Stake Date Night — a BYU dating culture
President Gerrit W. Gong nurtures a healthy dating culture as he serves as a stake president at Brigham Young University
Dating successes at BYU. Following is a letter sent from President Gerrit W. Gong to the bishops and leaders in his stake. It pertains to a healthy dating culture. The letter is dated October 19, 2006. Elder Gong became a member of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles in 2018.
From: Gerrit W. Gong
Sent: Thursday, October 19, 2006 at 4:47 PM
Subject: Successes
Presidents,
In the BYU 16th Stake, we call it “Stake Date Night”. Our stake activities committee identifies, advertises, and implements “date nights” to cultural, sporting, social, or other campus events. “Stake Date Nights” are “planned, paired, and paid for” as follows:
. 1. The first 15 men and first 15 women who sign up at a specified website are randomly matched as “dates” for stake “date night.”
. 2. Men arrange to pick up their dates; men pay $2 a ticket (i.e. $4 for 2 tickets) for themselves and their date; the stake pays the balance at a group discount rate.
. 3. The whole group sits and enjoys the event together.
. 4. Following the event, any and all in the stake are invited to join at a central location for stake-provided light refreshments.
The intent is to encourage dating with “planned, paired, and paid” activities, supplemented with manageable-sized larger group interaction. This way everyone has a date but meets a wider group; both the 30-or-so date night participants and the even larger group which gathers for refreshments. For some, dates are considered very expensive and having the stake help a little brings some young men who might not otherwise ever see a BYU cultural event with a date at those events, and thereby gives one of our young women a similar opportunity.
This week I interviewed a young woman for her temple wedding recommend who turned back a $17,000 a year scholarship at another university on the feeling she should come to BYU. She arrived on a Thursday. Her roommates told her they had singed her up for “stake date night’ the next night, Friday. The event was the BYU play, “Sarah, Plain and Tall”. The rest, as we say, is history. The young man she was paired with was nice, but the young man paired with one of her roommates really caught her eye, and she caught his eye.
We would love to hear other approaches to nurturing a “dating culture”.
Best wishes
President Gerrit Gong, BYU 16th Stake.
Following is a letter from President Barrett, the president of the BYU 21st Stake, regarding dating successes.
Brethren, Here is a celestial law: “Every man (or woman) seeking the interest of his (or her) neighbor…” (Doctrine and Covenants 82:19) We already knew we had to become better Match-Makers because Elder Monte J. Brough had given us the charge to do so. So last February, in preparation for stake conference, President Baker suggested the idea, “Every Member a Match-Maker.” It was right on target. So at the Saturday evening session of our stake conference, we declared “Every Member a Match-Maker” and we had two young people from our stake speak about matchmaking and being “set-up-able”, even if previous experiences had not been successful. Here is the idea: you don’t always have control over being asked out or whether the person you ask will go on a date. But you CAN set up other members of your ward and look out for them. Our wards, as a whole, have been very responsive to this idea. One young lady was hosting such an evening in her home and then thought, “Oh, I need a date also”, and so she asked a young man to come. They were married last week!
This idea also expands the circle of acquaintance. You don’t always know who you ought to know, but your roommate or another member of the ward does. Often, members will have the thought come to them: “You know, I think she and my cousin (or friend or missionary companion or person at my work) would be great together.” When we ask how someone met, we often hear, “Well, actually I was going out with his roommate…” The rest is history, as they say. So mostly, this all happens informally. More formally, we organized a “Match-Maker Task Force”, drawing from each ward in the stake. They looked at the whole spectrum of why people don’t date, the fears, anxieties, etc., and gave us a report as well as a recommendation. The recommendation was for each ward to hold a “Dating 101” class that would last about three weeks and even outlined the curriculum, which included a “practicum”, where each member of the class would go on a date. We recommended that a wife of a bishopric member would teach it. These have just started, so the jury is till out on how well this will work. The stake president noted that he was set up with Sister Barrett. He added, “And Father Adam was set up also.” There is precedence for all of us.
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