December 5, 2022
If your church was anything like mine, then you probably remember most (if not all) of your male pastors talking about “marrying up.”
Many men will talk up their wives by calling her their better half, or that she keeps him honest, or that she helps him grow, etc. That is not the same thing as marrying up, as I came to understand it.
Marrying up is a concept that refers to a guy who marries a woman who is perceived to be “out of his league.” This is almost always talked about in regards to physical appearance. This happens when a college pastor or a youth pastor—despite his trendy wardrobe—still kind of has a trollish appearance yet goes on to marry a hot blonde woman in the church. Once he does, the man will spend a huge amount of time bragging about having “married up.” This sometimes happens in private when he’s hanging out with just the guys in the church, but he’ll also do this in public, like on stage during the middle of his sermon. Of course he’ll do this to where his wife can hear, and oftentimes pulls her up on stage just to present her to the congregation as if showing her off.
Back when I was in the Church, I thought this was mostly just a bunch of fun and games—a way for the college pastor or youth pastor to be complimentary toward his wife and flatter her. Years later, after leaving the church and deconstructing my faith, I realized there’s a lot of subtle suggestions made in such conversations.
- “Dude, just stay faithful to God, and he’ll bring you an amazing wife.”
- “Dude, God has already created your perfect wife for you before you were even born. He formed you both together at the same time!”
- “Dude, you may be going through a season of singleness right now, but I have faith that God is planning to bring someone super special into your life any day now!”
I’d heard some variation of those things all throughout my time in the church. While I did find it encouraging at the time, I see now that these kinds of thoughts are promoting the idea that a man need not do anything and a quality mate will just magically appear. I suspect this is one big reason why Christian marriages always seem to be so hard—the most important metric that a church girl often uses to determine if she wants to marry someone is that he’s a “man of God.” Forget about whether he’s launched his career, started his business, has awkward social skills, or has emotional control of himself. None of that seems to matter. When (not if) all that stuff becomes a problem later in the marriage, the expectation is that it’ll just be dealt with then. But until then, damn it, at least he’s a man of God.
I explicitly remember having conversations with my college roommates (we all went to the same church together) running down lists of men we knew who had married up or who were looking like were going to marry up soon, since they’d been dating their girlfriends for a long time and an engagement was inevitably approaching.
Given how prevalent this was, I got the sense that it was becoming an expectation. Meaning if you were faithful enough and obeyed God enough, then he would eventually bring you a woman to marry who was super hot.
The other implication that I sensed was that the hotness of your future wife was significant because it was subtlety implied that if you were dating outside of the church in the “real world” where God and Jesus weren’t playing a role in the process, then you’d likely not be able to land a girl who was as hot as the one God would give you for dating like a Christian and being in the Church.
This is, of course, nonsense, but regardless this was subtlety communicated and also demonstrated. Almost all the young Christian couples in my church consisted of a woman who was very attractive and a man who was… meh.
This whole outlook on marrying up is rude, but it’s also quite dangerous. It’s another piece of the purity culture mindset that suggests men don’t really have to do much of anything except obey God and, because of that, will have a model-level woman dropped right into his lap as some kind of reward.
All the while, the women in the Church are expected to present themselves well and take care of themselves (while remembering that modest is hottest, of course) but the same expectation is not put on men. They can dress like crap and eat as much Chick Fil A as they want because it doesn’t matter—they don’t need to put their best foot forward in a dating situation—God will take care of all of that.