Why smoke shows marry bags of dirty socks among church folk

Economics, the Cold War, and the “hot wife waiting” phenomenon

Feb 16, 2023

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surrealist painting of a church via Dall-E

Adam Sandt recently wrote:

It’s science.
Folks generally partner with someone of similar attractiveness. It can be graphed on a bell curve. The meat of the curve represents the majority of folks and aesthetic equilibrium.
I’ve noticed however that niche communities invert this otherwise reliable phenomenon.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the niche of church folk. I’m not talking about folks that go to church. I’m talking specifically about “church folk”. People that derive their identity from their religious affiliation. They don’t associate with folks outside of their church community unless absolutely necessary and even then, they’d rather get a speeding ticket from a member of their church if choosing such things was possible.
Because most church folk are fundamentalists, this disparity is mainly observed in heterosexual relationships and only presents in one gender direction. The center of the curve is made up of attractive women and unattractive men. Literally a smoke show marries a bag of dirty socks. Charted outward, you see increasingly fewer and fewer incidents but a rapid move toward attractiveness equilibrium. To the left, the disparity shrinks until you get to a pair of uggos; to the right, a pair of tens.

In my experience growing up in Southern Baptist churches, Adam is absolutely right. Even church folks agree.

Christian writer Lauren Windle described the “hot wife waiting” phenomenon: Her non-Christian male friend “always says when he’s ready to get married, he’s going to go to church because that’s where he sees women of incredible calibre dating men who don’t always have the same to offer in terms of looks or intelligence.”

We need to talk about why. Okay, maybe we don’t need to. But I think it’s an interesting confluence of economics and religion to explore.

There are, imho, a few reasons.

1. Supply and demand

Here’s my thesis: Men in Evangelical churches have the upper hand when choosing partners. This fact does a lot of work to explain why these bags of dirty socks tend to nab smokeshows.

Women outnumber men in US churches. The gender gap for weekly church attendance is just 8% total. But, at least anecdotally, that gap is much higher if select for unmarried church folk. These men and women are, perhaps not shockingly, overwhelmingly heterosexual.

This means for every ten single women in a US church, there might be, I don’t know, five or fewer single men. More importantly, perhaps, when it comes to marriage trends, is the gender gap in youth and college groups. Since church folk tend to marry earlier, gaps here would be even more important for mating choices.

Obviously, men have leverage when they’re in high demand and low supply. While hookup culture is a myth, there is evidence suggesting men use their high demand on college campuses to have a little more casual sex than on campuses with more equal gender representation.

So what do church men use their leverage for? Hot wives.

2. Fox News hair

That church folk tend to be more conservative has many relevant implications for the bag of dirty socks/smokeshow pairing trend.

Nationally, most marriages are assortative. Men and women choose spouses who have roughly equal attractiveness, income, and education. Church folk more often avail themselves of the traditional status-beauty trade. The man has a higher income and education. The woman is hot.

Growing up Evangelical, my college education was a backup plan. Plan A was to marry someone who could provide for the family financially so I could stay home and take care of the kids. Best laid plans.

Conservatives also hew more closely to conventional beauty standards. I know I’ve written about this before and I can’t find it, but look at the female news anchors at Fox News vs MSNBC. When I was doing the pundit thing, we called their aggressive styling and makeup “Fox News hair.”

I graduated from Samford, a Baptist college in Birmingham, Alabama, in a year we don’t need to talk about. As you might imagine, the student body at Samford was aggressively conservative. Like, a girl in my Biblical Perspectives class raised her hand and said a woman could never be President because women are too emotional. The sororities made their members wear heels and skirts to class at least one day each week. I remember thinking that the leader of the college Democrats looked like a lesbian because she wore men’s tee-shirts and didn’t wear makeup or put a lot of effort into her hair. I didn’t have a lot of girlfriends, but most of them would get up and spend half an hour at least styling their hair before leaving their dorm rooms every morning. The men, as far as I could tell, spent a lot less time and energy on their physical appearance.

What progressives consider attractive, by contrast, seems much broader and less gendered. I don’t know that they put less time, money, and energy into aesthetics on average. Thrifting, getting tattooed, gauging your ears, and keeping the blue in your hair all take time, money, and energy. But they do seem to spend less time conforming to traditional, highly gendered, narrow beauty standards like frizz-free hair, no body hair, and the hours it can take to make your makeup look natural.

All that to say, conservatives socialize young women to be smokeshows and men to select for smokeshow partners rather than partners with roughly equal income or education.

3. Unequal yoking

Okay, you may think. Why aren’t these smokeshow church folk just marrying hot men outside the church? Church leaders also taught me I should avoid being “unequally yoked.” That is, my eventual husband should be an equally devout Christian. I’m not saying bag of dirty socks church men put so much emphasis on one otherwise pretty obscure and open-to-interpretation passage to further cement their advantage in the marriage market. Not at all. I’m just saying if they had done that it would have been pretty savvy.

Plus, Evangelical churches are more likely to be filled with “church folk.” I actually just read in Bowling Alone that Evangelical churchgoers tend to be more insular than mainline Protestants. So even if the smokeshows wanted to marry non-Christian men, they’re not even socializing with them for the most part.

4. Opting out

Fine, you may be saying at this point. So why don’t smokeshow church folk women just opt out of marriage entirely if they can only marry Christian men who aren’t as smart or hot as them?

Because Evangelical church leaders literally tell young women it’s our God-given purpose to get married and have kids who we raise up to be good Christians. They’re not saying this because the Bible says so. The Bible is, if anything, quite neutral on marriage and having kids on the whole. They say it because the military industrial complex thought encouraging American nuclear family formation and protection was necessary to defeat communism. I am not making this up.

5. Where the uggos go

Are you done yet? You may be wondering. Almost. We’ve established that church folk women are more likely to be smokeshows than non-church folk women, and why. But even with a lot of effort, not every church folk woman can be a smokeshow. So what happens to them? Well, some of them are in the singles ministry. But a lot of them have to marry outside the church. And it’s a bad look to show up to church without your spouse. First, it means you unequally yoked yourself, a big no-no. Second, it makes the women who showed up with their husbands nervous. Third, Evangelical churches are ALL ABOUT marriage. So you want to show you’re in one, and it’s strong.

In sum

I suspect smokeshow/bag of dirty socks pairings are overrepresented in church folk populations for five key reasons. First, men have demand on their side. Second, church folk women are socialized to smokeshow themselves and men are socialized to pick smokeshows. Third, marrying non-church-folk is not the move for good church folk. Fourth, you gotta marry someone. Fifth, if you do marry outside the church, you usually effectively stop being church folk.

Does any of this matter? I asked myself just now. Maybe. Here’s where it gets applicable. If you’re a heterosexual man and you want to get married, go to church. Remember, people with higher income and education are more likely to go to church and less likely to be believers. So you’ll hardly be alone if you’re not super religious. It’s a target-rich environment.

Now, what I really need to know is where are there more attractive, intelligent, high-income men 30+ than women, and how do I get in?

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