Answer

How Do I Actually Find Someone to Marry?

You want to be married and you are not sure what you are doing wrong. Perhaps you have dated for years without anything going anywhere, or barely dated at all and cannot see how to start. Either way it is exhausting, and the advice you keep getting is usually some version of “it will happen”.

Stop looking for the feeling first. There is no single hidden soulmate assigned to you, which means there is no one correct person to identify and no test you are failing. There are many people you could build a good marriage with. Building is the operative word, and it starts with going on more, lower-stakes dates than you are currently going on.

Eternal Truths

Marriage is ordained of God and is meant to be built, not discovered. The Family: A Proclamation to the World teaches that successful marriages are established and maintained on faith, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, work and wholesome recreation. That is a list of things two people do, not a list of qualities you screen for.

The Lord expects you to think it through, not wait to be struck. He told Oliver Cowdery that he could not expect an answer for nothing: “you must study it out in your mind” and then ask (Doctrine and Covenants 9:7-9). Revelation about marriage follows real effort and real information, which usually means actually spending time with someone.

What to look for is shorter than most people’s list. Mormon’s description of charity reads as a workable list for a marriage: it suffers long, is kind, is not easily provoked, seeks not her own, and endures all things (Moroni 7:45). Do they keep commitments? Are they honest when it costs them? Do they want a covenant marriage? Can they repent and forgive? Nearly everything else is preference, and preference is not a standard.

What Can Make This Confusing?

Standards quietly turn into a search for perfection, and it is almost impossible to see from inside. A list of requirements grows by one disappointment at a time until nobody could meet it, and the whole time it feels like discernment rather than avoidance. A useful test: could the person you are describing actually exist, and would they choose you?

What Research Shows

A BYU survey of 784 single students aged 18 to 30 found that nearly all of them said temple marriage mattered very much to them, and that fear of making a mistake was among the most common reasons they hesitated. The survey cannot tell you whom to marry. It does suggest that being unmarried longer than you expected is often about fear rather than about wanting it less.

Questions to Think About

• Am I waiting to be certain before I am willing to be interested?
• Which of my requirements are standards, and which are preferences I have promoted?
• When did I last ask someone out on a low-stakes date?

What You Can Do

Ask one person out this week for something short and ordinary. Coffee-length, not dinner-length. Then say yes to a second date with someone interesting rather than holding out for someone electric. Attraction matters and it can grow, but only if you give it room to. The essay behind this Answer covers the practicalities in much more detail.

Jesus Christ can steady you while you do the awkward part, and He can help you become the kind of person the marriage you want would need.