A Mormon Dating Show Clip Went Viral, But The Internet’s Reaction Was Even Wilder

Another viral dating show has emerged featuring the familiar ingredients: groups of individual men and women who pitch themselves as an attractive commodity, hoping to get some takers. The appeal is the awkward, vulnerable context we’re all familiar with: expressing your interest while opening yourself up to rejection, only this has the added spectacle of an invisible internet audience. 

With podcasts, TV, and gimmicky online shows all leaning on dating to drive views and with rates of uncoupled adults higher than ever, these programs function as equal parts ragebait (Whatever Podcast, Pop the Balloon or Find Love, The Button) and mimetic desire (Love Island, Perfect Match, Too Hot to Handle, The Bachelor). As interest grows, the niches get more hyper-specific: Jewish Matchmaking, Indian Matchmaking, Married at First Sight, Love on the Spectrum. Now enters the Mormon dating show The Altar.

Where most reality and internet dating shows rely on degeneracy, questionable character, and sleaze to make for good trashy viewership, The Altar’s newly released series, 20 Mormons Blind Date, took the internet by storm with its very first episode, seeming to challenge the idea that participants had to be morally questionable hot messes to capture our attention. 

Despite the show’s seemingly more wholesome demographic, however, it was the projection of everyone’s dating hang-ups about the opposite sex that drove the virality behind one contestant’s 30-second introduction. Like most viral clips, the one that went nuclear was divorced not just from the larger context of the 45-minute-long episode, but from the context of the show’s fundamental set-up. 

You can probably guess how it works: tell us about yourself, with details of your choosing, to the singles of the opposite sex, in the hopes they’ll choose you as a suitor. Everyone identifies as Mormon and lives in the Utah Valley area. There are three rounds to get through, each involving the elimination of couples until only one is remaining, who will be the proud recipients of a prize: a date giveaway package.

The first round, “Love at First Sight,” is the pitching round, but the men and women are shielded from one another by a dividing curtain. The contestants have only their voice and their story to offer to appeal to their potential suitors. If they couple up, the curtain will drop, and they’ll get to see one another as they move on to the next round. Importantly, though, only a limited number of couples advance to the second round, necessitating selectivity from the men, who will need to listen and choose carefully to each woman’s pitch. 

Rylie, our victim of virality, volunteers to go first. She steps up to the circular podium, her physicality hidden from the men on the other side, and tells them about herself. She has a slight lisp, and her voice might be perceived as more "dorky" or "quirky" than average. Her 30-second pitch, on the face of it, sounds banal and inoffensive. 

“I’m Rylie. I’m 24. I’m from Houston, Texas, and honestly, I’m down for any good adventure. I just got scuba dive certified, and I’m planning to go to Australia this summer, so I’m super excited about that. And I honestly love any themed party, like those are like my favorite things to go to, my favorite things to plan. And I’m looking for someone that wants to be my adventure buddy and is going to be there for me.”

But believe it or not, the men on the internet were hardly shocked that no men stepped forward to profess interest in Rylie, because she just committed a dating red flag: professing her love for traveling, which we all know is code for prostitution. At least, that’s what prominent X accounts would have you believe. But first, let’s back up.

When it came time for any takers interested in Rylie to step up, no one did. The video showed the men not just awkwardly giggling, but also looking at one another, seemingly for reassurance or approval. The caption of the video reads, “She was too cool for any of these guys,” baiting commenters to argue who was in the wrong. 

Rylie’s 30-second pitch was clipped and posted on X, cleverly edited to omit the dividing curtain between Rylie and the men, giving the impression that they’re all sitting there staring and laughing at her. The video took off, getting millions of views, where totally sane people had totally sane takes.

Who could take issue with a sweet 24-year-old Mormon girl or a group of guys not interested in selecting the very first girl to pitch herself (when they would have multiple opportunities to couple up, and only a limited number of couples were permitted)? The usual suspects. 

Women began seething, insisting the guys were intimidated by how cool and adventurous Rylie was, hyping her up as cute, interesting, and a catch. 

Fueled by righteous indignation after witnessing men lock eyes and seemingly laugh right in her face, women went off: “the male loneliness crisis? Men aren’t lonely enough.” Their expectations are too high because “porn and the internet have ruined young men’s brains.” They didn’t pick her because they were “insecure.”

When it came to light that the men actually couldn’t see her and instead rejected her based entirely on what she said (or they just didn’t think she sounded attractive), men started doing their own song and dance about modern women, practically emergency dialing the thot police. Countless accounts insisted “we all know what ‘travel’ is code for: sleeping around to get flown around the world for free.” 

Yes, that is precisely what being interested in traveling means, particularly for Mormon women who speak with slightly dorky lisps, dress in sweater vests, and tell the cameras they wonder why no one ever picks them. Then there was the insistence that no one likes a girl who’s into adventure or hobbies like scuba diving, despite my sitting through the entire episode only to hear the men repeatedly cite these sorts of interests and that they were seeking a woman who was also into those things. Or it was that she signaled she’d be a huge financial drain while offering nothing in return.

There was a clear gap between what terminally online men claimed men want and how the men on the show actually behaved. They practically jumped at the chance to bag the 27-year-old girlboss with an 800 credit score, and most of the other women’s pitches sounded almost identical to Rylie’s: “I like to travel, I like surfing, going outdoors, having a good time.” Don’t get me wrong, I find the way normies approach mate-seeking completely baffling in their decision to talk and advertise themselves in a way that makes them indistinguishable from any other person. But normies honestly don’t care. 

They’re usually just as basic as the next person, and their preferences reflect that. And no, men are not turned off by women who like to travel or who pitch themselves the way that Rylie did, so long as there’s some signal that she’s hot. It’s really that simple. In this sort of format, they’re defaulting to voice physiognomy and vibe checks. We don’t need a PhD analysis about how it’s biologically impossible for men to be attracted to women who are adventurous, have hobbies, and travel. But whatever helps you sleep at night. 

As @CartoonsHateHer pointed out, five minutes ago, the discourse was that men are saints for having the lowest dating standards alive. “All men need is for you not to be fat or a single mom.” But clearly, men do have standards. They’re not that low. And that’s fine. Women don’t need to write novella-length cope about every rejected girl being secretly irresistible, and men don’t need unanimity of disdain for “girlbosses” to uphold their own personal preferences.

Scrolling through my feed, it felt like living in two worlds at once. In one, a Mormon girl went first in a blind dating round and got passed over. In the other, the internet hallucinated an effigy to dump its neuroses into. The paranoia about “body count signaling” and sugar baby travel deals applies only to a tiny subset of very particular women. Yet, here it was being projected onto her archetypal opposite. Mormon women aren’t secretly a cartel of Latter-day sugar babies. This is just a sex-pest theory of mind: men imagining what they’d do in her position, then assuming all women are the same.

Video after video, tweet after tweet, men poisoned by discourse churned out their obligatory talking points, projecting so hard they made Tony Soprano look like a paragon of mental health. “Women will never take accountability.” Accountability for what, wanting to go to Australia? Having hobbies? Meanwhile, their female Twitter foils were just as insufferable, each side amplifying the other’s righteous anger, all finding Rylie a convenient proxy for their gender-war brainrot.

The male contestants themselves did nothing wrong. Their reactions were stripped of context, maybe even deliberately edited to spark outrage. And it worked—fueling clicks, rage, and, yes, this very article. But displacing anger onto random normal people because you’re fighting an imaginary battle in your head is not a good sign.

“Men aren’t lonely enough,” say the women, targeting random men just minding their business, not doing anything to hurt anyone. “Women are completely delusional about what men want in a mate,” say the men, and it’s just an innocent 24-year-old Mormon girl doing her best to describe her hobbies and interests in 30 seconds. 

Of course, all of these people are fighting completely imaginary battles, while the actual contestants, inhabiting real flesh and touching actual grass, are pairing up or going home with grace.