Christian boy meets Christian girl

Christians are not like the world when it comes to dating and courtship. But ­in-depth interviews reveal a lot of confusion and anxiety among God’s young men and women when it comes to forming relationships and finding a spouse | Susan Olasky

Lee Love/Genesis

'How do you meet guys?'

I ask a class of students in a figure drawing class at Parsons The New School for Design near Manhattan's Union Square. "In your classes?" The students, would-be artists and fashion designers who come from all over the world, laugh. In a school where nearly 80 percent of the students are female and many men are gay, their prospects are few. So they meet random men in Union Square or at Max Brenner's chocolate emporium. They start talking. They exchange phone numbers, a crucial step in what comes next, "digital flirting." They "text and text for weeks," liberated by the sense of remove that texting allows: "You're talking, but not really."

Many Christian students also prefer texting to face-to-face talking. But in 40 hours of comparing the boy-meets-girl ideas of secular students at Parsons and serious Christian ones in Alabama, Texas, New York City, and Virginia, I found a huge difference between the two groups. That difference is both comforting and confusing.