A post went up recently in the LDS Dating Midsingles group on Facebook that pulled 40 reactions and 105 comments in the first 2 hours. It was posted anonymously, which, honestly, tracks. The man who wrote it spent several paragraphs cataloguing his credentials: the 60 pounds he has lost, the fact that he used to model, the incredible car he drives, the vitality he projects, and the way women tell him he looks 10 to 15 years younger than he is. He was not, in other words, describing a man without self-awareness. He was describing a man with a very specific, very curated version of self-awareness.
Then came the ask. He is only interested in never-married women who are 15 to 25 years younger than him. He wants to father more children. He has no interest in women with kids from previous relationships. He used the phrase "feminist propaganda" to explain why modern LDS women are, in his view, unlikely to be good wives. He described the "my kids come first" attitude as a "poison-pill marriage." He is 45 or older. He has not matched with anyone or gone on a date since his divorce was finalized in late 2024.
The comments were, as one might expect, a lot. Some people offered sympathy. Some offered gentle pushback. A few told him plainly what they saw. What most of the thread agreed on, whether they said so directly or danced around it, was that this man is in significant pain and is aiming most of that pain outward.
Scott and Laurie read the whole thing. They have thoughts.
The Credential Trap
Scott
Here is something worth naming right up front: this man is not delusional about his situation. He knows he has not gone on a date in the better part of a year. He knows the women his age are not the ones he wants. He knows the women he wants are not responding to him. That level of honest observation takes something. The problem is that he has done all of that noticing and arrived at the conclusion that the world is the problem.
That is the credential trap. You build a case for your own value, item by item. The weight loss, the car, the youthful appearance, the energy, the former modeling. You lay out the receipts. And then, when the results do not match what the receipts seem to promise, you go looking for someone to blame. The market. The women. The culture. The propaganda. The fallen world.
What you do not do, or at least what this post does not do, is ask a harder question: what if the credentials are real and still not the point?
Value in a relationship is not a resume. Nobody falls in love with a bullet point list. Women in their mid-twenties who are never-married are not sitting around waiting to be impressed by a man who is approaching 50 and has shed some weight. They are living their lives and looking for someone they feel something with. And "I drive an incredible car and used to model and I'm told I look younger than I am" is not a feeling. It is a pitch deck.
What the List Actually Tells Us
Laurie
I want to sit with something for a moment, because I think it matters. The list of requirements in this post is not unusual in its existence. Most people, if they are honest, carry a list of what they want in a partner. The problem here is not that he has standards. The problem is what the list reveals about what he believes a relationship is for.
He wants a never-married woman 15 to 25 years his junior, who has not been "contaminated" by previous relationships or children, who will defer to him, who will bear his children, and who will not be influenced by ideas he finds threatening. That is not a partner he is describing. That is a controlled environment.
When someone builds a checklist that long and that specific, and when every item on the list is about minimizing risk to themselves, it is worth asking: what is he actually afraid of? Because behind every demand for a woman with zero prior attachments, zero kids, zero "outside influences," and total alignment with his vision, there is usually a man who is deeply frightened of being left again. Of being found insufficient. Of losing.
That is not a criticism. It is a human response to the wreckage a divorce leaves behind. But here is what I know to be true: you cannot protect yourself into intimacy. The fortress you build to keep out the pain is the same fortress that keeps out the connection.
The Younger Woman Fantasy Deserves a Direct Conversation
Scott
I am going to say this plainly, and I mean it with zero contempt: wanting a woman 15 to 25 years younger than you, at 45 plus, while also expecting her to be spiritually aligned, relationally serious, and ready to start a family with someone she met on a dating app, is not a reasonable plan. It is a wish.
Women in their mid-twenties who are active in the LDS faith are not, as a general rule, looking to marry a man two decades their senior. That is not feminist propaganda. That is just what is true. Some exceptions exist. They are exceptions. Building your entire romantic strategy around the exception, and then being confused and bitter when the exception does not materialize, is not the culture's failure. It is a math problem.
There is also something worth saying about the desire to "sire more children" as a stated reason for the age preference. That framing is worth sitting with. Women are not breeding partners. A 27-year-old woman is not a solution to a biological timeline. She is a person with her own story, her own desires, and her own right to choose who she builds a life with. When the conversation starts with what she can provide functionally, rather than who she is as a human being, that dynamic tends to communicate itself. People feel it. It is probably part of why he is invisible to the women he is trying to attract.
The Language in the Room
Laurie
I cannot move past the language without saying something about it, because language is not decorative. The phrases "feminist propaganda," "poison-pill marriage," and "fallen world" are not neutral descriptors. They are a worldview. And that worldview, regardless of where it comes from or how sincerely it is held, is doing active damage to this man's ability to connect with anyone.
When you walk into a room already convinced that the women there are corrupted, either by culture, by bad values, or by their previous choices, you are not actually open to meeting anyone. You are auditing them. You are looking for the one who passes the test. And women, whatever their background, are extraordinarily good at sensing when they are being evaluated rather than encountered.
I am not saying his values are wrong. I am saying that the contempt embedded in the language around those values is closing doors faster than anything else on his list. You can hold traditional values and still speak about women with basic dignity. Those two things are not in conflict. But this post, in several places, slides from "I value traditional family structure" to "women who disagree are broken, compromised, or dangerous." That slide is the problem.
What Divorce Actually Does to a Person
Scott
His divorce was finalized in the fall of 2024. That is recent. That is very recent. And I think some of what we are reading in this post is a man who is still in the acute phase of post-divorce grief and has not fully recognized it yet.
There is a clinical term for what often happens after divorce: complicated grief, which just means grief that has gotten stuck and started expressing itself sideways. Instead of sitting with the sadness, the loss, and the disorientation, it converts into anger, into blame, into hypercontrol of the future. The obsessive list of requirements is often a grief response. If I can just find the perfect person with zero variables, I will never hurt like this again.
The honest truth is that a year out from a divorce is too soon to know who you are yet on the other side of it. That does not mean you cannot date. It means you should hold your conclusions loosely, because the version of you that wrote this post is still in the middle of something. The man who comes out the other side, if he does the work, will want something different than what he is describing right now. He may even look back at this list and feel something complicated about it.
A Word for the Reader Who Recognized Themselves
Laurie
If you read this post and felt a flicker of recognition, even a small one, this section is for you. Not because you are this man. You may not be anywhere close. But the impulse underneath his words, the need to control the outcome, to protect the wound, to build the perfect filter so nothing can hurt you again, that impulse is not strange or shameful. It is one of the most common things in the world for people who have been through loss.
The path through it is not to refine the list. The path through it is to become genuinely curious about other people again, not as candidates, but as full human beings with their own weight and dimension. That curiosity is what makes you attractive. Not the car. Not the former modeling. Not the weight you have lost. The quality of your attention. The willingness to be surprised by someone. The courage to let someone be real with you rather than making them pass a test first.
You are not too far gone. Nobody is. But the work is internal, and it starts before you open another app or post in another group looking for someone to blame for the silence.
Unchaperoned Life exists precisely for this moment in the road, the one where you are somewhere between the person you were in your marriage and the person you are becoming. If something in this landed for you, you do not have to navigate that stretch alone. And when you are ready to go deeper, we will be here.
- Scott & Laurie
Weighing in from the lowest tier of the Celestial Kingdom, where we finally understood that the problem with a perfect checklist is that it keeps perfect company with an empty table.