Volunteering for Love: Romantification by Good Works

Volunteering is one of those great tasks that fulfills your human role on so many levels: It's American, it's spiritual, and it feels good. You can support and improve your community, and you can meet people, too.

There's nothing wrong with volunteering with an ulterior motive. Alexis de Tocqueville, writing about American democracy, said that the thing that makes it work is "enlightened self-interest," meaning that you serve your country and yourself at the same time. Many people make friends with the other volunteers while they're working on a project, and many non-profits specifically design volunteering events that provide a good amount of socializing.

A single person might be inclined to go work for a homeless shelter or a hospital or a political cause in hopes of serving others and maybe meeting a special someone who will think that civic virtue is really sexy. I call this venture "Romantification by Good Works." Okay, cheesy pun, but nobody's paying me to do this so I get to release groaners whenever I want.

I highly recommend volunteering, but, like everything else a single Christian might do for love, it is possible to overdo it. I did, spending two years in the Peace Corps and then getting an assortment of jobs for non-profits.

By overdoing it, I ran in to a fundamental rule of meeting people: The more you do things your way, the more you'll run in to people as screwed up as you. As time goes on, the more your interests narrow, the more your opportunities narrow, too.

Allow me to give an example: In college, I was a single guy and a history / journalism major who liked talking about international affairs. I couldn't find many people like me. I joined the Peace Corps and found myself in a group with 50 overeducated do-gooders who could talk your ear off about Uzbek politics and the evils of agricultural subsidies. And then I got out of the Peace Corps and couldn't find a job and I enrolled in graduate school, only to find 40 returned Peace Corps volunteers in the same program. At parties we competed to see who could brag about the most interesting disease contracted while in Uncle Sam's Service.

After getting out of graduate school I got a job working for a non-profit. There was an intern there, a 21-year-old woman who had traveled to Russia, who was very erudite and well-read. She could talk about literature and history very well, and had rather poor social skills. The whole office thought we were a perfect match. The girl and I talked a lot, and I never could tell whether she actually liked me. She alternated between trying to control me and telling me to buzz off. It was like the bickering of being married 20 years without any of the intervening warmth. She got annoyed when she saw me talking with other women and was impossible to work with for several days if I did. There was no actual affection in this relationship unless you count one brief outburst of stated interest (I'm not going to say who did it) that was followed by three months of stony, awkward silence which ended only when her internship ended and she left the state.

Those three months gave me plenty of time to reflect on how I had gotten into this world of dysfunction with her. A couple of things had caused it: One was my inability to get out and meet normal people and have an actual social life. I was too intent on staying within the community of workers and volunteers of the agency, so they (and the girl) assumed I was desperate, and I allowed myself to be put in the soap opera. The other was my idealism -- yes, too much community service -- which kind of messed with my head. I was one of those kids who bought the "Believe in yourself and help others and you can do anything" stuff they teach in the public schools, so I was intent on being a saint and working for agencies that help the poor.

When I was in middle school, our teachers organized this big theme called "Heal the world" based on the Michael Jackson song that goes "Heal the world / make it a better place / for you and for me and the entire human race." A couple of days before the huge school-wide sing-a-long, a boy our age sued Jackson for doing some very unidealistic things. We pretended not to notice.

Whenever the teachers would try to inspire us with some kind of world-changing theme, they'd have essay contests, and I'd go all out for them and write stuff that would put my classmates to sleep but please my teachers with all the four-syllable words I was using. So I kind of got it in my head to go out for service projects and stuff.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to serve poor people, but one of the reasons I was so intent on serving was that I thought all this do-gooding would help me forget about my difficulties making friends... and I found someone just like me, and we pecked at each other like chickens.

Please forgive me if I'm being too negative about volunteering. You would probably enjoy community service if you, unlike me, kept it down to a few hours a week. After the previously mentioned nagging anti-romance, I worked for Raphael House of San Francisco, an excellent Orthodox charity, and I did meet a lot of really nice people there. One member of our volunteer board of directors met a staff member at Raphael House, and they got married and now have a nine-month-old baby.

I also remember an extroverted, talkative young lady who made it clear to everyone that her intent was to get married soon and have at least 10 children. Beautiful and large-chested, she was meticulous in her make-up every morning, and this strategy did not take long to work. She was engaged in a few months and then disappeared and has not been heard from since. At evangelical universities, it's often joked that women go there for their MRS degree, and that the universities secretly advertise guarantees of, "Ring by spring or your tuition back" to get them to enroll. Raphael House wasn't a university, but this young lady came in with that intent, and it worked.

Some recommendations for romantic altruism

• Find an activity that you actually enjoy. If you're a hermit-crab introvert, don't sign up to be the chairperson of the fund-raising gala. If you're easily frightened, neighborhood watch in the ghetto might not be for you. If you're good with customer service, just about every agency has a front desk that needs to be operated, and you'll meet lots of people that way. If you're hoping to meet guys (straight guys, I mean) don't volunteer for a benefit fashion show.
  
• Find something that appeals to other people your own age. Volunteer poll workers are very important to making our democracy work... but for dating it's not such a great idea unless you're scouting guys for your widowed grandmother.
  
• Listen to the people you're serving. They know you better than you think. For example, when my mother was single and was teaching, she had a guy named Rob out to help put together a science experiment demonstration. A few months later, she brought a guy named Charles to be her assistant to help with hydrogen balloons. He was more cheerful and engaged than Rob had been. The next day, Mom's seventh-grade girls said, "Miss Fussell, that guy you brought yesterday was so dreamy..." She married Charles (my Dad).
• Try not to get too attached to the folks you're serving. When I told the kids at Raphael House that I was engaged to be married, one first-grade girl said, "Ew. We don't need to know about that."
• Don't assume that the other volunteers share your religious beliefs. Some people think that volunteering is a good substitute for religion since volunteers don't get all schismatic and judgmental of each other like religious people do. (This is, tragically, a somewhat accurate criticism.)
  
• If an Orthodox group organizes a volunteer effort, GO! You may not get another chance. A big challenge for the Orthodox volunteer is that the Orthodox Church isn't that good at community service. This is a problem that goes back to the very founding of America -- when the assorted Protestant groups got to the United States, they realized (or perhaps hoped) that the state would not provide social services to their members, and so the Protestant churches became major centers of community service. The very concept of American civil society and charity work is a Protestant invention, and the Orthodox Church, having only been here for 100 years, hasn't quite made the transition from being the King's Church in the Old Country to being a minority church here.
  

An idea: "The Volunteer Date"

This is when you and your sweetie (or someone who's just interesting) make it a personal event to volunteer for something together. Writer Bob Strauss offers some reasons why you might be inclined to do this:

If you're weary of spending your evenings making small talk or smiling as you think "I wonder if that spot on his face is a pimple or a mole," you may want to consider another option—the volunteer date, by which I mean doling out food at a soup kitchen or renovating a house in a run-down neighborhood rather than catching Son of the Waterboy at the local multiplex. Full article available here

It is a more relaxing setting, and the task at hand will make you seem more like a normal person. If you were one of the dozens of people who saw the romantic comedy movie Sidney White, (it has one funny joke and it's two words long) Sidney and her prince charming had their first date working at a soup kitchen in a church and staying after to talk.

I did something similar to this, too, for a first date. I invited Miri to visit Raphael House for dinner (I was living there at the time). We ate dinner with a mother and daughter who were there while they were trying to get housing, and then I gave her a tour of the shelter and then we went to the Asian Art Museum where there was this Pakistani band playing music. Then we went to Union Square where we sat and talked and looked at the Macy's sign and talked and talked and... uh, my in-laws read this blog. I guess a gentleman has to stop there.

But, one of the advantages of that kind of first date is that it didn't have to become a date, necessarily. That's one of the things Miri told her friends before she went: "I can't quite tell if this is going to be a date or not." I wasn't sure whether it was a date either until we were sitting, listening to the Pakistani band, and I had been looking at her hand for about 45 minutes, giving myself a heart attack trying to build up the nerve to take it and finally (cue major-key violin crescendo loud enough to drown out the Pakistani band) I reached over and took her hand and she let me know she liked having her hand held.