Why the widow's cruse explains why you're still single

For once, science and the Bible are on the same page

Let me tell you a story about online dating. This one has everything: famine, a dying widow, and breakfast cereal. And like all good dating stories, this one starts way back in 9th century BCE in Israel.

At the time, it was being ruled by King Ahab who worshipped a pagan god named Baal, bless his heart. The prophet Elijah was repping the Hebrew God, whose followers numbered only a few thousand. It was a tough gig, and though he got to perform some miracles such as causing a drought and then calling forth the rains to end it, Elijah also faced persecution. Plus, he didn’t get paid overtime, so God took pity on him. First God had ravens feed him before setting him up on a blind date with a widow in Zarephath, which was a Gentile city, but as Jesus said much later about this, “no man is a prophet in his own land.” Besides, it was just lunch, no pressure.

First dates are awkward. For starters, she was gathering sticks when he rolled into town, which seemed weird, but OK.

“Would you bring me a little water in a jar so I may have a drink?” he asked. As she was going to get it, he called, “And bring me, please, a piece of bread.” She answered that all she had was a little flour in a jar and some olive oil in a jug. “I am gathering a few sticks to take home and make a meal for myself and my son, that we may eat it—and die.”

Honestly, I’ve been on worse dates.

I have to tip my hat to Elijah, who didn’t let that phase him. That prophet had biblical game. He said sure, go home and die, but first make me some bread with the flour and oil, and make some for you and your son, and if you do that, God says, “The jar of flour will not be used up and the jug of oil will not run dry until the day the Lord sends rain on the land.” She made the bread for him and for her son and herself, and the flour and olive oil never ran out. And this was how Costco was invented.

We’ve come a long way since then. A friend of mine has a friend from India who is in an arranged marriage and asked him what it was like to be in a lifelong committed partnership not of his choosing. “It is a little strange,” his friend admitted, “but it’s not like we walk into a bar hoping to randomly find a wife.”

A chance meeting leading to a lifetime of married bliss has given way to online dating. Now, someone wanting to find everything from a no-strings encounter to a marriage can find endless options limited only by the space-time continuum. Instead of walking into one bar, you’re effectively walking into every bar, coffee shop, book club, Bible study, and coed frisbee golf meetup in town. The only limits are what you set, such as driving distance, age range, and whether someone voted for Trump. I mean, eww.

I’ve written previously about my extraordinary good luck in meeting S, who rules, but to level set, I’ve never been on the dating apps and have never experienced the dizzying abundance of effectively limitless dating options. And yes, mileage varies, but I imagine it would be something like what the title character of FX’s Fleishman Is In Trouble experienced when he “got back out there” after his marriage ended, except in his case it was less “out there” and more “online.”

And even that understates how dating apps have fundamentally changed life. It’s like we went from hoping to happen upon a stream where we might find gold to a world in which gold is seemingly in limitless abundance, and it’s texting you pictures of its nuggets.

“Toby Fleishman awoke one morning inside the city he’d lived in all his adult life, which was suddenly, somehow now crawling with women who wanted him,” says Fleishman’s narrator. “Not just any women. Women who were self-actualized and independent and who knew what they wanted. Women who seemed kind. Women who seemed motivated and available. But also some who just sent over a picture of a G-string.”

A libertarian would see this shift in the fundamentals of dating and theorize millions of rational actors reforming the marketplace of dating into one in which individuals maximized efficiency to create perfect pairings based on limitless options. But there are two problems with that: First, you’ve got your women, to which, I call and raise you men.

What do people do with a new reality of abundance? They immediately create scarcity. As I’ve said before, our brains are horribly dumb. People could be looking at the all-you-can-eat buffet of modern dating and think, “Huh, I’ve never dated an [insert literally whatever here]. I wonder what that’s like.” No, we revert to convention.

According to a 2018 study from two University of Michigan social scientists who studied heterosexual dating in New York, Boston, Chicago, and Seattle, men and women reach peak desirability at depressingly predictable ages: men at 50, and women at (sorry) 18 (ducks).

Also, the more educated a women is after undergrad, the less attractive she is, at least according to the men polluting the modern dating pool. So yes, if you’re a 44-year-old woman with some grad school, you might well be the loveliest and most enticing woman in the world, but you don’t score well on the algorithm because men.

One of the fascinating findings from this study were how men and women are both different and the same.

First, the difference: We judge each other’s looks differently. Male perceptions of female beauty seems objectively fair; only a few women are on either end of the beauty spectrum, and most are in the middle of a symmetrical bell curve. Women, however, judge more harshly; only a few men are seen as good-looking, and the rest, god bless them, are not. When it comes to women judging men, it’s pass/fail. There are no gentleman C’s. You’re either George Clooney or George Costanza, and brother, 99% of us are the latter.

Second, the similarity: According to one of the study’s authors, “Three-quarters, or more, of people are dating aspirationally.” By her calculations, moreover, those people are dating an average of 25% out of their league. This means that there are women who are swiping right on men they don’t think are attractive but who are considered more desirable on the app than they are. Who would have thought that Reply Guys who couldn’t get prom dates created a system that unfairly benefits largely unattractive men?

We probably should not be surprised that humans, or at least heterosexual, available city-dwellers have turned the possibility of limitless choices into a system that unfairly punishes women for being old enough to rent a car. We really have no excuse. It was right there all along for anyone who cared to keep reading the Bible after Elijah’s odd date with the widow, because that’s how we learn about the Widow’s Cruse.

As happens, Elijah was carried away by a tornado, and Elisha, who was one of his prophet proteges, received a double portion of his power, making him the new prophet of Israel. The job still did not pay overtime.

One day an entirely different widow came to him with a different problem also involving olive oil. Creditors were banging on her door, and if she couldn’t pay her bills, she had to sell her sons into slavery. All she had of value was a jar of olive oil, but Elisha was like, I got you. He told her to send her sons door-to-door to borrow all the jars, or cruses, they could, take them home, and poor the oil into the jars. I think you know where this is going.

Her one jar of oil filled all the jars they borrowed, paying off the debts and avoiding slavery, but the point here is that they eliminated scarcity by doing virtually nothing more than hitting command + all, command + copy, and command + paste a bunch of times.

In the Bible, the Widow’s Cruse is a story about the amount of one’s work (collecting jars) determining the amount of blessing and provision actually received. But in our digital age, the Widow’s Cruse becomes a curse, or more specifically the Paradox of Choice.

A human interaction that was once governed by matchmakers or beer-soaked chance is now replatformed to a romantic cereal aisle in which there are dozens of varieties of Cheerio’s and Chex. Too many choices means it’s harder to make a decision, and you’re less likely to be satisfied with the one you make. Neat.

Think of it this way: If a good-looking lady walked up to you in a bar and struck up a conversation, you’d feel lucky and value that interaction more. When you find the Golden Ticket, you run home happy.

How much would you value that same interaction if literally hundreds more similar ones are simultaneously available requiring so little effort that you don’t even need to put on pants? You start to get picky, swiping left on one fella because you don’t like the kind of fish he’s holding up. Don’t worry, there’s always another one, an endless stream of Golden Tickets, or at least good-enough tickets.

The problem with the dating apps isn’t really the apps, though there seems to be a huge market opportunity for AI-driven digital matchmaking. The best technology in the world won’t change the two-stroke combustion engines we have between our ears. We might have all the opportunity in the world at our fingertips, but when it comes down to it, the technology doesn’t make us smarter, it just makes our dumb brains more powerful.

Good luck out there. I’m rooting for you.

Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.

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