Seraphic Singles

Auntie's Night on the Tiles

2012-02-11T11:06:00.002Z

Well. Last night I went out with two giddy young things for supper, concert, and drinks--first in the sort of pub that turns out not to be so nice for American-sounding ladies in evening dress and then in the sort of chic hotel bar to which Auntie has grown accustomed.

It was hilarious although I must say I did not like the lighting in the Ladies' Room of any of those venues. When you are running around with giddy young things, you do not want to think "Oh dear. Oh dearie me" when you have a moment alone to repair the ravages of time.

School of Rock

2012-02-09T23:17:00.002Z

Tonight I am chilling with a pal, and we watched "School of Rock."

Listen, if you've been going through a tough time, or a pal has been going through a tough time, but the tough time in itself is over, there's nothing like a movie that makes you laugh until you cry.

I Don't Have Six Kids

2012-02-08T12:15:00.003Z

Reality check. Some girl who may want to consider counselling has claimed on a Catholic forum that Auntie Seraphic "went to a catholic college thus was surrounded by young devout catholic guys throughout her youth, got married straight out of college and now has 6 kids".

I did go to a Catholic college. There were young devout Catholic guys around, although most of them didn't pay much attention to little me, so I wouldn't call this "surrounded".

I married an anti-Catholic guy a year after college, divorced him shortly thereafter, got an annulment and then dated other non-Catholics (and two fallen-aways).* Young devout Catholic men were thin on the ground in those days, believe me.

When I was 37 I met a great convert Catholic, and when I was 38 we got married.

I don't have six kids. Barring a particularly startling miracle, I will never have six kids. I cannot imagine where anyone would get the idea that I have six kids. Especially as I have no children at all and am a little sad about that.

However, when you get married at 38, you know babies might not come. So although it's a bit sad to be my age, almost-three-years-married and childless, it's not a shock--unlike discovering some woman out there is claiming I have six kids.

It's a good thing I am having a good day, because on a bad day I might cry. But although I may never have kids of my own, today I have a strong sense of being able to help other people's kids. Usually these are kids in their 20s. Sometimes they have a problem and want my advice. Sometimes they are young parishioners who have fallen through a housing gap and want my spare room. And I love that I can help them. It's a little answer from God.

Me: Where's my baby?

God: I need you to take care of this one for two weeks.

Me: He's six feet tall!

God: So?

Me: Let's go ask B.A.

This is not today's post. (For today's post go here.) But I thought I should nip a blossom of lunacy in the bud.

*Update: And Volker! How could I forget the very Catholic Volker, my last and very favourite ex-boyfriend!? He may have broken up with me (the rat!) but he did buy front row tickets to a Bundesliga game when later I visited him in Germany. Jens Lehmann, my top football idol, was in net. That was extremely classy of Volker, I must say, and I'm sorry I bored him to death by talking so much about B.A.

Love in the Age of Facebook

2012-02-08T11:21:00.000Z

I have been asked to explain why I don't like internet dating sites. As I cast my memory over my own days chatting up and being chatted up by invisible strangers over the internet, I can find a lot of material.

However, I even more clearly remember an amusing afternoon chatting with my pal Aelianus, whom I met through blogging. His friends Berenike and--darn it--now that she has a nom-de-nun, I can't remember what her nom-de-blog was--anyway, these two nice young ladies were big fans, and so Aelianus had a look at my blog and, beginning what is now a four year habit, castigated me for my heresies.

Touched for his concern for Catholic truths and immortal souls, I eventually became his pal and, in a moment of unseraphicness, groused to him about being Single. His Facebook page was open to me, and I asked which of his Facebook friends were eligible.

"There's Such-and-such," said Aelianus--over Skype, I think. "He was at God's Own University with me."

"Oooh," I said, squinting at Such-and-such's photo. "That sounds good."

"He was sent down for [egregious behaviour]."

"Oh."

"And there's So-and-so," said Aelianus, as I went down the list. "But he got arrested for [egregious behaviour]."

"Oh."

And so on, until Aelianus asked me if I would like to live in a Historical House. One of his pals lived in a Historical House and was definitely in need of a wife to save his soul because women just flopped before him, etc., etc.

This was the first time I ever heard of B.A. I can't remember, but I must have had a look to see if he was among Aelianus's Facebook friends, and if he was I must have been turned off by the photo, because I hated all the photos of B.A. people started sending me, although his eyebrows were kind of cute, he had eyelids like subjects in Holbein paintings, and he appeared to have a merry personality.

It cost me exactly nothing to have a Skype conversation with Aelianus about his bachelor pals while we looked at their photos on Facebook. And it would cost all of you nothing to have a Skype conversation with a trusted, intelligent and morally astute male pal about his bachelor pals--or a female pal about her bachelorette pals--while looking at their photos on Facebook.

One thing a dating website can never do for you is give you the inside track on the men and women whose photos linger there. You simply have no way of knowing who the great guys and girls are, and who the great guys and girls aren't, and you probably skip over all kinds of amazing dudes and chicks because they don't LOOK amazing and they can't spell as well as you.

But friends can tell you all about their friends, memories prompted by the sight of them on Facebook, and trusting that their friends aren't going to care that much what they said to a stranger about them--or at least that they are unlikely to find out, unless they get married one day. So now B.A. knows what Aelianus said about him, but it doesn't matter because I am charmed by the idea of having snaffled someone Aelianus thought was a lady-killer. (B.A. says Aelianus was exaggerating.)

So there you go. This is a blog about feeling happy while being Single, not about ceasing to be Single. But I know that most Singles who read this blog hope to marry one day, so I have to respect that. And respecting that I can tell you that you don't have to pay $75 to stare at a lot of photos of strangers. You can just call up your best opposite sex pal and ask him or her about his or her pals. And while you are thinking about what you have been told, he or she can nudge his or her spouse-hunting pals in your direction.

What is Being in Love Like?

2012-02-07T12:02:00.002Z

The other day, somebody asked me what love feels like. Nobody could give her an answer.

Well, I gave her an answer, let me tell you. In hindsight, I might have added the caveat that this is what love is like for me. But, on the other hand, I have read about other women--even elderly, married-for-40-years, women--feeling this way, so my answer might hold some value.

By the way, before you read this, I must emphasize that this is a situation in which love is returned and proven. You know how I always say I don't believe in men's pretty words because I believe only in men's pretty diamonds? Keep that in mind. Men can say anything; it's when they cough up more than they can afford on something highly symbolic that I would pay serious attention. (Having no money, B.A. originally gave me his most prized possession, his grandfather's gold pocket watch.)

"Love," I said, "is when you hate being on the wrong side of the ocean from someone because you are haunted by the fear that you might not be able to get back on the right side, or that he might not be able to get back to you. Love is when you have conniption-fits because you are haunted by dread that you might not actually be able to marry each other after all because his plane might crash on the way, or you might be hit by a car, and the thought makes you cry and cry. Which is totally irrational, but that is what love is like."

"Love is also when you are sitting in your parents' house across the ocean for a month waiting for your temporary Spousal Visa, and you cry every day because you are on this side of the ocean and he is on that side of the ocean, and what if a volcano blows up and you can't get back? And it hurts and hurts and it sucks but that is the price you pay for love and it is worth it."

Love is also when you cannot believe your luck, and you hope you don't blow it by doing something egregiously stupid that you would normally never do, but fear you might do, like when you see the fire alarm in the subway station with the sign that says "$1000 Fine or Imprisonment for Misuse".

Love is also being happy most of the time you are around the beloved. When you are truly in love, you love almost everything about the beloved, including his country and his family and his friends and his ties and everything that reminds you of him, and because you are surrounded by all these reminders, you are generally very happy, and people feel happy around you because your happiness leaks out by osmosis.

I recognize that this is a lot for the Single readers to take on board, but I am writing it out for you to read because our societies are so in love with love that we are willing to take a chance on counterfeits and squint intellectually, or take off our emotional glasses, so that the counterfeit SEEMS like what I have just described. We WANT to be in love, so we IMAGINE ourselves into it, and when we feel terrible because the man we are "in love" with is a jerk, we rationalize that by saying "Well, love is pain."

But love is only pain when you are separated from the beloved, not when you are around him, unless he is very ill or dying, and then what makes you feel so bad is that he is in pain and also the fear of ultimate separation. Love is also an elderly lady sitting by her dying, comatose husband rubbing gel on his toothless gums so that they don't dry out as he drags in his last breaths. (I witnessed that myself, and it was the greatest exemplar of married love I ever saw.)

I'm writing all this so that you don't rip yourselves off by settling for, or actually pursuing, the fake instead of waiting for the real. I don't know how helpful it is, but I hope it is at least a clue. As I said to the girl who asked, I give out all this advice and write this blog not to get people together but to prevent divorce. And heartbreak, I'll add now. Cynicism. Jadedness. The slow hardening of heart and soul that too many shocking disappointments can bring.

Operation Valentinus 2012

2012-02-06T10:19:00.003Z

I'm a bit late this year in announcing Operation Valentinus, but I was reminded by a manipulative email from a Catholic dating website in my inbox. It was called "Pre-Valentine's Day Dread?"

The Valentine's merchandise arrived with force: boxed chocolates, shooting cupids, red roses. It can be dispiriting for those of us who are still searching for that special someone to wine and dine on Feb. 14.
Maybe it's time to become a full, paid member of X.

Ah dear. I see that that particular dating website has become a full-fledged Catholic industry, with smart bloggers and interesting articles and the occasional nihil obstat. It's amazing what can be done when subscribers are coughing up a one-time six month payment of $75. Maybe if I stopped writing about how exploitative I think Catholic dating websites are, I'd get a cut of the action.

But never mind that. It's time to launch Operation Valentinus. And Operation Valentinus is not based on signing up on dating websites to ogle photographs of men and deciding to contact them based on their ability to spell, but on showing your Single friends how much they mean in your life right now.

There are two parts to Operation Valentinus. The first part involves choosing five or so Single friends and sending them cards and chocolate--particularly chocolate--in the post for Valentine's Day. The second part involves arranging a fun party for Singles on the night of Valentine's Day, preferably far away from any restaurant teeming with couples willing to pay £45 per person for that which cost only £20 the night before.

It's really that simple. If you have discovered, year after year, that certain holidays make you feel depressed, then you owe it to your mental health to prepare for them. And just like your priest/spiritual director/mother said, there is something about thoughtful gestures for other people that makes you feel good yourself.

So I recommend that girl Singles send valentines and chocolates to their Single girl friends, and that boy Singles send valentines and chocolates to their elderly female relations. Elderly female relations love to hear from their young male relations whenever, and will never get the Wrong Idea. If boy Singles send valentines and chocolates to girl Singles in whom they are not at all interested in a romantic way, they risk giving the Wrong Idea.

If Married readers want to take part in Operation Valentinus, then they should plan their list of Single beneficiaries very carefully. Market research (e.g. me googling) indicates that Single girls like to get Single stuff (like my book) from Single friends but not as much from Married (or getting-married-next-week) friends. The last thing you want to get, as a Married woman whose own Valentine's Day might be lackluster, is a snippy response from the Single friend to whom you sent a card and gift.

As for the fun night you are going to have on Valentine's Day, I rather leave that up to you. My caveat is that you stay out of bars because predatory men might be taking special advantage of vulnerable women. I envision busy kitchens of Singles cooking for each other or revealing the dishes they have brought from home, or putting Chinese take-out on plates. And I envision cult classics on the DVD player. But mostly I envision friends having fun together and seeing for themselves that being Single doesn't mean being alone and unloved.

Snogging versus Your Immortal Souls

2012-02-02T12:29:00.000Z

Well, I certainly enjoyed writing that title. Wait a sec while I get even more caffeine.

By the way, this is going to be one of Auntie's franker mornings. You can warn your own teenage or generally more sensitive readers. Boys should probably avert their eyes, especially if they go to Mass with me, not that they EVER read this girly blog.

Snogging, first of all, is what the British call what the teenaged I called "making out" and what my American grandmother (born 1904) called "necking." It features in Archie Comics and films about the 1950s, and therefore the teenaged I thought there was absolutely nothing wrong with unmarried people snogging like mad in corners at parties or dances or in front of the television.

Of course, me and my fellow snoggers used to worry a lot about where we should draw the line and what was okay and what was not. Dear me. How we studied the chastity manuals for an answer. There was no point telling us that chastity was a point of view because we weren't interested in the point of view, we were interested in where the invisible line had been drawn, so we could stay on the right side of it and not have to make egregiously embarrassing confessions.

But nowhere did the chastity manuals of the 1980s point out that snogging is what human beings do to begin the gradually accelerating process of [hem-hem]*. I got an email the other day from a perfectly nice girl who snogs her perfectly nice boyfriend a bit every weekend, and they have discovered that their sexual temptations are getting worse. And of course they are. It's the snogging. Snogging goes straight to that part of the brain that doesn't read Theology of the Body or even think that much, to be honest. It just registers snog and says, "Yay! Human reproduction time! Let's get cracking!"

However, it is so easy to justify snogging when you're Single, that it is often not until you are engaged or married that you face up to just how potent snogging is. Because even though snogging a non-fiance or non-spouse did not seem to be such a big deal, morally speaking, it certainly seems to be a big deal morally speaking now. And why is this, eh? It is because there is nothing like having a lot to lose to sharpen up your moral vision. Oh, and love sharpens it up a lot, too.

One interesting thing about snogging is that you don't have to be in love with the person to do it. You don't even have to like him. You just have to be attracted to him. And I suppose one of the higher impulses that prevents women from just snogging just every man we find attractive is the notion that it is not kind to exploit men in this way. So, ironically, what prevents a lot of snogging is fraternal--or should I say sororal?--love.

This is (or should be) particularly true of believing Christians, especially those of us who have what has become a counter-cultural code of sexual ethics. Love, real love, is desiring the good of the other. And the ultimate good of the other is, of course, God. So when we make moral choices, we don't just think "Will this bring me closer to or further away from God?", we also think "Will this choice of mine bring my neighbour closer to or further away from God?"

I find this interesting in light of the locker room philosophies of my all-girls high school. I remember a variety, from the declaration that So-and-so had acted like a putana by giving Such-and-such "the kind of kiss you only give your husband" to the arch-liberal "it's okay to do 'It' as long as you really love the person."

But even then I mentally countered that if you loved the person, you wouldn't do 'It' if you loved them--unless you were married to them--because if you really loved them, you cared for their immortal soul more than anything else, including the promptings of your reptile brain.

And now, although I am more in favour of the other-centered, wholistic, philosophical, what-does-it-mean-to-be-chaste approach to sexual ethics, I will draw the "how-far-can-you-go" line. I think Single girls should take as their cue of how affectionate to be with non-husbands from the attractive and sociable married women of their culture. In artsy circles in Edinburgh it's light arm clasp and cheek kiss (or cheek kiss, cheek kiss if you've been influenced by Europeans/French Canadians). And that, mes amies, is it. Why? It's because we are married, and we know we can't afford to play with fire. Can you?

*Sorry, but otherwise people doing creepy word searches will turn up. You'd be amazed at what word combinations call up my blog.

Perpetual Praise

2012-02-01T11:06:00.003Z

This has nothing to do with Single Life. Au contraire. This is all about married life, for you to save for later. I do not recommend what I am about to say for boyfriends or friends who are boys or boys you wish were your friends or any other boys. This is just about husbands.

When you think your husband has done something good, you should tell him. Right there and then. Pick up the phone, unless you know he is in a meeting, and say, "I just wanted to tell you what a marvellous thing you did/person you are."

Not only does this make your husband feel good, it cements in your mind your absolute good fortune in having married such a splendid chap, instead of the sort of chap who might have made you absolutely miserable. This creates a beautiful mental walled city that can withstand the force of any puny annoyances you might have with your husband when you or he is in a temporary bad mood.

Apparently we learn how to be married from our parents, which is bad news if our parents had a miserable marriage. However, we can always learn from other marriages, so there is always hope. (My husband's parents divorced when he was a baby, and his mother never married again, but he does fine.) As for me, my parents are happily married, and when I was growing up, my mother praised my father all the time. She would praise him when he was at home, and she would praise him when he was away at work. "Oh children," she would carol, "what a very clever man your father is!" Etc., etc.

Now I am sure my dad must have liked that, and likes it still, but it was also very nice for me, for it hammered home the idea that my mother loved my father, which gave me a cozy sense of stability, and it brainwashed me into thinking that my dad must be the best man on earth, which gave me both a healthy sense of family pride and a solid idea of what men should be like.

It also made it very easy for me just to do the same thing where my own husband was concerned. I have no captive audience of children, so I just call him up and tell him when I think he is marvellous, like this morning, when I was reading about someone else's rather less marvellous husband.

But I will underscore that I think it a bad policy to perpetually praise adult men who are not yours by blood or marriage. You can tell your dad, brothers, sons, nephews and grandsons how absolutely marvellous they are, but after that, husbands only. Otherwise it might not look like honest praise but passionate pandering and---ick!

Mark Shea Gets It

2012-01-31T09:55:00.000Z

Yesterday Aussie Girl in Australia mentioned in the combox that Mark Shea had apologized to sexual assault survivors and taken down his offending post mentioning Lara Logan. It was quite late when I saw that, but I clicked over to Mark Shea's place and behold. (Ignore the dumber comments by the almost entirely male commentators. In fact, just skip the combox this time.)

That's one thing I like about Mark Shea: he is willing to admit when he is wrong, apologize and make amends by taking posts down. He lets you see his conscience at work, which is very brave, I must say.

Meanwhile, Mark's mea culpa reminded me of my post on his offending post, in which I suggest that any married man blogger think about his wife before posting anything touching on sexual assault:

I kept mulling it over, largely focusing on the logic and arguments and not really thinking beyond that. Then something occurred to me.

Would I have written it had my own wife been a survivor of rape? If the discussion has opened old wounds for her, would I have said it? The answer was a very clear, “No.” Nothing was worth making her cry or hurt. Even landing a good punch on real defenders of real evil. In fact, to do so was to fail to see her humanity, which is what defenders of torture do to their victims.

"Logic," said Spock's mother to Spock in Star Trek IV (or was it V?), "is only the beginning of wisdom."

When it comes to women's pain, the eyes of the heart see more clearly that the cold gaze of logic. I think this good advice for men who are absolutely bewildered by women's grief and anger.

And now I'm going to take my own post down, as it has served its purpose. And I hope what sexual assault survivors understand from my post and will now take from Mark Shea's apology is that we--your fellow Catholics, or just your fellow decent human beings--are listening to you. What you say and feel matters. We respect your feelings and opinions, and we don't want to add to your hurt. We hope for your healing, and we pray for an end to sexual violence.

When You Can't Stand Her Man

2012-01-30T10:51:00.000Z

Is there anything more annoying than seeing your pal eat her heart out over a complete jerk? It's really awful. You hear all about Scooter (let's call him Scooter) and thus you are naturally interested in meeting this paragon. And then you meet Scooter and you are horrified. It's not who Scooter is--it's not that he's too old or too young or too foreign or too whatever, for you are a fair-minded woman--it's what he says or does to your friend and perhaps says or does to you.

And then, inevitably, your friend calls you up and asks, "What do you think?!" Or maybe she doesn't ask, even though you are dying for her to ask, so that you can try to shake sense into her addled brain, and you feel terribly unhappy.

For many years, I was under the impression that it was pointless and indeed counter-productive to tell a female friend what I thought of her boyfriend or crush object. I noticed, in high school, that a boyfriend could most definitely come between two friends and if a girl said, "I don't like your boyfriend," that could be the end of a beautiful friendship. This struck me as very stupid, as I had also noticed that high school romances didn't last that long whereas women often keep their high school pals for the rest of their lives.

But I didn't want to lose my friends, so I kept a shut-mouth policy well into university and beyond. I more-or-less kept my mouth shut about the fact that I didn't like what this friend's boyfriend said or did until after the boyfriend was history. Then I would let fly.

This policy changed, however, after a very good friend ended up in a long-term abusive relationship that left her a shadow of her former self. And it occurred to me that keeping my mouth shut was cowardly and that if a friendship can't survive me saying "I don't like his attitude towards.../I don't like how he treats you", then the friendship wasn't that strong in the first place.

So now I have become a menace to the male sex. When a woman asks me "What do you think of him?" I tell her what I think of him. If I think he's really cute, I tell her that I think he's really cute. If I think he is deeply unattractive, I communicate that he is deeply unattractive.

However, there are ways of doing this. I have had two bits of feedback in recent months about decisions women made about men based on what I said about them. Of course I am longing to share.

The first was by a very young and beautiful girl with a sunny, trusting view of the world. She believed that the middle-aged grad student who had asked to come along with her to church really had done so because he was interested in Catholicism. Ah ha ha ha. Oldest trick in the non-Catholic book. After an initially friendly chat with the middle-aged grad student, I was 100% sure he was not interested in Catholicism but in my very young and beautiful friend. Which I told her. I did not add that I was all too familiar with that kind of chippy, defensive, domineering, self-loathing kind of middle-aged male graduate student. Instead I just remarked that he was a hundred and two. And, apparently, that number stuck in her head. X, he's a hundred and two. (By the way, I cheerfully confess that I myself am fully a hundred and two.)

The second was by a friend who at the time had been ground down by a terrible relationship and so, of course, was ripe to be ground down by another one. I was really very frightened that she would consent to go out with this overbearing guy--her landlord, in fact. I was very down on the idea of her having dinner with this landlord, who was also, incidentally, a slumlord. And when I met the land/slumlord, I was even more down on the idea. Really, I was frantic.

"You said he had a head shaped like a potato," said my friend, years later. And that is what had stuck in her head. For he did have a head shaped like a potato, and she seeing his head as I saw his head broke the spell he was weaving.

I am not sure what sort of universal lesson I can make out of two anecdotes. After all, I have a counter-anecdote, in which I offered female solidarity to a Catholic woman whose boyfriend--whom all her friends despised--was pressuring her for sex and although she had told all the girls this, she told me in friendship-ending terms to mind my own business.

My counter-example leads me to the conclusion that you might be want to be super-diplomatic about lousy boyfriends when it comes to women who aren't your best friends. And you might want to wait until a woman asks for your opinion--explicitly or implicitly--before you say anything. (If she is sporting a black eye or is otherwise obviously miserable, I'd take the plunge though, personally.) And when you are choosing words, if you do choose to choose words, pick a startling image--something short, pithy and arguably "non-judgmental" that just seems to sum up the man, or what he looks like--that will be sure to linger in your friend's mind. You might have a lot more influence over your friend's opinions than you think.

Update: Before anyone asks, I have to say I think it even riskier to say what you think of a guy's girlfriend. Heavens! Unless he's your brother, of course, and he's already feeling unhappy. Don't tick off your boyfriends' sisters, girls.

It's My Birthday Too, Yeah!

2012-01-26T16:55:00.000Z

Well, hello there, poppets! It is my birthday today, so I am in a mood to discuss birthdays which, at least in the Anglo-Saxon world, appear to be more important to girls than to guys. I will not state categorically that birthdays are more important to girls than to guys because I try to save my gross generalizations for more important stuff.

Anyway, when you are Single, but sometimes also when you are married, because of the guys-not-always-getting-the-importance-of birthdays factor, making the most of your birthday is up to you. Not telling anybody it is your birthday and then getting more and more depressed all day about an uncaring world before crying yourself asleep at night is just plain wrong.

Forget that. If you are the sort of woman--like me--who cares about birthdays and thinks of her birthday--as I think of my birthday--as a temporal extension of her very SELF, then you have to do a lot of prep.

First of all, you have to let everybody know that your birthday is coming up. Facebook has made this easier than ever, for Facebook can tell all your Facebook friends for you. But you can also let your friends know by inviting them to a par-tay. Unless you are up to 90% certain your best pals are throwing you a surprise party, you have to do this yourself. Frankly, I don't think it matters who organizes it, just as long as it is organized.

Second of all, you must buy yourself a little present. Or several little presents. Or a big present. I, for example, bought myself a manicure. For one shining hour this morning, I sat across from a very nice manicurist, an excellent conversationalist, and watched the transformation of my fingernails. And yesterday I popped into a charity shop and, seeing the perfect little green dress for £6.50, bought it to wear today.

Third of all, you must do a birthday thing on your actual birthday. My birthday dinner has been moved to Friday night because of the difficulties of having a party on Thursday night when 90% of our parties end at 2 AM. But, you know, Friday is not my birthday. If you are a birthday purist, as am I, it is okay to have delayed birthday celebration, but only if you do something nice on your birthday. So I had lunch out with B.A. and coffee out with a friend who can't make it tomorrow.

And now another friend has dropped by as a surprise and I must go...!

Just a Number

2012-01-24T11:29:00.000Z

To repeat, my three cardinal rules of dealing with men are as follow:

1. Men are who they are, and not who you want them to be.
2. Men are attracted to whom they are attracted and not to whom you think they should be attracted.
3. You can find out what men think, but you won't always like it.

This is not to say there is not a certain amount of pain wrapped up in this. An older woman I know--once a great beauty, if this adds to the story--bought a computer from her son's pal. She found p*rn on it, and she was devastated. She could hardly believe that that nice young man thought of women that way, and when next she saw him, she gave him a look. He blushed to the ears.

In this case a woman had merely stumbled on a guilty secret. The young man had no idea that his pal's mother had taken it personally--something the defenders of p*rn don't really get. They think the women who admit they don't like it are joyless prudes, but in fact we don't like it because we don't like what it says about women, which is to say, ourselves. Every dirty photograph is a judgement, a measure, standard: this is what a man thinks a woman is supposed to look like. And this is why breast implants and Brazilian waxes are now mainstream, and why some women now submit to genital cosmetic surgery. Such women want to be "normal", and this is what "men" (and women long for men) have said is normal and desirable.

But then there are men who make no secret of the fact that they have certain, quantifiable standards. Older men tend not to reveal them in front of women; either they have become kinder or they have learned some sense. But there are still, as there were when I was a teenager, young men who will shout numbers out car windows as women walk by.

Such a trivial incident, and such an ugly suburban parking lot, outside such a 1980s excuse for a suburban dance club--and yet I can still remember the three of us girls looking up, startled, as a car pulsating with music cruised past and young male voices shouted "6! 7! 7.5!"

In case the ranking is different where you are, these numbers were out of "10." "10" was the name of a film starring Bo Derek; when it appeared in cinemas,I was too young to see it, but I understood that "10" was what Bo Derek was, and her braided hair inspired a craze for braids among white girls, including little white girls like me.

I know the numbers change from country to country because a man casually bragged to me of the magical golden proportions expected of women in his country, and I went blind for a second. Actually blind. I've met one of his country's most elite scientists, a young Single woman, intense, incredibly intelligent, devout, attractive--and possibly not fitting into the magical golden proportions although how would I know? It would never have occurred to me in a million years to see her that way. Although I suppose if she walked down the street back home, that's all certain men would see: Oops, no golden proportions. Not for me.

My momentary blindness was caused by rage, and please don't ask me what the golden proportions are because I don't want to ruin your day. It's bad enough to have to tell you that some men--and not just sociopaths on the internet--still think like that. And I was not just mad for this scientist, and all of you, but for myself, because of course I do not fit those magical golden proportions either. And although it was completely illogical to feel hurt by that, I did. In A Handmaid's Tale (Opowiesc podrecznej), the Unwomen are all sent out to clean up radioactive areas; I think Atwood was channeling women's deep, deep fear of being considered Unwomen by men, any men.

But I should stress that some men still think like that. Not all men think like that. Very sensibly, I did what all happily married women should do when they are grappling with male psychology and consulted my husband.

"Is there some sort of magical proportion standard for women's bodies in Britain?" I asked.

Poor B.A. Now that I think about it, this is a heck of a question to ask a fellow when he first wakes up in the morning.

"No," said B.A. "Well, there was a lot of interest in Pippa Middleton's bottom, of course."

"I don't think anyone talked in terms of numbers, though, did they?" I said, greatly cheered.

"Maybe British men are bad at maths," said B.A.

Good. Or rather, good that they haven't agreed on a way to reduce women to numbers. Being reduced to mere bodies is bad enough, being reduced to numbers is truly dehumanizing.

Self-Censored

2012-01-23T16:28:00.001Z

Sometimes I actually do censor myself. Wait a week or so for today's post. It was satisfactorily ranty, but prudence, prudence...

Beauty and the Market

2012-01-21T13:52:00.000Z

Coco Chanel famously said that any woman who, after the age of 25, looks into the mirror to be pleased is a fool. But never mind mirrors. This is the age of the image--even more, I imagine, than in Coco Chanel's day. Worse, it is the age of the doctored image, so that most of the images of women we see don't look exactly like the models themselves. In related news, Cindy Crawford's daughter has begun her modelling career at the age of ten.

I don't need to tell you how this makes the rest of us feel, although of course feeling inadequate in the looks department is nothing new. When asked if she had any regrets in life, American former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a woman of enormous accomplishment and popularity, said she wished she had been prettier.

To channel a very early blog post, I once complained to my mother about my lack of early success in attracting boys. I felt majorly ripped off that I did not look like Brooke Shields, for example. If I looked like Brooke Shields, I was certain, all the boys would like me.

"If you looked like Brooke Shields," said my mother, "you would just have her problems."

That made a deep impression on me at the time because I knew Brooke had played a child prostitute in Pretty Baby, and she was also famous for having also been in The Blue Lagoon and Endless Love, all of which films no one my age (or, indeed, Brooke's age when she made them) was allowed to see. Grown men did seem to have a prurient interest in very young, very beautiful girls, and they hadn't changed by 1996 when Liv Tyler starred in Stealing Beauty.

All the same, though. All the same. All the same, it does feel to many of us girls that we have just missed out on seizing the apples on the tip-top of the beauty tree. Of course, it doesn't occur to us that this is because not-so-stellar-in-the-looks-department men and women are nevertheless attracted to each other and thus produce millions of not-so-stellar-in-the-looks-department babies, including most of us. Just so long as we are clean and good-tempered, what we look like shouldn't matter a damn. Unless we are selling stuff. Ah, there's the rub.

I am brooding on all this because I have been out having my photograph taken by B.A. This is for an official "author photograph" and frankly I would have gone to a professional, were we not so intensely broke in that way people so often are after Christmas. (Did you know that if you make carrot-coriander soup from scratch, 8 servings cost only about 90p whereas two servings from a can of Baxter's cost £1.09? Fact.)

The session filled me with gloom until B.A. began to shout "Cracking!" in the way photographers do in movies, which I now realize is to make the models smile more naturally. And he also took 88 photos, which was equally cheering because the essence of having a good photo taken is good luck. The more photos taken, the greater the likelihood that one of them will look good. If you aren't beautiful, there is always the hope that you might look striking, like Jane Morris or Tilda Swinton or the lady monster from Where the Wild Things Are.

In some lights I look like the lady monster from Where the Wild Things Are, but in others I look as though I might have descended from Jane Morris. And this false family resemblance--although I am perfectly well aware that what we do is so infinitely superior to what we merely look like--has long been a source of comfort to me.

The Merciful Penance of Silence

2012-01-20T11:02:00.001Z

I am sure I have blogged two or three times on this before, but I had a question the other day that has inspired me to blog on it again.

The topic is "Assuaging Feelings of Guilt by Blabbing."

Now, I will be the first to admit that talking makes me feel good. If I feel badly about something, I want to talk and talk and talk until I feel better. This is often at one in the morning, so it is fortunate that most of my female friends live in a different time zone.

However, over the years, I have learned what to tell my friends, and which friends to tell, and when I absolutely must keep my mouth shut and just suffer in silence. And when it is something that is clearly my fault and I feel guilty about it, even though I have made amends to whomever (if applicable/wise) and gone to confession, then I know that suffering in silence is part of my penance. And it is a merciful penance.

It is a merciful penance because although God forgives, the world does not. And if you don't forgive yourself enough to keep your own counsel, what makes you think the world will forgive you when you don't? And I'm not just talking about the world's delight in humiliating its enemies--look at all the mud it slings at Sarah Palin. I'm also talking about the actual harm public confessions can do to innocent people in the world.

For example, recently in Canada, the lawyer of a bishop caught with child porn on his computer explained to the court that the bishop was not a pedophile, really, but a homosexual who had had a series of homosexual one night stands and been in a secret homosexual relationship for ten years.

Maybe the court was, like, "Aw. Poor guy. Time served. Send him home." But Canadian Catholics were, like, "Say WHAT?! Our bishop also WHAT?!"

There are some sins that just grab the imagination of even very easygoing, very live-and-let-live, very kindly people and don't let go. Sexual sins are big on the list, thanks to the power sex has over the human imagination. Sacrilege is a biggy because of our passionate feelings for the sacred. (And combine sex with sacrilege--like having an affair with a priest--and blam! No Catholic who knows will ever forget.) Killing people or even family pets: yikes. Beating up people who were smaller than you at the time: ouch.

If you have committed these kinds of sins, no matter how sorry you are and no matter how much you have changed your life, they can colour other people's perceptions of you in ways you probably will not like and in ways that are not good for them.

St. Augustine, one of the most important Catholic Christian thinkers ever and writer of almost countless homilies and treatises, is unfortunately most famous for saying "Make me chaste, but not yet."

Thomas Merton, who wrote many beautiful books, was famous at my Canadian theology schools for having had an affair with a nurse. One elderly student proclaimed aloud that this should be evidence towards his canonization.

A much more likely candidate for canonization, a woman, was a modern-day St. Francis in her love for the poor, but it turns out she had an abortion before she became a Christian. She regretted this terribly and, as I suspect she knew perfectly well, if this had been widely known in her lifetime, she would not have gotten an iota of support for her sometimes controversial work. It is still not widely known, which is why I have not mentioned her name. I once read that someone justified her abortion by saying that this woman had had one; and all I can say is that the probable-saint would have been in agony had she heard that.

Before this talk-show, reveal-all age, people crept off timidly to confess their sins to priests, confident in the seal of the confessional, and to doctors, confident in doctors' codes of confidentiality. The seal and the codes are there for a reason, which is that there is a danger that people will be terribly hurt if their sins become common knowledge. Other people will be hurt, too. You think the other boys at school never told Princes William and Harry what the tabloids were saying about their parents' sins?

We are all sinners, and it is good to remember that, but it is not good to air to the whole world the exact particulars. So if you are feeling particularly badly about stuff you have done, even after going to confession, I recommend talking about it again to a priest in the confessional or to a therapist bound by a professional code of confidentiality. I absolutely beg you not to write about it on the internet, where it would remain forever. Such silence is not cowardice; it is prudence. And prudence is the "cause, measure and form of all virtues."

Oh, Women! Oh, Men!

2012-01-19T15:04:00.003Z

"Oh!" exclaimed a man at a party in abject frustration. "Oh, women!"

"Wave your hands around when you say that," I suggested.

He complied.

"Oh, women!"

I do not foresee that men will stop crying "Oh, women!" in confused frustration or that women will cease to shout "Arrrgh! Men!" anytime soon. At least, I hope not. If we cease to be staggered at the mystery of each other, we will certainly become bored.

Of course, when I say this, I immediately think of a young man named... Let me see. What will I call him? I think I will call him Jason. Something like a quarter of the Canadian men of my generation were named Jason.

Jason was a teenage pro-lifer when I was a teenage pro-lifer, only I believe he was 17 when I was 19. And I thought he was really, really cute. A lot of the other girls though he was really, really cute. He was a small-town boy, possibly even sort of a farming boy, and Protestant and also only 17, so he was not an ideal boyfriend for yours truly, the uber-urban, Catholic 19 year old Seraphic. But all the same I sighed a bit, as did all the other girls.

Sigh...

But we sighed in vain for he never showed any of us more than friendly attention, just as if he were a fellow girl, and then one day we had the most awful shock for out of the blue he announced that he was engaged to a 22 year old waitress.

Chagrin is one word that could sum up how we girls all felt about that. I in particular felt chagrin on account of having felt a bit of a cougar at 19 for having sighed over a 17 year old, and here he was actually engaged to a 22 year old waitress.

But one must wear the mask, and the next time I spoke to him, I congratulated him on his engagement. And he said--I have never forgotten this as it completely blew my mind--"I can't believe I've actually found a girl who likes me!"

MEN! Oh, MEN!!!!!

Blurbs...

2012-01-18T19:35:00.003Z

Occasionally I get an email that has nothing to do with being Single and everything to do with being unpublished novelists. One common question is "Do I really have to follow the submission guidelines?", and I always say "Yes. Yes, you have to write the plot summary. Yes, you have to write all the apparatus. Yes, you have to change the cool font into Times New Roman."

Right now I am writing my own back-of-cover blurb while stressing over which established people might give me blurbs. And this is so time-consuming, no Singles advice do I have for you today.

Bad at Relationships?

2012-01-17T08:41:00.002Z

I had a letter the other day from a reader who claimed she was bad at relationships. The rest of her email suggested she had many healthy relationships. But of course what she meant was "man & woman & sexual spark" relationships.

A lot of my readers do that--you talk about being bad "at relationships" when in fact you have many healthy relationships: with parents, siblings, work colleagues, students, professors, priests, the waitress who serves you coffee every day, female friends and even male friends. I think, therefore, that you are psyching yourselves out when you claim that you are bad at "relationships."

One of the enduring problems of our age is that we privilege "man & woman & sexual spark" relationships above absolutely every other relationship. But I think they should just take their place humbly among our well-established relationships with family members and our old friends.

A husband, interestingly enough, is a family member; it is another problem of our age that we do not recognize this and that "man & woman & sexual spark" is no longer (in English-speaking communities) put in the appropriate context of expanding a family. When I met my husband, I soon realized how much my family would like him and enjoy having him as a family member. And I was quite right.

"Okay then," I hear various voices pipe up, "we're good at most relationships. We're just bad at dating relationships."

But again I don't buy it. What does it mean to be good at a dating relationship? Ideally a dating relationship is a man and a woman who like each other, and get a bit wobbly and excited by just seeing the other, getting together to share interests, like a film or the museum or a marathon or a hockey game, and also meals and conversations. And out of these experiences, they singly and then together decide if they should make some kind of formal commitment or cease to go about so much together.

Very often they decide that they shouldn't commit and they shouldn't go about so much together. One or the other just isn't feeling it. And that is not being bad at dating relationships. No-one is to blame if you or the guy just doesn't feel a lasting attachment. Yes, it's disappointing, but it's also disappointing when your ticket doesn't win the lottery. You can't hurry love, as the song says. You just have to wait.

Meanwhile, another problem is not you but the current culture of dating relationships. To make a grand generalization, many men are rather messed up right now, and therefore are not so much on the hunt for wives, per se, but for girlfriends/bedmates. The courtship process for getting a girlfriend is not the same thing as the process for getting a wife, and so it is very difficult for the Catholic woman who does not want to have sex before marriage to navigate male attention. Fortunately, around the age of thirty men (particularly men from traditional cultures or who have returned to the practice of their faith) are often tired of messing around and just want to find a nice girl with whom to settle down.

And the only way I can think of to put up with this state of affairs is to keep the bonds strong with the real relationships in your life--with God, family, friends, colleagues, the waitress in the coffee shop, et alia--so that you have a lot of emotional support while you carry on with your life, all the while with a beautiful little hope (and it is beautiful, if kept small and in proportion) for the right man to come along one day.

Meanwhile, the one thing I can see many women being bad at is being rooted in reality when it comes to "man + woman + spark" relationships. We meet a handsome guy who seems nice and our minds race to months or even years ahead. We think "handsome=good" and "friendly=into me". And then when we are confronted with reality, we too often sweep it under the carpet because facing it would be too painful. ("No, no, no. Anyone that handsome must be a good guy.") We mentally write out a little history of how the future will go and we write a character description for a man we barely know, and then we defend our little mental compositions from the reality of NOW and the reality of HIM, the real guy, a man invented by God, not Jane Austen, and conditioned by his masculinity and his experiences in life, experiences you know almost nothing about yet. And this is simply crazy behaviour. It's like deliberately setting out on a journey with the wrong map.

It would, then, behoove everyone to approach "man + woman + spark" relationships in the same spirit adult women make new adult women friends: with friendliness, with caution, with much thought, with slowly growing emotional intimacy, and in appropriate proportion to relationships with family and old friends.

Hilary Cancer Free

2012-01-14T17:32:00.002Z

Thanks from a friend of Hilary's to everyone who said a prayer or donated a dollar towards Hilary White's fight against cancer. See Hilary's news here.

Cancer is really a lousy thing to have, as I never really thought about until Hilary got it. I personally have been taking steps to prevent those cancers which can be prevented. For me that means more exercise, more veg, more fruit, more fibre, zero crisps, zero pie shops and much less booze. Also, as all sexually active (or formerly sexually active) women should do, I get regular tests for cervical cancer.

Long-time readers already know how I feel about sunbathing and tanning. Bad, bad, bad. At 40, I have better skin than some friends in their early 30s. And why? Well, it's partly genetic. But it's partly because I shun the sun. In Italy, Hilary and I wore huge floppy hats and long linen skirts as I pushed her wheelchair up and down cheeky little hills to the doctor's office. I only went into the sea once before dusk, and that's when I was there on holiday with that madman B.A. (After 20 minutes I fled for shelter, thus avoiding the nasty sunburn he got.)

Anyway, yay for the good news, boo to cancer, and into the cart with the fruit and veg. I think I will have an eeny glass of wine tonight to celebrate Hilary's cancer-freedom.

Friendgirls

2012-01-12T23:24:00.002Z

Now THIS is a really good post. Check it out!

Dear Most Devoted Fans...

2012-01-12T19:04:00.002Z

I have a question pertaining to my book Seraphic Singles/The Closet's All Mine/Anielskie Single, so you can answer only if you've read it.

In May I will be in Krakow at a retreat built around Anielskie Single. The theme of the conference is "Brave Women," and I will be giving lectures on "Staying Sane While Single" (like at Notre Dame last year), Mulieris Dignitatem and femininity according to Saint Edith Stein. Maybe I will also talk about men although that would certainly take a lot of NERVE!

But I also want to read from Anielskie Single, and that will take a lot of practise. I read the first paragraph of "Laundry for One"/"Pralnia dla Samotnych" to my substitute tutor today, and it was challenging. (What a world of meaning lies hidden behind that modest word challenging.) Take, for example, the word przedstawiające. Lovely when the tutor says it; not so lovely from me.

Fortunately, I have four months to get it right, but I thought I'd ask you which pieces in the book you liked best and think I should read at the retreat.

It might seem foolhardy to actually attempt to read Polish on my own instead of relying entirely on the translator, but I do remember that on several occasions a certain Jan Paweł came to Canada and spoke to us all in English and French. So I think it would be just if I returned the compliment.

Majówka dla kobiet

2012-01-11T09:54:00.001Z

Dzień dobry! If you live near Krakow, or would like to go to Krakow for a women's retreat, you might like to know that I will be giving three lectures (in English) at the Redemptorists' "Majówka dla kobiet" ("May holiday for women").

I will lecture on femininity according to Saint Edith Stein, how to stay sane while Single, and on John Paul II and Mulieris Dignitatem.

Please follow the link to the conference details HERE.

Excuse me while I have a small heart attack wondering how much more Polish I can learn before May 1st. Let all publishers note the lengths to which I am willing to go to support those who publish my stuff.

Suddenly Over Online Romances

2012-01-10T11:49:00.000Z

My poll was even less scientific as usual, for I forgot to leave room for control groups. Alas. Well, anyway, 40 people (not a big slice of my daily readership) responded to the "Online Romance Suddenly Over Without Explanation" poll, 36 of them women and 4 of them men. Of the women, 28 have suddenly discovered internet silence where a man used to be, and 8 have done disappearing acts themselves. Of the 4 men, 3 have been abandoned, and one did the abandoning.

For readers' take on internet dating, see most of the comments here.

I am not sure what to say other than that unless you are actually frightened of a person, it is very disrespectful behaviour to abandon a friendly relationship--even an online friendly relationship--without an explanation. "I'm just not feeling a spark" counts as an explanation. "I'm not comfortable with your anger" does, too, if that's the problem.

If a very embarrassing situation has cropped up, like you have discovered that Mr Perfect was your little sister's hapless prom date, well, this is the sort of thing that separates the women from the flibbertigibbets. You should explain the situation, being straight to the point. Men tell me that they'd rather be told the truth then left hanging. So tell them the truth.

But don't tell them everything about yourself online. A lot of women have the bad habit of telling strangers our business, and online it strikes me as the equivalent of telling a man the end of a thriller just while he is absorbed in Chapter 2. If he really wants to get to know you, and if you really want to get to know him, you can darn well meet down at the doughnut shop. If you live in South Bend, and he lives in Boston, well, you're going to have to compromise on which doughnut shop.

There was a comment that worried about leading a man on by accepting three dates with him. I don't think that is leading a man on. Making a man think you might go out with him when you know you won't is leading a man on. Making him think you might sleep with him when you know you won't is leading him on. Making him think you might marry him when you know you won't is leading him on. Everything else is just you saying "Yes" to stuff you actually want to do. As long as whatever it is (e.g. going to a film) is morally licit, there's no problem.

One of the odder things about women, I have noticed, is that we tend to feel guilty about stuff we shouldn't feel guilty about and then not guilty about stuff for which we should feel guilty. If a man flies to your city to meet you, and then you don't fall in love with him, you shouldn't feel guilty about that. If a man flies to your city to meet you, takes you to dinner, you are smitten, he regretfully confesses he isn't smitten back, and in your hurt you tell everyone he led you on, you should feel guilty for that.

The Saddest War

2012-01-09T10:11:00.000Z

The saddest war is the war between the sexes. And quite obviously there is no truce that blankets over Christendom.

When I was a teenager, there were Catholic boys of a conservative, traditional disposition who expressed their disappointment and frustration with women with such remarks as, "Women wear jewellery to give themselves worth."

This was devastating to the girls who took these boys seriously. And I must say it is rather demoralizing to try to live up to Catholic--instead of worldly--standards, flinching against the mockery of less devout, and sometimes blatantly contemptuous, people, when some Catholic boys themselves are telling you how worthless women are.

I am not sure what is at the heart of such attacks, which of course still take place today. It might be a backlash against a tendency in society to blame men for everything bad in society. Or it might be an illogical reaction to the men's own, not inconsiderable, sexual temptations. Or it could be disappointment that not all women are like beloved mothers and sisters but rather more complicated than them.

Or it could be horror that large numbers of women are willing to hire doctors to kill their unborn children. There does seem to be rather a contradiction in the fact that boys are told to never, ever, hit girls when the only people in our society who can kill with impunity are girls.

But being as old as I am, and being rather more aware (I hope) than the average young Catholic of the shocking horrors of which some men are capable of inflicting on women and children, I find it ludicrous that some Catholic men can still, echoing the testier, more misognynist views of classical and mediaeval theologians, hold that women are morally weaker than men.

I can only assume that at the heart of such a denunciation lies some serious pain. Discuss in the combox with every ounce of respect and charity you can scrounge.

Pirate Goes to London

2012-01-07T16:19:00.001Z

In one last burst of activity, Pirate, Pirate's mother and Pirate's aunt rushed out of the house with all the luggage. Pirate's uncle was already in town, seeing about a last-minute present.

On the bus, I asked Pirate what his favourite part of Scotland was, and it is no longer Deep Sea World but Edinburgh Castle. Amusingly we saw his uncle on the street from the bus window, and there was much waving and gesturing of success and approval.

In the train station, I led Pirate and his mother the wrong way and then the right way, and there was Uncle, to whom Pirate ran with arms outstretched. Then we all got on the train and chatted until a train conductor began to speak over the intercom and B.A. and I disembarked.

B.A. was adamant that we go to the end of the platform, into the sun, to wave good-bye. Apparently this has something to do with The Railway Children. And no sooner had we got there but the train came roaring past, and there was a gap-toothed smiling face at a window, and Pirate was waving with all his might and main.

And that was them. Off they went to their weekend in London before Monday's Toronto flight. B.A. and I walked back down the platform and nipped into M&S to buy a few groceries and then took a smaller, slower train ourselves. We alighted early and took a path through some fields and some woods and returned to the Historical House. I put on some soup for lunch, and B.A. began to vacuum.

The house was unsually quiet. We had our soup and toast in the dining room.

"It was good that we got back into the habit of eating in the dining room," said B.A.

"Yes," I said.

"This afternoon I'l just read quietly in the sitting room," said B.A. "What a luxury!"

"Indeed," I said.

The sun is shining today. It shone through the round window in the dining room. We sipped our soup in the companionable quiet. I looked out the window and thought about our nephew, and how much we love him even though he drives everyone crazy quite a lot of the time.

"Guess what?" said B.A.

"Chicken butt," I said.

"Yep."

Family Time

2012-01-05T21:06:00.001Z

Oh, poppets, I so busy with family stuff. Busy, busy, busy. And I have to get my United Kingdom Indefinite Leave to Remain application together by tomorrow morning or I might guest star on UK Border Police as This Week's Deportee.

However, I did think of Single stuff today because I worked a bit on the May Anielskie Single retreat in Krakow and also on my Polish. And thus I first bored a very nice Polish Single by making him read me the Polish side of my vocabulary flashcards and then amused him by reading aloud Dialogue 1, Chapter 5 of Colloquial Polish.

It occurs to me that if you ever want to cheer up a homesick or generally depressed Polish student, anglophone you could always read to him or her in Polish. This never fails to make the Poles I know smile widely. Possibly this is because no matter how thick their accents in English, they will never be so bad as mine in Polish. But it could be because they love Polish so much they like to hear foreigners speak it. Or it could be the novelty of foreigners speaking it. At any rate, I recommend it.

Thoughts on "Hitch"

2012-01-03T09:40:00.001Z

Last night after Pirate was in bed, the grown-ups watched "Hitch". Pirate's mother had seen it already, but B.A. and I had not. We were charmed. It was a charming movie.

The premise of this film was that a man who trained other men to woo women successfully fell in love himself and acted like a dork. The object of his affections was a gossip columnist, a woman who hunted down the romances of stars and wrote about them in her newspaper. The film dodged any accusation that the hero was just a game-playing scum-pig by casting Will Smith, one of the most likable stars in America. Also, Will Smith can do smooth and dorky at the same time--quite a feat.

The film also underscored the good intentions of its hero by showing the nice (but dorky) men he helped and the nasty man whom he refuses to help. Most of the men who consult "the date doctor" have crushes on specific women and dream of marrying them but are too frightened even to approach them. The nasty man just wants to "pump and dump," and the "date doctor" realizes that the nasty man doesn't even like women.

Sadly, the nasty man is a lot closer to the reality of game and the Pick Up Artist movement. Men who study or teach "game" aren't usually interested in love and marriage but in getting sex. And given that the more partners a woman has, the more likely she is to contract HPV (which condoms don't necessarily prevent and for which men can't be tested) and cervical cancer, this sort of predatory behaviour can be lethal. (Sorry to mention cervical cancer again, but my friend Hilary has it and has just had a hysterectomy, and yesterday I had a nightmare in which I found her hairless and unconscious in an Italian airport. At this rate I might even end up giving chastity talks.)

The movie is sweet, and it would be nice if men thought more about how they appear to women--without thinking about how they can psychologically manipulate us onto our backs--so as to make good impressions and tweak our interest. Heaven knows we WANT men to impress us. It was heartwarming to see these men so humbled by love that they would seek help from another man. And it was heartwarming to see how much "the date doctor" cared about his clients.

The dark part of the film is that the heroine is a gossip columnist and is, during the inevitable crisis, shown to be in the wrong. Ironically, a large part of game is making women feel that we are in the wrong, that there is something wrong with us, and that we need to work harder or do something we might rather not do to win (or win back) a man's regard.

But I liked "Hitch" and he certainly seemed to have made a lot of money doing what I do for free, which is to give advice to my own sex to coping with feelings about the opposite sex. Hitch has the advantage, of course, in that men are naturally and traditionally, in most cultures, the suitors of women, not women the suitors of men. Hitch can tell men what to do, whereas I write an awful lot about what not to do. Hitch tell men, "Call her now", whereas my advice usually boils down to "Don't call him! Wait for him to call you! And if, despite your friendliness, he doesn't approach you at all, forget him!"

Update: I just visited the site of a man I think of as "the worst man on the internet". I'm not going to tell you who he is or link to his PUA blog. But I will tell you that once again I am convinced that PUAs hate women, even though they might think they love them. They hate women the way an alcoholic hates the bottle that has lost him everything he holds dear. They bed women the way nasty little boys kill frogs. And I'm not kidding about them spreading HPV. HPV doesn't hurt them after all, so why should they care? They can't even be tested for it; if they have it, nobody can know.

And now a light moment...

Seraphic (kidding): You got game, baby!

Benedict Ambrose: I do? In the fridge? Venison or rabbit?

The Most Pelagian Day of the Year II

2011-12-31T21:10:00.002Z

This is my second post of the day, so for an explanation of the poll, scroll down to the post below.

Poppets, it has come to my attention that some of you are making resolutions to find boyfriends or even husbands in the New Year. >:-(

I was going to write a huge old rant on that, but then I remembered that I wrote a perfectly fine one 365 days ago, so here it is again. Read and learn.

Meanwhile, happy Hogmanay and all the best in 2012!

Grace and peace,
Seraphic

Courtship and Cowardice Online

2011-12-31T10:13:00.001Z

It has come to my attention that there are Catholic men out there courting Catholic women very attentively by email and instant message and then suddenly disappearing into the ether when the going gets tough (e.g. plans to meet in person have fallen through). I do not know the scope of this problem, so I will set up a poll.

I cannot throw stones because when I was a young woman I used to talk about marriage with my poor downtrodden boyfriends, which led them to think I would marry them, and then I would break up with them because I was bored. This was terrible behaviour, for which I am now very sorry.

Meanwhile, I don't remember anyone telling me this was terrible behaviour--ooh, except one guy one frozen night one New Year's Eve, green eyes aflame with righteous indignation. I seem to remember we were inside the doors of a bank, by the cash machines, and he was actually yelling. Meanwhile, he had never even been my boyfriend, although he wanted to be. Oh dear, what drama.

Bad, bad Seraphic.

Anyway, enough about me. I am reading too many stories about this happening now, to girls, to very nice girls, to very nice Catholic girls, who are contacted by likely lads on Catholic dating sites and chat rooms. The boys write to the girls about their hopes and dreams, while thinking out loud that these might be the nice Catholic girls they'd like to share their lives with. But instead of ever meeting the nice Catholic girls, the Catholic boys eventually simply disappear without a trace, as if they had never said or thought any of this stuff.

First question: has this happened to you?

Second question: have you pulled a similar online disappearing act?

Please answer the poll and confess all below. For once I will allow Anonymous comments.

Pirate and the Old Joke

2011-12-30T19:52:00.001Z

Scene: Thursday, car park in North Berwick, Scotland. The McAmbrose and Single families are in a rental car. Auntie Seraphic and Pirate are in the back seat, and Uncle Ben and Pirate's Mum are in the front.

Pirate: Guess what?

Uncle: What?

Pirate: Chicken butt.

Auntie (genuinely): Ha ha ha ha ha!

Pirate: Ha ha ha ha ha! Guess who?

Uncle: Who?

Pirate: Chicken butt. Ha ha ha ha ha!

Auntie: Okay, cut that out. I only laughed because I hadn't heard it in twenty years.

Scene: Friday, highway in Perthshire, Scotland. Pirate's Mum is again in the driver's seat, and Uncle Ben is beside her. Auntie S and Pirate are once again in the back.

Pirate: Why did the chicken cross the road?

Auntie: Chicken butt. Ha ha ha ha ha!

Pirate: Ha ha ha ha ha!

Pirate's Mother (to Uncle B.A.) I'm really sorry. Now Seraphic has been influenced by Pirate and you have to live with the results.

Auntie: Chicken butt! Ha ha ha ha ha!

Crossing the Border in Orange County

2011-12-29T00:16:00.002Z

Tonight after Pirate was in bed, his mother, auntie and uncle watched "Orange County." And Auntie had a somewhat unpleasant shock during a scene in which Colin Hanks, playing an unlucky high school senior named Shaun, consults his hero, a writer/Stanford professor named Marcus Skinner, played by Kevin Kline.

At first I was amused at the way Marcus Skinner is portrayed: shrouded in J.D. Salinger type mystery. First he is just a pair of hands opening Shaun's fan letter. Then he is a well-dressed man with a briefcase seen from behind in the dark night of the Stanford campus. Then he turns around and looks like Kevin Kline. He doesn't speak much, but he remembers the novella Shaun sent him. Shaun throws his arms around him. (The audience giggles.)

The next thing we know, Shaun is in Skinner's office or sitting room or wherever, and Skinner is giving Shaun a very helpful review of his novella. His advice is so good that Shaun leaves absolutely euphoric. His smooth teenage face is a complete contrast to Skinner's grizzled charms, and he positively glows with youth and optimism and dreams and

And I was right back there in the sitting room with Marcus Skinner, thinking about how very young the young look, and I thought, Oh dear. I no longer identify with the young in young people movies. I identify solely with the grizzled adults they consult. I AM the grizzled adult they consult--or would be if they could see the grey in my hair, which they can't really, thank goodness, on account of the volume.

Sigh.

Have Cold But Also Presents!

2011-12-27T17:50:00.000Z

Hello, my little poppets. I have a terrible cold and only emerged from the House to see our old pal Aelianus. Aelianus, whom you may remember from my unofficial first novel, The Tragical Tale of Aelianus of England, was wondering if there is any magic realism in my official first novel (Ignatius, soon to be announced on a Catholic website near you), and I had to think for an hour, sipping Lemsip, before I remembered one eensy bit.// Anyway, being so sick, I cannot think of anything very brainy to say about either the Single or the Married Life today. Instead I will gloat over all my Christmas presents, which include a bottle of Chanel No. 5 from Mum and Dad and a book on British baking from Our Nearest Neighbour Angela. I am very excited to have a British baking book to go with British flour, which is so much different from Canadian.//Feel free to gloat over your presents, too, in the combox. We all know Christmas is not about presents, but now that it is the 27th, I think it is safe to revel in them. I personally love Christmas presents, and always recorded them in my diaries so as to remember who gave me what when.//What is with Blogger? I take special pride in my paragraphs, and their glitches are driving me nuts.

Woman with a Troubled Past

2011-12-26T13:32:00.001Z

Plans are afoot for Auntie to return victoriously to Poland as the keynote speaker for a women's retreat. This retreat is very much still in the planning stages, and eventually I will have to remind the enthusiastic organizer that I do not, in fact, speak Polish and I get the parish Polish altar servers to read me his letters./In one of the letters, the organizer sketched out his suggestions for the programme, and my parish Polish altar server du jour stumbled over one of the phrases. Apparently I was being described as a "brave woman with a troubled past", which the loyal altar server did not think a sterling summation of my auntish character./ "Yarg," shouted Auntie. "It's the divorce, isn't it? Yarg! Continental Europeans! Yarg!"/The altar server listened patiently as I ranted about European Catholic attitude towards annulments and divorced women and why people look at me as if I have a troubled past. And then I remembered the last bit might be because I actually wrote about it in my book. Meanwhile, if you write about being divorced, people are going to think of you as divorced. And if you are somehow magically married again, people are going to want to see your annulment papers and hopefully some contrition./ My principal source of contrition, which I thought about as I woke up today, is that I thought Dorothy L. Sayer's Gaudy Night was any kind of guide to life. Plot spoiler alert. In Dorothy L. Sayer's Lord Peter Wimsey novels, Lord Peter eventually falls in love with a dark-haired, husky-voiced, detective novelist named Harriet. We will not say that she was based on Dorothy L. Sayers herself because I will go mental if anyone thinks my own heroines are based on myself (unless they are actually named Seraphic, of course)./ Now, BIG PLOT SPOILER, after a few novels in which Harriet consents to go out to dinner now and again with the dashing and clever Lord Peter, about whom she has a major inferiority complex, Harriet "gives way" at the end of Gaudy Night and, to quote Lord Peter's mother, they end up "kissing madly in a punt."/ This is all very romantic, and I think Gaudy Night was an absolutely splendid book, but Dorothy L. Sayers sacrificed common sense to a handy literary device by making her heroine fall in love with a man she had consistently rejected for three years or so. Harriet is depicted as having won a major victory over herself, and it was of Harriet I thought when I was 24 and much stupider than I am now./ It may have been the last time I mistook fictional decisions for real life lessons. I certainly hope so. And meanwhile I have discovered that I am not the only woman who has done this, for apparently there are women who honestly take as Gospel lessons learned from Sex and the City and other television shows. Never mind that a freelance writer does not make Carrie's salary. I remember Samantha wondering if sleeping with half of New York is what got her breast cancer, and she being very relieved to discover that the nun in her waiting room also has breast cancer. Yes, nuns get breast cancer. But they don't usually get cervical cancer which, unlike breast cancer, is linked to a very common STD. And as my friend Lily pointed out, there is no way a woman who uses men the way Samantha does could possibly have long-term loyal friendships with three women./ Being in general pro-great world literature, I am sure that there are some lessons you can learn from the classics. However, I would steer clear of making major life decisions based on the decisions made by fictional characters. I don't care that PLOT SPOILER Anne and Gilbert got married in the end and had seven children. Lucy Maud Montgomery and her very best bosom friend both married men mostly just not to be spinsters, it seems, and they were miserable./ The Anne books were and are escapist fiction, no matter how many Japanese and Korean tourists insist Anne is real. Plato wouldn't allow any poets into his perfect state, and that is because they told such shocking lies. I am sure he would feel the same way about novelists. However, to be fair to novelists, our first loyalty is not always to the truth of ordinary life but to our beloved characters. We make up our own universes, and the laws that govern this universe do not always govern ours./If Blogger does not fix the bug in its new model I will be leaving it sooner rather than later for my very own new webpage, so stay tuned.

It's About Baby Jesus

2011-12-24T14:26:00.001Z

Great column from Single mum Crescat over here.

Being between washing a ton of dishes and mixing up the dough for gingerbread men for the tree which we finally bought this morning (£20 as last minute, woo-hoo!), I have almost nothing more to say.

What I have to say is a suggestion to thank God for who you have and what you have this Christmas, and concentrate on the people who really love and like you, and not on the people you wish loved and liked you. Celebrate with the people who really are in your life, like your nephews and nieces (if you have some), and don't brood over phantasms of your imagination, like your future children. That is the only and best way to keep sane over the holidays.

And, finally, it's not your birthday (unless it is): it's the day we mark the birthday of our Lord, so good Christian readers rejoice and get ye to the best and most beautiful service you can find to celebrate--unless you are a strict Presbyterian, in which case I wish you a happy and tranquil Sunday!

I'll be praying for you all at Midnight Mass.Merry Christmas (and happy Sunday) to all! Wesołych i błogosławionych świąt Bożego Narodzenia!

"What Do Aunties Do?" Redux

2011-12-23T10:36:00.000Z

Scene: Dinner Table

Pirate's Mum: Pirate, what do aunties do?

Pirate: They fool around.

Sensation.

Perfectly Innocent House Guest (mournfully): Denounced by a seven year old.

Auntie: What do you mean by fooling around, exactly?

Pirate hops down from the cushion on his chair.

Pirate (with relish): They walk around like THIS! (He does a shambling dance in a circle.)

An Acceptance Letter

2011-12-22T10:10:00.001Z

I was never this thin, however.

Yesterday I got a contract in the post from Ignatius Press. They wish to publish my novel.

No, not The Bodis Riper. (This is Ignatius Press, people!) I'm talking about my Graham Greenesque thriller, which almost none of you have seen because I never put a word of it online.

This is not a tremendous shock to me, as I was told over a month ago that Ignatius Press was thinking about it, and then I spent a week or two waiting for the final decision. There was a point where I could do nothing but pray that everything worked out the way it should, and then I thought, "Hey! I have a captive audience who could pray, too!"

Darlingses, I can say no more about the drama of it all, but you will all understand soon after you have rushed off to buy my Controversial and Stunning Debut.

The final decision came in early December and a suggested contract by email shortly after that. B.A. and I bought a magnum of champagne and served it to our pals after Mass the next Sunday. But I was determined not to say anything to the outside world until after I got the contract in the post. And lo, I have. It has very nice, thick paper too!

I will tell you what it is called and various other information all in good time. Meanwhile, I just wanted to let you know about this lovely non-rejection letter and what is, I admit, extremely exciting news.

The Realities of Marriage

2011-12-21T10:16:00.001Z

Occasionally I get an email from a nice Catholic girl who has been dating a nice Catholic boy for some months, and she is trying to decide if she wants to marry him or not. She lays out all the good qualities of the nice Catholic boy and his family and asks me what I think.

What I think is that she should marry him only if she wants to have sex with him, wash his socks and sit beside him on the couch as he watches yet another boring episode of yet another boring TV show. Because this is what the daily, domestic reality of marriage largely is, when you get right down to it.

I'm not talking about the spiritual stuff, obviously. There are dozens of Catholics happy to tell you all about the spiritual stuff, so go read them if you want to find out about it. I think Christopher West has even developed a kind of Catholic tantra or something, so if you want to mix in some ooh-la-la with your theological reading, off you go to Chris.

Meanwhile, if you are younger than me (it seems) there is also getting pregnant, which involves swollen ankles and having a puffy face and staring down at your huge belly moaning "Come onnnnn, new baby! Hurry uuuuuup!" The new baby will usually look like your husband, so it is important to really like or even love your husband so that you love the fact that his baby looks like him.

Oh yes. Love. I guess I should also talk about love, although now that I live in Britain it is an even more embarrassing word than sex. The problem with love is that we North Americans throw the word around a lot, and tell everyone that we love them. Even North American boys now indulge, as in "I love you, man!" And what you feel when you get a crush on someone can be called love, I suppose, although I prefer the expression "temporary insanity." The British call it "fancying", as in "Do you fancy him?" which sounds suspiciously akin to that other common expression, "Fancy a fish supper?"

For marriage purposes, however, love is not just a feeling of sexual attraction or affection but, in my experience at least, a feeling that you will absolutely die if you cannot marry this person within six to eight months which morphs, after marriage, into the knowledge that life will really, really suck if this person escapes or dies.

Of course, you could argue, that is just me, Auntie Seraphic, over 35 and brimming with natural affections. What of the indecisive young?

I would say that the indecisive young should just sit tight until they meet a person--of proven good character and appropriate family background, beliefs and education--who truly rocks their world. And this is because marriage is not something tremendously exciting in itself, on the domestic level (on the social level it is crucial to the health of society), but a man and a woman living in one space, trying to keep the space and themselves clean, earning money and spending it on boring things, having sex, arguing and watching boring TV. That's what the "marriage lifestyle" looks like, so unless you marry someone who rocks your world, you are going to feel seriously ripped off.

There is a cynical little term that has arisen from people who marry young and soon feel ripped off. It's called "starter marriage." But this is a little term we want to stamp out because divorce should not be an option, and if you're even thinking of divorce as your handy little escape hatch then most definitely you should not be getting married.

More Pirate

2011-12-20T10:03:00.002Z

This is the first time a child has waited for Christmas in the Historical House for decades--perhaps a century. Our attic flat used to be nurseries and servants' quarters, so it is easy to imagine children at the table in what is now our dining room, although it is hard to imagine Pirate in the role of some Georgian or Victorian darling in a sailor suit.

Take, for example, a necessarily informal dinner party the other night. Around the table were two young Polish students, Uncle B.A., Auntie Seraphic, Pirate's Mum and, at the foot, Pirate eagerly spooning up his soup. It was Polish chicken soup and thus unfamiliar to Pirate, but to my relief he slurped it down. And such was his contentment with life in general that he began to sing a little ditty that I can only assume he learned in the playground of his Catholic school:

"Ladies on top," he caroled. "Ladies on top, ladies on top."

Spoons halted in the air as five pairs of adult eyes swiveled to the brown-eyed, gap-toothed songster.

"Ladies on top of what?" asked Pirate's mother. "That's just silly. What does that even mean?"

Puzzled, Pirate thought about his song and then his face cleared.

"Ladies on top of the roof!" he sang. "Ladies on top of the roof!"

Then, you may be heartened to hear, he burst into "All the Single Ladies." That one he learned from the Chipmunks.

Update: Memory compels me to admit that one ditty that did the rounds when I was in my own Catholic school playground was "[Angel in the] Centerfold."

Auntie Seraphic & Older and Wiser

2011-12-17T10:06:00.001Z

To return for a moment to the vaccination debate:

Dear Auntie Seraphic,

I'm a bit hesitant to write this due to its sensitive nature, but I feel that I must.

I'm not sure what conservative Christians (Catholic and Protestant) have against the HPV vaccination, but I strongly think that they should reconsider their positions. Unlike condoms or birth control pills, there isn't a moral prohibition against vaccinations. On the contrary, the vaccination protects the life of the girl and preserves her potential to give life to children.

I don't buy the argument that getting the girl the vaccine signals to her that it's okay to have sex whenever she wants. Hormones aside, 15 year old girls aren't complete idiots, and they are capable of understanding preventive measures taken in case of a mistake versus parental approval of said mistake. What that does require is a parental conversation with the kid about sex, which I think the real reason they've come up with such a shoddy argument.

In my experience the sex ed in Christian circles is abysmal. The real reason condoms don't protect against HPV? It's spread by skin on skin contact, not bodily fluids like most of the others. Which means that "technical virgins" can actually get HPV. When's the last time you heard that discussed? I'm sure I've never heard that from any Christian source, and I've been around for awhile. Yeah, I'm sure it would be nice if teenagers didn't have sex before marriage, but many do, and they are the most vulnerable ones due to their age.

Aside from teenage promiscuity, there's all sorts of reasons to vaccinate. There's sexual assault, and having the vaccination is just one less thing to worry about in that case. Also, you mentioned that the guy the girl one day marries may not have been perfect in his past. There's no test to take, and there's usually no symptoms for the guy. The best protection for the girl is to get vaccinated. Vaccinating early is best because it is most effective before sexual activity. Also, I'm not sure how the NHS works, but insurance in the US only pays for the vaccine if you are in the appropriate age range.

Which brings the topic to me. You see, I once thought I didn't need the vaccine when I was younger, for many of the same reasons I hear on conservative news and blogs. Now I wish I had taken the opportunity, because when I reconsidered I was out of the age range and couldn't afford it without insurance. I made a mistake, and now I have HPV, even though I was a really really good girl for many years. Luckily I don't have cancer, but pap smears every 6 months is no picnic. I'm not feeling sorry for myself, I just wish I had been wiser. No one knows the future, and even the best NCG can't guarantee that she'll never slip up once. Speaking from experience, the best method is to protect yourself, and that includes getting vaccinations against a very common disease.

Sorry for the long email, I just have strong views on this topic. Christians often talk about being cautious and protecting ourselves in regards to many other topics, and they should protect their girls against HPV.

-Older and Wiser

Dear Older and Wiser,

Thank you very much for your email. I didn't know that conservative Christians had anything against HPV vaccinations, unless it is part of a general distrust for Big Government and anything having to do with sex education or the patronizing idea that teenagers "will just do it anyway."

I think that maybe there is a learning curve, not just for the Christian community but for any public health body that needs to get across the idea that an HPV vaccination is not dirty or a statement that a girl can become promiscuous now. When my father said he wished his (now too old) daughters could have got the HPV vaccination, I was very angry with him because I thought he was suggesting something pessimistic about us. However, my father has a friend whose daughter died of cervical cancer, and this affected him very much.

Thus your arguments are very good. An HPV vaccination is not a mark of dishonour for any 15 year old girl but a recognition that she could catch HPV from any man, including her husband. And I think any public health body should get that idea across instead of dumb posters with a teenage girl with her head tilted to one side with "Am I ready for sex?" in a thought bubble over her head.

I hope I may publish your email, as I would like other girls to read it. Meanwhile, I am sorry you have HPV, and I hope it clears completely out of your system. From my reading, it appears that it usually does.

Grace and peace,

Seraphic

P.S. to all: Once again, I am not a doctor, and I don't know if I would have my 15 year old daughter vaccinated, if I had one. (Ask your doctor if she would.)

It is not guaranteed that any of us will get HPV, and I am (rightly or wrongly) suspicious of all new "magic bullet" drugs and vaccinations because of what happened to the "DES Daughters" and the poor people exposed to thalidomide. All I can say is that it is your parents' and/or your decision. And, incidentally, I see that boys can be inoculated for it, too. Interesting that the burden of responsibility for sexual health has ONCE AGAIN been placed on women.

By the way, as a twice-married middle-aged lady, I get a cervical smear myself. The National Health Service in Scotland advises that women have this done every two years.

Advent of Pirate, Age 7

2011-12-16T20:44:00.000Z

If you have read my book, you know all about Pirate. Pirate and his mother have arrived in Scotland for their Christmas holidays. I fixed up the guest room for them; they are now both asleep on the sitting-room couch.

But when they first arrived they were all about cookies and conversation.

Pirate: I want a new cousin.

Auntie S: You can talk to your Auntie [mother-of-2] about that.

Pirate: I want a new SCOTTISH cousin!

Auntie S: Um, er, um, er, um. Sometimes people don't get to decide about that. It is God who decides.

Pirate's Mummy: I know a lady who is 43 and has a really cute 3 month old baby.

Auntie S: That's nice. That's a nice story. I like stories like that.

Pirate's Mummy: In Bulgaria there is no age limit on adopting children.

Auntie S: Goodness!

Sex and Cancer

2011-12-15T14:23:00.006Z

This is one of those posts in which I have to remind you that I am not a doctor.

When I was a teenager, I read in "Seventeen" magazine that sexually active teenagers and women over 18 were supposed to have regular pap (or cervical) smears, but I never read why that was exactly. The reason why is that vaginal sex can give you a virus called HPV which can go on to give you cervical cancer. If you have a regular pap (or cervical smear) regularly, doctors can see if you have cervical cancer sooner rather than later.

This is probably the tenth time I've written this, but the scientist Natalie Angiers wrote in "Woman: An Intimate Geography" that the very scary thing about HPV and cervical cancer is that condoms don't seem to prevent them. The more men you sleep with, whether or not you use condoms, the more likely you are to get them.

Meanwhile, I know that a teenage girl is especially vulnerable to contracting HPV and other diseases because the walls of her cervix are not very thick yet.

Here is something my friend Hilary recently wrote about sex and cervical cancer. http://anglocath.blogspot.com/2011/12/dear-16-year-old-me.html

(Blogger doesn't seem to be working properly right now, so I can't embed it.)

Please read it and then come back for my following remarks. (By the way, I can't get youtube, either, so I have no idea what video Hilary has up.)

The first thing I have to say is that it is disgraceful that nobody warned my mother's or my or your generation that "free love" was potentially lethal and that even the almighty condom can't stop all venereal diseases. The only excuse for the enablers of the sexual dissolution that I can think of is that they simply didn't know: never before had so many women slept with so many men. I suspect they know now, which is why various public health bodies are so keen to inoculate as many 15 year old girls as possible against HPV.

The second thing I have to say is that a hysterectomy should not signal the end of matrimonial hopes. Not all men long to have children. Some never really think about them, and some have had children in first marriages or earlier relationships, and some discover at the age of 50 that although they'd like to get married, they would be relieved to be married to a woman who, barring a miracle, wasn't going to have children herself, e.g. a woman their own age. That's not selfish; that's just the reality of many men over 50.

Meanwhile, as women over childbearing age marry or remarry, I don't see why a woman with a hysterectomy might not marry or remarry, too.

The third thing I have to say, and this is not in criticism of Hilary, who has written a generous post, from a place of illness, disillusionment, fear and pain, and it is that it is in general a bad idea for an unmarried Catholic woman to write on the internet about her past sexual sins, no matter how far in the past they may be.

Long-time readers will remember how I discourage female readers from revealing whether or not they are virgins to anyone other than their doctor or their date-has-been-set-hall-has-been booked fiances. Your virginity or lack thereof is nobody's business but your own, and for various reasons (freaking out the sensitive, gossipy friends, creepy virgin hunters, "how come you would for him but not for me?", etc.) you should keep it to yourself.

But I will also say, as I have said many times before, that you should also keep a lid on the sexual sins of your past life because they freak out religious men, particularly younger or less sexually experienced religious men. Men's imaginations are on a hair-trigger where sex is concerned anyway, and so if they discover the girl they really like has been with some other guy, their imaginations go wild. They torture themselves wondering who and what and where and when, and they feel competitive and jealous and potentially inadequate and generally awful. And they occasionally (often?) move the Publicly Known to Have Slept Around Girl off the Potential Wife list, no matter how humble and contrite she might now be.

And so another lie of the sexual revolution is revealed. Not only can sleeping around end up in cancer, a lot of good young men still feel uncomfortable knowing that women they might bring home to their mothers have slept around. Yes, never-married girls do have to tell their fiances whether they are virgins or not and if they have an incurable sexual disease, but I cannot think of any man not your doctor or your very trusted confessor who needs to hear about your past sexual actions.

And if you and/or your fiance has been sexually active, make sure you both/he gets checked out for HPV* and any other sexually transmitted disease before you get married. After that, it's a regular pap (cervical) smear for you. Life is hard, and in many ways the sexual dissolution made it harder. As Sister Wilfreda said back in Grade 9 religion, "Sin has its own built-in punishment."

Update: Actually, it seems that men cannot be tested for HPV. This is not good news.

Update 2: A handy article from Uncle Sam. Read all the words.

Women and Symbols

2011-12-14T08:35:00.005Z

I was trying to explain female psychology this morning, so there will be a lot of bold generalization appearing on this post. Explaining female psychology without a degree in the subject is also a dangerous thing to do. When a man begins a sentence, "Any red-blooded man would---", I always assume he is mostly talking about himself. And therefore, if I begin a sentence with the word "Women feel," would it not be reasonable to assume that I am talking mostly about myself?

But I am saved by the cardinal rule of this blog, which is that just because men behave/think/speak a certain way doesn't mean women do, too, and vice versa.

Anyway, my thought this morning is that women think in terms of symbols. My principal example is the frivolous, pretty, high heeled shoe. Why do so many women buy so many shoes? Why did the shoe obsession of Sex and the City (not that any of us ever saw a single episode) ring so true with legions of girls. Why do I and my girly-girl friends unwrap our shoe-purchases for each other's gazes with such shoe-venerating anticipation? Can it really be the shoes, or do the shoes point to some other reality, like Femininity, Attractiveness and Disposable Income?

I think crushes operate the same way. Women get crushes on men we don't know, and whom we even, with another part of our brains, dislike. We fixate like mad, daydream and then, after having an actual conversation with the man, go away feeling angry and disappointed but still fixated. What is with that?

Could it be that the crush has nothing to do with the man but something the man symbolically represents? Could it be a displacement for feelings of attraction to a place or time you are currently in? For example, if you are loving your holiday on the Dalmatian coast, perhaps the Croatian waiter who makes your heart race does so simply because he has become a symbol of your lovely holiday.

I think this works for other emotions, too. For example, I was once in a terrible state when B.A. and I returned from an outwardly pleasant evening out with a very nice former classmate of mine from my not very nice Ph.D. department and a much younger friend. I seemed to have plunged into an ocean of grief and loss. But when I sorted it out, I realized that on one level I had spent an evening with my husband, a friend and a former colleague, but on another level I had spent it with my husband, My Lost Youth and the Implosion of my Academic Theological Career.

I think this is also why women get so upset if we get a very lame present for Valentine's Day or if our husbands forget our birthdays or wedding anniversaries. It has nothing to do with "stuff"; it has to do with what the "stuff" represents.

Symbols can point in good directions, of course. I once turned down a marriage proposal from a Mr Almost (but not quite) Right, who was not a Catholic. One very strong influence on this decision was, quite unbeknownst to either of them, a classmate who was a male religious. Now, I knew that I did not want to run away with a male religious. However, I did know that I would really prefer to marry someone a lot like him--which is to say, a funny, good-humoured, devoutly Catholic guy. At the time, it seemed unlikely that this might happen, as I was already in my thirties and tick tick tick and blah blah blah. However, I decided that this was the kind of man I would hold out for, and I did. The male religious, bless his heart, was a symbol of the Good Catholic Husband, and B.A. is the reality.

Auntie Seraphic & How Will I Know?

2011-12-12T11:44:00.012Z

As we know, not all marriages are love matches. In some cultures, people--especially women--are pressured to marry by a certain age, and for reasons other than love. In such cultures, parents tend to say that love will follow the wedding, and this may very well be true--in those cultures. I suspect that, most of the time, at least among educated people, the bride and groom whose families have agreed that their arranged marriage is mutually acceptable at least like and sympathize with each other. I can imagine a South Asian woman doctor saying to a handsome South Asian doctor, "Our families! Argh!" and the man doctor saying back, "Argh! I know", and each feeling understood and supported by the other.

However, most English-speaking Catholics arrange our own marriages and expect that feelings of deep attachment will precede the wedding. I certainly do, especially since B.A. and I were all gobsmacked about each other when we met. And this is all a preamble to a letter I am rewriting entirely to protect the writer.

Dear Auntie Seraphic,

I am in my early twenties, and I've always been popular with boys. [Auntie note: This is my wording, so don't get huffy.] I've dated boys long enough to call them boyfriends, but I broke up with every one. I wonder if this is because I am very indecisive, and I wonder how I can stop the dating-boyfriend-break-up cycle.

But my biggest question is how will I know when I meet the man I'm supposed to marry. I've consulted movies, books and my parent on this subject. But my parents and other married people always say "You just know," and that drives me crazy.

Sincerely,
How Will I Know

Dear How Will I Know,

I wouldn't put much faith in books and movies! Books and movies have to have simple, exciting plots with lots of drama and steadily growing character development, and life isn't really like that. We develop in fits and starts, and life unfolds according to its own schedule, with a lot of boring bits.

It would probably drive you crazy if I said "You just know" like your parents, so I will try to elaborate on this. Essentially, you make friends with a man who intrigues you very much, and the better you get to know him, the more excited you are to be around him and the more you hope he feels that way about you, too. And when you do find out he does feel this way, you are so happy you feel that your life has become a fairy tale. You might be torn between the excitement of getting married and the dread that something horrible might happen to prevent it. You are a little bit insane. Meanwhile, you have a serious hunch that he will get along absolutely great with your family and friends.

This sounds very exciting, and the western world is packed with women wondering if and when this will happen to them. However, there is no way of knowing if and when, although American marriage statistics, at any rate, do suggest it's more "when" than "if."

It's okay that you are indecisive. That sounds extremely normal for [an early 20-something]. But you know when you are looking for the right book or the right dress and suddenly THE PERFECT THING pops out at you? It's like that. One moment you're just casually looking around a store, and nothing seems right and then (once in a blue moon)--WHAM! Right dress! Hooray!

So don't blame yourself for being indecisive. Just keep on meeting people and going out on dates with nice Catholic boys to see if a friendship or something more might develop. Keep things on a friendly level as much as possible. I know this is difficult because our culture has developed this thing about dating as a highway to "relationships" instead of dating as a way to spend time with friendly men who might (or might not) become something more.

Also, don't watch the clock. Fortunately you are only [early 20-something] and therefore presumably not freaking about growing older, but you have no way of knowing when it is that the Future Mister You will swim into view. It could be next week. It could be next year. It could be when you are 37. Eeek! But whenever it happens--and I speak as one who experienced it at 37--it will be totally worth it and you will be so terribly thankful you didn't settle for someone else.

I hope this is helpful!

Grace and peace,
Seraphic

Update: In light of the first comment, I should add explicitly what I meant implicitly above, and it is that both of you have become absolutely certain you should marry, and the sooner the better. And I am talking about adults, not teenagers, or people who started their "fairy tale" relationship as teenagers.

That said, I know two couples of my parents (Baby Boom) generation who did meet as children. One literally met in the sandbox (she whacked him with a plastic shovel), and the other dated in high school, broke up, and got back together.

"You're Not a Teenager, Are You?"

2011-12-10T21:37:00.006Z

Darlingses. Sometimes I get an email that makes my head explode. It's not the writer who makes it explode--usually the writer is wonderfully sweet with a vulnerability that goes straight to my auntish heart. No--it is always the man she is writing about.

If you are a teenager, and you find yourself in a car with or across the table from an OLD MAN (and if you are a teenager every man over 21 is an old man) who is talking about his love life, and he says, with a bit of a smirk, "You're not a teenager, are you?", I want you to take a big breath, sit up straight and say "YES. Yes, I AM a teenager. And I have to call my mom now."

I cannot express how serious I am about this. There is nothing wrong or shameful about being a teenager. But there is something wrong and shameful about an OLD MAN saying "You're not a teenager, are you?" to an obviously much younger woman. He should feel ashamed, not you. And if I could, I would come right over there and kick his butt.

Other People's Children

2011-12-09T21:45:00.002Z

I had quite a nice day with other people's children! First I went to visit a pal with a one year old and a one week old! The one year old stroked his baby sister's head very gently; he was adorable. And the little baby was as sweet as only a one week old can be!

And then I had an email from a university-age friend, whose parents are farther away from her than I am, and I answered with zeal.

Finally my university-age Polish teacher arrived, and I heard about his housing woes and the genitive case.

It was all very satisfactory. I don't think children, teenagers and university students understand what a lift they give older people (including 40 year olds) just by being there, but they certainly do.

Nagging Young Women's Boyfriends Day

2011-12-08T16:06:00.004Z

The other day I heard the depressing story of a woman in Britain, no longer young, who is waiting for the Leap Year, so she can ask her boyfriend to marry her. In a way this seems very old-fashioned, as the tradition is that this is the one acceptable day women can ask men to marry them. But it also sounds like one long humiliation. Years gone by, the boyfriend's elderly neighbours may have said something to him like, "Such-and-such is a nice girl. When are you going to do right by her?"

"Mind your own business," the boyfriend might have snarled.

"It is our business," the elderly might have shot back. "Nice girl, Such-and-such. Known her all our lives. Know her people. Knew her people's people."

And then the boyfriend might have slunk off sulkily but newly clued in to the ideas that 1.) public behaviour, like courting or living with a woman for umpteen months or years, is kind of public and 2.) his girlfriend is well-thought of in the community and 3.) the community is somewhat disapproving of him for what they perceive to be a wrong to his girlfriend.

I am of course opposed to married people picking on single people and demanding of them why they are not married. I am especially opposed to married people picking on single women and demanding to know why they are not married or, worse, offering hypotheses for their single state. In the West, it has never been the job of a woman to hunt for a husband; it has been the job of a man to hunt for a wife.

But that's "a wife." I am not terrifically thrilled by men who hunt for a girlfriend solely to have a girlfriend and then to string her along for years and years. That's one reason why I think adult women (out of school) should start to re-evaluate her commitment to any boyfriend who has not mentioned marriage in a whole 12 months of dating.

Personally, I cannot imagine why any seriously religious woman (out of school) would date any man for more than 12 months without a whisper of a hint of marriage, given the sexual temptations, the where-is-this-going anxiety and, eventually, the boredom. However, a thought has just occurred to me, and I suppose it is because she is in love with him, poor thing.

That is why it is up to the community once again to start nagging Mr. Dragging His Feet. Marriage would actually be good for Mr. Dragging His Feet, but men are an eenie-weenie bit scared of marriage, in the same way they are an eenie-weenie bit scared of bears. I can just imagine a man admitting he was scared of bears, however, especially to men who have faced bears and won.

Other Men (chuckling): So, I guess you're scared of bears, son, eh?

I, Seraphic, have a really hard time keeping my mouth shut around Catholic men (out of school) who have been dating the same woman for years and years with no mention of a ring. "Marry or move on" I spit between my teeth, uncomfortably knowing that if they moved on, their girlfriends would be initially devastated. I don't know personally if it is more devastating to be left by Mr Wonderful after 13 months of dating, or by Mr Dragging His Feet after five years of dating, but I am guessing the latter because five years is a way bigger investment than 13 months, and time is something women are a bit sensitive about.

It feels better to dump a guy for not getting to the point than to be dumped by a guy who has found "someone better", that is for darn tootin'. And I think if all adult women (out of school) gave suitors no more than a year and a month to come to scratch, men would stop dragging their lazy man feet about marriage. I can just imagine it: lovely women, all shiny and new, intriguing, exciting and slightly mysterious for twelve months and then---RRRRRAAAAAH! Godzilla. Or at least a raised eyebrow and "Where is this going? Because if it isn't going anywhere, buddy boy, I've got places to go, people to see and there's this new guy in the parish who keeps looking up at me when I'm in the queue for Communion."

Until women get that kind of gumption, however, I leave it to their neighbours, families and friends to start clearing their throats and making short but pointed observations to their long-term boyfriends.

Very Bad Boyfriend of the Week

2011-12-06T17:04:00.011Z

Poppets, I am busy studying for my "Life in the UK" exam. The details don't seem to have much to do with my life in the UK, but perhaps that proves I'm just not that integrated. (Shhhh!)

Anyway, that's the price I pay for marrying an exotic foreign person and living in his exotic foreign country as an exotic foreigner.

Meanwhile, here is a simply ghastly story about exotic foreigners to which I cannot resist linking, even though it probably is adding fuel to the strangely xenophobic why-are-there-so-many-Poles-in-the-UK meme. (Incidentally, the biggest migrant groups to the UK in the 1980s were Americans, Australians, South Africans and New Zealanders; see textbook.) Bonnie Prince Charlie was half-Polish, you know, and the Poles helped to win the Battle of Britain. Also, Poles in Poland are ordering my book in large quantities, so I am reflexively pro-Pole.

I do not know what to say about this story other than that this Marcin person seems like a very bad guy, much much worse than the general run of guys who live with their girlfriends for six years with no ring in sight. Although it is true that 25% of children in the UK live in a single-parent household (see textbook), it is not generally because their fathers have allegedly buried their mothers alive in the woods.

I hope you all appreciate that I linked to the Telegraph and not to the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail is considered a tabloid like the Sun, and the Telegraph is supposed to be a respectable paper.

Perhaps the part that makes my hair stand on end is that the boyfriend's excuse was that he was "bored" with his girlfriend. It makes my hair stand on end because it was probably true. Talk about your disposable (sexual) culture! Brr-rr-rr-rr!

Busy Day

2011-12-05T18:09:00.002Z

Hello dear readers! B.A. and I have been out with Single friends, and so I haven't had time to blog today. Meanwhile, I pontificated over a bottle of wine and then over tremendous stacks of books, so I am all pontificated out. No more advice from me today.

Auntie Seraphic & Don't Crush On Me

2011-12-03T09:12:00.006Z

Dear Auntie Seraphic:

A friend of mine is newly single, and seems to be paying me extra attention. I’m not sure whether he just wants more emotional support, or if he is crushing on me, but knows enough not to jump into a rebound relationship. Either way, I want to discourage him. He’s a wonderful person, and we have some nice things in common, but he is a bit too young for me, and just not someone I am attracted to in that way. I really cannot ever see this going beyond friendship.

This is someone I see nearly every day, as part of a small circle of friends who share class and social time. We are all in our mid to late twenties. I want to continue my relationship with the group as a whole, which is very supportive and important to me. Yet, when he is there, I feel more constrained and not quite able to be myself because of my suspicions.

I know that in the end, I can’t stop him from crushing if he’s bound and determined to do so. But I know how much it can hurt when someone leads you on…or even when they are oblivious, but kind of dumb about their boundaries. Is there any way I can be clear that I’m not interested in him without confronting him directly? Do your male readers have any tips?

Thanks,

Don't Crush on Me

Dear Don't Crush on Me,

Just as you cannot make a man fall in love with you, you cannot make a man not fall in love with you. This is the annoying thing about men: they do not come with a remote control.

One good thing about men, however, is that in many countries they are not allowed to touch you, take you out to dinner or marry you without your consent. They can think and wish whatever they want, but they can do nothing involving you without your permission.

It is not a tragedy that your young friend is paying you extra attention. At best, it is a compliment and at worst, it is slightly boring. But you can discourage him as soon as he gives you the first opportunity, e.g. when he actually asks you out on a date, if he ever does, or actually tries to hold your hand. The only "middle ground" I can think of--where it is not clear that what he might be feeling actually affects you in any real way--is if he is staring at you. If he is staring at you, go ahead and say "What?" in an aggrieved tone.

Continue to be just yourself, and for heaven's sake don't blame him for having a crush on you. A crush is as ordinary, and can be as brief, as a cold. Meanwhile, the best way to keep the group together and happy is NOT to create a drama out of this situation by talking about it to the group. For his sake, your sake and the sake of the group, don't gossip about your suspicions. And, of course, don't go out of your way to text, email or call him, for an extraordinary gesture is what is most likely to make him think you like him back.

Never forget that the magical words "No, thank you" keep you from going on dates or having to hold Mr Wrong's clammy hands. All you have to do is wait for the opportunity to use them.

I hope this is helpful!

Grace and peace,
Seraphic

One of the joys of people-watching is realizing who in your set has a crush on whom. There is, of course, an ethical dimension in trying to read the minds and hearts of those around you, so whatever you think you find out by observation, you should keep locked in your head behind the barrier of your teeth. The lesson to be gained from the exercise is that almost everybody--not just you--comes down with crushes, and also that people recover from their crushes, often very rapidly. It is very embarrassing when you discourage a guy with a crush on you, only to change your mind two months later and then discover that he has completely recovered.

Type Versus Reality

2011-12-02T09:26:00.008Z

I had a hilarious conversation with a married friend the other day. For some reason we were talking about boys. You would think that married ladies over thirty would get tired of talking about boys, but we haven't. At least, I haven't, and maybe the other married ladies over thirty are just humouring me.

But anyway we were having this hilarious conversation in which the subject of Our Type came up. If you have lived more than twenty years, you know what I am talking about. Perhaps you have even said (for example) to a friend, "You know, My Type is six-feet-tall-or-over, dark-haired, blue-eyed, athletic but also intellectual." And your friend may have said, "Oh, well, I don't really care about height, but My Type is dark-eyed and muscular."

These do not, by the way, approximate Our specific Types. I can't tell you what Our Types are because of the next part of the conversation, which was when we fell about laughing because in the end we married men who didn't look at all like Our Types.

I wonder if this is a sweeping phenomenon, this being attracted to One Type and then happily falling in love with another. And I wonder if it is related! (A sudden look of existential horror has passed over Auntie Seraphic's face.) What if the very fact that we are attracted to Type A gives us the exact right amount of indifference towards Type B that makes Type B go to vast lengths to impress us?

And since the more attractive examples of Type B doing the human version of the blue-footed booby dance are demonstrably more lovable than dumb ol' hot-but-haven't-noticed-we're-alive Type As, could it be that our psyche gives up on Type A and just falls in love with this highly attractive example of Type B? Or is it that our psyche knows that Type A is fun for dreaming about, but that this particular Type B guy is the real eligible deal?

I don't know. I haven't done any social-scientific research on this. I almost never do any social-scientific research on anything I write here, poppets, which I hope you remember. I work from instinct, curiosity and memory, like Miss Marple.

By the way, when I talk about forgetting about Type A long enough to fall in love with Type B, I am not talking about settling. I am never talking about settling; I hate the whole concept of settling. This is the 21st century, and you shouldn't have to settle. In Western cultures, you either marry in an exuberant spirit of friendship-on-fire or you don't marry.

I once spoke to a deserted husband who said "I've known for some time that I wasn't the kind of man she wanted" and I felt so awful for him. No woman should marry a man with whom she is not madly in love. It is not fair on him, no matter what he says beforehand. He can't love enough for two, and I wonder who came up with that particular bit of nonsense.

No, all I am saying is that we women may have certain Types that we recognize when we see them, but that they have little to do with the flourishing female life as it is actually lived. And thank goodness that's true, or English-speaking men under 5'10" would never get married. I have never in my life heard a Canadian, American, Australian or British woman describe her Type as "of small or medium height." Yet men of small or medium height can make great husbands, as I happen to know first-hand.

And don't write in saying "But what about men?" because men aren't women. I believe, and this is based not on science but on hearsay, circumstantial evidence and personal experience, that men are much less likely to fall in love "out of Type." Nope. When Type B starts doing his blue-footed booby dance, it is because his psyche has perceived his Type A before him.

Thanks to the Poppets!

2011-12-01T19:54:00.002Z

Thanks, kids. You did it. Intention answered. All smiles.

I'll tell you more when I can.

Grace and peace,
Seraphic

Happy Saint Andrew's Day!

2011-11-30T23:22:00.004Z

Today is Saint Andrew's Day, and as Saint Andrew is the patron saint of Scotland, there was a lot of running around for me today. Plus one of my pals leaves Scotland tomorrow and another is about to have a baby. So the Scotland-leaving pal and I went to see our baby-having pal between bouts of going to Mass. First we went to the Ordinary Form at the Cathedral (celebrated by our Cardinal Archbishop and involving relics of Saint Andrew), and then we went to the Extraordinary Form in a chapel (celebrated by our chaplain).

Thus I don't have much to say about the Single Life today. But thank you for praying for my career-related intention--and you can keep on going, if you like! I don't know what is going to happen, but I'm feeling a lot more calm about possible outcomes.

Auntie Seraphic's Intention

2011-11-29T10:59:00.004Z

Listen, poppets. Your Auntie Seraphic has a very big prayer intention.

It is not about babies. I had a conversation with the Lord on Sunday about babies.

"How come you never send me a baby?" I asked.

Eventually He got around to answering.

"I want you to take care of other people's babies right now," He said. "Okay, some of them are six feet tall, but they need your help and I want you to give it to them."

"Oh," I said. "But can't I have a baby AND take care of other people's babies?"

But He had said all He wanted to say for the time being, so that was it.

No, this prayer intention has to do with my career. And I think the very best thing I can do, since I feel more-or-less powerless in this situation, is to ask you to pray for my intention. I ask particularly those who have written me letters because, whereas although obviously the Lord doesn't forget stuff, prayers that begin "Lord, could you help Auntie Seraphic because she helped me" sound kind of convincing---to my ear, at least.

A Nice Bunch of Flowers

2011-11-28T12:49:00.004Z

Oh poppets, I have been looking at a lovely bouquet of flowers all weekend. They did not come from B.A. but from a friend whose thesis I had a look at before he handed it in. How very nice that in all the fuss around his degree ceremony he thought of little me.

And this reminds me of how important it is to have all kinds of relationships and how terribly we overlook and undervalue them. In A Whole Woman, Germaine Greer suggests that we have grossly undervalued even motherhood and that the be-all and end-all identity of woman is now Wife.

But there is something else going on in English-speaking societies, and it is the devaluation of the different degrees of friendship. I suppose the biggest example of what I mean is "Facebook" where a list of all the individuals who have full access to your page are called "Friends." However, I very much doubt all those people are your friends. Most of them are probably Acquaintances, and there is nothing wrong with that. It's good to have a wide range of acquaintances. You just shouldn't act like they are your friends.

Aristotle was very strict on the concept of friends. He thought that only men of excellent character could be true friends, and then only to their social equals. He didn't think men and women could be friends because they were not social equals. Ancient Roman aristocrats, however, did not agree with Aristotle on this one, and as a matter of fact very often the only person a Roman aristocrat trusted was his wife. In an intensely competitive and violent society, his best interests were her best interests, and they both knew it.

But let's get away from marriage, although not before I say that what holds marriage together is not romance, which is its agreeable starting point, but friendship with various benefits. Marriage is something very odd, for something so ancient and universal, and I am not going to write about it. Instead I will hint about the different kinds of friendship and acquaintance there are.

First of all, as hipped as we are on the idea of loyalty and fidelity, various people have waxing and waning importance in our lives. Christmas card and wedding invitation lists are very sweet for they honour not only those who are most important NOW but those who were most important THEN. Meanwhile, I think fondly of various women in various offices I have worked in, but I don't think of them as friends, past or present. They were good colleagues and made boring jobs more enjoyable. But we have passed completely from each other's lives.

This suggests that you, too, will have waxing and waning importance in the lives of others. I was a tremendous social asset in my Canadian theological school; I threw myself into the life of the school and achieved a kind of local fame. Various people told me how much I would be missed. My most heartfelt ambition was to return as a professor and continue on where I left off, but this was not to be. Now as far as 99% of the school is concerned I am just a photo on the wall. But this is okay, for I have new roles now, including Safe Grown-Up To Whom To Appeal in Emergency.

Second, it is okay not to be everyone's best friend. Heavens. The idea. But it is pleasant to have people with whom you meet up for the occasional coffee, and people with whom you meet up for the occasional drink, and people whom you invite for dinner, and people with whom you go on holiday. Social life seems to me to be a series of rings, and people move into the inner rings or out into the outer rings, depending on what happens in your life.

Third, we don't have to be so serious all the time. When I am sixty, I will probably be telling good-humoured young men that it is a terrible shame that we were born forty years apart. They will agree, and we will all know that we are lying, but we will also know that it is amusing to say things like that.

What everyone who met her apparently loved about the Queen Mother is that she gave everyone the impression that she really was interested in him/her and what he/she had to say, quite as if she had come there on purpose to see him/her and him/her alone. This was not fakery but charm. I think the only way to master such a wonderful skill is to practice.

I am very sorry to say this, for I married so late, but I did not become such a marvellous flirt until I was safely married. Now I can say outrageous things from the ramparts of my fortress of marriage, and am thus popular with the sort of men of whom I used to be afraid. If B.A. should shuffle off this mortal coil, however, I fear there would be a general stampede out of town, but oh well. I might not want to see them anyway. B.A. is unlikely to shuffle off until I am old, and perhaps by then I will not at all be interested in men but only in television and sweets.

Fourth, it is good to exchange greetings and remarks with simply everyone in your life, including bus drivers and assistants in the butcher shop, so as to fight against the forces of loneliness: not just your loneliness, but the loneliness of the bus driver and of the assistant in the butcher shop. When I worked as a teenager in a cafe, working before and after school, I very much enjoyed greeting all the regulars, for they livened up a lonely time in my life, and some very much enjoyed being greeted by Seraphic, age 17.

When news that I was leaving reached the regulars, one wrote me a letter. Apparently he had been suffering the end of his marriage, and the one thing that got him to work in the morning was the fact that someone was happy to see him, said "Good morning" like she meant it and remembered his usual order. So you never know how much good you can do just by smiling and saying good morning. "Favourite Cafe Waitress" was for one person the most important role I played in life, and by saying thank you, he now stands out in my mind as "Favourite Cafe Patron."

Auntie Seraphic & The Catherinettes

2011-11-25T11:49:00.008Z

Thanksgiving Dinner Report post below.
****

Hi there, Seraphic!

I teach French to little kids, and today this involved celebrating St. Catherine's Day by making taffy. Not being francophone myself, I had to look up the French Canadian tradition, and I noted that St. Catherine's Day (November 25) seems to have a lot connected to it with regards to single women.

Apparently her intercession has been invoked for the past 8 centuries by single women wanting husbands, with varying degrees of desperation. It also seems that unmarried women over the age of 25 were dubbed "Catherinettes" on St. Catherine's Day. Catherinettes would take the opportunity to send cards and treats to their fellow Catherinettes.

This made me think of your Operation Valentinus, and thought it would be fun to bring it up on your blog. Mind you, I suppose celebrating St. Catherine's Day in this way might be an unnecessary reminder of one's singlehood, and being dubbed a Catherinette might be somewhat scarring...I think it's a fun name, but then again I am still one year away from being a Catherinette myself...

Here is a link to the ever-so-reliable Wikipedia...read the sections on Canada and France: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Catherine's_Day

Anyway, I thought it might be something fun/questionably relevant to bring up on your blog tomorrow (or rather, today, since for you it must already be Nov. 25th!) I will not be offended if you don't bring it up though!

God bless,

A Reader

I did not know any of this, so I am grateful to my reader for sending this email. I strongly support the notion of Single women sending each other cards and treats to affectionately mark their shared Singleness. Sisterhood is powerful--when it really is sisterhood and not some men-are-scum-rah-rah political pose.

I am struck that a Catherinette is (or was) a Single woman who has had her 25th birthday. Some sort of black magic seems to be attributed to one's 25th birthday, which is absolutely bonkers from the point of view of a 40 year old. When I was 25, I was not very smart, but at least I had tremendously beautiful skin, no grey hairs at all and probably hundreds of healthy little eggies hidden away. You would think that, given the improvements in women's health, looks and life expectancy, we'd now go into a panic before our 35th birthday instead of our 25th, but no. Thirty-five is not-such-a-big-deal and twenty-five is woe-is-me.

Why this is, is less of a mystery the more you discover about the history of turning 25. But I think it may also be that adolescents are rather anxious and adult women rather less. You have the impression that your youth will be over when you turn 25, but then you reach 25 and 26 and 27 and realize it isn't.

If you don't have children, your youth can go on and on and on, which can be either good or bad. In my case it is good because I can hang out with twenty-somethings without them treating me like their mothers, but it is bad because in some ways I remain a feckless human being. I am sure I would be a better person if, like my mother, I did laundry every Monday and ironed it all until it was done.

Below this post is the Thanksgiving Report Post, so if you collected points yesterday, report them in the combox for that post. Meanwhile, happy Feast of Saint Catherine of Alexandria!

Thanksgiving Game Anecdotes

2011-11-25T11:39:00.005Z

Okay, there are two posts today. The one above is about an amusing St. Catherine's Day custom, and this one is merely to give the Americans among you a space to report on their Thanksgiving.

Strangely enough, I went to a Thanksgiving Dinner myself, here in sunny Scotland, at a nice seventeenth century house across the fields. There was a toast to the American Founding Fathers and, I think, the Declaration of Independence, on which the Scottish Nationalist Party may be rather keen. B.A. had been invited, of course, but he was too sick to go, so I went unescorted, and various fellow guests asked where he was.

This reminded me of my Single readers being asked where your non-existent husband are, and although of course my case is completely different, it just goes to show that any woman who shows up sans man at parties may excite curiosity.

Okay, if you played one of the games, enter your points below.

Puppy Love in the Cold War

2011-11-24T09:22:00.009Z

Once upon a time, my little chickadees, two great powers divided much of the world. These powers were called NATO and the USSR, which is to say the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Both powers were rather worried that one would attack the other, and they both pointed nuclear warheads in each other's direction.

My mother spent her childhood under the shadow of the Bomb, and so did I. My mother's primary school welcomed refugee Germans, and my primary school welcomed refugee Yugoslavs, Romanians, Poles, Hungarians, Vietnamese and others who had managed to escape the confines of life under Communism. A Polish priest, two steps ahead of the SB, appeared in my parish. A Hungarian priest, recently released from captivity, recovered in the Hungarian parish around the corner, down the street.

We thought in terms of "Evil Empire" and "Iron Curtain". My brother bought a single called "Russians," in which Sting hopes "the Russians love their children, too." There were hit songs about nuclear war: "99 Red Balloons" and "Forever Young" were just two of many. It was widely known that the Iron Curtain was difficult to get through, and photos of poor Eastern Germans who had been shot trying to get over the Berlin Wall appeared in Time magazine.

Occasionally, though, people could get temporary visas to visit either side of the Iron Curtain. When I was about six, a Polish couple and one or two of their children came to Canada to visit their brother, my father's friend. They all came to visit my family at the cottage we had rented or borrowed beside Georgian Bay, a famous beauty spot in Ontario. The eldest son of this Polish family was about five years old, spoke absolutely no English and was struck by a passion for little me. Being without guile, he threw his arms around me at once, and seemed glued to my side for the duration of his visit.

I was rather astonished by this, and there exists a photo of my six year old self caught in something between a hug and a headlock smiling weakly at the camera. Small Canadian boys of my acquaintance did not act like that, especially not towards me. However, even at six I knew that inspiring this kind of regard in a boy was what a great many people thought life was all about. So when my admirer went home, I inquired of my mother where that was, and that is how I realized that real people lived behind the Iron Curtain. I had some shy notion of sending him one of my toys, but my mother said people behind the Iron Curtain did not need toys but basic things like soap and medicine. She impressed upon me that they were all tremendously poor and hard to see, and I was unlikely ever to see my admirer again.

All this seemed very unfair, and in those days I was easily discouraged. It did not even occur to me to suggest we send over a nice box of soap and medicine, then. Instead I treasured the fact, so important in the decadent West, that I had once had an admirer, and it was some comfort in the horrible years ahead when that became the primary measure of one's worth in the schoolyard. It was even, I blush to admit, balm to a recent graze to my ego when a Polish parishioner mentioned (yet again) the superior beauty of Polish girls in general. I informed him that I, at any rate, had been up to Polish standards when I was six.

This set a train of thought in motion, and it slowly chugged its way across the maps laid out after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Nobody had expected the Wall to fall--on reruns of Star Trek Pavel Chekhov still nattered on about cossacks and Leningrad--but it did, shattering the Iron Curtain between thriving us and impoverished them. And what is more, and possibly even more staggering, is that it is now possible to find almost anybody alive through the internet. So I found my first admirer on Facebook.

Dear me. I fear that like Tosca I live for art and love, and not necessarily in that order. At any rate, it was the work of moments to find my father's friend, to click on the page of the son of his old age, to swiftly scroll down the list of his friends to his presumed cousin and click on his name. And there he was. I recognized him at once, and my heart flipped over. He now lives in Canada.

My mother skyped later with his name, written decades ago in her old phone book, but I had remembered his Christian name and the shape of his surname, so this was only confirmation of what I had discovered already. And I was already feeling embarrassed by my sudden curiosity, since it is perhaps not fitting for married ladies to look up complete strangers, also married, they met briefly when they were six.

However, I think the moral of all this story is that history is astonishing. When I was a child, people were so physically and politically divided that, not only was it unlikely to stay friends with Polish children after their short Western holiday, we were not sure if any of us would make it to the next century. When I was 17, we were watching horror films about the coming nuclear apocalypse, and when I was 19, we were suddenly watching Germans streaming over the shattered Wall to embrace long-lost members of their families. The Cold War was over.

My American father once said that the fact that despite our best efforts World War III never happened is solid evidence that there really is a God who loves us. And as I search my brain for a reason I should have written this post, it occurs to me that it is, after all, American Thanksgiving. So I would like to give thanks for the fall of the Wall and also for the technological miracle that helps people find people in seconds.

***
By the way, American readers should sign up in the combox below if they want to play "Points" with other American readers. In short, you count up how many times Thanksgiving guests (or hosts) mention your Single status. In the morning, report in tomorrow's combox. Sisters can all get a point each if the mention is collective, e.g. "Why aren't ANY of you girls married off yet? What is with boys today?"

Games in Preparation for Thanksgiving

2011-11-23T09:49:00.009Z

Okay, tomorrow is American Thanksgiving, so it is time to batter down the hatches and talk frankly about emotional survival plans on behalf of the American readership. (Strangely, some British people have adopted American Thanksgiving themselves which, as a Canadian, I find very strange, yet another example of the bizarre British fascination with the USA. You should see BBC4 this week--absolutely mental.)

The essence of being rooted in reality is looking unpleasant facts in the eye and standing up to them instead of cowering behind a wall of dreamy-dreaminess. Therefore, if Great-Aunt Tilly has asked you every Thanksgiving for the past ten years if you are a Lesbian, don't think she won't ask you again this year. Turn it into a game. Make a bet with your friends when she will ask. In fact, run a pool. Your friends all give you a quarter, and whoever guesses right gets the pot. If she DOESN'T ask, the pot goes to the poor box in thanksgiving. I guarantee that, this way, when Great-Aunt Tilly asks the dreaded question, you will not want to die but to cheer and write down the time she asked.

Great-Aunt Tilly: Tell me, dear, are you a Lesbian?

You: Yay! OMG! What time is it?

The game can apply to any prediction based on past family Thanksgivings. Another game would be to agree beforehand with Single friends to write down the hour and minute you are first asked about your Single status. ("Any boyfriend yet, dear? Well, never mind.") Then when you can meet up, you all produce your pieces of paper.

And then there's simply collecting points for every time your Single state gets mentioned. I suggested this last year, and much hilarity ensued.

Obviously you need a quirky sense of humour for these games, although come to think of it, if you read this blog, you probably do have a quirky sense of humour. And the games also assume your families are functional enough that Thanksgiving Dinner does not mean a slide into dysfunction and depression. If Thanksgiving Dinner has for the past ten years meant a slide into dysfunction and depression, I heartily urge you not to go. And if you do go anyway, I urge you to have some lovely treat waiting for you as soon as you can escape. Do not exchange this lovely treat for the questionable joys of feeling like a martyr.

I also urge you not to compare yourself to your little sister, who has brought her boyfriend this year, or to your cousin, who married a millionaire, or to anybody else. I usually found it salutary, when envying a pal her girlfriend status or diamond ring, to ask myself if I would want her man. The answer has always been NO, although I did have to admit that one pal (one pal in 35 years of having pals) did have a very fetching fiance. Now he is her very fetching husband, and I really should stop mentioning how fetching he is. Fortunately, my own husband is pretty fetching in his own right, B.A.

Sorry to mention B.A. at a time like this, but if married women write about the beauties of other men, we sort of have to mention our own beautiful husbands in the next breath. And I suppose that this is a good opportunity to remind the majority of my Single readers who will actually marry (according to American statistics) that I didn't meet B.A. until I was 37. This may not cheer you if you are 27 or 47, but the point is that just because you haven't found Mr Right by this Thanksgiving doesn't mean you won't ever find him. Maybe you won't, but maybe you will. The ways of God--and of Mr Right, if he exists--are very mysterious.

By the way, if any of my readers thinks the way to cope with the holiday is to curl up with a bottle of vodka, I am here to scold you and tell you that it isn't. If it even crosses your mind, I will be very mad, and if I ever find out, I will block you. So don't. Choose friends and fun instead. If you can't be with your own friends or make your own fun, then pop down to the nearest shelter and spend Thanksgiving serving the homeless.

Supporting Soldiers

2011-11-22T13:33:00.007Z

A while back I got a letter from a young woman who was seeing a naval officer. Never mind which navy. Come to think of it, readers from at least three countries seem to be seeing naval officers. Some of these naval officers seem to spend more time in helicopters than on actual boats, but that's naval life for you.

Anyway, this particular naval officer was about to disappear into a submarine for several months. And it is submarining tradition in that navy that submariners open up a care package from their wife or girlfriend back home halfway through their sojourn in the submarine. Guys who did not have a care package were mocked and pitied by the other men.

Now, my reader wanted to know if she could send along a care package with her submariner even though they had been dating for only a short time. She noticed that I am very down on women giving men stuff too soon. Germaine Greer and I agree that women-in-general have a teeny giving problem, particularly when we give to get love. So she (my reader, not Germaine Greer) wondered if she should send along the care package, and I said yes.

There are men, and then there are servicemen. There is peacetime, and there is war. I don't know if you've noticed this, but all the major English-speaking nations have been at war for a decade. Canadian, British, American and other soldiers are still in Afghanistan, for example. I personally do not know how Canadian or British soldiers in Afghanistan improve the national security of Canada or Britain, but for now that is beside the point. The point I am making is that there are a lot of young men and women who have given themselves to their countries to risk their lives for the lives and freedoms of others.

That strikes me as rather more important than worrying about looking too eager or about where this relationship is going to go.

Now, I don't want to get all romantic about the morals of soldiers and sailors, especially since older women have warned younger women against soldiers and sailors since time immemorial. But from what I hear, there are many decent young church-going guys in the military, such as make good boyfriends and husbands. So it is no surprise to me that numbers of you fall for them and hope they will fall for you too. I sympathize.

However, I think the worst time to worry about future romantic commitments is when a man has a previous commitment to H.M. the Queen or Uncle Sam. If you are friends with a soldier who is not an established boyfriend, then treat him like a good friend and worry about the romance when and if he gets back. Don't cut off a correspondence because you can't see a romance going anywhere; I understand guys live for letters from home. Don't refrain from sending a care package because it might look "too forward." Civilians aren't called to make much of a war effort these days; giving a boost in morale to a soldier of your country strikes me as the least a patriotic girl can do. And I'm just talking just correspondence and care packages here, got it?

My thinking here comes straight from 1918. In 1918 my American grandmother (my German-American grandmother, incidentally) kept up a correspondence with a young American soldier who was a complete stranger to her. All the girls she knew did. My grandmother didn't mention that she was only 14, and I believe tried to give the impression she was older. Anyway, the soldier was delighted by these letters, and looked forward to meeting my grandmother when he got back home, and said they would have themselves a time, etc. This may have led to interesting complications, but as a matter of fact it never came to that. I believe the soldier was killed.

Now, if in 1918 my 14 year old Catholic school-educated grandmother and her chums were all encouraged to write to servicemen who were complete strangers, it seems to me that young women who are actually seeing servicemen they know should be encouraged to stop worrying about who-gives-what-present-when and just support them.

However, what I know about the modern-day military of my own countries you could stuff in the left nostril of a bug and have room left over, so if there are any servicewomen--or even servicemen--out there who have insights to share on this topic, please write them in the combox.

Nice Review & Femininity

2011-11-21T13:31:00.013Z

The Crescat has written a generous review of The Closet's All Mine, as the American release of Seraphic Singles is known. I bet it sells more copies than the expensive ad in America I was told about.

It seems an eensy bit churlish to make a correction, but it involves my name, so you know. The correction is merely that the author of TCAM is Miss C or Ms. C, but not Mrs. C as I am now Mrs. M socially and Ms. C-M in print. Mrs. C is my mother. (My sister-in-law was married in the province of Quebec, and thus remains Dr. S.)

Kat also linked to this page as an example of a feminine blog, and I was heartily flattered by that. I was reminded my surprise when my (now ex-)shrink told me I was a very feminine woman. After all, my favourite hobbies at the time were boxing and reading tough-minded short fiction at Spoken Word events. Shrink pointed out that I was wearing a floor-length black velvet skirt and a tight blue velvet shirt with 18th-century sleeves and I was, like, oh yeah.

Same with this blog. I guess it is kind of feminine to talk constantly about single life and courtship and men. I thought I'd get tired of these topics when I got married, but no. I don't feel at all bad about this, as some Top Novelist or other recently said (I paraphrase) that the essence of writing fiction was actually caring that John loves Jane.

Femininity is an increasingly contentious topic. For example, there are men who wish to be women, and go about this in an intensely masculine way: fighting and striving and having this surgically cut off and that surgically put on and being pumped full of drugs. I think real women are more like apples: we develop to a delicious well-roundedness and grow even sweeter as we shrivel, fall off the tree and die. Of course, I'm physically lazy these days. I acknowledge that the natural female body trained to the muscularity of an Athena is feminine, too. (Oh, how I miss my boxing body... Size 2... Could wear jeans without fear... Whimper, whimper...)

The man-as-active, woman-as-passive paradigm drives many people absolutely nuts. It drives me nuts, too, when it interferes with something I want especially to do. So I'm not even going there, except to trash cosmetic surgery. Women who get "boob jobs" have turned themselves into female impersonators, which is a very dumb thing for a real woman to do. There is a huge difference between making the most of, and protecting, your feminine appearance and turning yourself into a walking cartoon.

When I was an undergraduate, I read books by Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth), Susan Brownmiller (Femininity), Andrea Dworkin (Intercourse) and Camille Paglia (Vamps and Tramps) to get my mind around contemporary ideas about femininity. (By the way, Dworkin can mess you up; I am in no way endorsing any of these books although Paglia was great fun.) Later I read Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem, The Boston Women's Health Collective, Natalie Angier (Woman: An Intimate Geography, which I DO recommend) and Germaine Greer. Much, much later I read Edith Stein and John Paul II. (I know I should read Alice von Hildebrand, too.)

What I got out of all this mostly-feminist reading, in the end, was a healthy distaste for elective surgical modification of any kind, an enduring respect for female athleticism, an enjoyment of dressing-as-art, dread of both anorexia and obesity, recognition that all healthy bodies are beautiful, a taste for higher-end cosmetics (maquillage, not skin-cream rip offs) and permission not to be more like a man. I loved how Goth subculture has an aesthetic that suits both slim and apple-shaped girls; so do historical re-enactment societies, by the way. Although 20th century fashion freed us from corsets and dangerous paints, it has otherwise been at war with the female figure. Boo, Coco Chanel.

I wasn't even thinking about femininity as a complement to masculinity. "Who cares what men-in-general think?" was my usual scornful mindset from the age of 19 to 32 or so. Now I think about femininity and masculinity a lot because the hugest battles of our time, including the one with radical Islamism, surround them.

I keep thinking about the symbolic significance of masculine and feminine, as opposed to unisex, clothing.

My parish church is packed with fogies, old and young, and they tend to wear beautifully tailored wool or tweed jackets. As they never take their jackets off in public, I haven't a clue what their shoulders actually look like. They never wear shorts, either; they could be wearing sock braces for all I know, and I doubt I will ever know for sure. Wide or slim, the fogies share Male Shape, the inverted triangle of wide shoulders narrowing to shiny well-shod feet. They all look sharp and masculine, not macho.

The church has fewer female fogies, but we tend to wear skirts, to keep our hair long and to wear at least a modicum of make-up. Your pale Auntie S favours dark red lipstick, but she is 40 so she can get away with it. She also set a minor parish trend for killer heels, if one other woman can count as even a minor trend.

Killer heels look good, but they are bad for you in the long run and best worn sitting down. The whole point to them is that they make your calves look nicer and that men don't wear them. Few pieces of clothing say Women are mysterious than totally impractical killer heels. Various women writers have ascribed darker symbolic meanings to killer heels, but I am more optimistic than they.

I blame unisex clothing for the current craze in cosmetic fakery and over-emphasis on bodily shape. Fat or thin, women in my town wear jeans and skin-tight leggings. They hoick up their breasts with padded bras or, horror of horrors, they have them filled with silicon balloons. They wear obviously fake eyelashes and sometimes hair extensions. They paint their skin brown or, worse, tan themselves in tanning salons. They are the reason I love Marry, Snog, Avoid, a show in which a sarcastic machine named Pod mysteriously scrubs the fakery off such girls and puts them in pretty dresses. Sadly, there is not much Pod can do about the breast implants, the tats and the scary piercings, except cleverly "de-emphasize" the bust and assign sleeves.

One well-dressed young fogey tells me that in Germany men and women wear much the same clothes and length of hair, although men draw attention to their chests by wearing super-tight T-shirts. I have not noticed young men doing that here, but the principle strikes me as the same. If we dispense with gentle symbolic ways of indicating masculinity or femininity, we are left with hyper-focus on real, literal, secondary sexual characteristics: big chests, big breasts, round bottoms.

And how deeply boring is that? It's the socio-sexual equivalent of never being able to read novels or look at paintings; only words of one syllable and cartoons allowed.

Live Every Day

2011-11-19T15:46:00.005Z

Today I greeted B.A., who went to work. Then I walked to the nearest grocery store, which is through a lightly wooded area and network of paths, and bought coffee and little doughnuts. I tidied the sitting-room and set out the coffee and doughnuts. My Polish teacher arrived at 11. We had a nice long Polish lesson. The fact that in Polish, as in Latin, the neuter nominative is the same as the neuter accusative delighted us. Yay, Indo-European!

I started this post, and then my brother called me on Skype. I saw him and his two children, and we had a brief chat. Then I called my father on Skype, and we too had a video chat.

This morning I also read my friend Hilary's update about her health. The news is not good. Hilary's cancer is not gone, and she may be ill for the rest of her life. Her life may very well be shorter than it would have been, had she not got cancer. She has agreed to have a hysterectomy, anticipates early, violent menopause, and predicts that she will never get married.

She is now thinking about what she should do for the rest of her, possibly shortened, life.

Myself, I do not know when I am going to die. And I don't know when B.A. is going to die either, so I don't know how much longer I am going to be married. I know a woman who married in her late twenties to a man in his mid-twenties, who suddenly died of a heart-attack less than a year later. Nobody knew until the autopsy that he had had a series of minor heart attacks; he seemed a perfectly healthy young man.

Essentially, we are all going to die, and the question that confronts us all is "How do we live, knowing that we are going to die?" We do not know what we are going to be doing, so what do you hope you will be doing? Will you go when you are creeping here and there bitterly, having resented not getting what others have got, or will you be striding joyfully through the life you have when you are called suddenly into the next room?

The Unbearable Alarmingness of Youth

2011-11-18T08:31:00.003Z

Somewhere in a box across an ocean lies a list of qualities I wanted to have at forty. I cannot remember what was on it in detail, although I think "Fluent in French, Italian, German and Latin" is on it. (I always want to be fluent in something other than English, but I never am, despite endless assaults on the walls of foreign.) I seem to recall the overarching theme was that I was supposed to be a slim, well-dressed lady of unshakable confidence and sophistication. My youth at an end and my children all born (ha!), I was supposed to be serenely ruling my world.

I bet I was supposed to have a housekeeper, too. My sister-in-law has a housekeeper, although that is probably because instead of writing detailed lists about her future self, she studied anatomy and became a medical doctor.

To make a long intro shorter, I do not measure up to the heights of my optimistic list although I occasionally have my moments of supreme confidence. And one of the gifts of middle-life is that I am not afraid of twenty-something boys anymore.

I went on at great length to a pal about this yesterday. In short, when I was in my early twenties, men in their early twenties were alarming because I viewed most of them as either (A) sexual threats or (B) the holy grail. It was very, very difficult to see them just as people, and if I could go back and talk to my early-twenties self, I would beg myself to try to see them as people.

This reminds me of Gordon. Gordon was in a play I directed, and all the girls knew Gordon. I think he must have lived in one of the men's residences, for he was famous among the girls in women's residences. He was tall and broad-shouldered, pleasant-looking instead of handsome, and had buckets of laid-back charm. But winged-footed rumour had whispered in my ear that Gordon slept around--or if not around, where he ought not. So I was utterly terrified of Gordon. My psyche unsheathed invisible spikes all around me.

But, amazingly, Gordon was not just an object of sexual threat. He was also a person with a soul and a brain and rather awesome powers of observation. It was not lost on Gordon that I was reserved around him.

"It's like you've surrounded yourself with an electric cow fence," he complained.

And this was quite true. And it was a useful electric cow fence because it intimidated people who needed intimidating, even if it also intimidated people whom it would be nice to know. It took me a very long time to learn how to turn it on and off as I liked.

I think I lost my fear of twenty-something boys (in general, more on that) for good when I went to theology school. I was very much at home at theology school, and got very good grades, and seemed very clever, so I had tons of confidence. The school was very big on hospitality, so I flung myself into hospitality, and went up to new people to introduce myself and after a chat introduced them to other people. As most new people were women or male religious, I had no ulterior motives. And then at parties, when rambunctious twenty-something boys lit up joints, trashed John Paul II, were rumoured to sleep in the wrong place, and said "Lookin' fine, toots," I found them merely amusing.

Eventually I went to Germany, and some of my adventures there are in My Book. Go reread the bit about Max, because I am now thinking about Max. Anyway, in Germany, I discovered that twenty-somethings there are not as allergic to thirty-somethings as they are in other cultures. I had many conversations with twenty-something German boys, and went to their parties, and generally got along with them. And although I was frankly amazed, I understood that this had something to do with me being (A)foreign, and therefore glamorous and (B)a doctoral student, which in hierarchical Germany meant a lot.

The one exception was Max. I was terrified of Max, not because there was anything wrong with him, but because he was so intensely good-looking. As much as I liked looking at him, I was in a welter of fear lest I (A) make a complete ass of myself and (B) make some life-altering mistake. I used to march down to a telephone centre and call a pal in Canada to go on and on about Max.

"Listen," she said. "You must stop this. Just make out with him and come home!"

Hi-LAR-ious. I never did, though, and thank goodness, for the news would have been all over the entire campus in milliseconds.

Anyway, this seems to be All About Me again, so I will sum up with a generalization that twenty-something men may seem terrifying when you are twenty-something, but when you are no longer twenty-something yourself, twenty-something boys just seem like people, unless they are supernaturally good-looking, in which case you might very well shake in your shoes again. Discuss.

American Thanksgiving is Coming

2011-11-17T19:06:00.003Z

Hello, my little chickadees. Today I was very busy writing about Scottish history for pay, so I did not have time for a post. However, it did occur to me that American Thanksgiving is either tonight or next week and that means the beginning of the holiday season.

We all know that the holiday season can be really tough on Singles.

So I won't say anything more on the subject, but will just open the combox for you to emote in.

Thanksgiving (or, outside U.S., holiday season). You. Family. Go for it.

Is Nagging a No-No?

2011-11-16T09:28:00.005Z

Now this will be a tough post to write because, let's face it, I love to tell people what to do. It's probably an impulse born in elementary school where I was one of those girls who went red in the face while waving her hand in the air to show that she had the answer. And you have to admit, all our female role models do nothing but nag from the minute we are born until we escape from the house to university or our own place. Clean your room. Do your homework. Eat your vegetables. You shouldn't do this because. You shouldn't do that because.

I know at least one confirmed bachelor who will never marry because he hates being nagged and he assumes all women nag. You cannot tell this man what to do. If you told him to breathe, he would hold his breath until he passed out. He is the Patrick Henry of male emancipation. And I think a lot of men are like that.

Getting over telling men what to do has taken me a very long time. I'm the eldest of five, so from the age of 10 or 12 I was put "in charge of the others" when my parents were out of the house. And therefore, since I told them what they should do, it seemed perfectly normal to tell boys I met what they should do. I now credit this for my relative lack of popularity in high school.

When you like someone, it is very hard to watch him do things that you think are bad for him and neglect those things you think are good for him. You don't think he should smoke, especially not so much. And you don't think he should drink, especially not so much. You don't think he should waste his fine mind watching so much TV or playing so many video games. You think he should use his God-given talents more often. You think he should stop seeing the girl he is currently seeing and ask out another one instead. You think he should eat a vegetable sometime before 2015.

However, unless this directly effects you, or he is doing something clearly criminal and/or gravely sinful, you should probably keep your mouth shut. The time to raise your voice against the ciggies, the booze, the video games or the bone-idleness is when you are asked to "be his girlfriend". This is when you smile and say, "Oh, I could never be seriously involved with a heavy smoker/a man who gets drunk every day/a man who spends so much time with video games/a man so laid-back."

This gives Sigsimund the Ciggie a choice: girl or smokes. He might pick the smokes, of course, but that is his right. Then you can pass serenely (at least in appearance) out of his smelly orbit.

I know we all get fixated on whoever we get fixated on, but sooner or later, we all have to ask ourselves "What can I live with?" and tell the truth. Men are not like old houses; they are not fix-it jobs. What you see is basically what you get, especially if they are over 30. The only time you can bargain for any kind of reno is when they ask you to be their girlfriend or wife. Tell them truthfully what you can live with, and what you can't, and stick to it.

Of course, afterwards things crop up. At some point in her marriage, my mother put her foot down and told my dad he couldn't come home from work later than 7 PM. And if B.A. isn't home by 7 PM, he gets a sad little phone call from a Canadian asking "Missing Persons?"

The trick is to concentrate on what directly affects you. Male friend drinking bottle of wine every night, probably not. Husband smoking half a pack of cigarettes in a room you are in, most definitely. The behaviour of husbands by nature tends to affect you directly.

My conscience is now troubling me, however, because I seem to recall several recent episodes in which I gave men friends unsolicited advice, wailed over how much they smoked or cajoled them to some act of goodness, e.g. being altar servers. This was mostly useless. However, it did not work against my marital chances either, seeing that I am, you know, married already.

Incidentally, I was relieved but surprised when my signature was good enough to get B.A. registered at our nearest medical centre. I think this is because the National Health Service knows that the average man does not go near a doctor unless his wife makes him. And thus husbands put wives into a position where wives have to nag husbands for their very survival.

So you see that this is a difficult issue. Meanwhile, I am not counting as nagging gentle requests that men not fill your ears with bad language and improper jokes. That's just self-defense. I party and pray with a very decent set, so this is not a very big deal, and usually a neo-Victorian "Oh, Such-and-such! Before me?" is good enough.

Congrats to Rosario...

2011-11-15T10:32:00.004Z

Rosario Rodriguez won The Crescat's Seraphic Giveaway contest. She gets a copy of The Closet's All Mine. If you don't have one, you can of course get one from Amazon or (even better) if you are in the USA in the nearest bookshop run by nuns. If the nuns don't have it in, they will get it in. I think it is nicer to buy books from nuns than from Amazon if you can.

Otherwise, in Canada the book is called Seraphic Singles and in Poland it is called Anielskie Single and the whole reason this blog is up is to promote it/them. This is vaguely amusing because now the blog is longer than all three editions put together. And I hope this is not the literary equivalent of "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?"!

Although this is a blog for feeling good about being Single, I am sometimes tempted to have a Bachelor Giveaway contest. Now that I am married, I meet nice twenty-something bachelors all the time. I wonder if this is because they are far, far away from their mothers and feel the need of an auntie; it is not like I suddenly became more beautiful than I was in my twenties. It could be that I care less; when I see a twenty-something bachelor standing around shyly in the parish hall, my first thought is not "Is he cute?" but "Does he know anybody?"

I don't care what they think when I come up to them and say, "How do you do?" I don't mentally skip to the chase. There is no chase to skip to. Well, actually, I suppose B.A. might succumb to scarlet fever and leave me a youngish widow, but you know, I don't think, when I see some wilting undergrad in tweed, "Oh! I wonder if that could be my third husband!" No. My motives are entirely pure, and then when someone vaguely their age is in earshot, I introduce them to each other, and push off.

In general advice-givers suggest young women not approach men directly, and I agree with this except when one new man is surrounded by people he doesn't know but you do, especially in a parish situation. I think in this case the corporal work of mercy of welcoming the stranger takes precedence over all other considerations.

That reminds me that if there are any Catholic girls living in south-east Scotland who read this blog, our Latin Mass community could really use some more twenty-something girls and thirty-something ladies. Hint hint hint. See the strawberry blonde lady in green tweed in the parish hall after Mass.

Boundaries

2011-11-14T08:27:00.009Z

The question of boundaries has been much on my mind of late because of conversation with other expat women about the Scottish ritual of banter. If you are used to offices and families where a certain friendly formality is the order of the day, then Scottish banter can knock you for a loop.

I'm trying to think of an example of banter you can all access, and it occurs to me there is a bit of it in So I Married an Axe Murderer, although the dynamic is wrong. If you might recall, Charlie has Scottish parents, and his father ribs his little brother mercilessly about his big head of curly hair.

"Heid," yells the Scottish dad, as he tries to watch the soccer game around him. "That boy's got a heid the size of Sputnik."

Charlie's friend giggles, and the boy merely glowers and says nothing. In real life, the Scottish dad would be waiting for his retort, and the boy would have given it as hard and wittily as he could. Hilarity all around.

I forget if we were married already, or if this happened during my engagement visit, but I sat down and had a Talk with B.A. about all this. I don't like insults, and I don't put up with insults from men. When I was a younger woman, I used to put up with insults, in the hopes that it was all a joke a-ha-ha-ha-ha. As a teenage pro-life activist, the numero uno insult was "feminist", of course, which was infuriating. And when I was dating, and when I was married the first time around... Argh, argh.

One thing that alerted me to the fact that I was miserable in Marriage No. 1 was that the man I was living with said things my father never says to my mother, never never never. He never speaks to her in that tone, and he never insults her friends, tastes, religious beliefs, etc. So you can just imagine my horror when, at an Edinburgh dinner party of B.A.'s friends, he made fun of me and joined in the general hilarity at my expense.

And, boy, did he get it when we got back to the Historical House. Ooh. I had not wanted to say anything because we had been floating on the Cloud of Rosy New Engaged (or Married) Love, and I wanted to stay there and ignore anything that I could just ignore. However, that would not be being rooted in reality, which is my daily goal. So I said the dreaded, "We have to talk" and we did.

Poor old B.A. was flabbergasted because B.A. has lived in Scotland his entire life, and it did not occur to him that making fun of your fiancee/wife at a dinner party full of his friends might be found offensive by women in the rest of the known universe. And I was flabbergasted that he was flabbergasted, and slowly it began to dawn on me that what we had here was a Cultural Difference. (Some priest or other warned us we would have Cultural Differences, and we ignored him because, hello, my mother's family was all Scottish. How much could Scottishness have changed in 100 years, eh?)

Meanwhile, what was most important was that B.A. didn't disrespect me. And in Scotland you don't exchange banter with people you don't respect. You just ignore them or, in extreme and criminal circumstances, beat them up.

Having the choice to sulk or to integrate into Scottish society, I decided to integrate into Scottish society. And now I sit across from B.A. at dinner parties and think on my feet. When he makes fun of me, I make fun of him right back. And then I flirt outrageously with another man at the table. Hilarity all around.

A Canadian might be horrified, and I can just imagine what my American girlfriends would have to say about the outrageous flirtation. But our British friends think we're a wonderful couple and that we're an example to the nations, etc.

So that is the very first thing I'm going to say about boundaries. Not everyone has the same cultural expectations of what they are. And therefore, when someone hurts your feelings, it is best to have it out with him, especially if he comes from another place or culture. Universally, people deserve respect, but what respect IS is not universally agreed upon.

"Feminist," I said mildly, since I got called a feminist again yesterday after Mass by a young Eastern European male, "is actually the most insulting thing you can call a woman in traditional Catholicism."

"Is it?"

"Yes."

"That's good," said young Eastern European male, who was nevertheless enlightened. At least, he'd better be, because it would get very boring having to repeat it over and over again. It's also mildly annoying, since traditionally-minded Catholic women actually share some of the aims of feminism (e.g. being able to vote, equal pay, not being felt up in crowds), and it feels odd to have to repudiate it all the darn time.

But that is often what it takes to defend boundaries: repetition. First, sadly for many of us, there is a confrontation. And then there is often repetition.

Those of us who adhere to traditional understandings of sexual morality often feel outraged when men suggest we transgress them. We feel outraged, embarrassed, threatened, shy, you name it. We often feel like we have been terribly insulted, as insulted as the heroine of a Regency romance or of a Shakespeare play. However, now that this sexual revolution thing has happened, it is naive to think "How dare he? How can he not know that I AM NOT THAT KIND OF GIRL?"

This type of thinking assumes that the average man lives by the code that prevailed in the West until 1963. He doesn't. And therefore he will try it on, and you will have to have The Talk. The talk shouldn't be a big deal. It should be merely something like, "Actually, you might not know this, but I am a Christian [observant Jew, Muslim, Buddhist], and so I am very distressed that you suggested X. I don't believe X is a suitable recreational activity among unmarried people, and I'm sorry you thought I might." Or it could just be, "Yeah, you wish, pal." (Smug smile.) "In your dreams." It all depends on the context.

Meanwhile, let's not pick on the usual kind of guy. I am continually haunted by the memory of a Single reader who works for a conservative think-tank and got sneered at by a young Catholic married man because she isn't married. When an ordinary bloke from a different culture (which means the majority non-Catholic culture we live in, peeps) hurts our feelings, there might be some excuse for him: he might know now better; things are different "where he comes from." But when a Catholic guy who goes to Mass every Sunday and reads Mark Shea and kisses bishops' rings bullies a Catholic girl, I want to rip his head off.

The sad fact is that although we are prepared for attacks from our ideological opposites, we are often left speechless by our supposed allies. But we have to get along with our allies, so we have to create and defend our boundaries.

First, we have to know what our boundaries are. What can you put up with, and what can you not put up with? If at work you are willing to stay late because "you don't have kids to go home to," then fine. But if you are not, you are not. That's okay. Just because you "don't have kids to go home to" doesn't mean anyone deserves more of your time than you've contracted out.

Second, you have to state your boundaries, directly or indirectly. "Don't call me a feminist; as a traditional Catholic woman, I personally find it really insulting" is direct. "A feminist is the worst thing you can call a trad Catholic woman" is indirect. "As a Single woman, I find it insulting that you think I have no life outside this office" is pretty direct. Gauge which is the best communication strategy.

Third, you have to defend your boundaries. This is where repetition comes in. Hopefully you will not have to do this to the same person more than once or twice. Possibly the person is just testing you, to see if you really meant what you said. Make it clear you meant what you said. If the person offends you once after you told him/her what your boundary is, that's one thing. Remind them of your boundary and leave it at that. But if he or she does it twice, it is time to take more action.

In work or school life, it is time to talk to an authority. In social life, it is time to keep away from them. If they apologize, that's great. Forgive them. But if they don't, don't be a noodle-spined wimp. Constant disrespect is bad for your mental and spiritual health.

Fourth, be just as respectful of other peoples' boundaries. If a guy does not like being hugged, don't hug him.

I want to say something about the "feminist" issue. It could be that you are insulted that the word "feminist" is used as an insult, just as I would be if the word "Catholic" or "woman" were used as an insult.

First of all, cultural differences apply. Many men feel, rightly or wrongly, that they themselves or society in general has suffered severe hurt because of trends in society that some or all ascribe to a philosophy called "feminism." When they snap at you about "feminism" they are saying much more about their own views than about yours. It's not you it's them, and if they really have suffered from "feminism" (and if you care, you might ask), you might understand where they are coming from.

Second, it is not okay for men to express contempt for women to women. If men want to blow off steam to other men about their frustration with women-in-general, okay. Women blow off steam to other women about men-in-general all the time. (Although, to be frank, my married friends and I don't bitch about our husbands, even to each other, and if B.A. complained about me to his pals, I would be hurt. There is such a thing as loyalty.)

If a Catholic man (like a married young Catholic man working for one of the zillions of conservative think tanks out there) expresses contempt for you based on your sex or marital status, it is time to get all John Paul II on his butt. Every Catholic woman should read Mulieris Dignitatem at least once, and be willing to invoke it to defend herself against Catholic guys being jerks.

Sample speech. "That's not funny. That offends me as a woman and a Catholic, and I'm surprised that as a Catholic you are going against Blessed John Paul II's assertion that..."

This will not work on all Catholic men, of course. Some Catholics don't actually like Blessed John Paul II. However, if you are working for your standard conservative think-tank, you are unlikely to run into them. But if you do, and they insult you just for being a woman, especially an unmarried woman, I suppose your next shot is to give them a withering stare and then say the ever-devastating, "I'll pray for you."

Brothers

2011-11-11T08:37:00.004Z

I have two brothers, and I love them to pieces. One is now a married man with two kids, and one, seven years younger, is single. When I was single, and feeling very cranky about men in general, I would make myself think about my brothers and how fantastic they are. This invariably cheered me up and made me think more positively about the other half of the human race.

My brothers--I think I can safely describe them together--are upstanding and hard-working. I fear they are too hard-working, just like our dad. They are both musically talented and great fun to be around. They each have a zillion friends, but they each make time to get home to Mum and Dad. They are both intensely intelligent. They still go to Mass.

When we were little, we all played together, and my brothers (and sisters, too, but I'm thinking about brothers today) added so much to my childhood. The older brother was a bit of a child prodigy on the piano, and so I often woke to the sound of beautiful music: childhood was full of live music. The younger brother was great fun and his sly sense of humour, which included building complicated traps for the baby of the family, provided material for enduring family jokes.

In adult life, my brother still add so much to the family. Both of them kept up their music, and so when I am in Canada, I might find myself in a romantically seedy nightclub listening to the younger brother's rock band or in a concert hall listening to the older brother's quintet. The older brother got married to a woman whom the family all, without exception, hesitation or reservation, adore and has had two bee-oo-tee-ful children (so far)! The younger brother lives close to my parents and has helped them out a lot with physical tasks, like taking care of our late grandma's house. He also got me out of a financial mess, for which I will be forever grateful, and I'm putting a cheque in the mail today! 8-0 (No, really. The Polish money came in.)

My brothers, I think, helped to make me the married woman I am today. Soon after I met Benedict Ambrose in person, I thought "This man is so much like my brothers." And I also thought, "This man would get along so well with my family. I can so see him around the table at Christmas!" And this proved to be true. Last Christmas, when my parents, one brother and one sister came to the Historical House for their first Scottish Christmas ever, was one of the happiest of my life.

When my brothers come to visit, they move seamlessly into our social set. They are both former choirboys, and they can both sightread, so they are immediately pressed into Trid Mass choir service and/or singing after boozy Trid suppers. The elder brother, incidentally, drove B.A. and I to our honeymoon, and brother and B.A. sang Gilbert and Sullivan tunes together as we whizzed down the highway.

Because it is Remembrance Day, I will also mention that the elder brother put in ten active years in the militia and the younger brother gave army cadets a go. Their willingness to serve others has extended to the civil sphere, you see. I suppose I am also reactionary enough to be proud of my brothers to have been brave and adventurous enough to have gotten involved with the military, which in Canada is not an everyday sort of institution.

So there you go. I am lucky to have been given two wonderful brothers, and I am also lucky enough to fallen for a guy like my brothers, instead of my usual type. (Actually, I think B.A. is half like my brothers and half like my usual type!)

Today's topic being brothers, please feel free to write about your wonderful brothers (real or "adopted") in the combox. I realize this is a topic I have brought up before, but it can't hurt anyone to enthuse yet again about the great men in her life!

The One Who Danced Away

2011-11-10T06:34:00.004Z

Dear Auntie Seraphic,

I just wanted to write and tell you how much I love your blog! I really, really wish I had found it a long time ago, when I could have used your advice the most. My close friend from college...recommended your blog to me quite some time ago, and I wish I had found it then! This may sound silly, but I didn't really understand blogs at the time, or what seraphicsingles was all about.

I read your post today about what it means to be a lady. You said you were surprised that people don't write in complaining about controlling men who try to make them fit their idea of what it means to be a lady. Well, I dated a man like that in college. He wanted me to always wear skirts, to behave in a certain way, and to not dance what he considered were "modern" and unladylike dances (such as swing).

At first, I hardly even noticed that I was losing my freedom. I honestly think I was with him because he reminded me of my father, who is also controlling and does not think highly of women. I think being with a controlling man who was judgmental and restricted my freedom felt familiar, and thus (in a way) comfortable.

After about a year, though, I began to rebel. He told me not to go to swing dancing practice, and I went anyway. I finally realized that he was controlling and that I could not live with a man like that for the rest of my life. As soon as I realized that, I broke up with him, and I felt so FREE. Of course, I was sorry to cause him pain, but I felt so happy about my life and my future when I was alone again.

I have seen unhappy marriages, and I know how terrible it can be to be tied to a man who does not love you for who you are. I thank God that He helped me realize in time that I could not spend my life with a man like that. It is so true that it is better to be alone than to be with the wrong man!

I got engaged about a month ago to a good man who I love and who loves and respects me. He would never try to control me or make me conform to a certain standard of womanhood. I know it is only through the grace of God that I did not marry a controlling man.

Thank you for writing that post today. I am sorry you had to go through that, but it is nice to know that you understand what it's like to be with a controlling man.

God bless you always,
Danced to Freedom

Ah, poppets. I love emails like this!

Divorce, Annulment, Remarriage

2011-11-09T17:32:00.005Z

Polish sentence structure is so unlike English sentence structure that Google Translate cannot cope with it very well. Therefore, when I find out that someone has written something about Anielskie Single online, I go half-crazy trying to figure out what it is. The one solution is to get a native Polish speaker to read it to me, and they do not grow on trees.

Happily, there was one in the neighbourhood today, so I lured him in with doughnuts and got him to translate something written about beautiful, fascinating me. And we discovered that edited right out of this biography of former singledom was my divorce, annulment and remarriage.

Let's make this quite clear. I was divorced. I got an annulment. I am in my second marriage. If you have a problem in general with people who are granted annulments and remarry, then you have a problem with me. And I am sorry about that.

I am sorry about that because I think I have funny and interesting things to say and I would be sorry if someone lost out on the fun and the conversation simply because they think any divorced Catholic is not worth listening to. But I am also sorry about that because divorced Catholics are often treated like crap. I knew that when I got divorced, and you can bet the ink was barely dry on my divorce certificate when I was banging on the Marriage Tribunal door.

I didn't get my annulment to get married again. I got my annulment to end the fiction that I had been sacramentally married in the first place. I wanted freedom, not just the freedom to marry, but the freedom to be single, no longer tied to a non-husband in any way whatsoever. And of course I would not have married B.A. without an annulment, and he would not have married me. We're Catholics because we actually happen to believe the Roman Catholic faith.

It is obvious that the sanctity of marriage is in serious trouble. This is one of the reasons why I write this blog: to preserve the sanctity of marriage. People abuse marriage all the time, and in different ways. Some people mistake marriage for permanent-never-failing-romance. Other people mistake marriage for a Church-sponsored spouse trap. Still others use it as a vehicle to force others to say that their lifestyle is A-OK.

Therefore, I can understand why Catholics--especially European Catholics--are so frightened by divorced-and-remarried people. And I respect the fact that I would not be allowed anywhere near the microphone of an orthodox Catholic media outlet had I not been granted an annulment before I started to call myself single again, let alone married B.A. And I even see why the fact that I had a divorce and an annulment before I wrote my singles book was dropped from this particular bio: it was too complicated for that particular article, that particular magazine.

Life, however, is complicated. And I don't think it is helpful for the Catholic community to sweep complications under the rug and nail the rug down. We might all look wonderful and upstanding at Mass, whether beaming and clapping or bowed and silent, but we all are sinners, and we all struggle. One difference between people is that the more you have to lose, the smarter you are about keeping your mouth shut. When my pal X was Single, she would tell anyone about her latest crush object. When she was married, she told only me. (Yes, some married women--even respectable married women who love God, their husbands and their children--sometimes have crush objects. They also catch colds and the flu.)

I am no expert on ministry to divorced-and-remarried Catholics. The issues are horribly painful, pitting "being faithful" against "being welcoming." I understand that love sometimes means saying "No". I understand that receiving communion without being in a state of grace can actually harm a person. But I also understand that the divorced person so easily becomes a scapegoat. That makes me worry for divorced people, whether they are canonically single--as I was--or canonically married.

I understand why the divorce and annulment might have been dropped from my bio, but it makes me a little sad for the divorced-and-annulled all the same.

The Lady

2011-11-08T09:08:00.016Z

I approach today's topic with dread because it slices very close to the bone. Also, I tried to have a light philosophical conversation on the topic the other day and it did not go well. A very old incision in my psyche began slowly to bleed.

Today's topic is "the lady."

We are all men and women, but from very early in human history we have separated men and women into categories. I suppose it is natural to do that; we put all creatures into categories. We have distinguished categories of angels. And it may even be helpful sometimes to continue to distinguish between different kinds of men and women: by nationality, for example, or by age. Other categories (class, sexual orientation) are not so helpful, for they not only distinguish but divide.

The terms "lady" and "gentleman" spring from class division. Bluntly stated, a lady was a woman whose father did not work with his hands, and a gentleman was a man who did not work with his hands. For the fine shades of who was or was not considered a lady in Britain in the early 19th century, read Jane Austen. Elizabeth Bennett was most definitely a lady because her father owned land and the family (more or less) kept up the standards expected of a landowner's daughters.

In republican America, Louisa May Alcott proudly rejected the class assumptions inherent in the word "lady": Jo March declares in Little Women that she believes in "men and women" not in "ladies and gentlemen." Her heroes and heroines are well-educated, highly moral folk who are willing to work for a living and hold their heads high among their richer relations and friends. Henry James, however, continued to use the expression "lady", although his "lady" of Portrait of a Lady was not the daughter of a landowner, but merely a woman of sterling character.

But who determines what a woman of sterling character is? No doubt this is a hotly debated smoking room topic to this very day. In the ancient world, a woman of sterling character was one whom nobody talked about by name: the mother of the Gracchi is known solely as "the mother of the Gracchi" for that very reason. In the modern world, a woman of sterling character was once one whose name appeared in the newspaper only when she was born, was married and died. In Christian circles, she was (or is) a woman who obeyed her husband or at very least never made him look like an ass in public.

I have my own ideas about what a woman of sterling character is, but they are not necessarily the same as the ideas I held when I was 21 and met a man with very pronounced ideas on the topic indeed. The man in question was absolutely sure I was "a lady" and took great pains to make sure I always was so.

Readers of this blog often write of their frustration and dread of controlling men utterly determined to get them into bed. So far I don't recall anyone writing in of her frustration and dread of a controlling man utterly determined to (A) make her conform to his ideal of The Lady and (B) make her marry him. It surprises me because most of the women who read this blog are young, traditional and/or religious, and it strikes me that a young, traditional and/or religious man is most likely to behave like that. He has it in his head what a Good Woman is (the opposite of "all those sluts out there"), and by God he's going to get her.

I have in a box somewhere a dozen letters in fine masculine script, written with an excellent pen, exhorting me to be a lady. They are very flattering, and they quite turned my twenty-something head. The mix of fulsome praise and roguish nagging would probably make me vomit today, but at the time it merely made me blush, shake my head and roll my eyes.

In the end it proved effective, and I found myself obeying a man who laid down an awful lot of rules. I was not allowed to wear blue jeans. Ladies did not wear blue jeans. I was not allowed to get fat. Ladies did not get fat. (NB Married people usually put on 10 pounds after they marry; I lost 20.) I was not allowed to walk the quiet, crime-free two blocks from the bus stop to my parents' house after dark. Ladies did not take risks. I had to wear elbow length gloves everywhere I went in broad daylight. Ladies did not get sunburnt. I had to carry a parasol for the same reason. (Yes, a parasol.) I was not allowed to use bad words, ever, even when I dropped something on my toe. Ladies did not use bad words.

He was twenty-three years old. I very much doubt he is like that now. At least, I hope not: when the worm turned, he suffered very much. And when the worm ran away, one of worm's pals gave her a pair of blue jeans. I look terrible in blue jeans now, but at the time they symbolized... What? Freedom? Self-determination.

B.A. says that a gentlemen is a man who never unintentionally gives offense. This means a man who is so aware of how his actions and demeanor affect others that he never makes a social mistake. He puts everyone at his or her ease unless, for some good reason, he needs to give someone a set-down.

I do not know what a lady is. I just know that the concept can be used as a whip to make a woman strive to turn into something she is not: a precious porcelain statue, an angel in human form, corporeal vanilla ice-cream. I am very uncomfortable with the term; I wish we could merely distinguish between good manners and bad.

And why bring all this up today? Because I know not only young women but young men read this blog and I know that some traditional young men--without first considering what John Paul II said in Dignitatem Mulieris--are working out their own anthropologies of The Lady.

At least, I think they are. Because the word cuts so close to the bone, I am not the best judge of what young men are doing when they talk about ladies or make pronouncements on female dress and behaviour. I told myself that the other day when, while walking down an ancient street with my husband and a young friend, the young friend suddenly turned to me and said, "I never imagined you would own a pair of blue jeans."

The knife of male expectation can cut both ways. Both women and men are hurt when men set up impossible standards of womanhood they glean not from Christianity or real life but from the prejudices and restrictions of a vanished age.

As I love to warn you all, some scars never heal.

***

Update: Welcome readers of The Crescat! Regular readers should know that Kat is giving away a copy of The Closet's All Mine, the American version of Anielskie Single/ Seraphic Singles. So if you are Single and can think of something you love about your Single state, toddle on over there and tell her what it is for a chance to win the prize.

Who is Your Most Far-Out Friend?

2011-11-07T13:34:00.005Z

I've been thinking a lot about friendship. Friendship is very, very important for Single people, but also important to many married people. Having a husband is not a kind of one-stop-shopping of the heart. A husband is not a girl-friend in male form. Definitely not. Many (most?) people need all kinds of relationships. Being married means you have only one marital/erotic relationship; it does not mean you give up all other relationships.

One of the small deprivations of married life in Britain--don't laugh--is that I don't really get to hug anybody. It's not a huggy country. There is mwah-mwah social kissing--or there is when I am around as it's not a Scottish thing--but no hugs. It's a small island, and the islanders are careful with their space.

Anyway, having come to Britain as a middle-aged foreign spouse, I cannot depend on my old school friends and old college chums for day-to-day friendship. Facebook, email and Skype are godsends, but the truth is that I am most likely to socialize with somebody local. And, given that most married British women my age are at work and already have lots of friends, it is not surprising that I am most likely to hang out with church friends, especially other expats.

The most recent addition to my daily life is a twenty-something Central European male graduate student of Islamic Studies, which strikes me as rather funny. So I thought I'd open up the combox to readers and ask you describe a friend whose company you very much enjoy but who is not very much like you.

"Anielskie Single" Interview

2011-11-05T18:38:00.010Z

How exciting! At last my Nasz Dziennik interview has come out. Nasz Dziennik is a conservative national Polish daily paper.

It is also posted on the Radio Maryja website.

Update: Szczęść Boże Polska. Powitanie!

Update 2: This is a great take on the thorny issue "Is the unconsecrated Single life a vocation?" Hat-tip The Crescat.

Misfits with Marrieds

2011-11-04T10:19:00.007Z

Sometimes I get a comment or email from Single women about fitting in with Married women, particularly Married women with children. The Single women feel like misfits, as though the Married Women with Children are the social norm. And maybe Married Women with Children are the social norm, in that office or that parish.

To visualize this I have to squint into hazy memories of the past because my life is full of Single people without children. My parish--well, actually it's not a real parish but the maximum 70 local people who prefer the Extraordinary Form of the Mass--is full of Single people. Some are university students, some are middle-aged artists or professionals, and some are elderly.

Some are special-needs adults who will never marry. Some are old-fashioned British bachelors who honestly think marriage means being shackled to a madwoman with a rolling pin. Some are widowers or widows. Some are retired schoolteachers or other professionals who never in their long lives married. Most of the Singles of my parish simply aren't eligible.

I sometimes wish B.A. and I had been married in the parish, just for the novelty it would have afforded the congregation. However, there is now a younger married couple, and they provided us with a baptism last year.

Notice I say "A". We have married couples with adult children in the parish, but only one young couple with babies, so far, although there is a father who brings his three children but not his (rumoured Protestant) wife. And thus--hold on to your hats--it is the young married pregnant woman with a baby who is in the minority. And although she is beautiful, intelligent and fun, she is not a regular at the parties held by the middle-aged segment of the parish, sometimes attended by the students, which are fueled by alcohol and often last until 2 AM.

Married women with children are largely cast out of the Single Eden of drink, late-night parties, spontaneous travel and quiet time. Usually they love their children, but sometimes they feel wistful for the old days, especially if the old days involved flirting and clubbing and other things responsible married-women-with-babies do not do. Unless they have a job, their social lives are sharply curtailed and revolve around their husbands and kids. They feel starved for adult conversation, and they wait all day for their husbands to come home and have adult conversations, only to discover that the men have had enough of adult conversation for the day and just want to watch the news in peace.

Married women with babies and jobs do have access to adult conversation. However, they are also stressed out of their minds, possibly because their bodies (and babies) are telling them that this sucks and they ought to be home with the babies. And thus, they need to complain to other women (which is the one of women's natural ways of coping with stress: men have "fight or flight"; we have "fight, flight or b*tch") who might understand what they are going through. This means other married women with babies.

I spent a year or so in a female-dominated government office. It was a dull job, although I was grateful for the pay, and I soon applied to go to graduate school. Graduate school, incidentally, is full of Single women or married, childless women. In many a graduate department, you are not made to feel bad for not having children. You are made to feel bad for wanting children. Still, here I was in this mostly-boring office,greeting disabled welfare recipients (some of whom were disabled because they were addicted to crack, poor things) and working in the file room with women without deep intellectual interests but with children. But I did not feel like a misfit.

I did not feel like a misfit in part because, admittedly, I had a boyfriend. And I did not feel like a misfit because I had friends outside of work, most of whom were Single themselves. And I did not feel like a misfit because I was more-or-less comfortable with who I was and with my own life, a life unlike that of the women in the office. And I did not feel like a misfit because, even though they talked about recipes and their children, I could enter easily into those conversations. The children (teenagers) were interesting, and the recipes good.

When I first started working in offices, I was a big fat--well, thin, actually, a small thin intellectual snob. This showed up on my face, so as you can imagine I was not very popular with the not-so-intellectual women, just like in elementary school. However, by the time I was in this government office, I had learned that not-so-intellectual women had a lot to offer me.

One woman in this office, who had dropped out of school under the legal age, taught me a lot about kindness, and she was an absolute genius at calming down crazy people off their meds. Another woman, a C&E Catholic, challenged my then-dodgy theology; to my shock, I realized that she had looked up to me in matters Catholic and that I had disappointed her. Another woman entertained me with stories about Poland; all the brides in her village rented the same wedding dress from the same shop. Another woman, who had had servants in India, showed her cultural vulnerability by refusing to help the rest of us carry boxes. It would have broken her heart to move boxes, but the other women assumed she thought she was better than the rest of us, and that is fatal in female-dominated work environments, as you no doubt know.

The point to all this verbiage about my old office is that it is never a matter of a Single woman in the abstract trying to get along with Married-women-with-children in the abstract. We live our life in concrete circumstances, with concrete individuals, all of whom are different. Meanwhile, some Married-women-with-children envy Single-women-without-children as much or more than they occasionally pity you, and if they pity you out loud it says more about the Married-women-with-children than about you Single childless girls.

There are also environments where Single women, or partnered-women-without-children, are the norm. It is quite normal for a woman of any age in my parish to be Single. It was quite normal for women in both my Canadian and American theology classes to be Single, and of course most of the men were unmarried too (but usually priests, religious, or with SSA).

My advice on how to handle situations where Single you are surrounded by Married-Women-With-Children all day is, firstly, to see the women as people other than Married-With-Children and, when it is possible, engage them in conversation about shared interests and to actually listen to what they say.

Secondly, it is crucially important to have interests outside this environment of Married women. Some Married women will be interested to hear about your Single adventures and opportunities, whereas others will voice their panicked feelings that they are missing out on Life by telling you how lucky (or selfish) you are. Do see the value in the opportunities you have as a Single woman.

Thirdly, if you cannot take the heat, get out of the kitchen. Some office and school environments are simply toxic, and the majority vent their frustrations on the minority, particularly the minority that seems unfriendly, like the poor formerly-rich Indian lady who wouldn't carry boxes. If you are that unhappy, leave when you can, and learn from past experiences how better to get along with office mates. (NB If the problem is that everyone is discussing their sex life, then have a word with your manager. You don't have to work in in a hyper-sexualized environment, and if people mock you for not being sexually active, this is a form of sexual harrassment. Sex does not belong in the office.)

Fourthly, there is a growing awareness in the Church that Single people are being neglected. I'm not the only Catholic writing and talking to and about Single Catholics. Keep looking for resources for Single Catholics and don't lose heart. The Catechism states that unmarried people are "particularly close to Jesus' heart".

Hypothetical Retreat Question

2011-11-03T17:30:00.003Z

So if I were planning a three day retreat for Single women with a priest in your town, on what topics do you think the seminar talks should be?

This is a serious question. I've been given a date, a location and even a title. By the way, it will be in central Europe, so don't bounce up and down shrieking with joy unless pani rozumie po Polsku.

Anyway. There it is. Three days. Primary text: my book. Priest on tap. Mass. Adoration. Lectures. No boys (except priest) allowed. What should we all talk about?

"The Innocents"

2011-11-02T20:14:00.009Z

I always have Canadian Thanksgiving Dinner and Hallowe'en on the same night. This year it was not on actual Hallowe'en but on All Hallows Night, so I was very tired this morning, let me tell you. I made all the food my family has for Thanksgiving, except for pumpkin pie, because I couldn't find anything pumpkin in Tesco, and the roast turkey was actually twin chickens. Plus I was dressed as "Dorothy" in The Wizard of Oz. I trotted around the kitchen in ruby slippers. Was I glad to finally sit down and have a glass of wine! Whoo!

After supper, the party settled down in the sitting-room to watch The Innocents, a film adaptation of Henry James' novella The Turn of the Screw. It stars Deborah Kerr, is very scary and is very interesting from a psychological point of view. Are there really ghosts, or is the heroine imagining it all?

This question was of particular interest for me because I am a very imaginative person and I have found it very, very important in my life to sort out what really is true from what I imagine to be true. But at the same time, I have discovered that sometimes I am absolutely right when others think I am just imagining things.

In matters of the heart, this can be particularly difficult to sort out. There's the problem of thinking Johnnie has a massive crush on me, and then discovering that maybe Johnnie doesn't have a massive crush on me, and then feeling disappointed because, actually, it wasn't that Johnnie had a crush on me but that I had a crush on Johnnie. How humiliating.

Unrequited love is one of the most humiliating aspects of everyday life that I can think of. And I am thinking about it today because recently I got a letter from a woman who chased a guy, without realizing/admitting that's what she was doing, and when he broke up with her, she was devastated. The break-up seemed to come out of nowhere. She was so sure they were meant for each other.

When "Volker" of my book (plot spoiler!) broke up with me, my friends and I were so shocked that we called all such surprise break-ups "Volkers" ever after. Volker would no doubt be horrified to know that, so let's hope he's not still reading. But after some years' distance from that humiliating and surprising event, I can admit that it was not so surprising after all. Although I tried reeeeeealllieeee hard not to pursue Volker, there was some serious Volker-pursuing behaviour in there. Boo. Left to his own devices, Volker would not have asked me out in the first place.

(For those who are new here, a cornerstone of my overarching theory of male psychology is that men don't stay interested very long in women who pursue them and therefore are easy to win. [Exception: much older men will fall for the happy-go-lucky girls crazy enough to flirt with them.] Despite massive social engineering, all but the laziest men want to woo and win the princess in the tower, taking a manhood-proving risks to do so. Being given everything on a plate makes boys bored, cranky and infantile. Polish guy over here agrees with me.)

Anyway, my correspondent described the courtship/dating period in great detail, so even if she could not see where she had been "the (courting) man" and her ex had been "the (courted) woman" (complete with early explanations that he had been hurt and needed time to reflect, etc.), I could. So I gritted my teeth and pointed them out. I felt rather awful about this because, really, facing up to one's mistakes when it comes to courtship is sooooo painful. If someone points them out to you, you don't feel like thanking them. You feel like killing them.

However, it is better to live in reality than in a fantasy world, which is what I think every time I sit down before Confession and force myself to do an examination of conscience. Bleah!

Trampy Hallowe'en!

2011-10-31T19:13:00.004Z

I have been sooo busy, poppets! But here I am again. I have even managed to carve a jack o'lantern despite not having time to get a pumpkin: I remembered the old butternut squash squatting on our cookbooks. The year simply would not be a proper year without a jack o'lantern on October 31; I could not cope.

Now I was going to write a condemnation of trampy Hallowe'en costumes, but then I remember in time that last year I dressed as a Jordan Wannabe, and if you are British you know what that means: fake tan, fake eyelashes, tons o' slap, and trampy outfit. I thought if I went really over the top, it would be more funny than trampy. However, I knew I had failed to reach the level of funniness when the church organist arrived, took one look and said, "You should go to church like that."

I would love to post a photograph of my wonderful last year Jordan Wannabe costume, but the internet is forever and I would like to keep my job. Fortunately, none of my guests are Facebook fans. How girls dare to wear trampy costumes in the Age of Facebook is a mystery. I repeat: the internet is forever.

When I was at an American Catholic college, the conservative student newspaper complained that Hallowe'en on campus seemed like nothing but an excuse for girls--and, increasingly, guys--to wear sexy costumes: sexy nurse, sexy witch, sexy vampire--possibly even sexy Lonerganian Teaching Assistant (whoa!). It made seriously serious Catholic girls really uncomfortable to come to parties in unsexy costumes and, indeed, one of the great life lessons I have learned regarding my own confidence is that I must never come to a party looking bad. If I went anywhere dressed as a ladybug,I would try to be the most beautiful ladybug I could be. I'm not saying I would be a sexy ladybug; I'm saying I would aim for a Pretty Ladybug With High Self Esteem.

I bet the Catholic blogsphere is full of diatribes against Sexy Costumes today. Undoubtedly sexy costumes for children are just completely inappropriate. And, yes, really we Catholic adults should do our best not to scandalize others, although how we are likely to do that if the evening's community standard is Sexy French Nurse is beyond me.

However, I reluctantly admit that "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" is a lousy attitude, even on Hallowe'en. My advice is to search the internet for Japanese goth outfits and take notes. Goths, bless 'em, tend to go for long skirts and black kilts. Guy or girl, you can dress all in black, iron your hair, powder your face, indulge in tons and tons of grey eyeshadow, pop in some vampire teeth and--hey presto! Modest yet attractive in a creepy way. If you have the money or the sewing skills, Beheaded French Aristo is also modest, attractive and creepy.

I feel a bit guilty harping on attractive, and if you are the kind of girl who enjoys dressing up in a gorilla suit or as a nuclear holocaust survivor, then I am full of admiration and giggles. However, I personally need to feel confident when I go to a party, especially if there are strangers or university students or such of my husband's pals who are under the impression that I am a little sister to be upbraided and oppressed at every opportunity.

The thing is, there is such a thing as being attractive in a classy way, even on Hallowe'en. Some of my girlfriends back home had a party where all the female guests had to dress like Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's; they looked amazing. And for one of my favourite birthday parties ever, all the guests dressed up as Goths, many for the first time ever. We all looked great, even I, who was fighting the flu.

Now doubtless many of you are down on Hallowe'en, but I love it because it is the one day in the North American calendar when everyone can indulge their imagination to the extent of dressing up in costumes (and I love spooky stuff, so thrilling and so much less disgusting than the horrors of real life). Anyway, if you are going to a party tonight, I hope you have a very good time, and never forget you can look great without being flagrantly immodest, even on Hallowe'en.

The photo is of part of a tomb in a mostly Presbyterian Edinburgh graveyard. Spooky!

Drifting

2011-10-27T10:05:00.013+01:00

I do hope Father B chimes in to tell us what he meant by "drifting" in the Seraphic Goes to Scotland "Knowing Young Nuns" post. It makes me think of skeletal wraiths in worn shrouds floating about the library downstairs. (Eeek!) Wraiths are a better image than zombies because although zombies are rather unthinking, they at least have a goal: "Braaains! Braaaains!"

To take a stab at what he might mean by drifting, I will say that I think he might mean a rather unthinking habit of following the path that grown-ups set for us, be they parents, teachers or taste-makers, while choosing those things that we think (for complicated reasons perhaps unknown even to ourselves) we think we should choose, and then coming to the huge foggy void that meets us when we finish education.

As much as we love Brideshead Revisited, I think we should be told that this is no model for the undergraduate life. Waugh almost ruined his life by behaving like Charles and Sebastian. It wasn't their fashionable homoeroticism (which in Brideshead Revisited is worded very, very carefully indeed) as much as their drunkenness, their snobbery, and their contempt for work in general.

Charles and Sebastian and Waugh himself were serious drifters. After Oxford, Waugh drifted into teaching little boys, whom he loathed, and longed for his fashionable friends and wrote. He almost drowned himself. Fortunately for him, he wrote a book about people who drift, and it was a huge hit. Realizing he could make money through writing, Waugh ceased to drift quite so much.

In this he was like Charles, who discovered he could make a living through painting, although poor Charles does drift in and out of marriage and from country to country and from love to love, doesn't he? Poor Sebastian drifts in and out of sobriety and finally applies to a religious order. They are very nice men, but they can't take him on because he really doesn't have much to offer by then, poor man.

I read Brideshead Revisited at 11 or so, and as its homoeroticism went way over my head, as Waugh meant it to do, it became my second Bible. I fell in love with Sebastian, of course, so thank goodness this was in Canada, or I might have ended up like the young Nancy Mitford: longing to marry a charming, handsome aristocrat who mysteriously was not at all attracted to women.

I fell in love also with Oxford, which made any Canadian university a sad second choice, with literature, which--as everything I studied was written before 1950--gave me an unhealthy distaste for ordinary employment, and with aesthetic thrills:

Then we talked of [the wine] and nibbled Bath Oliver biscuits, and passed on to another wine; then back to the first, and on to the other, until all three were in circulation and the order of glasses got confused, and we fell out over which was which, and we passed the glasses to and fro between us until there were six glasses, some of them with mixed wines in them which we had filled from the wrong bottle, til we were obliged to start again with three clean glasses each, and the bottles were empty and our praise of them wilder and more exotic...

...And we would leave the golden candlelight of the dining-room for the starlight outside and sit on the edge of the fountain, cooling our hands in the water and listening drunkenly to its splash and gurgle on the rocks.

'Ought we to be drunk every night?' Sebastian asked one morning.

'Yes, I think so.'

'I think so too.'

The idea that young loves are replaced by higher, more progressive, loves also left its mark.

Waugh was uneasy about this book for the rest of his life, and well he should. He made the young Charles and Sebastian so enchanting that the young reader does not compute that Charles' youth leads him to an unhappy, lonely middle-age and that Sebastian ends up penniless, bald and drunk in some godforsaken African dump.

Hindsight is 20-20, and if I had not been such an ass when I was young--and I vaguely knew I was an ass, incidentally--I would have avoided anything hard-but-classy (like Ancient Greek, for which I simply was not clever enough) and worked my butt off for top grades, so as to go to law school. Alternatively, I could have gotten over my snobby attitude that only "dumb girls" studied French and Italian so as to become language teachers for the district school board. Their pension---aah! What was I thinking?!

I'll tell you what I was thinking--when I was thinking at all, that is, since most of the time I was feeling. I was thinking that I was just going to get a Ph.D. in English Lit on the strength of my delicious writing style, and that bestselling books would just come to me as I gazed from my mullioned office window into an elegant Victorian Gothic quadrangle. A much more important concern was whether I should marry or remain Single, entirely wedded to my Academic Career.

Meanwhile, I spent my five undergraduate years battling a kind of interior fog. It had crept in when I was a teenager, despite loving high school so much more than elementary. What I didn't know then, but certainly know now, is that I suffer from a tendency towards clinical depression.

Sitting about determined to be sad and snarky about everything is a moral failing, but clinical depression is a physical, as well as a psychic, illness. It can sometimes be managed by eating the right things and sometimes by medication. It can be worsened by all kinds of external things. It is a very interesting condition, as I can say at the moment, as I am between bouts. Of course, bouts are hellish.

If you have a terrible feeling that you are just drifting and are willing to do anything, including JUSTGETTINGMARRIED to get it over with, or JUSTSIGNINGTHEPAPER to get it over with, it might be that you have some kind of depression. And if you think you might have some kind of depression, it might be helpful to talk to a doctor or counsellor about it.

I am not a doctor, of course, but I do caution you against using the possibility of being "a depressive" to feed an addiction to DRAMA. I've met too many people hooked on the DRAMA of being on Zoloft, etc. It's not helpful. Really, my vulnerability to depression is just as banal as my youngest sister's vulnerability to bronchitis. The poor child never comes to the UK but she gets the most awful colds. And they go on forever.

Sadly, because I love them, you can't be on my kind of anti-depressants (SSRIs) if you are married and "open to life" because SSRIs scramble baby brains. However, I very much wish I had found out what the fog in my head was when I was 19 and gone straight onto lovely lovely What-Was-It or, actually, I suppose, since What-Was-It wasn't invented yet, its grandmother Prozac. [Update: On the other hand, I see that teenagers and adults under 24 aren't supposed to be on SSRIs, and that they don't work for milder forms of depression, which means most kinds of depression. Oh dear. Well, talk to a medical doctor, if you think you are depressed.]

And now I shall toddle off purposefully to the library to work on my paid article about James III/VIII and Family.

"Young Nuns"

2011-10-26T12:33:00.003+01:00

In a rush, poppets. Read what I wrote over here, come back, discuss in the combox.

All I want to add is that the French nun who spoke to Catherine and the cameras stressed that a vocation can be judged by how much you want it. It is a falling in love.

"Falling in love with Jesus" does not necessarily mean becoming a monk or nun. You have to fall in love with that kind of life itself, and with a particular Rule, and with a particular group of people living the Rule. Jesus is the spouse of every Christian soul, so perhaps it is wrong to overemphasize the "Bride of Christ" aspect to religious life.

Strictly Dancing

2011-10-24T17:45:00.005+01:00

It was quite hilarious and led to broken glass, but yesterday evening some of my friends and I began a Scottish country dance. Although we often meet for a meal after Mass on Sundays, we do not usually break into dancing. I do seem to recall spontaneous waltz some months ago, when someone began to play a waltz medley on the parlour piano, but usually no. This time I found a reel on Youtube, and my husband began to shout instructions, and almost before we knew what going on, all had joined hands and were jumping about in a circle.

Country dancing is great fun, and in its way it is like Gregorian chant: it doesn't need a lot of training and anyone can learn it. And I know anyone can learn it because I can learn it, and I am the biggest dunderhead at choreography ever. I was the bane of my ballet mistresses and their carefully planned year's end performances. Eurgh! My youngest sister is lucky to have been spared ballet; she was sent straight into Highland Dance.

So I must admit up front I have a terrible bias against partner dancing, including the waltz. I realize that in partner dancing the lady (or "follower") is supposed to just do whatever the gentleman (or "lead") wishes, but I resist such notions. Only my husband has the right to give me orders, thank you very much.

And in the case of gentlemen dancers so talented that they make the lucky ladies in their arms feel like they are floating, I am much too wicked for such temptations. My head might float away, and then where would I be, eh? So I leave the waltz, the tango, the salsa, and all other modern dances to the pure. That said, the easiest way to get over a crush on a Celtic, Anglo-Saxon or differently Germanic guy is dance a salsa with him. Total anaphrodesiac.

I hate partner dancing so much I wonder why I have taken so many classes in it. I think, though, that it is usually because of peer pressure. The words "Come on it will be fun" ring a bell, as do the words "I don't want to go by myself." It is the sort of thing my Single friends would do, and then not do again once they were married. The great majority of husbands are allergic to going out in the evening, to say nothing of going out swing- or salsa-dancing.

However, ethnic country dancing of the kind all generations can and often do at ethnic weddings is a different story entirely. For me, that means reels, jigs and dances named after such mysterious individuals as Gay Gordon and the Dashing White Sergeant. The happiest "real" dances I have done have been group affairs with callers and fiddles and occasionally pipes.

What is the difference? Not to sound like a member of the Anti-Sex League, but one big difference is that the emphasis upon Boy-Girl is almost entirely removed. It is never about Him and Me or Her and Him but upon All Of Us. In country dancing, men and women and men and men and women and women hold hands and link arms with zero sexual significance. Partners are switched with dizzying speed; all that is constant is the group.

In a world that acts as though sexual partnership is the be-all and end-all of post-pubescent existence, it is wonderful that there is an ancient social activity for men and women that celebrates them not as couples but as all together, married, single, widowed, clergy, teen.

Update: Okay, I realize that this is a total old lady question, but...ummmm...is there grinding in all the dance clubs now? I ask because I am plotting to go outdoors really late for an old person to check out a dance club downtown soon, and I have heard weird stories about women in it.

Compassion

2011-10-21T10:55:00.018+01:00

Some men are jerks; most men are not. Frankly, I do not think there is a better way of correcting the bitterness searching Single women so often feel that by upbraiding the little voice that tells them the "problem" is men.

I think it must be "Man" week on Seraphic Singles because I keep thinking about the ways in which society has shortchanged boys and men. The "hook up" culture of high school, college and clubbing is horrible for women (and the children they have or abort), but it is also horrible for men. Sex on tap is emasculating. Past generations of men knew this, from Homer--who portrayed Paris as a dumb pretty-boy--to George Bernard Shaw, who credits Napoleon with saying that "woman is the occupation of the idle man."

I do not think the deep rift between men and women can be healed until women are moved to compassion for men. And by this I mean a real, disinterested compassion, one that is not about binding a man to one's side, and not about being supported by a man or having children of a man.

Men, like women, want to be loved for themselves, their concrete selves. Women are terrified that they will have to support a man who just mooches off them; men have the same fear. Women are no longer so worried that men will see them as baby-machines; this is something that now terrifies men, and it should: occasionally I get emails from women who wonder if they should marry a man they don't love just so they can have babies. Imagine if that man was your brother or son or friend.

It is hard, as a woman, to feel compassion for men and see how weak and enslaved they are to so much, including their own sexual drives and expectations. Men are usually bigger than us and stronger; that can be scary. Men can be very dangerous, to us but also to themselves. Young women do not videotape each other being pulled on sleds along icy highways by cars; young men do and if the video makes it to TV, not-so-young men watch, absolutely rapt.

However, it is not very difficult to see how advertisers, in cahoots with the entertainment industry, are constantly stabbing through the weakest link in men's armour, their sexuality, to separate them from their money.

It's so base and yet so basic that it's part of the furniture of daily life. Every morning when I check my email I have to erase yet another invitation to increase the size of a body part I don't have. If I walk along Toronto's Yonge Street or Montreal's Rue Ste. Catharine or Edinburgh's Lothian Road, naked neon dames flash on and off, tempting men to walk inside the strip club. And the pop singer Rhianna squirms around in tiny outfits on TV, singing about "whips and chains" exciting her.

(Imagine if people forced you to read erotic passages every day while handsome men gently gave you back massages. Exactly.)

And it's not just the entertainment industry. In my local medical office, scowling, sexy, nearly-naked men glare from posters warning men with SSA that only condoms save. "Relationships can't protect you from HIV" says the poster, a blatant, brainless lie if you think for two minutes about what "relationship" actually means. And it makes me angry as a human being that the National Health Service thinks it needs to use soft porn to get its advice across to certain men.

And then there's the "progressive" double-standard, as I noted while studying for my "Living in the UK" exam: more women than men receive higher education, but nobody seems to think that this is a problem. The fact that men make more money (if they still do in the UK, which I doubt, given the benefits culture and post-industrial collapse) than women is seen to be a problem.

So yes, men sometimes hurt our feelings and sometimes disappoint us, especially by not matching up to the version of them we have in our imaginations. And they sometimes embarrass us by asking for that which a big, lying, pornographic, entertainment/psychiatric/ideological industry has led them to expect. But they are our fellow human beings, and they are in a terrible fix. I think that it is our job to help to save them from drowning--without, of course, being dragged under ourselves.

Compassion literally means "suffering with."

Update: Thanks to Healthily Sanguine in the combox for linking to this! A hilarious and touching example of How Men Think.

Maggie Gallagher on the Atlantic Piece

2011-10-20T15:23:00.004+01:00

Good response by Maggie Gallagher to the Atlantic "All the Single Ladies" piece.

My one caveat is that many Single women do not choose to be Single and that many women who have been open to marriage, and have lived according to Christian virtues of chastity, do not marry until their forties or later.

Singleness can and should be celebrated for its blessed opportunities, which do not include the opportunity to get it on with a variety of "partners", no matter how much younger.

Men Are Who They Are

2011-10-20T13:16:00.009+01:00

...and not who you wish they would be.

This is a quote from He's Just Not That Into You, a book I very much enjoyed, although religious girls have to mentally rewrite some parts. For example, the authors are of the opinion that if a man is that into you, he will do his best get you into bed. Catholics and other Christians and women from other religious traditions know that this is not necessarily true for men committed to their faith tradition. If an unmarried religious man is "that into you" he marries you, and if a married religious man is "that into you" he tries to avoid you, and if a priest is "that into you" he goes into denial and blames you for the whole thing. (Ha, ha, just kidding, priests. Mostly.)

(By the way, we know crushes on priests are very, very dangerous, yes? If you have one, don't beat yourself up--crushes are just the common cold of the psyche--but don't encourage it either.)

Anyway, I have been thinking about men this week because the combox has been a bit harsh on them, and the last thing I want to do is encourage a men-are-scum mentality. Men-are-scum is not a rational belief, and it is the hallmark of the Bitter Woman. Bitterness is the Single's Enemy Number One.

I may be the General of Generalizations, but the truth of the matter is that all men, although they share maleness and thus tend to share certain behaviours, are unique, and that should always be taken into consideration. And men should be taken into consideration in a logical, methodical way. When I was a teenager, I would get a crush on a guy based on what he looked like, and from his looks I extrapolated what he might be like. And then I would be away into Fantasyville because very rarely did I get to know my crush very well.

I knew boys and men in books and on TV a zillion times better than boys and men in real life. And in elementary school I had found it very disappointing that boys and men were so unlike boys and men in books and on TV. They used bad language and said very rude things and either hated girls or snogged them behind the school (or both), and often delighted in making the weak suffer, which was not something Aragorn son of Arathorn--or even Henry of the Purple Crayon--had let me to expect.

Anyway, now that I am grown-up and even married, I take a scientific interest in concrete men and watch them and listen to them and try to determine what they are like and to predict what they will do in a given situation. For the generalities, I rely on books like He's Just Not That Into You and mull over things men have told me about men and whether experience has proven those things true.

Anything is better than wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is when you think about men not in terms of who they really are but in terms of whom you wish them to be. A very, very, basic example of this is mistaking "A man with such a pleasant smile must be a wonderful man" for a viable intellectual conclusion instead of a wish. (N.B. The worst of the bullies of my elementary school had a smile that charmed the hearts of all female creatures older than the ones he beat up/molested.)

Another wish is that men be as pure as Saint Dominic Savio, who once tore up a magazine of "bad pictures" that had found its way into his schoolyard and was being gazed at by his fellow students. However, very few men are as pure as Saint Dominic Savio, who wanted to be a priest, and died at 14 anyway. Come to think of it, most women are not as pure as Saint Dominic Savio either, as you should reflect the next time you leaf through Cosmo, Vogue or a romance novel.

I am reminded of a great young Catholic friend, a married guy, who half-ruefully told me (when my other friend his beautiful wife was in the room) that he thought he might be too preoccupied with sex, and I said that I didn't see anything wrong with that as he was a young man, and married, and it was good for the species.

I thought of this because of Denise's anecdote (thank you, Denise) about the guy who said he and his friends thought of the kind of girl who threw herself at men in bars as "Practice." Denise was angry about this, and I would be angry, too, although not because men think like of girls "like that" as "Practice". Men have thought of girls "like that" as "Practice" for at least six thousand years. If they didn't avail themselves of the girls and call them "Practice", they merely despised them from afar and called them "Harlots." The Old Testament stresses avoiding such women entirely.

I can't speak for Denise, but I would be angry because not only do I not want to be thought of as "Practice", I want to be the sort of woman to whom a man is embarrassed to reveal the seamier side of male culture. I want to inspire a man to think of higher things, etc., etc., and to reflect that all womanhood is noble and that all women are made in the image and likeness of God. Obviously, the poor benighted goop who shocked Denise was not inspired by Denise to reflect upon this. But at least he is old-fashioned enough to believe that there are some girls, like Denise, who are not "for Practice." Some men think all women are up for grabs.

This is not me saying that you should give male sluts the time of day. In fact, if I were Denise, I would have told the man that I was offended by his exploitative attitude towards the silly girls who, like everyone else, just want to be loved, and gone home. But I would not have been particularly surprised by his attitude because men-in-general have, openly or secretly, despised women "like that" forever.

As generalizations go, I think I am on solid ground when I say that. Meanwhile, the substance of the post is "Men are who they are and not who you want them to be" and this is all just commentary. I will just add that if you let a man talk more than you, or just sit silently listening to him interact with a group, you can learn a lot about him.

Don't block it out or conveniently forget it because it does not jive with your expectations. If he says something that seems disappointing or unreasonable, and you are reluctant to ask questions about what he has said, go check it out with your brother or a good male friend.

The Forces of History

2011-10-19T10:35:00.027+01:00

Berenike sent me this Atlantic Monthly article, and I most definitely think it is worth a read. By the way, I wonder when people will stop using "All the Single Ladies" as a title for everything written about Single people.

Read the whole thing. It is long, so get a coffee.

The article is worth a read because it shows that the Dominant Narrative, which is not Catholicism, has woken up and noticed what forty years of the feminist revolution and much social engineering has wrought. Of course, the Dominant Narrative thinks this is mostly pretty good, especially the part about Single women having (doing) as much sex as they like and Single women embracing "biological parenthood." It ignores, of course, the mangled corpses of millions of aborted human fetuses and the natural wish of children to have and know their fathers.

Page 2 of the article does acknowledge the ill-effects the past forty years have had on men, economic and moral. Economically, men are often in a worse situation than women, and morally the ones who can get it are more interested in having sex than in having committed relationships until (page 3) they apparently hit "Marriage O'Clock" at the age of 35.

The article also talks about historical periods in which there have been literal man-shortages. I find it significant, however, that instead of talking about England, France or Germany after the First World War, the writer chooses (page 2) to look at atheist communist Russia after World War Two. The illegitimacy rate in Britain was at its LOWEST by the end of the 1950s whatever it was in Russia.

And it also looks at the American (but not just American) problem of the black, fatherless underclass. One of life's little ironies that makes me grind my teeth to stumps is that comparatively rich white and Asian kids in Canada, the USA, Britain, France and Germany think American black ghetto culture--the big stupid baseball caps, the falling down jeans, the horrible noises--so goldarned glamorous. Little European girls of eight do bump and grind routines to lyrics celebrating unfettered, uncommitted, blatantly misogynist or misandrist sex. How on earth did we get from dignified, well-dressed, church-going civil rights marchers to that?

I could go on and on, but instead I will cut to the chase. And the chase is that a healthy society is a society in which men and women co-operate and love each other. Loving each other means men and women respecting each other's differences and understanding what makes each other happy. It doesn't mean shaming them or ourselves into some brand new notion of what human beings SHOULD be like. It certainly doesn't mean saying that men are redundant. How can that POSSIBLY make men flourish?

Meanwhile, as the article points out, there have been times in history when there were not a lot of "marriageable men." In Britain, women's chances for marriage were blighted by war. Some Single women (like Rose Macaulay and sex-obsessed Diana Athill) made extramarital sexual arrangements in the wake of war, but others lived lives of impeccable respectability. Some of the post-WW2 Singles are still alive, and there is a set of very elderly and frail Edinburgh bluestockings that totter together determinedly to every arts event or lecture they can manage.

It is possible to face a husband-free existence with class and determination; women always have, and usually on much less money than today. But, for society at large, the destruction of marriage, which is the proper cradle of children and the protection of men and women from sexual decadence, is a seriously terrible thing.

What if the reason why American white people are comparatively more successful than American black people, or Europeans comparatively richer than Caribbean people, IS marriage? For me, racism is not noticing that some people flourish better than others. It is assuming that success is naturally determined by race. Europeans have not flourished because they are white; Europeans have flourished because the majority of European men have been proper husbands and fathers.

The Christian Single Life does not denigrate Married Life. The Best (and the tradition of the Church is that perpetual virginity is the highest state in life, barring martyrdom) must not be the enemy of the Good. So on this blog, even as I hope to convince Single women that their Singleness is not just a cross but an invitation to holiness, I am also very pro-marriage. Anyone who cares about their culture--or the flourishing of the human race--should care about marriage. Marriage is about the proper ordering of relations among men, women and children. It is not about sentiment, gifts and a champagne reception.

Meanwhile, we should all have a hard look at reality--and I mean reality. Recently a 15 year old child in Ontario, a child with loving parents and many friends, who identified publicly as "gay" and read with interest material by Dan Savage for gay teens, took his own life. He noted that being an openly homosexual teenager was not like it was on "Glee." Of course it is not like it is on "Glee!" What you can learn about real life from television is almost nothing.*

And thus the article to which I have linked is very interesting. If it is true that men get all anxious about marriage at 35, and if it is true that men prefer to marry women younger than themselves, and if it is true that the way to keep a husband happy is to look at him adoringly, then this is useful information. If you are (despite my protests) on a Catholic dating website, stop complaining about that men your age won't look at you and start catching the eye of men ten years older. And if you think you would rather die than acknowledge your husband as the head of the household, give your think a think.

***

*Note: I had a look at the poor child's blog, and it is seriously disturbing. It juxtaposes homoerotic images and gay porn with notes and photographs about suicide, photographs and notes about his self-harm, quotes from another gay teen about her own disappointing love life, and declarations that his friends aren't really his friends.

This is an incredibly sad story, and the boy was terribly bullied, and heads should roll. But what has gotten lost in the media circus is that he had a bottomless, irrational, unhealthy, impossible hunger to be loved and accepted by everybody.

Most people don't have this, thank goodness. Most of us understand that there will always be people who don't like us, who are mean to us (if they can be), and are uncomfortable with our hugs and neediness. I understand that there are men and even women who will always dislike me because I am a woman, Catholic, white, foreign, whatever.

If we belong to an ideological minority and we can't take the heat, we get out of the kitchen: I lasted only two years or so as an on-the-street, blatant-button-wearing pro-lifer. I couldn't take the verbal abuse, and I got seriously depressed. I did not stop being pro-life, of course, but I thought very prudently about how to express this controversial stance and to whom to reveal it.

Despite years of bullying, this poor child didn't know how to do that yet. He trusted to "Glee", and not to experience, when he sought love and acceptance through "Rainbow Club" posters. It is terrible that a mentally unstable 15 year old was allowed become his school's gay rights crusader.

As difficult and as unpleasant as it can be, we must stare reality in the face.

Sin and Stupid Sin

2011-10-18T10:41:00.013+01:00

This could be a very long post or it could be very short. I have just broken off a long one, so I could cut to the chase.

(Update: As I generalize more than ever in this post, it would be helpful to know that I am thinking of university students in Canada and the United States.)

Sin is sin. It's either bad or super-bad. If you feel awake and brainy, read all about it here. Sin in itself is pretty stupid, since to choose any created thing over God is stupid.

My excuse (since for a moment I feel like arguing our case to God) for our backsliding is that people try to bang atheistic materialism or various other heresies into our brains all day long. I feel sorry for us. Secularism is a cracker that serves up the philosophy of the bureaucrats, and in the West the bureaucrats are no longer Christians as we understand them but Feel Gooders who seem to think Brave New World was a brilliant self-help book, not a dire warning.

When it comes to sexual sins, non-religious girls [update: who make it to university] have an edge over religious girls in the prudence department. Religious* girls believe sex is something we're not supposed to have** until we are married. Non-religious girls believe sex is something women should have if (and only if) we have thought about it and decided we want it. These are not, by the way, completely contradictory. When it comes to stubbornly defending what we really want, we can learn from the non-religious girls.

Religious girls bolster their faith that God does not want us to have sex before we are married with a zillion fear-based arguments as to why we shouldn't have sex, e.g. pregnancy, disease, loss of reputation, broken hearts. However, non-religious girls think they have those problems solved because they are taught about contraception, abortion "rights", their right to be sexual, and option to "have sex like men"--a libel on many men, incidentally. Not all men can "have sex like men." They too have hearts that can be broken.

Religious girls and non-religious girls go to the same colleges and very often have prickly, if not outright hostile, relationships with each other. Religious girls sometimes put up pro-life posters, and non-religious girls rip them down. Non-religious girls leave brightly wrapped condoms for other girls in washrooms, and religious girls throw them out. Of course, they sometimes do talk together about their differences, and the religious girls are rather shaken by the faith of the non-religious girls in their "sexual rights." When it comes to catechism classes these days, Venus has the edge. Her missionaries are on fire. They seem so confident.

This can lead religious girls to doubt. And it doesn't help our faith when right-on, "progressive" Catholics (and other Christians) tell us that all that stuff in the Bible and tradition against fornication is "man-made law." (I had a Catholic therapist who told me that kind of thing.) These "man-made laws", say our progressive brothers and sisters, were invented by men to control women because men feared female sexuality so much, etc. God wants us to be "happy", etc.

All this can tempt a religious girl to give in. And I mean "give in", not "boldly choose to be a sexual subject" like her non-religious classmates. The religious girl has been trained to submit her will to the will of God, but with enough argument she can be made to submit her will to the will of a man to whom she has an inordinate attachment. That's a very serious and stupid sin.

The non-religious girl has sex because she really wants to. This, outside marriage, is a serious sin, but it is not necessarily a stupid sin. The religious girl sometimes has sex although she doesn't really want to because the man she thinks she is in love with wants to, or because she wants to hang onto the man and thinks this the way to do it. That's very stupid.

The problem may be that a religious girl believes all premarital sexual intercourse is equally sinful, so she might as well be damned for a crush object-sheep as for a fiance-lamb. But a non-religious girl thinks of sex as being safe, safer or unsafe and makes her decisions accordingly.

I think it dangerous that religious girls think they are either pitiable or special because they are not having sex and all the non-religious girls around are. As a matter of fact, the non-religious girls aren't necessarily having sex. The non-religious girls might be, in fact, highly moral and sexually conservative according to their lights. Just because they believe they should have sex when they want to, and tell Catholic you that ten times a day, doesn't mean they are willing to have sex with just anyone or at any time or just because they thinks a man is hot.

The non-religious girl does not ask herself, when confronted with sexual temptation "Is this good?" but "Is this smart?" The religious girl after asking herself "Is this good?", and answering "No, but I'm going to do it anyway" skips over the "Is this smart?" question. That's stupid.

Thus although this is not a category recognized by the Church, Mater et Magistra, and I could not put it in a book and expect a nice bishop or provincial to stamp the MS with "Nihil Obstat", I note a difference in sin and stupid sin. If you have sexual intercourse with your fiance, you are committing a sin. But if you have sexual intercourse with a man who isn't even a dear friend, you are committing a very stupid sin indeed.

The one theologian I can think of who backs me up in the discussion of sin and stupid sin is C.S. Lewis, who said something like (I paraphrase) "A fool is a man who sins and doesn't even enjoy it; he gets neither his bun nor his penny."

What is the solution to the problem of stupid sin? I think it might be the ability to meet the non-religious girls and the "progressive" theologians with more preparation and more charity.

It was a great shock to me when I discovered in university that "sexually active" girls in university were neither miserable nor ashamed nor secretive nor pregnant, like certain girls in my all-girls Catholic school. Religious women should not be that naive about "sexually active" women when we get to university. We might even admire them for their only-when-I-want-it stance. The best should not be the enemy of the good, and their belief in their sovereignty over their bodies is good--to an extent. It certainly beats the "Because I love him, and I'm hoping for the best" rationalization of our dumber fellow Catholics.

What is not good is that they think women have the right to hand the keys to the kingdom to whoever we wish, husband or not. That's where their sense of autonomy goes wrong. However, the idea that women are the keepers of the keys, and that the keys must not be handed over without a lot of careful consideration, is a good start.

Okay, today's combox theme is really good books on the subject of Catholic teaching and sexuality, stuff that would come in really handy in dorm-room debates with very nice, very confident, sexually-active women. And when I say handy, I mean handy for you and your confidence in Catholic teaching about sexuality in the face of their confidence in the soi-disant sexual revolution.

*Meaning, observant to the tenets of your religion and the only religion that I've come across that thinks all consensual sex is just a-okay is Wicca.

**Why do we say sex is something we "have" when it is somthing people do?

Sunshine for a Monday morning

2011-10-17T09:43:00.008+01:00

Oh boy. In the wake of the past two posts, I have had two serious emails. The first was from a 40-something Single who was basically traumatized by the horrible sex-war dystopia the two posts revealed, a world she described as being populated by evil vampires on one side and female idiots on the other. The second was from a 20-second who is dating a very attentive man she doesn't love but thinks maybe she should marry since compared to whiny sex-demanding boy-men of the two posts, he is a rare catch.

This made me think that it is time for a happy, hopeful post.

The problem with writing about the Single Life is that no matter how much people try to convince Singles that the Single Life is good and noble and can be lived in a happy, contented way, the great majority of young Singles will still want to get married. And as marriage has been greatly attacked and eroded by everything successive popes said would attack and erode it, marriage seems less and less of a sure thing. And, thus, as if this were 1890, women dread being 30 and Single, 35 and Single, 40 and Single, even though there has been no better time in history for women to be Single.

I still get emails asking me if I think the writers should settle. But here is what one reader wrote about settling: "At the same time, I seems you and your husband, BA, had a good connection early on and still enjoy talking to each other. So do my parents. I am worried if I marry this guy, I will dread coming home to someone I find boring."

And it occurs to me that I should talk to you again about B.A and me. Fortunately, one of the defining characteristics is that he is as laid-back as I am a walking bundle of nerves, so he won't mind.

But first I will tell you about good men in general. First of all, there are a lot of them. Almost obody writes Auntie Seraphic to tell her about the wonderful man with whom the reader has an amazing connection, and how their biggest problem is which hall to have the wedding in, since all the halls are booked two years in advance. Thus, if your only discussion about men comes from this blog, you are going to have rather a gloomy view of them.

However, I know a lot of good men. My dad and brothers (one of whom is Single) are very good men indeed. I had some good-man classmates at both my Canadian and American theology schools, and pre-B.A. I met the good-man brother of a Jesuit pal to see if sparks would fly. (They did not.) Today I know two or three fine young Polish university students and some excellent married men, Catholic and non, and some charming grey-haired men who have been unmarried so long, it would be too much of a shock for them to get married now.

There are also good men who were lousy whiny boy-men when they were in their teens and early 20s, as they ruefully confess to me in their 30s and 40s.

And there is B.A. Sometimes I wail that B.A. and I did not meet when we were in our early 20s, but then we agree we were probably not ready for marriage to each other when we were in our early 20s. B.A. was even interested in becoming an Anglican clergyman, which is fine for Anglican girls, but not so fine for Catholic girls like me.

Meanwhile, I was still in the grip of adolescence, totally unrooted in reality, and my brain synapses zigged when they should zag and vice versa. Honestly. And one of my biggest problems was that for too long I thought men were gods to be worshiped, monsters to be feared or status symbols to be attracted. And this was just bonkers because I had brothers and therefore should have known better.

Happily, I grew up and got a clue. And I also got B.A., which was a great surprise since it looked like I might start an enterprising career of ministering to Single people and being a Professional Single. But no. First B.A. started leaving witty remarks on my blog, and then such readers who were his friends started sending me his photo. Next I sent him chapters of a novel about a Scottish girl so he could correct the "Americanisms", and then we met in a bus station. He was wearing a tweed jacket that almost knocked my eyes out, so bright was it. And then he began to talk and didn't stop, except to chew and presumably to sleep.

I immediately caught a miserable cold, and in the mornings I would want to kill B.A. because he wouldn't stop talking, but by the late afternoons I would be in love with him because he was amazing, and eventually I felt the same in the mornings as I did in the afternoons, and fortunately for me, he proposed marriage shortly after that.

I make haste to point out that we were in our late thirties and that from the moment I stepped into the wooden church in which the Edinburgh Trids have Mass, the Edinburgh Trids all seemed to decide I should marry B.A. Everyone looked very cunning and soppy by turns. The peer pressure was immense, and I had just met these people. Even before we knew we should be a couple, a whole lot of even-older people did.

And then I went off to see Der Gute and Volker in Germany, and talked their ears off about the wonderfulness of B.A., which greatly annoyed Volker, who begged me to use his phone and talk to a girlfriend instead.

Skip ahead past the engagement (long-distance) and the wedding (small) and the honeymoon (cheap) and the first two years, and you have Mr and Mrs B.A. getting along quite merrily, especially when I do the merest modicum of housework. B.A. does his very interesting job, and I sit in his (well, his job's) very interesting house and write interesting things and occasionally do a load of laundry. For me the weirdest thing is eating dinner with just one person, instead of six, as I was raised to do, but we go to or have dinner parties, so that makes life seem more normal.

Sunday is the most important day of the week, not only because we go to Mass but because we spend most of the day with a gang of people who are mad-keen on the Extraordinary Form and other things pertaining the the True, the Good and the Beautiful.

If life is boring sometimes, that is my own fault for not getting a "proper job", and never B.A's fault because he is never boring. He is always making a joke or having an idea or fighting with someone who "is wrong on the internet". He is very popular with amusing, laid-back, intelligent, creative people because he is amusing, laid-back, intelligent and creative himself. He is also very loyal, not just to me, but to all his friends, and he is very kind indeed about my tendency to mope around in my pyjamas complaining about the forces of heterodoxy that destroyed my academic career, etc.

I am often very surprised by how very nice and kind B.A. is, and I wonder what that says about me. I suppose some women might find that boring, but I certainly do not. I hate a row more than anything, at least when it is about something that is clearly my fault ;-). And I am always thankful that I can make up all kinds of outrageous jokes ("That's it! I'm going back to Canada!") without him ever taking them seriously and getting hurt or mad.

I suppose we are both very flirty people, and now that I think about it, we flirt with each other constantly in private, although not in public, where apparently the done thing is for us to mildly insult each other instead. (An occasion for one of our earliest culture-clash rows.) If you can stand the gory detail, we were happily flirting away at 7:45 AM this morning in the kitchen, as I told him I had been arguing in the combox for his right not to be made out with. About 75% of what we say to each other is complete piffle, but it all seems to add up to happiness.

Okay, that's enough because I don't want to give you sunstroke. But I did want to give you an example of what one happy marriage looks like, two-and-a-half years after the wedding, so that you don't think you ought to settle for decent-but-boring just because so many 20-something men seem to be out-and-out so-and-sos. I could never be happy with decent-but-boring myself because I would treat such a man like crap. I am not proud of this fact, but it is a fact. As a married lady, I could only be happy and good with a human sparkler like B.A., and lo.

Today in the combox feel free to praise a good man, so that we all remember there are lots of them.

Chesterton Would Vomit

2011-10-15T09:17:00.006+01:00

More doom and gloom today because a reader sent me this link to a rival Auntie. Here is a snippet:

"Dear Margo: My daughter, 22, refuses to go out with men. Why? It seems that girls of her generation have created a situation where the young man summons the young woman to his apartment to "hook up." That's the date: no phone call, just a text message. Then, after the event, the girl wonders why he doesn't call. In addition, the young lady is expected to wax her privates and carry baby wipes in her purse so she can be fresh and ready for anything. This is because men like "young" girls.

If you recall our college days, gentlemen called you no later than Wednesday for a Saturday night date. They wined and dined you and walked you to the door for a goodnight kiss, if they were lucky. Sex came later, when the woman felt she was in a committed relationship. Young women today should all unite, stop waxing and "take back the night." — Sally"

Go read what Margo says and then what the daughter says and then come back to me so we can wring our hands and wail about the death of civilisation together. And you were wondering why so many Islamic immigrants are so in love with the idea of sharia law.

But I have a lot of quibbles with this letter. First of all, I wonder how old Sally is, because I am almost old enough to have a 22 year old daughter myself, and in MY college days, very few gentlemen called you no later than a Wednesday for a Saturday night date. This was because they didn't read The Rules, which says that is what men SHOULD do. They did, however, call because there was no texting yet. There was still such a concept as the "Saturday night date" although, really, once you had a boyfriend, you just hung out as much as possible.

Also, you got walked to your door only if you insisted on it. In my college days, college age men were generally clueless about how scary it is for women to be out on their own after dark, particularly from the bus stop. One night a male friend of mine thought it would be a really good joke to scare me as I made my way home from the bus stop. He met my Inner Banshee. Most men of my generation had no idea, NO IDEA, what it might be like to be a woman when they were in college.

Men and women of my college years, like men and women of my grandmother's generation's college years, made out like bandits. (My grandmother was born in 1904, and didn't go to college, but she told me she would catch her college-age sister "necking" on the sofa.) The "good-night kiss" was a first date, will he/won't he, will I/won't I, worry, although even when I was in high school, a few girls would make out with cute strangers on the dance floor.

Sex probably "came later" for the vast majority of undergrads who did not get drunk at parties to steel themselves to do what they wrongly thought the majority was doing. I'll give Sally that. We did not reside in the sexual world she describes, with its Brazilian waxes and baby wipes.

Now I'll talk about that. First of all, I don't think this world was created by the college girls of today. It was created by p*rnographers. It was created by HBO. It may have been created by the writers of "Sex and the City". It was created by the music industry, possibly inspired by Madonna Ciccone. (In the 1980s, children, that far-off decade in which you were born, female pop stars wore big baggy clothes. The only pop star who pranced around in underwear was Madonna Ciccone, and those of us who copied her made it look 80s instead of sexy. The very daring might wear a bra over her shirt, not just a bra. Boy, those were the days.) I spend the 1990s in Goth clubs, but I recall that most women wore jeans to class. Jeans and t-shirts and no make-up. Make-up was so high school.

Incidentally, Naomi Klein was an undergrad at the University of Toronto when I was, and the feminists of that era loathed Camille Paglia and pro-porn feminism. They were beginning to waffle on "sex work", but they were still generally against porn. In so far as they thought about having children at all, they were sure they would bring up their sons to respect women as partners and equals and all of that. I doubt any of us could have predicted that their sons would summon girls to their beds with a text-message or that our daughters would simply shave their private parts and go.

The shaving thing would have made us all, radical feminists and Catholics, throw up, and indeed I do feel a twinge of nausea because only prepubescent girls do not have pubic hair. I suppose, though, that porn actresses don't either, because I can't imagine where else men would get the idea that adult women don't have pubic hair. (John Ruskin was a different headcase altogether.)

And the text message summonses would also have made us throw up, as would the baby wipes. My feminist pals carried condoms in their bags to protect themselves from disease, not baby wipes to make themselves all fresh and nice for non-paying clients.

By the way, you'll notice that I am taking Sally's ideas about today at face value, which might be a mistake. If she wildly exaggerated the (snork snork) chivalry of the 1980s or 1990s, she might be exaggerating what her daughter told her. However, my heart broke at [high-profile American soi-disant Catholic college] when a professor reported the findings about Frosh Week, which was that incoming students, in their shyness and fear and who knows what, get absolutely smashed at parties so as to be able have sex with each other later. After that, it is easy to believe thousands of American girls are trotting around to men's bedrooms like absentminded hookers who forget to ask for payment.

Why do women act like this? I almost wrote "girls", but maybe that is part of the problem. Maybe we should hark back to the 1990s, when it was considered wrong to refer to any woman over 12 as "a girl." It could be that women think they are SUPPOSED to. But who told them this? And why do they believe it?

Meanwhile, I am absolutely sure this situation is not fault of children born in the late '80s and '90s. They were groomed for it--but by whom? Surely not just Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda?

Incidentally, one of the commentators scolds Margo about her advice that Sally's daughter should accept dates. So far nobody has asked Sally's daughter on a real date, so she is quite right to say no to everyone who just invites his over to their place. Personally, I would ask Sally's daughter why she picked the pseudonym "Virgin Whore". She is quite obviously not a whore, and refuses to act like one or be treated like one. If it is because she feels sexually frustrated, that's just mad because most adult women feel sexually frustrated at least of the time. Meanwhile, she's only 22. Most men are not old enough for marriage at 22. She should wait for a grown-up. A grown-up will ask her out for dinner.

Now that we are all depressed, I will tell you that the male university students I know do not summon women to their beds with text messages. They are Catholic and Polish and wish to be married. They have fiancees or they hope to find one soon. So there is hope for your generation, particularly if you are Polish.

The Overwhelming Question

2011-10-14T08:48:00.018+01:00

I got an email from a reader the other day. She was full of anxiety about a situation I am sure many (if not most) of you know all too well. After being set up by a friend with a guy who doesn't value chastity (except when it suits him), she had to explain that she doesn't want to have sex before marriage.

By the way, this is an example of how we have to fight like berserkers to stop "gay marriage" and other upheavals of the social order. Don't think, "Oh well. If we lose this battle, we can just go and form our own little Christian enclaves, and we'll be left alone." Ah ha ha. That isn't going to happen. And it shouldn't happen. For example, let's look at what the average English chap thought relationships with girls looked like in 1911 and what he thinks they look like now:

1910: 1. Find nice girl--(don't get sidetracked by bad girls), 2. marry nice girl, 3. sleep with nice girl, 4. eventually become proud papa.

2011: 1. have as much sex as you can have, with as many consenting partners as you can find, because this is the greatest thing in life; 2. when you feel like "getting serious", find nice girl; 3. sleep with nice girl to make sure monogamy will not stop the sex supply; 4. when you feel ready, move in with nice girl and split chores 70/30 although you said 50/50, but come on, she must be a neat freak; 5. when your friends have started getting married, ask nice girl to marry you and be rewarded by her shrieks of joy and gratitude; 6. have huge blow-out wedding once you can afford it; 7. have child once you can afford him/her/it.

The man in the 2011 scenario is not an evil bastard. He is just an ordinary bloke of his times. And therefore that is the kind of bloke we are dealing with most of the time. Even if he is a western Catholic, from a Catholic family, he probably unconsciously believes in the 2011 scenario because he gets messages that this is normal every day. This is why just scooting off into enclaves is no way to deal with outrageous social engineering. If you do that, then you've lost the war without a fight, and any Catholic who is willing to do so can never make a remark about "once dropped, never fired" French rifles ever again.

Back to my reader. My reader did not tell the guy up front that she did not want to have sex before marriage. When the Overwhelming Question came up, she tried to put it as vaguely as possible, so the guy thought she just wanted to be sure she could "trust him" first. And, actually, this was true, because the only man you can trust with your private parts is your husband, and then only after your husband, unless he has never had sex before, has been declared clean of sexually transmitted diseases. But this vagueness only delayed the crisis in which my reader had to tell him what he thought very bad news indeed. Hands up everyone who has gone through THAT!

Well, I will not go into in tooth-grinding details, but in short it was All About Him and he said that if he had known that right up front, he would have dumped her, but as he had grown to care for her, he was willing to put up with it and see where the relationship might go. However, he worried that he might grow to resent it.

FAIL. FAIL. FAIL. FAIL.

The A response to "I don't want to have sex until I am married" is "Oh my gosh. I totally respect that, and I hope you don't feel like I've been pressuring you."

The B response is "Of course you don't. If you were the kind of girl who did, we would not be together." (This is vaguely annoying, but I can hear most of the Catholic guys I know saying that.)

Everything else is F for Fail.

Because our grandparents and great-grandparents lost some serious battles in the 1960s, young women are told every freaking day that they are stealing from men if they do not have sex with them. It is positively schizoid: on the one hand "Your body, your choice", and on the other, "I feel so hurt that you will not have sex with me. I see this as you having power over me, and that's not equality. I associate this kind of behaviour with needy women, and am disappointed with you. Why are you being such a bitch about this?"

When it comes to you killing their kids when said kids still kind of look like tadpoles or space aliens, A-OK. When it comes to you explaining that sex is for marriage, AAAAAAAAAH! You're worse than Stalin.

I'm afraid the one cure for the horrible position Mr Resentment puts you in, concerning the sovereignty of your body, is to dump him before he dumps you or, worse, badgers you over the long months into having sex with him.

The pattern will look like this: MR WONDERFUL mr angry MR WONDERFUL mr angry MR WONDERFUL mr angry. He plays good cop/bad cop all by himself until you are half-insane. No man is worth that, so if he fails the Sex Talk, ditch him.

For lo, it is he, NOT YOU, who has failed the Sex Talk.

The only man on earth you are indebted to have sex with is your husband, if you have one, and even that is open to some negotiation under some circumstances. You are under no obligation to have sex with anyone else. Meanwhile, men are obliged BY GOD not to be bastards about it. Of course, if they are bastards about it, your tummy will know, and even if you don't want to listen to your tummy, your tummy will tell you to dump them. You should listen to your tummy because your tummy is your best friend and it is screaming "Red Alert! Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Red Alert!"

Society is broken, and although society is still very much down on out-and-out rape by violence, society does not give much of a damn about rape by Chinese-water-torture nagging and sighing and "What about MY needs?" And society has more-or-less told young people that they will die or go crazy if they do not have "regular sex", so society has created successive generations of men who think they have a right to it. Not just in marriage, and not even just in exchange for money to prostitutes, but for free, from the girl who likes them enough to make out.

G.K. Chesterton, who was around in 1911, would be appalled. He would be staggered that not only do men in great numbers debauch the kind of women they might (or should) marry, they make such women feel bad about refusing to be debauched. And not only that, instead of dismissing such men with the steely, noble gaze of a red-headed Chesterton heroine, women feel bad about saying no. We feel guilty. We wonder if we are being selfish.

Well, we aren't. We are being good. We are protecting ourselves, our hearts, our health, our future husband's health, our future children's health, our histories and our immortal souls. We are even protecting the sulky moron who feels personally attacked by our refusal to have sex with him. We are behaving like women have for thousands or years.

He, meanwhile, is also behaving like men have for thousands of years. He can dress up his routine with 21st century waffle about "rights" and "needs" and "equality", but as some rather pessimistic woman said long before the sexual revolution, "His job to try, and your job to say no."

I throw this in because of the men who actually squeak a pass from the Sex Talk Test. Lapsed Catholic men from Mediterranean cultures who have been around the block a few times and then meet a Nice Catholic Girl will sometimes try the old "voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir?" anyway and then get The Sex Talk. Then Mr Mediterranean Cultural Catholic says something like, "Well, I don't like it, but I respect that." Then they will either stick around and get married or they will scram.

Actually it is only on the topmost level of their consciousness they don't like it. Subconsciously they have moved the NCG from the "Foxy Lady" category to the "Potential Wife" category. And, if he sticks around, the NCG can expect a ring real soon because a man in love is still a man who wants to have sex. Duh.

***
An Amusing Word about Making Out: I get a lot of letters in which readers admit to making out with non-husbands. Because almost everyone not a priest, including Archie Comics, tells you that making out with non-husbands is fine and fun, gazillions of Catholics end up making out.

Actually, I think making out with non-husbands is risky, judgement-clouding, obviously sexually-charged behaviour. It certainly channels sexual frustration, but I believe it makes it worse, especially for men, if memory of masculine complaint serves, unless you are getting married next week.

You may say, "Oh come on, Seraphic, now you are sounding kind of old-ladyish. Making out with non-husbands is not such a big deal." Okay, then, so can, like, I make out with non-husbands?

You: (screams) No! Of course you can't! You're MARRIED!

Me: Okay, so you can make out with non-husbands because you are Single, and I can't because I'm Married?

You: Exactly.

Me: So because you are Single you can have highly charged sexual experiences with a man here and a man there, and because I am Married, I can't.

You: Um. Yes. Um.

Me: Where is this in Scripture and tradition again? Because, you know, I thought any deliberately chosen, highly-charged sexual experiences were just for Married people.

You: Um.

Me: Ah hah!

You: Don't go all Smug Married on us, or we'll come to Scotland and kill you.

Me: Just sayin'.

Update: National Catholic Singles Conference . Girlfriend has ideas quite similar to mine, except that she is a Theology of the Boditarian. Hat tip to Berenike, who sent me the link.

Power and Illusion

2011-10-13T10:28:00.006+01:00

There is a school of thought rampant in theology schools called "the hermeneutic of suspicion." The hermeneutic of suspicion is obsessed with power, although usually just who has it. It helps you to lose your love for and trust in Holy Scriptures and tradition because it demands that you read them thinking "And if this is so, who has the power?"

In my experience, theologians who worry so much about power and who has it are quite powerful themselves. Academia is about political alliances as much as it is about grades. The successful theology student is the theology student who is lucky enough to find professors he or she agrees with (and therefore doesn't threaten) and a thesis adviser who cares enough to get him or her through the whole awful process of getting a PhD and--if he or she is lucky and their professor-patrons have enough clout--a good teaching job. The power professors have over their job-hungry students is quite scary, and even scarier is that they do not notice it as they fulminate about "who has the power."

Catholic North America is full of intensely powerful academics who are afraid that the CDF is going to swoop down on them and take their power away. Thus, they think they are the powerless ones, even as they hold the careers of the next generation of Catholic theologians in their hands.*

Even without a professorship, priests have a lot of power. A lot. Possibly the best cinematic example of this I have seen recently is the scene in "Doubt" where the priest--who may or not be a child-abuser--demands of the hard-as-nails nun who believes he is if she has ever committed a mortal sin. She bursts into tears. "Yes, Father," she quavers. And that's not just a 1950s thing.

We are talked to about self-empowerment, and we hear the expression "power to the people", and we hear "fight the power", and we are told to discover our own power. Feminists, in recent decades, have talked about sexual power. In the 1970s, feminists were all about modest clothing that was comfortable and did not highlight secondary sexual characteristics. By the 1990s, however, feminists supported power-dressing and women using their sexuality to get what they want "in the boardroom AND in the bedroom."

The problem with sexual power, however, is that it is largely illusory.

I'm hammering out a philosophy about sexual power, and I think ultimately the winner in the whole power game is power itself.

Take, for example, two characters in my favourite novel, Turnip-Tops by Ethel Boileau (1926). (It is an odd favourite novel to have, but we do not choose our favourite novels: they choose us.) One character is an intensely intelligent, art-loving and fastidious Oxford student named Colin. The other is a middle-aged, married socialite named Arlene. She is beautiful and married and takes rather a shine to Colin, the son of her friend Alison, the narrator.

Now, who do you think has the power in their relationship? Is it the single young man, or is it the aging if beautiful married woman? We all know of course that the young have oodles of sexual power because they are so young and so attractive and so... and so... and... Um...

Actually, Arlene has a history, it turns out, of attracting earnest young men and then breaking their hearts for fun. Her husband is disgusted by her behaviour, but won't divorce her because "she has all the money" and the scandal would be enormous. So when the narrator discovers what is going on, she desperately figures out how to put a stop to the affair before Colin fails all his exams.

So it would seem that Arlene has the power, and why not? She has a husband at home, money and everything she could possibly want. Colin, on the other hand, is an intensely idealistic, unmarried man of 20 or so, and therefore a seething mass of hormones and unrequited desire. (And by the way, the love of an honest younger woman could mean squat to Colin. Yours truly has been dumped for ten-years-older women twice.) Colin is very flattered by Arlene's interest in him and his ideas, and I can just imagine him explaining his philosophy of life, as brainy young men like to do, as she nods, pretends to listen and brushes the hair out of her face with a perfectly painted fingernail.

And indeed poor old Colin suffers intensely indeed. His ideals are besmirched and he cannot believe the cruelty of women, etc. But--now that I am 40--I am left feeling even sorrier for Arlene, because it is now obvious to me that Arlene is bored of her life, which is why she is addicted to the kick of attracting young men and making them smile and then eventually cry. Arlene is a slave to her own sense of sexual power.

Now that I am even older than this fictional Arlene person, I feel very protective of the young and their illusions about their own sexual power. It blows my mind that there are undergrad girls who intentionally dress like tramps because they think they will get better grades if their lecturers are sexually attracted to them. How crestfallen would they be if they ever heard what professors and T.A.'s think about THAT.

The young are very beautiful, but they are not often very smart about sexual politics, which we tend to learn not from real life but from Hollywood. Pretty Woman, I regret to say because I enjoyed it, is a movie that did great evil, a complete and utter fairy tale which too many girls around the world took as a documentary, just as now others take Sex & the City as Gospel.

(This reminds me of a photo of myself at 20. I have beautiful, beautiful skin and big blue eyes and look as worldly-wise as your average bunny rabbit. All that kept me out of serious trouble for so long was Catholicism and the kindness of older people.)

I was thinking about all this yesterday because, in contrast to who I was at 20, I am now a middle-aged married lady with insane levels of confidence. (Unlike many women, when I look in the mirror I think I look thinner than I am.) Yesterday--I say this not to brag but to illustrate--I was out with girlfriends and as I walked through a snazzy bar in my quest for the loo--various faces turned to watch me. (When I was 20, I would not have noticed.)

The faces probably turned because, even when ironed flat as it currently is, I weirdly have more hair on my head than anyone else, but I felt very attractive and powerful all the same. People are, after all, very attracted to happy, confident people, no matter how far from the model-perfect beauty standard they are.

And then I was brought up short because I realized that I could become very quickly addicted to this feeling of power. And that would not make me very powerful at all, but merely a slave to power. And, then, bottom line, I would be in danger of hell.

This is not really an issue for you, my little Singles, since you are much more likely to be the exploited than the exploiters. (Honestly, and by the way deciding to remain chaste is in no way exploitation, whatever manipulative men may tell you.)File this away for later.

Mostly I suggest that right now you not put too much trust in your "sexual power." As the narrator of Turnip Tops concluded, that kind of power is a weapon that can break in your hand. Really, you should think about the good influence you might be having on the people around you in your determination to follow Christ and the bad influence you might be having when you fail.

*The Holy Spirit might have something to say about that, however, as I silently pondered in the studio of Radio Warszawa last week.

Auntie Seraphic & the Speaker's Acquaintance

2011-10-12T09:09:00.006+01:00

Dear Auntie Seraphic,

A few weeks ago, I a friend introduced me to an out-of-town guest. I was surprised to discover that this guest was an attractive single man about my age. I got flustered and while I didn’t do anything too embarrassing, I kind of got quiet & shy and didn’t let him see the best parts of me. However, my interest was sparked...something that (a friend observed) hasn’t happened for me in some time. I find myself wishing for an opportunity to get to know him better.

This guest is returning to town soon, to participate in a public forum. I am interested in the topic, as well as in the man, and so I am planning to go to the event. My question is: how do I go about saying hello and starting a conversation with him, without actually chasing after him?

I’m so not good at this - I despise any hint that I’m “throwing myself” at a man - but some friends have pointed out that you do have to let the guy know that you’re open to his attention. And one married female friend has encouraged me to let him know about a few things we have in common. Of course, after that the ball would be in his court.

No, he didn’t call me, email me, or friend me on Facebook. I realize he could be completely uninterested. But he’ll be back in town briefly, and then not again until who knows when. Would it be violating The Rules to show up to a public event where he will be and start a conversation with him? If not, how can I go about doing this?

Thanks for any practical tips you can give.

Speaker's Acquaintance

Dear Speaker's Acquaintance,

As he is coming to a public forum, there is no harm in you going up to him afterwards to say, "Hi, I'm [Speaker's Aquaintance]. We met at so-and-so's house. I really enjoyed your talk. Listen, if you're not doing anything afterwards, X, Y and I would be happy to take you out for a drink." Having been introduced to him by a mutual friend, you have the right to talk to him. In fact, you have to, to be polite.

Suggesting you and your friends whisk him away for a drink is just good hospitality to a someone who you know who has travelled to your town. It makes you seem friendly, not a man-chaser. If he is already booked, then smile and tell him you hope he enjoys his visit and then toddle off with a happy (if fake) smile on your face. Go out with X and Y and moan.

Notice X and Y have to be there. As a woman, you really can't just ask a male acquaintance, on the strength of one introduction, out for a drink. Keep in mind, though, that if X and Y are girls, he might like one of them better. So put some thought into whom you pick as wingmen, as the boys call such useful friends, or wingwomen.

Incidentally, it is also okay, at a day-long seminar, to plunk yourself down beside any speaker if you spot him munching his sandwich alone. That whole ritual of introducing a speaker means that, for the duration of the seminar, he is officially part of your social circle. And, once again, approaching a speaker who has been introduced to you during or just after the seminar or talk is just good hospitality. Speaking as a speaker, I love it when people come up to me to say "Hi." It makes me feel like a movie star.

One of the problems in society is that we have forgotten all the useful old rules that explained the difference between friendly hospitality and overly forward behaviour. For centuries, an adult woman could always speak to a man to whom she had been introduced by a mutual friend. But of course women could not (and still should not) go up to a complete stranger her age in a park or bar and start chatting away.

The Rules is very much obsessed with husband-hunting. I am more interested in men and women becoming good, chaste friends, friends who may or may not fall in love. The introductions of mutual friends and public lectures are ways in which women can meet new men in a respectable, stress-free way.

You know, I may start advising shy readers to intentionally go up to speakers after lectures to say "Hi, I really liked your lecture!" just to bang into their heads that men are not that scary, and not just marriage-possibilities, and there are indeed appropriate times to go up and talk to them.

I hope this is helpful.

Grace and peace,
Seraphic

Singles in Poland

2011-10-11T09:19:00.011+01:00

It is hard to believe I spent only four nights and four days in Poland because I saw so much and spoke to so many people. At night I collapsed into bed and fell more deeply asleep than I had for ages. I spent most of my waking moments trying to absorb everything I saw while listening to people tell me snippets of Polish history in whatever English they could command. My Polish is still of a very "Hello. Pleased to meet you. Is it here? Thank you very much" simplicity.

I had four interviews, and two of the interviewers were Single. I wish now that I had asked them about their Single lives as Poles; we had very long conversations when the interviews were done, but we spoke mostly about Poland, John Paul II, theology, history and politics. All my interviewers were very bright young women, well-travelled polyglots, but it did not occur to me to ask them about Single life in Poland, although on radio I was careful to qualify my opinions with the handy phrase "We in the West".

(I think I enjoyed saying "We in the West" just a little too much, but I could not get over the romance of being in Warsaw. When I was a child [which was during the Cold War], being interviewed by Catholic radio in Warsaw one day seemed less likely than one day travelling to the moon.)

Eventually I asked two older Single women how they thought Polish Single life might be uniquely different from Single life in the West, but before then I got some clues. First, I learned from the Homo Dei office that the very word "Single" (SING-la) is controversial in Catholic circles in Poland as it is synonymous with "swinging Singles" and is associated with "Sex & the City." And let me tell you, poppets, when it comes to Catholic media anywhere, "Sex & the City" is not something you want to be associated with.*

Second, before my radio interview and through a translator, I was grilled on my divorce-and-annulment. Well, perhaps I was not really grilled, but it felt like being grilled. My interviewer was a young, beautiful married Polish woman still in her twenties, but her face was stern.

Now, my head is 100% sympathetic with making sure the people to whom the Church entrusts a microphone to speak to the Church are orthodox and orthoprax. If anybody has to have her toes held to the fire while making an official declaration that her previous marriage was dissolved and declared null by the Most Holy Catholic and Roman Church, it is I. However, my heart doesn't like it that much. My heart wails, "Why don't you trust meeeeee?" It bleeds a little with bad memories, too. And feels for all the other people with annulments, keeping their heads down and their mouths shut, and for the flatly excommunicated Divorced-and-Remarried people.

In short, it probably sucks even more to be divorced in Catholic Poland than in North American Catholic circles. And, yes, that is not exactly Single, as my radio interviewer would be swift to point out. In fact, her next question was about whether I had written Anielskie Single before or after my annulment. Once again, my darlings, I thanked God I had applied for my annulment as soon as I possibly could, i.e. when I had my certificate of divorce in my trembling hands, thirteen years ago.

But at the same time, I acknowledge the right of Catholic newspapers and radio stations and employment tribunals and whoever else, to ascertain if a speaker has dodgy theology. It is horrible to be an orthodox Catholic being fed heterodoxy by trusted Catholic institutions, as I know all too well. Thus, I am in a different situation than other annulled people out there.

Yes, give me a hard time because I claim to write as a Catholic, but please be kind to the average annulled-marriage Catholic who went through the process in good faith (and probably much suffering) and came out the other side with enough of a whole soul to get married again. We all have a little scar, and it hurts when you poke it.

Third, from my interviewer's questions, I gleaned that there is a gender war between Polish men and Polish women. I am not sure exactly what this looks like, or if it is any different from the usual. It must be, because the Communists sent women out to work, and thus large numbers of Polish women did "men's jobs" long before large numbers of Canadian and American women did.

My very tentative guess is that Polish women were expected by the Communists to do two jobs, their man job and their womanly perfect-house-quiet-children-perfectly-cooked-pierogi job, while men struggled to find some sort of manhood balance in the face of such overwhelming superwomanhood. Before men could blame women's mens's-wage-earning on the Communists (while extolling housework-and-cooking as rebelliously Catholic), but there is no-one to blame for it now and even John Paul II said women earning man-sized money was okay.

I would like to stress, however, that I personally know almost squat about Poland and am just hazarding a guess based on conversations with Poles. Another tentative guess is that Polish men ignored what John Paul II said about not trusting all the values of the West and now read Playboy. I saw Polish Playboy for sale in a Warsaw railway station. I wonder if Hugh Hefner actually sold his soul to the devil in a personal transaction or whether it was all done on an unconscious level.

Fourth, a non-nun woman's theological career is likely to be even more curtailed in Poland than in Canada and the USA because the big teaching jobs go to priests, of whom there is still no lack in Poland. (N.B. Here in the U.K. my priest asked me to prepare something for a parish function this week. I honestly thought he meant a speech or writing of some kind. He meant sandwiches.)

But when I finally asked Single Polish women what made Single life in Poland different than in other countries, they were surprised and a bit stumped. The one thing that occurred to them was that it is more expensive and difficult to go on holiday as Single people. Tours are organized for married couples, so a Single person is out of place and has to pay more. I think by this they meant the "Single supplement", which I know well myself. The women I spoke to solved this problem by going on holiday together.

And that, poppets, is all I can tell you about being Single in Poland, so I invite Polish readers, both Poles-in-Poland and Polonia, to enlighten us in the combox today.

*Exception that proves the rule: America magazine.

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving!

2011-10-10T09:21:00.002+01:00

Normal blogging will commence soon. I have at least two articles and a whole lot of thank you notes to write!

Jestem w Warszawie

2011-10-06T21:42:00.003+01:00

O poppets! I am so tired! Up at 6 this morning in Krakow to take a train to Warsaw. So far I have had two print interviews and recorded a radio interview. I must say it is very exciting, however.

Krakow is very very beautiful, and Warsaw is enormous. The religious articles shop where Berenike (of Laodicea) said "Anielskie Single" would be has sold out of "Anielskie Single." Meanwhile the shop was very crowded; I have not been in a crowded religious articles shop before. Ah, Poland!

Now I must sleep.

The Anielskie Single Tour

2011-10-04T08:37:00.005+01:00

Poppets! We returned from Rome on Sunday, and tonight I leave for Krakow. I think the first thing I shall do when I get there--if shops are still open--is to buy a postcard for my youngest brother. He was with me at the never-to-be-forgotten Toronto Spoken Word event when a crazy Polish-Canadian poet got up and read a poem including the immortal verse:

First I lived in Krakow
And now I live
In a crack house.

You may laugh scornfully, but after going to Clara Blackwood's Syntactic Sunday event for years, that is one of the only verses that stuck in my head.

I am not sure of my schedule as yet, but I do know that I will be appearing on Radio Warsawa at NOON (Polish time) on Thursday, October 6 to talk about my book.

It's all very exciting. Don't forget that you can still buy my book in Canadian, American and Polish.

Kind Readers!

2011-09-24T09:52:00.003+01:00

Poppets, here am I, insanely busy as I clear all the decks before leaving for Rome. No, Hilary hasn't taken a turn for the worse! This time B.A. and I are going on holiday. As I write and travel and advise and generally amuse myself, he works hard all year long. So I am delighted that at last his holiday is here and that he can see Rome for himself.

Meanwhile, so many of you sounded so worried about the Innocent Traveller (below), that I thought I'd better double-check that the Guilty Traveller did not cling to her life after she cancelled dinner. I am happy to report that when she told him she was too busy to see him (quite true, incidentally), he backed off with a minimum of fuss.

The Innocent Traveller told me that she found your comments very supportive. She was still inclined to feel a little guilty and also to think that he wasn't as bad as everyone who heard about him thought. However, the very fact that so many of her acquaintance, and that we, were so horrified, made her think that maybe she was too close to the situation to see its implications for herself.

Once again I am impressed by the sagacity of the I.T., who is a lot brighter than I was at her age, let me tell you. There is a tendency in some women--encouraged no doubt by such films as Jerry McGuire--to shove their fingers in their ears when their family and friends warn her that a certain man is no good. These women waft on a cloud of "Only I understand him, and see the good in him, and that makes me special." Actually, it makes them--us--me at 21--rather dumb.

I cannot stress the importance of confiding in family and friends when you are in a confusing social situation, especially one involving handsome male near-strangers from abroad. Confiding in professionals, like a therapist or a random priest, is not necessarily the same thing, as I know firsthand.* Family and friends love you and they are not interested in giving handsome near-strangers the benefit of the doubt.

And now I must go. Although I can't promise anything for next week, keep an eye on this space in case I have an overwhelming inspiration. I will probably have some email access, thanks to our gracious hostess Hilary

*One day I will tell you this sad story. Pastoral FAIL. However, I suppose that disaster helped me become the Auntie Seraphic I am, so I shouldn't complain too much.

Auntie Seraphic & The Guilty Traveller

2011-09-21T08:14:00.008+01:00

When I get a letter late at night, I usually just write something like "Read your email! Will sleep on it and email you back in the morning." However, this email was "time-sensitive" and scared the stuffing out of me, as you will see. Thus, there are TWO letters.

Dear Auntie Seraphic,

I enjoyed reading your book and fantastic blog for the past several months. You’ve given so many girls wonderful and witty advice, and I’m hoping you can provide some insight on my predicament.

I went on vacation in Europe this summer. On the night before I left, I met an extremely charming, handsome British man – let’s call him “John.” We had a great conversation, during which he mentioned that he was planning a month-long cross-country trip to different parts of Canada and the United States. He said he was planning to stop in my city for a week or so. We met again the following morning for coffee, I went off to the airport, and then we emailed and talked often on the phone for the next month.

He arrived this week, and took me to a nice restaurant one evening. We had a great time – but two nights ago, we went to a bar and met up with his friend, who was drinking heavily. The friend – whom I had met very briefly the day before – made extremely vulgar and mortifying remarks at the top of his lungs, embarrassed our entire table, and finished off the evening by making a completely inappropriate pass at me.

Worse yet, during the course of the friend’s drunken ramblings, some unpleasant revelations about John came to light. I was shocked to discover that (1) John planned this trip specifically to see me, not months in advance as he alluded to in our earlier conversations. (2) After four days, he has spent almost his entire budget for a month long trip. He is unemployed, but [made a very expensive and trivial purchase] using his student loan money. (3) He’s spending the entire month here in a hostel and has no plans (or money) to go elsewhere.

Seraphic, I have no idea what to do. He is very nice and I do enjoy talking to him, but knowing that he made this trip specifically to see me, when he can’t afford it, makes me really uncomfortable. We haven’t even kissed yet! I’ve seen him one time since the debacle with his friend, and even though he apologized for his friend’s behavior, our conversation was still a little awkward. I’m no longer sure if I want to date him – and now that I’ve spent more time with him, I don’t think things would work out in the long run (though I do wonder if my sudden change of heart is just because I’ve never had a boyfriend before – I’m 23 – and I’m just feeling nervous).

In any case, he’s here for three more weeks! I feel incredibly guilty, and I don’t want to hurt his feelings, but I think it would be best if we just remained friends for the time being. I’m also trying to balance a demanding full time job with a full load of graduate courses, so I don’t want to see him more than a couple of times a week – and in friendship mode at that. He wants to cook me dinner at my apartment tomorrow, and I worry that I’m leading him on.

The entire situation is stressing me out. I would be extremely appreciative of any advice you have to offer, because I have no idea how to get myself out of this situation.

The Guilty Traveller

Letter 1

Dear INNOCENT Traveller,

Usually when I read new letters this close to midnight, I say "It's late, my brain is fried, but I got your letter, and I'll email you in the morning."

I think I should say that again because this is a very tricky situation, and I need fresh brains. However, I will say tonight that YOU ARE NOT LEADING HIM ON.

NONE of this is your fault. First of all, it looks like Mr British lied to you. He said he had planned this trip, but actually he made it up on the spot. Second, he has a really lousy friend that he inflicted on you, too. Why is this awful guy the British guy's friend, I wonder, and what kind of guy makes a drunken pass at the girl his friend came from Britain to see? Third, this guy sound incredibly impractical and imprudent, considering his sending habits and financial predicament. He's a walking accident. He was before he met you, and he is now. For heaven's sake, DO NOT think you have any responsibility to rescue him. You don't. In fact, given your age and lack of experience, you must not.

I don't think it is a good idea for him to be in your apartment. Hurriedly arrange something with family or a female friend, and tell him you have to cancel dinner. (Then go out to your family or friend, or have them over to do whatever.) Meanwhile, if you have a good relationship with your dad or with an older brother, I want you to call him ASAP and tell him EVERYTHING you told me. You may need serious, old-fashioned back-up to get out of this situation.

But you never have to see "John" again if you don't want to. Honestly. And you certainly don't have to see him more than once or twice a week if you DO decide you want to keep the friendship going. (Why you would, since he is a totally irresponsible-sounding, unemployed British guy, is a question that springs to my mind.)

I'll write more in the morning. Bottom line: call father (if applicable), brother or best male friend and tell him about this guy. See what he says. If you lack any male relations or friends, call up your mother and tell her. Tell her how uncomfortable you feel. Honey, I really do think you need back-up. This is a weird situation, totally not of your own making, and you need to establish some serious boundaries, if not brick walls.

This is not a cute, boy-girl, 1950s-style dating situation. This is an unemployed liar from a foreign country (one which is a lot different from the tourist brochures, believe me) on a holiday he can't afford, and he is clearly not rooted in reality. Be careful and canny.

Grace and peace,
Seraphic

Letter 2

Dear Innocent Traveller,

It's morning and my brain is both rested and buzzing with caffeine. I stick with what I said yesterday, and in fact I am even more adamant that you not let this young man into your apartment. Even if you just text or email him to say "Can't do dinner tonight. Won't be home", that is enough. This is a man with proven poor judgement, who is proven to be irresponsible. If I were your mother, I'd be on my way. I don't think you should be alone with him in your apartment.

There are so many alarm bells ringing from your email! "Charming" and "handsome" (and "British") mean absolutely nothing when the man in question lies to you, subjects you to the bad behaviour of a friend, HAS friends like that in the first place, behaves so irresponsibly with money, and makes you feel uncomfortable.

The problem with a guy--a near-stranger--coming to your place to make you dinner is that (A) now you are alone with him behind closed doors, (B) you could easily be made to feel "indebted" to him because he has done this "nice thing", (C) it is a typical seduction ploy.

You mentioned being 23, and the problem with being 23 is that a 23 year old has less confidence than a 33 year old in telling Mr Wrong to beat it. (Your feelings of nervousness are not immaturity but darned good sense.) This is why I have suggested you tell family and friends (especially male) about this situation. If you were 33, you would not feel guilty. You would feel outraged.

Please let me know what happens and how you are because I am actually worried. I bounced the story off my British husband for a "British guy's eye view," and he said, "He sounds crazy!"

And, once again, I repeat: This is not your fault. He told you a lie. He made the decision to come to your town. He chose to spend his money foolishly. He chooses to stay in a hostel. Hopefully when his money runs out, he will go straight back to Britain. This is the best case scenario, so for heaven's sake do not give him any money or other material support. Do not even see him if you do not want to see him.

I hope this is helpful.

Grace and peace,
Seraphic

Result: The Innocent Traveller cancelled dinner and then called up her aunt and a male friend, who reacted as I did. She felt a great weight of guilt fall from her shoulders. Thank heaven!

By the way, this girl really did not do anything wrong. She had some hopes for the relationship which were dashed: that's it. As soon as there was evidence this man was not who she was led to believe he was, she didn't ignore it. She worried about it and then asked for help. Thus, I am full of admiration. The truly guilty traveller is not rooted in reality, but my reader is. Good!

A Break from Blogging

2011-09-14T23:15:00.001+01:00

I'll be recharging my writing batteries for a bit. If there's an emergency, send me an email!

Why Buy the Cow?

2011-09-14T10:24:00.007+01:00

A link to this amusing article appeared in my Facebook page today.

In short, after living with a man for three years, a woman wonders why her boyfriend is reluctant to marry her. He says he is not ready, which, come to think of it, is one of the few male euphemisms. It's male-speak for "I'm scared of marriage. Since I am having regular sex, meals and company watching TV, why do I need to get married?" "I'm not ready" is girly enough to make girls sympathetic, but not as girly as "I'm scared."

Anyway, the therapist consulted in the case was not impressed by the woman's "Decide in a year, or I'll split" ultimatum. She seems to advocate more of a "This is what I'd like. What would you like?" approach. It seems very touchy-feely, as if men thought and expressed themselves just like women.

Girlfriend: Wow! That is a nice cardigan.

Boyfriend: Do you like it? I got it on sale.

Girlfriend: It's great! Now, listen, I've been thinking, and you are the kind of guy I'd like to marry.

Boyfriend: Wow. That's a nice thing to say. I'm truly flattered.

Girlfriend: What do you think of marriage?

Boyfriend: Well, of course I have always dreamed of my wedding day. I love my parents' wedding photos although, don't tell my dad, but I am so not wearing his wedding tux. The thing is, oh my gosh, I hope you're not offended, I'm so scared of being stuck in a Bobby Breadwinner role, you know? And I'm also scared my wife would get too fat or too skinny and old. I mean, I know that happens to everyone, but when I hear the word "marriage", that's what I think of. A too fat or too skinny old woman. Who shouts. ARGH! I hate it when women shout. And what if she took off and sued me for everything I ever earned for the rest of my life? EEE! OMG, I know this guy it happened to. What a NIGHTMARE!

Girlfriend: I don't shout. And I'm not like that.

Boyfriend: OMG, I never meant YOU! I meant in general. Marriage! Eek! Shudder!

Girlfriend: Um...So when do you think you will stop feeling that way?

Boyfriend: I have no idea! You know? AAAH! I forgot! I so totally have to text Stephen now about our BFF pedicure date.

Amusingly, the woman's live-in boyfriend has adjusted his ideas now that the deadline approaches and is speaking more positively about marriage. Of course, I have no idea what their ultimatum conversation was like, but I like to imagine it was something like this:

Girlfriend: So have you thought any more about us getting married?

Boyfriend: (thinks) Eek! (says) Oh gosh, can we have this conversation later?

The Girlfriend looks sad.

Boyfriend (thinks) Darn. Better throw her a bone. (says) No, wait. I can see it's important to you. Well, I have, and it's the same thing. I just don't feel ready yet.

Girlfriend: After three years with me, you don't feel ready?

Boyfriend: (thinks) Ready, hell. I'm terrified. (says) You know with work and stuff....

Girlfriend: Right. Time for a deadline. I'm tired of just being your girlfriend. It's tired. It's old news. Frankly, it's boring, not knowing if we're ever going to move ahead, have a family and create a permanent life together. I don't want to be just a roommate with benefits, I want to be your wife. So you have a year to make up your mind, bucko, or I'm out of here.

Boyfriend (thinks): Uh oh. Uh oh. Uh oh. She's serious. Oh noooooooo! Give up the goodies or just get married? Give up the goodies or just get married? Give up--Oh my God. I actually love this woman. Maybe I should man up. Maybe we should get married.

You all know, of course, that I am very DOWN on premarital cohabitation, especially for Catholics who are supposed to know better and set a good example. But I am also down on three-year non-marital, exclusive dating relationships for working adults. I mean, three years??? One year of steady dating should be plenty to figure out if marriage is the plan.