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Notes -
-Actual IRL tradcaths socialize their daughters to be shy, stick close to their parents, and not party or stay out late. This makes it harder for young people to meet on their own.
-Actual IRL tradcaths expect men to be full time employed in potential provider roles before beginning to date. The geographic effects of this(young men having to move away to get good jobs) tend to distort local gender balances, and young women are socially expected to live with their parents until they marry so it can’t self-correct. There’s also some minor effects with social skills but most men figure those out quickly enough.
-Gender roles in the community can have a gender-segregating effect which combines with a cultural prejudice that the man pursues to make it harder for young people to meet organically.
-Some young people are becoming monks/priests/nuns. Worrying about whether to do so isn’t the main factor but it makes it mildly more difficult to escalate from ‘meeting’ to ‘dating’ for a population which is already a bit awkward with the opposite sex.
-Social uberconservatism can make it difficult to date by imposing lots of extra rules.
-As mentioned above, you can’t date unless that couple can have the woman stay home full time. Student loans are sometimes a factor taking women out of the marriage market for that reason- payments simply need to be bought down first.
The first two factors are definitely the big ones. If the community were better organized I suspect there would be some equivalent of shidduch independently derived but it’s not. Most influential lay community members recognize the situation as a problem but will not coordinate well enough with each other to make more than partial, patchwork progress.
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