Here's an excerpt from a New York Times story on Mormon women:



The block of ice cream was melting fast. Jessica Sagers, who returned from her mission last year fluent in Korean, worked quickly with her date, using a knife and a melon baller to sculpture the slab of vanilla into something that resembled a skull. In a room carpeted with plastic tarps at Brigham Young University, male-female pairs chiseled away, then scooped their artwork into bowls to make sundaes topped with candy.

Goofy icebreakers are customary even for cosmopolitan Mormons like Ms. Sagers, 23, who was then applying to a bioscience doctoral program at Harvard. It was a Saturday “date night” in her singles ward, the church’s answer to bars and nightclubs. At the age of 18, Mormons typically join a ward, or singles congregation, where those of marrying age gather for worship and social events. Without alcohol or coffee to lubricate the socializing (both are prohibited by the church’s Word of Wisdom), there are bowling outings, pie-eating contests, ballroom dancing lessons and, in traditional Mormon fashion, lots and lots of sweets.
I read this and thought, "Isn't that delightful? Why can't we do something like that for our singles?" Not that I want to borrow too much from Mormonism, but I think we could do a little more to get the single people in the same room.