Courtesy of Daniel Gelora via Pixabay

You’ve probably already heard of the Christians-only dating site, ChristianMingle.com. In fact, if you owned a TV or computer in 2012, I can almost guarantee it. That’s the year the faith-based matchmaker rolled out an aggressive advertising campaign that saturated America with commercials, emails, and social media ads, all promising they could “find God’s match for you” for just $13.99 a month. This promise implied a direct connection to the divine that felt a little too convenient and transactional for some, and it quickly became a source of ridicule, being mocked by Christian bloggers and Stephen Colbert alike.

Despite the fun had at their expense, the company’s aggressive advertising did pay off. Claiming that their matches were “made in heaven” allowed them to claim they were the “nation’s leading Christian-based dating site” the very next year. Christian Mingle also became the most successful website for their parent company and online dating conglomerate, Sparks Network.

Sparks Network owns dating sites for other religious subsets, such as Jdate for Jewish people, and for other specialized groups, such as Attractive World for conventionally good looking people. Their particular success in the Christian category came much to the chagrin of their competitors however, such as Christian-owned dating site, ChristianCafe.com. Their president told The Washington Post that unlike Christian Mingle, they “don’t claim to have a pipeline direct to God.”

Even though America was taking notice of their advertising, it seemed Christian Mingle’s quest for the most pervasive marketing coverage wasn’t quite complete. Luckily, an opportunity to spread their reach even further arose when writer, actor, and director Corbin Bernsen approached the head of the company at a Faith and Film festival. Bernsen told him, “I want to do a movie with you, with Christian Mingle, a romantic comedy.” A feature length film must’ve seemed like the natural next step for the religious dating giant because in December of 2013, it was announced that Christian Mingle the company was going to make “Christian Mingle” the movie, and wow, what a movie they made.

Their namesake film was released in October of 2014, but I wasn’t aware of its existence until about six months ago. That’s when a Youtuber named Kurtis Conner made a video about it that piqued my interest. The plot line he described seemed too commercial and strange to be true, and I knew I had to watch the whole thing for myself if I was ever going to wrap my head around it.

I assumed I’d still have to pay at least a couple of dollars to rent it on Amazon though, and paying even one dollar to see it seemed like too much. Since the film only grossed $19,836 in the United States, apparently a lot of people agreed with me too. Christian Mingle’s 103 minute commercial must’ve paid off some other way because they didn’t exactly recoup their estimated $650,000 budget. However, on a whim, I typed “Christian Mingle” into Netflix last weekend, and lo and behold, there it was.

Let me tell you; the movie did not disappoint. I paused it about every five minutes to give my boyfriend more and more incredulous commentary about what was happening. The whole thing felt like a Hallmark movie gone terribly wrong, and if it weren’t for its problematic messaging about women, it would be just another cheesy, low budget movie we could all forget about. Unfortunately, this rom com is truly unforgettable.

The movie stars unempowered protagonist, Gwyneth Hayden, who has a pretty good life going when this whole mess of a storyline starts. As the film’s IMDb page puts it, Gwyneth “has it all. A top-notch career, killer wardrobe, dream apartment, and great friends.” She thinks all she’s missing is a man, and you better believe her “great” friends wholeheartedly agree.

At the beginning of the movie, Gwyneth and her girlfriends are out to eat after Gwenyth was on a bad date last night, and her friends make it very clear they don’t really care that Gwyneth didn’t have a good time. Instead of them being sympathetic to the way her date ignored her for another woman, one of her friends warns her that if she’s not careful, she’ll “be the last one standing” when it comes to marriage because her friends and their husbands are “running out of guys” to set her up with. Instead of pushing back on this you-need-a-husband-to-be-happy rhetoric, Gwyneth agrees with her, telling her not to worry because their friend Anne-Marie will definitely be the last woman they know to get engaged.

This sets up marriage right from the get go as the ultimate goal of this movie, painting Gwyneth as little more than a marriage hungry failure who hasn’t yet achieved this coveted status. She’s doing everything else right, but if she doesn’t have a man to share it with, then it’s all for nothing. I understand marriage being the end goal of dating for most people, especially women who are told that being a wife and mother is always the most fulfilling path for them, but Gwyneth’s desperation for marriage is her main characterization. That’s why the whole movie kicks off with Gwyneth explaining that the story we’re about to see starts with her just looking for a guy to “stick a ring” on her finger. On her quest for love, she finds him, and she finds Him, AKA God, since this is a Christian movie after all.

Now it could be said that Gwyneth’s friends framing marriage as a competition is part of the comedy in this romantic comedy, but her friends are pretty reasonable any other time they pop up. Sure, they still put a dramatic spin on things, but later on, they try to get her to slow down and think things through when she’s falling head over heels for the movie’s love interest after only one date, and I agreed with them.

The movie also makes it clear that Gwyneth isn’t content waiting around for love, and that in itself is fine. I’m not against dating sites or putting yourself out there. I met my boyfriend on a dating app. What I do have a problem with is Gwyneth’s comically low standards. At first, she tells her friends, “I just want a guy who will look at me for ten seconds,” before admitting later on in voiceover that really, she still wants a “genuinely decent guy” like it’s a dirty secret to expect the bare minimum. It’s hard to believe that with this almost nonexistent criteria, apparent desperation for marriage, and the admittance that she’s “dated and dated and dated,” there hasn’t been even one guy who’s fit the bill in her thirty years of life.

This is probably a sore spot for me in particular because I often joke that my personal campaign for women who date men is to get them to raise their standards. I went off to college with a “decent” guy from highschool in tow, and I held on to that relationship for years too long because I kept lowering my standards. He wore down my self confidence and sense of security, and I was truly convinced it didn’t get any better than this man who I was begging to just be nice to me. From the outside, everybody thought he was the epitome of a decent guy though, the kind of guy any Midwestern dad would sit down and have a beer with. I wish I could sit my past self down next to Gwyneth and shout at them both, “You don’t have to settle! You don’t have to change to find a man!”

However, since Gwyneth is a fictional character, she decides she most definitely needs to change to find a man. She makes this decision when she sees on social media that her most unmarriageable friend, Anne-Marie, is engaged. Obviously if Anne-Marie can land a man, then there must be something wrong with Gwyneth because what are women but rival warriors on the battlefield of marriage.

In the wake of this defeat, Gwyneth’s sad and vulnerable, and what does she see when she turns on the TV but a Christian Mingle commercial. This just so happens to be the second Christian Mingle commercial they stick right into the movie, reminding you that at the end of the day, this whole story is just an attempt to get you to buy their product. The first time Gwyneth sees the commercial, she stays strong, but the second time, she can’t help but give in.

Since Gwyneth is the VP of brand management at an advertising agency, you’d think she’d be a little more skeptical about falling so easily for an ad since making products look better than they really are is her whole job. Apparently, we’re not supposed to think about that too hard though. We’re supposed to be busy laughing as Gwyneth fills out her dating profile, lying about going to church every week and putting down her church of choice as “God’s Church” instead of just looking up a local church and putting that.

It turns out, Gwyneth isn’t a very devout Christian, but she knows she has to lie about being more religious than she really is because she wants to find a decent guy, and everybody knows that all Christian guys are genuinely decent guys. That’s why my sophomore year crush from Jesus camp asked me on a date just so he could try to stick his hand down my pants in a public park without my permission. Don’t worry though, from the outside, he seemed like a great guy. I couldn’t tell you if he’s still a Christian though. His Facebook page is mostly about guns now, so clearly Gwyneth must know something I don’t.

Once her dating profile is officially live, and she’s perused her newly purchased copy of “Christianity for Dummies,” it’s time for the love interest to swoop in. “Swoop” might be too dramatic of a word for Paul Wood’s entrance though. He shows up late to their first coffee date, and his personality is akin to that of a stock photo of a white suburban dad who suddenly came to life.

He calls his own dad “papa” and tries to cajole Gwyneth into ordering a cookie, which she rebukes by saying, “that’s a double chin coming on faster than a freight train” just so we know she’s internalized the pressure society puts on her body on top of the societal pressure for her to get married before her ovaries dry up. This is one of the rare moments I actually felt bad for Gwyneth because it was one of the few moments I could actually relate to her and her need to cut herself down. I don’t blame her for performing the way her environment has told her to perform. I blame this movie for romanticizing the unnecessary pressure she’s put under as a recipe for success in love.

As the first date continues, it’s revealed that Paul is a classic, small town, Christian guy, and Gwyneth is a more well traveled, big city gal, so they don’t really have any initial chemistry. Gwyneth describes Paul as being out of “Leave it to Beaver” to her friends afterwards, and I definitely assumed this was just the movie showing Gwyneth suffering through a bad date to make the eventual real love interest look better. This isn’t the case at all, however. Instead, we watch Gwyneth tersely fake laugh as Paul jokes about having wanted to be a rock star when he was younger and how strange the world is now that online dating exists. Then when the coffee arrives, Gwyneth awkwardly prays over it, and they both decide they like each other for some reason.

If you think the awkward dates are over at this point, think again, because date number two is even worse. This time, Gwyneth and Paul meet up for sushi, a food that Paul supposedly likes. However, when the sushi arrives, he’s so visibly disgusted by it that Gwyneth tells him, “you look like you just smelled dog poop.” Paul then has to admit that he’s never actually tried sushi. He claims he wants to though, so he skewers a piece of tuna on a single chopstick and chews it for so long that Gwyneth points out that he is going to “actually have to swallow at some point.” When he does eventually manage to get it down, he brushes it off by saying, “I guess I’m just more of a chili cheese dog kind of guy.”

You might think they’re still not hitting it off, but even after this date, Gwyneth is still sold enough on Paul that when he invites her to a Bible study, she’s all in. She buys the book “The Bible for Dummies” and has a serious study session to try and keep up the charade of being more devout than she really is. This is a little strange though because earlier in the movie when her assistant asks her if she’s a Christian, says, “I believe in God and stuff. I was baptized. I went to Sunday school. I read the Bible when I was a kid,” so it’s kind of surprising that none of that information stuck with her. She apparently doesn’t even know what a Bible study is, but she still goes and stumbles through it. Paul and her finally seem to connect when he’s walking her home at least. He tells her about his come to Jesus moment. She tells him about how she always wanted to become a teacher. It feels like their first real conversation.

For their fourth date, Gwyneth goes to church with Paul’s parents and then goes out to lunch with them afterwards. This leads to Gwyneth giving another ridiculously long winded and awkward prayer over their food when it arrives, which is still extremely confusing. I don’t do the Christianity thing anymore, but just by being raised Christian, I could definitely give a much more acceptable, off the cuff prayer. Gwyneth was supposedly raised Christian too, so I don’t know why she’s so confused about how food prayers work.

The movie decides this is a good time to throw in some tension though, so Paul’s mom lets it slip that their whole family is going to Mexico for a missionary trip, and plot twist; they’re leaving tomorrow. The real kicker is that they’ll be gone for a whole month though. Now a month really isn’t that long to wait if you’re really feeling a connection with someone new, but since Gwyneth’s main deal is that she needs to get married as soon as possible, a month mind as well be years.

She decides she’s ready to throw in the towel on their relationship, and she’s not taking Paul’s attempted apology calls the next day for not giving her a heads up about the trip. Lucky for Paul though, things aren’t going well at work, which makes sense since this movie never actually shows Gwyneth being good at her job. Instead, we get to watch her bomb a big marketing pitch for an important client and decide to call Paul afterwards. When they’re on the phone, Paul can tell she’s getting ready to break up with him, so he throws out that she should “come on down” to Mexico, and she says yes. Whether that’s because she actually wants to see him or because she could just use some time away from work feels pretty up in the air.

Once she’s in Mexico, her assistant calls her to see where the hell she is, and Gwyneth justifies taking off across the border by telling her, “I want paradise, his version of paradise,” and just let that statement’s wording sink in. Her clarification of it being “his version of paradise” completely cleared up Gwyneth’s real feelings about Paul for me. She’s not in love with Paul. She’s in love with the idea of Paul. She’s in love with the way Paul’s friend told her, “he’s the last of the good ones.”

Paul could be switched out with any other wholesome, repressed, dad-in-waiting, Christian guy with no significant character flaws, and this romance would be exactly the same. The level of connection would be exactly the same. She’s given up on her version of paradise, and she’s settling for his because she thinks it’s the next best thing. That’s what she’s been socialized to believe, and it makes their relationship seem really hollow and sad.

However, unfortunately for Gwyneth, it ends up that she’s just as interchangeable for Paul. While in Mexico, she’s off with the other women folk teaching the Mexican kids the Bible in a school that’s literally just called school, or rather, “escuela,” as the sign says, when one of the students has a tough religious question. She wants to know why God sent a hurricane to destroy her village, and Paul’s mom tells Gwyneth to answer since she doesn’t like Gwyneth. Gwyneth doesn’t know what to say since this is a tough question after all, but Paul’s childhood friend, Kelly, who’s also on the mission trip has a biblical answer to give, and Gwyneth loses the Christianity contest.

The final nail in the coffin comes when Paul’s back from building stuff with the other men folk and reveals that the kids who clean the bunkhouse found her “Christianity for Dummies” book under her bed. Once Paul finds out that Gwyneth isn’t already a hardcore, Bible-reciting Christian, he dumps her for lying about being a true believer. She tries to compromise with him by saying it shouldn’t matter that she’s still learning because they both really like each other, but Paul’s just looking for someone to share his version of paradise too, and she doesn’t fit the bill anymore. All he needs is a nice, Christian girl to have his kids and share his small town values, making Gwyneth just as replaceable as he is.

Ironically, she is replaced by Kelly once she leaves. Apparently Kelly is a more legitimate Christian, so Gwyneth decides she’s going to become a legitimate Christian too despite the fact that I’m pretty sure she is one already. Even when I was a kid in the Catholic Church, I don’t remember them trying to root out the fake Christians, and they’re pretty judgmental. Most churches are in the process of losing younger members, and they need those members to donate money and bear children into the faith, so they’re not really trying to push people out the door as far as I know.

Either way, Gwyneth claims she’s not becoming a “real” Christian just to get Paul back, but after a month of going to some non-denominational church with fun music, she tries to convince Paul to break up with Kelly. When he says no, she gets more extreme and decides to go back to Mexico to fulfill her dream of becoming a teacher. She goes back to the same village where they went for the mission trip to teach the kids there English, and this long game approach turns out to be the right one.

Paul’s “papa” still comes back to the village every now and then, so Paul knows where Gwyneth is, and he decides to show up that Christmas to sweep her off her feet. Apparently four dates and a few days together on a mission trip constitutes unrequited love if you interpret it as being God’s plan. During their romantic reunion, I kept wondering how Paul and Kelly broke up though because it didn’t really feel like Paul was going to choose Gwyneth over Kelly. He had a lot more history with Kelly. His mom liked Kelly. It felt more like Kelly probably broke up with him, and he came back for his plan B.

Overall, it’s a lackluster end to the movie, and it felt like a harmful story line to romanticize. Protagonists don’t have to be perfect. The most interesting and relatable ones aren’t, but if women are meant to follow Gwyneth’s path towards love, a path this movie uplifts in its success, they’re supposed to prioritize marriage over everything else and enter into friendships that reinforce that prioritization. If they’re still “failing” at finding a husband, then a sure fire way to snag one is to change integral parts of themselves, such as their spirituality. As a genre, romantic comedies are supposed to leave their audience with a warm and fuzzy feeling inside, but this one just left me wondering how they fell so short of a love story.

The shame put on Gwyneth for not snagging a husband reminded me of the shame entitled men put on women who post photos of themselves in their natural states, when they’re not bending over backwards to fit society’s out of reach beauty standards. When they cut their hair short, or decide not to shave, or don’t put on any makeup that day, there are men who will comment, “no man will want you now.” These same men get mad when women are “trying too hard,” equating a full face of makeup and form fitting clothes with deceit. They want women to know they need to be trying, but they also want them to know it needs to look effortless.

When Gwyneth goes back to Mexico, she finally stops looking like she’s trying too hard, and it works. Paul comes back to her. I don’t think she ever really stopped trying though. Once her and Paul are reunited, and she knows their relationship is back on, she starts talking about how they’ll have to figure out how to get his mom to like her now. She’s already planning what’s next, already planning how to fit another mold to get someone else’s approval. I don’t think she ever really stopped planning though. I think it was too scary to stop.