The dilemma of the Provo dater: A guy’s perspective

In my college physics class, my cousin Andrew and I came up with a theory on the ideal age for a guy to tie get married. We based our theory on the assumption that guys want to marry the right girl at the right time in her development. To support our theory, we compiled two graphs. First, there are three characteristics that a guy is looking for in a girl, to one degree or another: pretty, interesting, and spiritual. These characteristics tend to increase and decrease at different points in a girl’s life so the goal for the guy is to maximize. Second, the availability of girls diminishes rapidly due to the environment of Provo. A perplexing tension thus exists, our theory held, for the guy to choose between the girl’s ideal age and her availability. Here are the data:

Graph 1. The x-axis represents age, and the y-axis represents an arbitrary scale from 1-100. You may be wondering why my graph starts at the age of 17. There happen to be 17-year olds that attend BYU. I have a story about that.

The first characteristic that every guy looks for to some degree in a girl is physical beauty. This characteristic peaks in the early twenties. However, it remains remarkably stable for a long period of time, well into the early thirties. There is a big window of opportunity for a guy looking for prettiness in a girl.

The second trait is the spirituality. The guy wants a girl who he can go to church with for the rest of his life, someone who can help bring him up when he is feeling down and vice versa, and also help him raise kids in the gospel. Generally the late teens and early twenties are a period of finding oneself. Away from family for the first time, the Utah valley culture and influence of the church provide opportunities to learn and grow and be challenged in ways they never have before. This leads to much spiritual growth during these years. After a few years of this, many girls choose to serve a mission, which further increases the spiritual factor. This spiritual growth tends to plateau as missionaries come back home to enter the real world, graduate from college or otherwise head off to get absorbed into a career or grad school. Rather than being encouraged to keep up their spiritual lifestyle, they tend to get influenced the opposite direction. Unless they have great faith, they will tend to throw out tenets of their belief system. After a few years, however, of once again finding oneself outside the bubble, the girl recognizes that in some regards she “threw out the baby with the bath water” and finds again elements of her beliefs. After this second period of finding oneself, steady spiritual growth ensues.

The final factor is how interesting the girl is. This can mean a lot of things to a lot of guys—having a funny personality, having an ability to carry on interesting conversation, an being able to play an instrument, or just having a passion in something. The graphs show that girls’ level of being interesting generally increases throughout their lives as they accumulate experiences, talents and other interests. As the guy’s “interesting” factor increases, this in turn increases the girl’s interesting factor. It takes interesting to perceive interesting.

To the observer of this graph, it would appear that the ideal age at which to meet and marry one of these girls would be 29 years old. At this time, the factors are maximized at a central point. But here the second graph is introduced, which changes the selection dynamics altogether.

Graph 2. The x-axis once again represents age and the y-axis represents the percent availability.

Starting out, there is near 100% availability. As you can see by the following graph, Provo is a unique environment where girls start getting into serious relationships very young. Starting at age 19 and continuing until the age of 26, the availability of girls decreases exponentially. This in turn leads to fewer odds of finding that special someone that matches the guy’s traits.

Thus the paradox is that the longer the guy holds out for the ideal age for the positive traits, the less he has to work with and thus the lower these characteristics actually are.

Guys for the most part know about these graphs intuitively, but the majority of them don’t know how to resolve the tension. They don’t know when to hold out until while still getting a pretty good deal. That is why many of them do not get married for a while.