There is a right and wrong way to swipe right. Today 17% of all marriages begin through an online dating site. “Swiping right,” of course refers to the process of accepting a virtual connection on a dating site.
There are more than 8,000 online dating sites and apps in operation worldwide. In the United States, there are more than 2,500 online dating services, with 1,000 new ones opening each year.
Americans have fallen in love with online dating. The dating scene in the United States has undergone huge changes in the past decade. A third of all Americans use a dating site and learning to write a dating profile has become a necessary life skill. When looking for a romantic connection, it is now unusual not to use a dating app. Millennials are the generation that made online dating mainstream.
Research shows that people who meet online often head to the altar sooner than those who meet through friends, at work, at a bar, or other places like that. Michael Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Stanford, said there are a couple of reasons for this.
“You can be more selective because you have a bigger group to select from,” he told The Washington Post. “A lot of the information-gathering that courtship is really about is sped up by the information you can gather from the profiles and from a person before actually meeting them.”
Whether you are using a dating app or not, everyone comes to the dating scene with a mental checklist. Having a checklist is important. Almost all complex operations where failure has a high cost, like skydiving or flying a plane, have a routine checklist. There are numerous reasons for having a checklist: reduces error, improves accountability, encourages reflection, supports communication, and increases efficiency. We’d do well to guard our hearts with a checklist prior to dating and marriage.
Yet the checklist most people use in dating is sadly inadequate. Research has shown that most men choose women based primarily on physical attractiveness. Likewise, most women choose the men they are going to date based on five criteria: power, status, athleticism, looks, and money (PSALM). In terms of these characteristics, women desire to “marry up.” Women tend to marry men who are older, taller, and make more money. The relationship games men and women play are conducted on this field and against these criteria. Most “game” techniques are methods of signaling characteristics considered valuable by the opposite sex—displaying high value. Playing these games, however enticing, will not lead to a stable godly marriage. While we don’t need to get so superspiritual to ignore the appeal of the five criteria of power, status, athleticism, looks, and money or deny the importance of fitness and grooming, yet these criteria are woefully incomplete, even inaccurate criteria for establishing a meaningful marriage. For starters, it completely discounts the significance of a person’s spiritual dynamic, which touches on the entire life priorities of the person we are looking to date.
A better measure of your marriageability or a person you are interested in dating’s marriageability are the following ten characteristics. You may think that these ten criteria make finding a potential person to marry impossible, but it is not if you flip the script. Aim instead on becoming a person characterized by these ten criteria and you will save yourself a lifetime of heartache and needless relational pain. The prior question is “Are you a person who is marriageable, and if married, still marriageable?”
Again, the aim is not perfection in any one of these criteria but rather a conscious attention to them all. Moreover, the primary mission is not finding someone to marry. The mission is becoming someone worthy of marriage, and this is a lifetime enterprise for all persons whether married or unmarried. Swipe right based on these ten criteria and your likelihood of a happy fulfilling marriage is far higher than the typical Tinder or Match profile.
1. Practicing the Way: Becoming in practice an active apprentice of Jesus, learning from him how to be like him. This is far more than saying one is a Christian, affirming beliefs, or going to church—all of which are ubiquitous with Southern cultural Christianity. As John Mark Comer counseled: “Jesus did not invite people to convert to Christianity. He didn’t even call people to become Christians; he invited people to apprentice under him into a whole new way of living. To be transformed.”[1]
Are you an apprentice of Jesus?
2. Facing Familial Wounds: Have you dealt with your relationships with your family of origin? These are the sources of the wounds that are passed down from generation to generation through family systems. You do not marry a person but a family system. Have you faced this honestly? Have you sought forgiveness for them when appropriate? Who you are is heavily shaped by your family of origin. This adds enormous complexities to the dynamics of any interpersonal relationship because in the room are many more than just the two of you.
Have you dealt with your emotional wounds from your family of origin?
3. Sense of Self: Have you developed a secure sense of your identity? Do you know who you are as a man in Christ? Do you know how identity is formed? Are you living out of the daily dynamic of living in Christ? Many suffer from identity dysphoria thinking that they can create their own identity or discover it from psychometric tests. This is not how your identity is formed. We spend enormous amount of emotional energy compensating for our identity insecurities. We dare not bring these insecurities into any future relationship. This is a major problem for men who no longer know how to be a man or who they are as a man. Most men need to start here and work to address this question as it is foundational to your life story.
Do you know whose you are?
4. Personal Maturity: Are you prepared to take on the responsibilities of being an adult? Do you have habits and disciplines needed for being an adult, meaning that you’ve willingly given up the patterns of adolescence? We live in a culture that celebrates youth, derides maturity, and delays adulthood. This is nothing to be proud of. If you are to get married, you’ll need to grow up and become a responsible adult. Fewer and fewer young men fit or are willing to fit this criterion. “Failure to Launch” makes a compelling rom-com. It is a non-starter in marriage.
Do you have the discipline to be an adult?
5. Developing Character: Are you aligning your life according to transcendent virtues? Do you know what are the most important transcendent virtues you need to focus on? You are not able to lead your family without the virtues of love, integrity, truth, excellence, and healthy relationships. These are the prerequisites for being a husband and father, much less a successful leader. Do you have mentors who are helping to incorporate them into your life? Character is revealed over time especially when under pressure. It’s what emerges in the foxholes and on the battlefields of life. When everything is going great, character remains hidden. Dealing with suffering and failure is what reveals character. Live long enough and your character will become evident to you and to everyone around you in the harsh circumstances of life.
Are virtues being habituated into your life?
6. Finding Emotional Intelligence: Are you prioritizing the development of emotional intelligence, such as the ability to manage your emotions, become more self-aware, and be more other-centered? If reality is fundamentally relational, then nothing trumps the professional importance of having emotional intelligence. IQ accounts for 6% of professional success, EQ almost half. Since marriage is primarily relational, EQ is critical for marital success. It can be learned, and it is a priority.
Are you growing in emotional intelligence?
7. Leveling Up with Friends: Our friends reflect our heart’s priorities. Do you have close friends who are enabling you to level up? Do you have an accountability partner or anam cara (soul friend)? Is your crew making you a better or worse person? Your five best friends are the quickest way to reveal the priorities of your heart. It is always peer preference before it is peer pressure. Do you have friends that are making you a better person, helping you level up to your best self, to be a person who is more marriageable or less?
Do you have five friends who best reflect your best life aspirations?
8. Your Mystical Calling: Do you have a sense of your particular or personal calling—that arena of a broken world for which you are spiritually responsible to address with your life? Are you shaping your life choices in terms of your calling? Are you actively involved in a broken aspect of the world reflecting your calling? Does your calling have sufficient boundaries to govern your life choices as to the nature of your work, the location of your work, and who you will partner with? Calling is the externalization of your identity in service to God and his kingdom. Knowing your place in this larger story is foundational to who you are and should marry. Marriage should not be based on consent or chemistry, but on a mutual sense of calling. This means that the place where you will most likely find the person you should marry is in the exercise of your particular calling. She will be found there.
What is your particular calling?
9. Your Livelihood: Do you know how to monetize your particular calling to be able to develop a sustainable livelihood? The idealism of “making the world a better place” is not enough if you don’t know how to make a living doing so. Do you know how much money is enough as a reflection of your calling? Are you a good steward of your time, talents, and treasure? In a changing economic environment, you will have to learn how to make a living so that you can care for yourself and ideally others. Marriages get in trouble usually for two reasons: sex and money. We must learn to be responsible stewards of both. You must learn to be a financially responsible person.
Are you capable of making a living in your calling?
10. Finding Contentment: Ironically, you are only marriageable when marriage is not your goal. Are you content in your singleness? The purpose of marriage is not marriage, but something larger than marriage. This “something larger” to which marriage ideally assists is fully available, perhaps even more, to a single person. Half of the adult population is unmarried. Many will stay single. Are you willing to develop alternative relationships and friends if marriage is not what God has in store for you? Have you kept marriage from becoming an idol in your life? In some church circles you are not godly until you are married and godly. Singles are treated as second class citizens. This is just backwards. Singleness demonstrates what marriage is to be about: living a life in union with God for a purpose larger than yourself that is a unique reflection of yourself. When you get here, with real contentment, you are ready for marriage.
Are you content being single?
A Means Not an End
If you are being called by God to be married, then marriage is a means to more effective kingdom service as well as an embodied symbol of your union in Christ. Few young men are thinking of dating and marriage in these terms. As such, the relationships that emerge from their confused choices are not going to be God’s best for their lives.
The aim of a godly man is not to get married but to become a genuinely marriageable man. For most of us, whether single or married, there is a lifetime of work ahead to get to this point. It necessitates a process of intentional growth, spiritually, emotionally, professionally, and relationally.
But even as we begin to orient our lives in this direction, we must remember that it is God who is at work in each of us to will and do his good pleasure. “Now you must continue to make this new life fully manifested as you live in the holy awe of God—which brings you trembling into his presence. God will continually revitalize you, implanting within you the passion to do what pleases him.”[2] It is God who is writing the poetry of our life, and this includes the poetry of our love life. “We have become his poetry, a re-created people that will fulfill the destiny he has given each of us, for we are joined to Jesus, the Anointed One. Even before we were born, God planned in advance our destiny and the good works we would do to fulfill it!”[3] He is the sole author of a seamless life of kingdom spiritual adventure for every man. Make this your personal aspiration as a man and God will take over.
If you swipe right, make sure you are swiping against the right criteria. Do not date or marry cavalierly. Have a checklist. Do not settle for less. God’s glory and your fulfillment ride on it. This makes dating and marriage one of life’s grandest spiritual adventures.
[1] John Mark Comer, Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus, Become Like Him, Do as He Did (WaterBrook, 2024), xvi.
[2] Philippians 2:12–13.
[3] Ephesians 2:10.
