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Noah Mullins's avatar

Probably one of the most dangerous old scripts that no longer applies is "don't worry about finding your partner too quickly. It'll happen like it does with everyone."

Definitely not true anymore. Everyone, men and women, need to be very intentional about this now.

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Kate D.'s avatar

My husband and I, when looking around at the younger friends gathered around our dinner table, feel like we got the last chopper out of 'Nam. The scripts *did* work for us and we were the last ones.

My dad told all his children to get an electrical engineering degree, and then they could do whatever they wanted, but they'd have the bachelor's degree with the highest average earnings. Four out of five of us are electrical engineers and that advice worked great for the four of us. (And for the two daughters it worked waaay better than he planned, we absolutely got way more job offers, more leadership-tracked, and more salary adjustments and promotions because we were women and graduated in peak "recruit and retain women in STEM" years. And my sister and I are solid engineers, we just wouldn't have gotten the same awards and visibility if we were men.

I'm also a writer and editor, which came in super handy among engineers who had seen military service but broke out in a cold sweat about writing a sentence. Instead of being a writer competing against other writers, I was an engineer who was routinely the best writer in the room and was asked to help on many writing projects for customers. I love public speaking and many engineers don't. I presented to many customers and within four years at a Fortune 500 company I was presenting and hosting a panel for 200 defense and government leaders in DC with our CEO present. Some of the speakers were: the deputy administrator of NASA; the first African-American Congress woman from Selma, Alabama; and me (who am I to be in this list?!!). My sister was a Director of a Fortune 500 company by 28. All this to say, my dad's career advice worked SUPER WELL for us.

My sister and I both met our husbands in college (majoring in engineering does help, "Finding a guy in engineering: the odds are good, but the goods are odd" as they say 😅). So, our romance trajectories looked more similar to our parents' in the 1970s than that of young people today, where meeting online or through an app is common and third places to meet people have mostly vanished. Despite both my sister and I having infertility struggles, I have two kids and my sister is expecting her first. (Praise God!) We both have houses, even though the market is crazy. We are the ones for whom our parents' life advice worked.

When people younger than me (or even my age, early thirties) despair of online dating but say, "what else is there to do...?" I think, I would probably despair too!

We've hosted weekly open invite dinners for eight years. This year we're just hosting twice a month, because of increased commitments elsewhere. We have had three couples get married after meeting at our house! Praise God!

I have young people in my house at my table week after week and I listen to them and think, wow, the scripts are broken, it's a new world and I don't know what I would do if I were in their shoes. I had it much easier than they did and my parents' advice all worked for me. I don't have any advice to give them and it makes me feel old, of a different generation. I think I can do my part to bring people together in friendship with shared food and love of Jesus. And I can pray. That's all I've got.

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