On March 26th, someone posted a poll in the LDS Dating - Midsingles group. 4 options. Simple question. "When you hear 'I'm not sure I want to get married again,' what do you assume it means?"
Option A: Keeping options open.
Option B: Doesn't love enough yet.
Option C: Protecting themselves from the cost of a past marriage.
Option D: Something else.
The post got 192 comments- not 192 opinions about marriage - 192 people quietly telling the truth about themselves.
Then, 24 hours later, a woman in the same group posted this: "I would like to know, with everything we've all been through, who is ready to move forward and work through fears and concerns with a new partner by their side?"
That post got 56 comments. And the top-rated response, the one the community lifted above all the others, said this: "I am. But I'm not chasing it. Build yourself into the healthiest person you can be."
2 posts. 1 day apart. And together, they form the most complete picture of where this community actually is that we've seen in months.
We read both threads carefully. And we want to tell you what we saw. Because there's something underneath these two conversations that almost nobody named directly. And once you see it, you'll recognize it in yourself immediately.
The Poll That Wasn't Really a Poll
Scott
Let's start with the marriage poll, because it's more interesting than it looks.
On the surface it's a simple multiple choice question about what a phrase means. In practice, it was an invitation for 192 people to explain, with the cover of "just answering a poll," why they themselves are not sure they want to get married again.
And they took that invitation. In detail.
Option C won overwhelmingly. Protecting themselves from the cost of a past marriage. Not keeping options open, not lacking love, not something vague and undefined. Protection. Self-preservation. The specific, conscious, earned decision to build a wall where a door used to be.
What struck us wasn't the result. It was the relief in the comments. People weren't just choosing C. They were exhaling while they did it. "Yes, this. Finally someone asked." "C, without question." "This is me and I'm not ashamed of it."
That relief tells you something important. These are people who have been carrying an answer they weren't sure they were allowed to give. Because in a faith culture that centers eternal marriage as the highest aspiration, saying "I'm not sure I want that again" is not just a personal preference. It feels like a confession. Like admitting you've stopped believing in something sacred.
Laurie
And here's the thing that the poll couldn't capture but the comments did: most of these people DO still want love. They want connection, partnership, someone to build something with. What they're not sure about is the institution. The legal and spiritual formality of marriage, specifically, after experiencing how catastrophically it can fail.
That's a meaningful distinction. And it's one that almost never gets made in this community, because the cultural script doesn't have a slot for "I want love but I'm not sure about marriage." The script only has two options: you want to get married, or you've given up.
So people choose one of those two options to present to the world, and carry the more complicated truth quietly by themselves.
What the poll did, briefly, was create a third option. And 192 people walked through it gratefully.
What "Protection" Actually Costs
Laurie
We want to sit with the word "protection" for a moment, because it's doing a lot of work in these comments and I don't think people always see how much.
Protection is a good thing. After real pain, the impulse to protect yourself is not weakness. It's intelligence. Your nervous system learned something from what happened and it is trying to make sure it doesn't happen again.
But protection has a shadow side. And the shadow side is this: the same walls that keep out future pain also keep out future love. Not because you chose to close yourself off to love specifically. But because walls are not selective. They keep out everything that tries to get in.
This is what therapists call avoidant attachment, and I want to explain what that actually means in plain terms, because the clinical name makes it sound more dramatic than it is. Avoidant attachment is simply what happens when closeness starts to feel dangerous. When intimacy - real intimacy, the kind where someone actually sees you - triggers anxiety instead of comfort. When you find yourself pulling back just as things get good, or staying busy, or keeping relationships just slightly too casual to get truly hurt.
It's not a character flaw. It's a survival response. And it's extraordinarily common in people who've been through the specific kind of betrayal that a failed covenant marriage represents.
The problem is that surviving and living are not the same thing.
Scott
Here's how I'd put it plainly.
If you chose Option C in that poll, you're not broken. You're protected. And there is a real difference between those two things.
But I want you to ask yourself an honest question. When you imagine being in a relationship, what's the first thing you feel? Not what you think. What you feel.
If the first thing is something like warmth, curiosity, the possibility of something good, then your protection is doing its job. It's keeping you selective without shutting you down.
But if the first thing is something like dread, or the calculating sensation of running a risk assessment, or a quiet exhaustion at the thought of having to open up again, then your protection may have drifted from "healthy boundary" into something closer to a prison you've learned to call home.
And here's the open loop I want to leave you with, because we're going to come back to this at the end: the people who move from protection to readiness don't do it by deciding to stop being afraid. They do it a completely different way. And most people get this exactly backwards.
We'll get there. First, let's look at the other post.
"Who Is Ready to Move Forward?"
Scott
The second post is, on the surface, more optimistic. It's asking who's ready. It's forward-looking. It got hearts and likes and affirmations.
But read the comments carefully and you'll notice something interesting. The most resonant response, the one the community voted to the top, wasn't "I am, let's go!" It was: "I am. But I'm not chasing it."
That qualifier matters enormously.
"I'm ready but I'm not chasing it" is not the same as "I'm ready." It's actually a very carefully constructed sentence that does two things at once. It claims readiness while immediately distancing itself from need. It says "I want this" and "I'm not desperate for this" in the same breath.
And that instinct, to immediately qualify your desire with proof that you don't need it too much, is one of the most telling patterns we see in this community. Over and over. "I'd love to find someone, but I'm not looking." "I'm open to it, but I'm not going to chase it." "If it happens, great, but I'm fine either way."
Laurie
I want to be careful here, because I don't want to be dismissive of what's actually healthy in that response. And there is something genuinely healthy in it.
The person who said "I'm ready but I'm not chasing it" is describing something real and important: the shift from dating out of scarcity to dating out of fullness. From "I need this to be okay" to "I'm already okay, and this would be a wonderful addition." That shift is real, it matters, and it's genuinely hard to get to.
But I also want to name what can hide behind that language. Because "I'm not chasing it" can mean two very different things. It can mean "I've done enough work on myself that I'm not desperate anymore." Or it can mean "I've been disappointed enough times that I've stopped letting myself want it fully."
The first one is growth. The second one is the Resigned Humorist's cousin, wearing slightly nicer clothes.
The question worth asking yourself is: when you say "I'm not chasing it," are you describing freedom or protection? Are you not chasing it because you genuinely feel whole and at peace, or because wanting something fully and not getting it is a specific kind of pain you've decided not to risk again?
Only you know the answer. But it's worth knowing.
The Thing Both Posts Are Circling
Scott
Here's what we want to say about these two posts together, because together they reveal something that neither one says alone.
On March 26th, 192 people said, in one way or another: I've been hurt and I'm protecting myself.
On March 27th, 56 people said, in one way or another: I'm ready, but carefully, and on my own terms.
Same community. Same people, many of them. 24 hours apart.
And what that tells us is not that this community is confused or contradictory. It tells us that they are in the middle of something. They are not at the beginning, where everything is raw and nothing makes sense. And they are not at the end, where they've arrived at some peaceful, fully-healed version of themselves who dates without fear.
They are in the middle. Which is actually the hardest place to be, because the middle doesn't have a name. The beginning has a name: devastated. The end has a name: healed. But the middle, where you're mostly okay but not quite ready, where you want to move forward but don't fully trust yourself to, where you're protecting yourself but starting to wonder if the wall is still serving you?
That place doesn't have a name. Nobody writes songs about it. Nobody makes a hallmark card for it. You're just in it, trying to figure out the next step.
Laurie
We'd like to give it a name. We call it the gap.
The gap is the space between "I survived this" and "I'm fully living again." It is populated by people who are functional, often impressive, sometimes genuinely happy, who have rebuilt their lives in almost every measurable way. And who are still, quietly, carrying something unfinished.
The gap has some very specific features that we want you to recognize, because recognizing where you are is the first step to moving through it.
In the gap, you feel ready on Tuesdays and terrified on Thursdays. You have a great first date and then spend the next three days talking yourself out of being excited about it. You know, intellectually, that not every relationship ends in devastation. But your body hasn't gotten the memo yet.
In the gap, you give excellent relationship advice to your friends and then go home and watch Netflix alone and feel the small, specific loneliness of someone who knows exactly what healthy love looks like and can't quite access it for themselves.
In the gap, you've done a lot of the right things. Therapy, maybe. Self-reflection, definitely. You've read the books and listened to the podcasts and you understand your patterns. And you're still stuck.
Sound familiar? Keep reading. Because here's the part where we tell you what actually moves people through the gap. And as we promised earlier, most people get this completely backwards.
What Actually Moves People Through the Gap
Scott
Most people think the way through the gap is to feel less afraid.
So they work on themselves until the fear diminishes. They build their confidence. They get into therapy. They journal. They pray. They wait for the day when they wake up and the fear is gone and they feel finally, genuinely ready.
Here's the problem with that strategy: the fear doesn't go away first. It never does. The people who move through the gap successfully don't move through it because they stopped being afraid. They move through it because they stopped letting fear make their decisions.
That sounds like a small distinction. It is not a small distinction. It is the whole thing.
Fear of getting hurt again is rational. You were hurt. The fear is correct information about a real risk. Asking it to go away before you act is like refusing to drive until driving is perfectly safe. The risk is real. The question is whether you are going to let the risk run your life.
The people in that "who is ready" thread who were actually moving forward, the ones whose comments had a different quality, a groundedness rather than bravado, had figured out something specific. They had decided that who they were becoming was worth the risk of being seen. Not that the risk had disappeared. That they were worth it anyway.
Laurie
And this is where I want to say something that might be the most important thing in this entire column.
If you are in the gap, the way through is not more self-improvement. You have probably improved yourself significantly. The problem is not that you haven't done enough work. The problem is that you are trying to become safe enough to love before you let yourself be loved.
And that's backwards. Safety in love doesn't come before vulnerability. It comes through it. There is no version of this where you get to skip the exposure and still get the connection.
This does not mean throwing yourself at the first person who shows interest. It means being willing to let someone see you, genuinely see you, before you know how it ends. It means texting when you want to text, saying what you actually feel, asking for what you actually need, and being willing to find out what happens.
Not with everyone. With someone who has earned a little bit of that exposure. Someone who has been consistent and present and who responds to your realness with their own.
The gap closes not because you finally got healed enough to risk love. The gap closes because you decided to risk love and discovered that you were more capable of surviving the risk than the fear told you you were.
One more thing. And this is the part that will either land or it won't, and I'm saying it anyway.
The people reading this who are deepest in the gap are often the ones the community most admires. They're the "ready but not chasing it" people. The composed, self-aware, emotionally intelligent ones who seem so healthy, so sorted, so unbothered.
They're also sometimes the loneliest. Because they've gotten so good at protecting themselves with the language of growth that even they can't always tell the difference between genuine peace and sophisticated avoidance.
If that sentence made you feel seen in an uncomfortable way, that's not an accident.
And when you're ready to look at that honestly, with support and without judgment, we will be here.
-- Scott & Laurie
Weighing in from the lowest tier of the Celestial Kingdom, where we finally figured out that the gap doesn't close because you get brave enough. It closes because you get tired enough of living on the safe side of your own life.