The first place we announced our engagement (after the phone calls to our parents) was at a 15th St. Meeting YAF bowling party.

One of the most important things for me about being married to another Quaker is that Quaker time and family time are not separate. I don’t have to choose between going to Quarterly Meeting or spending the weekend with my family. It is part of our family’s identity.

One of my ulterior motives in working with children’s programs at Quaker gatherings is that there be enough Quaker children who grow up to be adult Quakers so that my children could choose to marry other Quakers. Not that they have to, but I want it to be an option for them.

I keep meaning to write a post about plain dress and romance: are they compatible?

Actually, this brings to mind a conversation I had with a woman I met last Thursday evening, who asked at some point whether I thought I could raise children with a non-Quaker. When I said yes, she asked what spiritual values my co-parent and I would use to raise the kids. I was absolutely stumped, not because it’s a hard question but because it seems so obvious – we would use *our* spiritual values. A spiritual connection is essential in my date-selection process, but I’ve found that I can connect in that way with atheists, agnostics, and pagans just as well as (and in some cases better than) professed believers. The specific words a person uses to talk about spiritual experience are far less important to me than the experience itself.

I finally just decided to live my life and assume that I’d bump into someone else living their life in a similar trajectory. The irony is that although my final love was more involved and informed and committed to Quakers than just about any YAF I’d ever met, after a few years of marriage she left Friends. It’s good to find someone with compatible values but it’s important to remember that you’re not marrying someone because their identity at-this-moment-of-life completely matches up with your identity at-this-moment-of-life. No matter how compatible someone is, they and you will change and you have to find someone whose approach to life you’ll find interesting twenty, thirty, forty years down the line. If it were me, I’d skip the movies and organize something like a Habitat-for-Humanity project: seeing who’s committed, works hard and knows how to use a hammer seems more important now than someone who knows how to hang like a YAF.

There are some good sexuality resources over on the Quakers spirituality/sexuality site. I would really recommend the 1998 YAF epistle. Insider YAF groupings can become… well, predatory is probably the best word… when they’re used as dating forums. They’re great places to meet prospective partners and there are plenty of successful marriages that started in YAF dorms but they can be dangerous places too. Rapes can and do happen, newcomers can and do get treated like “fresh meat,” spiritually unhealthy attitudes get all mixed in with the healthy ones, etc. (I’m speaking from experience of what happened in the years of the last strong FGC YAF community). If there is a kind of renaissance of conscious Quaker dating I hope it might include some soul-searching about the darker side that comes with being a tight spiritual community. Most of it’s great of course and I’ll always be happy I kept the elevator open for that cutie I saw coming through the front doors of the 2000 Gathering YAF dorm!

Good luck and keep your finger on the elevator “doors open” button! Martin at Quaker Ranter