The Love Boat: A Boy, A Blog, and A Mid-Singles Mormon Cruise

After several months of tenuously dipping my little toe into the mid-single dating pool, with some successes and some failures, I figured it was time to cannonball right into the middle of that sucker by joining a Mormon Mid-Singles s Caribbean even night  cruise.  Go big or go home...single.  I was not quite sure if I was getting onto The Love Boat or a Waterworld version of the Island of Misfit Toys (I still want a water pistol that shoots jelly), nevertheless I set off for a grand an adventure.  Now boarding a Carnival Cruise ship, often referred to as the drunken Grey Hound of the Sea, with 240 Mormon singles is an interesting paradox of cultural collisions.  As a scientist, I had the opportunity to sit back and study this cultural anomaly (for those who are not socially awkward engineers; “studying” = “being a wall flower”) and can now report my findings back to the general public  -  that is if I can consider my extended family and 7 other blog readers as a "general public."  So here are some of the discoveries I made about mid-singles, Mormons, 'Merican Cruisers, men, and myself during seven days at sea:

• American Cruisers – On the 3rd day at sea while strolling through the empty buffet area rather too early in the morning, I came across what has become to me the most iconic image of the American Cruiser.  Front and center of the closed buffet was a Vegas style omelet station and there, standing alone in the vacant buffet area was a solitary and slightly portly American woman, plate clasped tightly in both hands, eagerly counting the seconds down until that omelet station fired up.  I couldn't help but wonder if the Filipino cruise workers regale their children with fanciful stories of the Americans who could devour the food equivalent of a full grown Filipino citizen in a single sitting. 

• Mormons – We think we are so funny. Our first full day at sea was extremely choppy with an enormous contingent being rather seasick. Still being Mormons, we actually had church services on the boat with about 200 of us. Amidst the rocking and heaving we opted to end our mini sacrament meeting with “Master the Tempest is Raging.”  We are a funny lot.  Despite the song, there was little peace on the seas that first day and I think there was even a nurse in our group handing out anti-nausea medicine for cancer patients to some of our more beleaguered souls.  With the smell of vomit permeating here and there, we might’ve needed an exorcism instead. 

• Myself - Despite my enjoyment of karaoke, I must now resign myself to the fact that I cannot sing.  We had two group karaoke nights, and boy these Mormons can sing.  Well most of them, not me. On the second night I decided to serenade the crowd with Cake’s version of I Will Survive (seemed appropriate for me).  I figured, “It is Cake, he talks more than he sings, I can pull this off.”  Well apparently I was so bad that a sweet little Brit jumped up from the crowd to help me out to cheers from the crowd. You ever seen a special needs kid get cheered on by the crowd? Yeah, it kind of looked like that.  But props to others in the crowd who could sing.  We had a concert worthy and tear jerking performance of “Just Give Me a Reason,” which caused some of the more recent divorcees to add extra lemons to their ice water and some even went full caffeinated beverage to drown their sorrows.
  
  

• Mormon Cruising – If you want to meet lots of women, tell everyone you are a photographer and bring a nice camera. We had a professional photographer on the trip, Scott Jarvie, who took tons of great photos for everyone.  But when observing his end of trip slideshow I noticed that he was in about half of his own pictures posing with everyone.  So he didn’t even have to take about half of the photos.  He just handed off the camera.  There were some very good pictures there too.   So I might recommend a strategy of just buying a nice camera and then posing with all the pretty women while everyone else takes the pictures of you.  Brilliant!

• Men - When you have four men sharing a cabin, don’t waste your time on the first day creating an intricate door signal plan to indicate whether one of you is in the room with a lady friend. It is best to first (1) assess each of your abilities in picking up said woman and then (2) determine whether the smell in the room after one day would even be tolerable for female habitation.  If both one and two are not met, don’t waste the time with a plan. 

• Mormons - Through my observations I determined that the best way to meet people on a cruise is to either be a ballroom dancer or a doctor.  If you can dance, you can literally walk up to any woman without saying a word take her by the hand and spin her around the floor.  Taking a woman’s hand and then clumsily stomping her toes is not as effective.  Alternatively, if food poisoning strikes on a cruise ship (which it did on the fourth day), if you’re a doctor you get to make house calls to not an insignificant number of sick people and make loads of friends.  I also found that hiding away and listening to your headset in the remote corners of the ship is the less effective way to meet people.
  
  

• Cruise Line’s v. Mormon - About 10% of the passengers on the cruise ship were teetotaling Mormons.  I could not help but wonder if the financial department for the cruise line was puzzled as to why their profits from booze and gambling was down by a tenth, but soft-serve ice cream and hot chocolate consumption was through the roof. 

• Mormons - On the last night I found myself sitting at the “Table of Truth.”  This is a rather Mormon version of a confessional, but with a bunch of Mormon’s it was rather dull.  In a nutshell, most reported “fooling around” was done with ex-spouses while married and most everyone who was arrested was done so as a missionary. So there is very little titillating scuttlebutt to be had in fact the words “titillating” and “scuttlebutt” are probably more scandalous than anything said at the table.
  
  

• Myself - I need some new (or just any) pickup lines.  So here I am on the dating scene, six months into it and going head to head with quite a few serial daters, I knew my lines would be rusty, but I think the best I had was "What is your name?"  "Did you know there are two identical buffets?" "Be careful, there is glass on the dance floor and you have bare feet." or my favorite, "Can I borrow some eyeliner, it is '80's Rocker night?"  That first line got me lots of names, but with 240 people to meet, I promptly forgot 93% of them within five minutes and I never found out if that woman did or did not cut her bare feet on the broken glass.

So there you have it, my takeaways from my first LDS singles cruise.  In truth, it was a blast. Like all things in life, it was what I made of it and, despite my awkwardness, I wanted to have fun.  So veni, vidi, and maybe even a little vici in there to.