professor of Jewish Education and Administration at Yeshiva University.

Matchmaker, make me a match

Sarah Samuels is a matchmaker in the Orthodox Jewish community who spends significant time networking single people who are close to her family — a role she takes very seriously. “Matchmaking is partnering with the Almighty and participating in His most important work to bring a husband and a wife together to build the next generation.”

This Orthodox community stands in stark contrast to Judaism in general, for whom intermarriage rates are quite high: about 1 of 3 of self-identified Jews who marry do so to a non-Jew, according to 2024 Pew data. For Catholics and Evangelical Protestants, about 1 out of 4 are married to a spouse that does not share their faith, while for Latter-day Saints, interfaith marriages are relatively rare at about 1 in 5.

While matchmaking has a long historical presence in Jewish marriage, third parties with an interest in connecting people from the same faith show up in many other faiths, even if matchmaking is less formalized. For example, Caleb’s preferred way of meeting Latter-day Saints is through third-party connections, since they typically know both people well enough to “see some solid compatibility.”

Someone like this “can easily imagine the two being best friends, and would love to see if something comes about from pairing the two together,” he says, which can often “result in wonderful dating experiences.”

Scrolling or speaking?

In-person acquaintances at local worship services will always be prized by believers. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has an extensive series of singles congregations set up for this purpose. And within the Orthodox Jewish community, “one need to look no further than their local Orthodox synagogue as we spend a tremendous amount of time with each other in shared spaces,” according to Samuels.

However, in an increasingly secular environment, the pool of devout religionists can still be quite small, and meeting one in the course of one’s day-to-day life can be difficult. At a panel on Catholic dating at the National Eucharistic Conference, a large event put on by the U.S. Catholic Church, a common theme was that it was simply difficult to find devout Catholics to marry. Even a student at Notre Dame, one of the landmark Catholic universities in the country, stated that Catholic dating was “hard just because there are so few of us,” while another attendee noted that “A lot of people no longer really adhere to the Catholic teachings.”

This is why some see new technologies as offering unique opportunities for devout singles to find each other, even if their numbers are relatively small — with a growing demand, evidenced by the proliferation of apps geared toward this purpose: Muzz for Muslims hoping to meet other Muslim singles, SawYouAtSinai for Jewish singles, Christian Mingle for Christians and Mutual for Latter-day Saints.

This new approach, vastly different from the analogue dating world of yesteryear, comes with unique benefits and challenges. Caleb used to use Mutual, a popular dating app among Latter-day Saints, but doesn’t anymore. “You can spend hours,” he says, “scrolling and never actually go on any dates. So while I think everyone can see the appeal, it’s too disengaged from actual people to be of much use.”

Too many options?

This “ paradox of choice ,” where added options makes it ironically more difficult to find a match, is also facing the Orthodox Jewish community, according to Samuels, who describes the challenges arising from this “explosion of technology at our fingertips.”

“Many years ago, dating was a far more blind process. Of course, there were basic inquiries regarding baseline compatibility,” she writes in an email. “But the expectations were different to get to a first date. Today, the extensive technologies to share dating resumes or CVs, digital pictures, and make endless inquiries have made getting from inquiry to a first date more challenging.”

Closing the gender gap?

In addition to these newer complexities, there are also age-old problems in religiously bounded dating markets. For example, in the United States for some time, women have tended to be more religious than men, meaning there have historically often been more religious women on the marriage market than religious men (a trend that may be changing as men start to outweigh women in some faith surveys ).

To state the obvious, having a surplus of one gender or the other in a marriage market limits the options for the gender that is in the majority and increases the “bargaining power” for the gender in the minority, which has a number of downstream effects. It goes without saying that this could result in religious women wanting to marry within their faith simply having fewer options.

But again, the gender gap in religion appears to be narrowing — perhaps even closing. In a new data analysis, I calculated the proportion of single women (including “never married,” “divorced,” and “widowed”) in various religious traditions, defined as those who attend services “once or twice a month” or more. As you can see, while there is an apparent surplus of women in Protestantism, a disparity among the Eastern Orthodox, other traditions are closer to the mean of 50% — most of whom have a slight or significant (Muslim and Eastern Orthodox) surplus of men. (However, the “surplus” of Muslim men may be an artifact of the fact that in Islam, men are under a greater obligation to attend Friday prayers.)

Anecdotally, however, people in smaller religious communities sometimes still report many more women than men who are interested in a same-faith, religious marriage. According to Krakowski, in the Orthodox Jewish community “the men have the pick of the women and the women struggle to find men — there is a whole industry within the community trying to figure out why this is.”

Sarah Samuels sees this strong imbalance in the resumes that come through matchmaking discussion groups, although according to Krakowski, this imbalance is less of a problem in the ultra-strict Haredi community.

There are also some reports of this being an issue in the Catholic world. For example, organizers of the Catholic singles panel at the National Eucharistic Conference tried to set up a speed dating event, but cancelled it after signups were 78% female.

Caleb’s experience in the Latter-day Saint marriage market is more ambiguous. ”It depends on where you live. I know of some congregations that have a surplus of men, others that have a surplus of women.”

Always having more options to swipe is, of course, a distinctive luxury of the 21st century, where religion-specific marriage markets are not limited to the handful of single people in your local shtetl or rural parish. However, modernity, with its proliferation of choices, increasing religious diversity, and general decline in religious commitment comes with its own complications as believers do what they can to find others who share their own deep faith.