Singles shake-down

ELNA BAKER is 28-years-old. She’s been living in New York City since moving there at 18 years of age to go to university. She’s five foot 10 inches and beautiful. She’s a comedian. In conversation, she has a self-deprecating charm and ready wit that makes her disarmingly attractive.

Unsurprisingly, she’s kissed a lot of guys since moving to New York, but she’s never slept with any of them because she’s a Mormon. It’s a stance that creates “a relationship Catch 22” with her amorous encounters. The longest non-Mormon boyfriend she had stuck around for four weeks, and that was because, she kids, he was outta town for two of those weeks.

Her decision to write a memoir about the conflict between her religious convictions and life as a bohemian in the world’s funkiest city has made her, as she puts it, “oddly famous in Mormon circles”.

Half the community has embraced her courage in airing her doubts; the other half has nothing but scorn for her. “Unfortunately, they’re the type who get their rifles out,” she quips.

“My dad has been supportive,” she says of her parents’ reaction. “My mother is really supportive, but in a different way. It’s almost like: ‘this is a chance for me to show you how forgiving I am’.”

Baker’s book is entitled The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance, a reference to the city’s annual Mormon singles shake-down, an event that she’s trundled along to for the last nine years in an effort to find a soul mate amongst the male community of 800 single Mormons in the city, a lot of whom she remarks will either be divorced or gay.

When it comes to dancing, the rule of thumb is that you should be able to fit “the standard works” between you and your partner. “The standard works” is a Mormon term for the books they study, so that you ought to be able to fit the Old Testament and New Testament and several other works of scripture between you and your dance partner — or else you’re dancing too close.

Marriage is a key cornerstone of Mormon faith. In fact, most Mormons believe that you need to be hitched if you’re to get into the highest level of heaven. And it pays to make it to the highest level, one of three eternal levels. There you can become, it is said, a God, with the wherewithal to create your own world.

This pressure, as you can imagine, creates an awful scrum amongst its constituency to find a partner. At a church gathering or a Mormon social event, Baker writes, single members will scan the room thinking: “If I don’t get married to one of these people, I limit my eternal progress.”

This social strain is compounded by the young age Mormons tend to marry. Being single and over 21 years of age, means you’re past your prime. Her parents, for example, were dating for three-and-a-half weeks in their early 20s before getting engaged.

Mormons, from her evidence, have a markedly anti-feminist view of a woman’s place in the world. Career-driven women are looked down on. One of Baker’s great aunts pulled her aside one time and said: “When are you going to give up your big dreams and settle down?”

Mormons also abide by a string of prohibitions: along with forsaking sex until marriage, you’re not allowed to drink caffeine, alcohol or take drugs. The depiction of the Mormon social scene she writes of seems childlike and stifling.

Women over 31 are no longer allowed to go to singles’ soirees, as they’re deemed to have passed their sell-by-date. Baker once bumped into a group of them queuing together to get into a production of the musical The Lion King, and skulked quickly away, having possibly glimpsed through the window at her future.

“I think you can look at it two ways,” she counters. “You can look at it as being repressed or you could also say it’s being innocent. It’s one thing that I’ve noticed about Mormons is that they are almost childlike in their joy and that they have a really fun time getting in water fights, or they’re very creative in the things that they choose to do for fun.

“I think a lot of people grow up when they’ve had sex or when they experiment with drugs or alcohol, but it can make you a bit jaded or cynical. It can make you shift your priorities so that you can get screwed or screwed up again. So when you’ve never dabbled in that realm of life, you don’t know what you’re missing.”

Having dabbled herself for the last year in some of the vices of the secular world, she found her investigations to be “anti-climatic.”

Drinking booze worryingly incurred too many calories. Weight is an issue with her. She writes movingly about her battle with obesity. When she was 22 years of age, she lost 80 pounds over five and a half months as a result of a crash diet, and has managed to keep the weight off since.

During her break from Mormon strictures, she didn’t, however, try sex, she admits, laughing. She remains firm in the belief of the power of prayer, with one or two caveats.

“My little sister Jill, who is only 19 years of age, has been dating this Mormon boy,” she says.

“They’ve been dating for three weeks, only three weeks, and he prayed and asked God should he marry her and God said, ‘No.’ So he broke up with her. She was, like, heartbroken. She asked for my advice, and I was like, ‘Jill, I think he just broke up with you.’ How many Mormon guys have been using the line over the years: ‘Ah, sorry, God told me no’.”