Befriending Families

I've written before about how migratory Americans and Canadians are (and always have been) compared to Europeans until very recently. We seem to have this feeling that we can just pick up and leave Chicago for New York or Toronto for Montreal, and everything will be fine. However, the older we get, the more difficult it is for many of us to make friends. Real friends, that is. Naturally we have colleagues at work, but those don't always turn into friends.  (The test is whether you still get together after you have left the job.)

The Poles, incidentally, have at least two words for friends, differentiating between best friends and everyone else. I admire their hard-headed ability to reserve przyjaciel (m.)/przyjaciólka (f.) for the few and apply kolega/koleżanka to the many. I would not be surprised if there were further gradations, e.g. kumpel/kumpelka. I bet there are further gradations in Germany, too. Central Europeans are simultaneously blunt and sentimental. How they survive social life in the UK, having to cope with the Anglo-Saxon conversational stream of polite nothings, is a question.

Anyway, most of the people we native English-speakers call our friends are really just our colleagues or our acquaintances, and there is nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is to take our friends, first class (przyjaciel/przyjacióka class), for granted, and to assume we can make new friends in a new town right away.

Since I migrated to Scotland, I have made two attempts to have a social life outside of my husband's circle of friends and acquaintances. There was my writing circle, in which virulent anti-Catholics unintentionally made me extremely uncomfortable, so I quit, and there is now my Polish class. Besides Polish class, I have church, writing, travel and occasional forays into the Edinburgh art scene. Thus, I feel a bit isolated. At least there are more under-50 women at church now. There were very few when I arrived.

My hometown friend Lily suggested that I go to a local Novus Ordo Mass to meet more women, but I am such a Usus Antiquor junkie, I really didn't think I could bear that. Also, Catholic women my age (39++) tend to have complete social circles already. Women who don't move from town to town settle in among their relations, their grade school friends, their high school friends or their university friends, get married or get a partner, and divide most of their time between their place of work and their home. Many have children who take almost all the emotional energy the women have to give. And happy the partnered woman who does not spend 7 out of 7 nights keeping her man company in front of the telly.

After some dithering and feeling sorry for myself, I decided that I would stay put and see who God sent, and every once in a while God sends the parish somebody new and disposed to find new friends.Thank heavens for coffee hour. Every parish should have coffee hour, so it doesn't have to dread one day hearing, "I was a stranger, and you didn't welcome Me."

And those six paragraphs lead to my advice to the Single woman who wants to befriend families: give up your dream of meeting families and accept the friends God sees fit to send you. The truth is, I cannot imagine why a busy family with small children would go out of their way to befriend complete strangers, unless the parents of the family were unusually gregarious souls. Couples with children are emotionally stretched, sometimes to the breaking point, and if a mother of babies has any time to herself, she wants it for herself, or for girl-time with old friends.

I could be wrong, of course. But I honestly don't think a married woman with kids is going to bond with a new single woman just because the single woman seems to like her kids. There has to be something else to bond over. If the married woman is a keen tennis-player, and the new single woman is also a keen tennis-player, then that would be something, especially if the married woman has been stuck for some time for someone with whom to play tennis. However, only in chatting with a married woman can Single you find out if you have such interests in common, so by all means strike up conversations with married women with children after Mass or wherever else.

Birds of a feather flock together. With one hometown exception, my friends with children were my friends before they had their children. I have babysat for only two young families because only two young families here know me well enough to ask. Most of the people I socialize with are childless, like me. Most of them are Single. Most were not born in Edinburgh. We share the same interests and the same basic lifestyle. Orphaned by geography, I turn to two older friends for motherly advice, and childless by accident, I mother younger friends when called upon to do so. And maybe sometimes when not. And if sometimes I feel isolated and lonely, that's the price most migrants pay for migration.

Single Friends and Stability

I answered an email today that made me think about friendships. I have a number of friends who are Single and probably always will be Single. And this means they have a lot of time for their friends, and their friends--particularly the Single or childless ones--have a lot of time for them.

Singles often worry about not being a priority in other people's lives--although presumably they rank somewhere in the affections of their family members--but I can tell you that my Single friends are top priority with me. (Well, top after B.A.) This is probably because I don't have children, but even if I did have children, I would certainly want adult friends to talk to after a long day or week of shrieking and baby talk.

The North American reluctance to have friends much younger or much older than oneself strikes me as foolish and shortsighted. I did not realize now normative it was for me until I spent a summer in Germany and discovered that 20 year old boys were happy to hang out with 30-something me. I was happy but troubled enough to talk it over with a fellow foreign student, a priest, and he told me that's how Europeans are. And how awesome is that?

B.A. and I recently had two Canadian Trid girls to stay, and they were astonished that our set acted as if we were all the same age. That said, we were all of us over 23. It's not like there were any children around, or teenagers who should not have been downing the Tesco plonk we guzzle by the bottle or listening to our endless thoughts on the O'Brien scandal.

What gives the multi-generational set stability are the Elders, as we over-39s have been for convenience called. We Elders have deep, deep roots in the community, and although we go on holiday, we come back to our homes.  The younger members, especially the foreign students, leave Edinburgh on holiday or permanently, but they eventually come back, if only for a visit. Foreign students who return to their old haunts (e.g. Toronto) sometimes discover that everything has changed and their old friends have dispersed and moved on, or have no time for them. This isn't likely to happen with us Elders, for we are old and stable. Our sentimental young can fly free confident in the knowledge that as long as the Elders live, we will be up for a drink and a chat.

As a thirty-something Single, I found myself with a lot of twenty-something Single friends. I put this down to the fact that I was were twenty-something Singles are, i.e. grad school, and that we had the same lifestyle: Catholic, no kids, feverishly studying, longing to party, wondering where The One was. But, of course, I expected and hoped my twenty-something friends would get married because that's what they wanted to do. My surprise when I got engaged (age 37) before some of them did! And then I ran off to the UK. How very unstable and unreliable of me. Fortunately, I had a reputation for mad pranks and surprising behaviour. My friend Lily's summation of B.A. was, "I'm so thankful. I was worried he'd be too normal."

But now I am definitely old and stable and set in my ways, and even if I did have a baby, the walls of the Historical House are super-thick, so he or she could wail away comfortably in his or her room while the rest of us guzzled Tesco plonk in the dining-room.

What I am saying here is that if you are a twenty-five year old Single, of course most of your friends are going to get married and go. And therefore you must not put all your friendship eggs in the youth basket. You should go out of your way to be friendly to interesting and interested older married couples whose children have flown the nest, or to middle-aged couples who haven't had children, or to older Singles who love being Single but are also sociable. It is especially helpful, I think, to make friends with Catholic Singles who honestly enjoy their Catholic Single way of life and live it to the hilt.

You can also set down roots yourself as you grow older, and become a sort of bird house for younger Singles to visit occasionally as they flit about in their unstable, adventurous, youthful way. I adore the younger members of my set, but I am rooted in reality and realize that they have a lot of flitting to do before they settle down, and they are very likely to settle somewhere else. This is not as painful for me (age 39++) as it might be for you, not only because I have B.A. (a very big because), but because I know I have older friends who simply aren't going anywhere. Well, the grave, I suppose, but there's no need to worry about that quite yet.

Guarding Your Heart

I found an email this morning asking for practical tips on how to guard your hearts. Guarding one's heart, this reader suggests, is really hard when guys seem to show some cautious interest and then do not follow up.

That sounded very familiar to me because I come from one of those towns where Cautious seems to be every man's middle name. I know a Latina who got very depressed after moving to my hometown in Canada because men didn't seem to notice her anymore, and of course I am always charmed in Italy when seventeen year old boys roll their eyes at me and say "Bellissima!"  Complete nonsense, but flattering nonsense, especially when you're 39+.

Anyway, my heart-guarding advice can be divided into having a good defense and a good offense.

The good defense is 1. being rooted in reality. This means constantly telling yourself the truth about some guy you like, even (especially) if that truth is just that you don't even know him. It is just so easy to fixate on a handsome face and make up a story to go along with it. Not that I was fixated on him, but my shock when I first heard David Beckham's voice---!

Sad to say, the only proof that a guy is that into you is that he figures out a way to spend a lot of time with you in person, and not for free therapy, either. If all he wants to do on what you thought was a coffee date is talk about your beautiful best friend, then he's not into you. And why bother thinking all day long about a man who would prefer your friend to you, anyway?

If you really cannot stop yourself from thinking obsessively about some guy, then I recommend that you give him a fake name and write outrageously adventurous or romantic stories about him. This is better than mooning about for it is productive and will underscore the difference between fact and fiction.

Meanwhile 2. don't tell people your secrets, m'kay? Don't try to speed up intimacy (by which I mean a deep, soulful, meeting of hearts) by telling new friends or crush objects or your date The Whole Truth About You, Warts and All.  Your secrets and deepest feelings are precious, and there will be emotional payback if you share them with the wrong people or even with the right people too soon. You should approach all first and second dates as if your happiness depended on projecting that you are happy and confident and your life is practically perfect and no man has ever done you wrong, and (if you are asked about him) your ex-boyfriend was a great guy; you just had different goals.

The good offense is 1. light flirtation. Light flirtation means acting and speaking as if you are a fun, confident person who isn't afraid of men, thinks they are awesome and loves a good joke.

I belong firmly in the Don't Chase Men School of Thought, but this doesn't mean I don't belong to the Reel Him In School. Actually, when you think about it, there is the Hunting Him Down School--for "modern women"--and the Fishing School--for "trads."

I recommend the Fishing School. You go where the fish are, wearing fishing lure colours, sit quietly and stealthily, and when a fish comes slouching along and says "Hey," you reel him in with your smile, your sense of humour, and your other-centeredness. Other-centeredness means that when you talk to somebody, you are 100% conscious of your audience and the effect your conversation is having on him. It means noticing, for example, that he is wearing a sharp tie, and saying, "Hey, sharp tie!"  You cannot sit like a lump; now is the time to shine. Fake it till you make it.

The late Queen Mother was apparently an absolute genius at being able to talk to everyone in a crowded room while giving each and every one the impression that he was the one she had come to see. This quality is called charm, and I think it a very useful quality to have.

Now, it was pointed out to me in my last year of Singleness that I only ever flirted with people that I was obviously never going to go out with, e.g. my female friends and elderly Irish priests. Flirtation when you are Single is like a high-wire act without a net, but I suppose one needs to be bold--and to pretend we don't care what happens if we tell the guy we've had a crush on for six months that he has beautiful eyes. (For the record, I think that is okay as long as you don't contact him afterwards. By the way, if his friend should afterwards sneakily ask you what you think of him, say you think he is a great guy--"Why do you ask?")

Meanwhile, once you have chatted lightly and brightly with your fish, you must let him go and go on your way, forgetting all about him until he swims into view again. Easier said than done, I know. If it's any comfort, this gets easier with practice and age. Practice on the guy behind the counter at Starbucks.

Guarding your heart does not mean looking and acting like an icicle. It means staying rooted in reality and dealing with men as they are and not as who you would like them, or fear them, to be. It means not filling your head with stuff you make up but with facts. It means not forcing deep, soulful conversations or telling your secrets to the wrong people or too soon. Paradoxically, it also means unleashing your inner Scarlett O'Hara--talking to men as if they are delightful, amusing people whom you are lucky to know but don't take too seriously. In short, project happiness and confidence, even if you have to fake it, which we all do at least some of the time. People like happy, confident people.

And don't call them. Let them call you. If they don't call you, forget them. Men generally show what they want to do by doing it. Simples.

We are not Ivory Soap

From yesterday's combox:

How much influence do you think sexual sin has on the personal history of a woman? Obviously God can redeem and call anyone to anything (Mary Magdalene, for example), but do you think that women who have had some experience of un-chastity, even if not the sexual act itself, are far less likely to find themselves being called to religious life? Maybe because they would prefer to be married and experience sexuality that way, or because they no longer feel free to give themselves to God in a consecrated way? (Leaving aside canonical issues, of course.)

It seems worth discussing in this culture where very few remain completely pure until/ through adulthood.


***

Ah, the overwhelming issue of sexual sin. Well, as I understand it, most men at least when they are teenagers have quite a problem with what some confessors treat as a not-so-serious sin for pastoral reasons but which the catechism says is a serious sin. Many (at least when they are teenagers) also deliberately dwell on sexual thoughts instead of allowing them to flit through their teeming brains. And yet no-one ever says that these men are necessarily not called to the priesthood or religious life. Some men (and I know at least one) give up a life of wine, women and song for the life of men religious). St. Augustine, St. Ignatius of Loyola and Thomas Merton were all unwed fathers. (In the case of the third, this fact was too much for the Franciscans, but the Trappists found it no bar. NB It is believed the baby and mother were killed in the London Blitz.)

For the past 15 or 16 years I have resisted and decried the notion that men and women can be pure in the same sense as a bar of Ivory soap. Whereas the whole notion of spotless purity was perhaps important psychologically in the past, and roused chivalrous feelings of protection towards children, virgins and "nice women", I think its day is mostly done except in the case of Our Lady, who was preserved from all sin and perhaps other human experiences too by an extraordinary and arguably never-repeated gift from God. (As for children, everyone in my fifth grade class deserved protection from sexual exploitation, but I wouldn't call them "spotlessly pure" as a goodly number spent recess french-kissing each other behind the school.)

It simply is impossible to talk about the purity of women as if women were white wedding dresses that can be stained, uglified, cheapened and heaven knows what by sexual experiences. We aren't. Sexuality is a lot more complicated than a gravy stain, and women (like men) are not things but people. We derive our value not from our lack of sexual feelings or experiences but from our createdness by the Creator, especially in the two past thousand years because of our redemption by the Redeemer. The Father considered us worth the life and death of His Son, but this has nothing to do with our merits. It has entirely to do with the mysterious love of God for His creatures.

There is no Scriptural evidence that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute, other than that she was inflicted by demons, which suggests to me that she was left unprotected by her family and then, yes, prostitution probably would have been the only way she could have survived. If so, Mary Magdalene was a victim of one of the seriously unjust systems that Christ came to overturn. One might argue that since the sexual revolution, young people are also victims of an unjust system, one which shoves harmful sexual imagery and philosophy at them constantly: in magazines, billboards, television, music, the internet and even in doctors' waiting rooms and at school. Mary Magdalene did not define her life by how well she coped with the system, but by Christ. So should we.

So what does this mean in terms of religious life for women? Well, I was turned down sight unseen by the Tennessee Dominicans, bless them, because 1. I had had an annulment (and therefore had been married) AND because 2. I was 35. It wasn't just that I had been married. It was that I had been married AND was 35. If I had been 35 and never-married, they might have pondered longer. Or if I had just got my annulment and was therefore 28, they might have pondered longer. But actually I was a mess when I was 28, and it would never have occurred to me to join the T.D.s

I'm glad, too, because although I loved growing up with women--Brownies, Girl Guides, Pathfinders, ballet class, women's ice hockey, all-girls school--I enjoy the company of men. A lot. And not just as pals. Nooo. Since I was seven or so, I have been in a state of at least serious crush almost constantly. And the older I get, the more I like men. The attractive ones who also have good characters, anyway. It would be a real wrench to learn to think and speak and behave like a religious sister, which is no doubt why no-one who knows me well has ever suggested I would make a good one.

I can't pinpoint a particular Rubicon that I crossed that made me unfit for religious life. An examination of historical circumstances shows that my parents never praised religious life for women, that not a single teacher, including nuns, ever tried to interest me in religious life until my very last day at school, that between the ages of 6 and 34 I never met a nun whom I thought was the bees' knees*, that the episode in my school's order's foundress' (Mary Ward's) life that impressed me most was that a whole sloo of eligible Catholic bachelors wanted to get engaged to her before she was 12. Me, I could not get a date to the Spring Fling in Grade 9. Boo.

Meanwhile, the most romantic place in the entire world for me was not a convent of any description but the choir stalls of the local Cathedral, for there were the best-trained teenage Catholic Tenors, Baritones and Basses in the archdiocese, and I generally had a crush on one of them. In hindsight this suggests the deepest desire of my heart was to marry a Catholic Tenor, Baritone or Bass from some choir stall somewhere, which is what in 2009 I did.

I can see that developing habits of inchastity may make it difficult to quit being unchaste, but as a matter of fact throughout the ages thousands of women have gone into the desert or into convents to do just that. I am not sure the current structures of religious life support that kind of thing these days, but I'm not a Vocations Director, so who knows?

What I think suggests that a woman has a calling to religious life is not an "unspotted past" (if such a thing is possible for the vast majority of adult women--I mean, where does the spotting start? Kissing games at 12? Fantasies about boy bands at 13? Dancing dangerously too close to your principal crush object to "Stairway to Heaven" at 17? A grope-fest gone out of control with a "fiance" at 22? ) but a real interest in religious life and a real admiration for concrete, real-life women religious. For me it's not enough that St Teresa of Avila and Edith Stein were Carmelite nuns. I'd want to meet and admire a living Carmelite nun before I pondered her way of life for a second.

Frankly, I don't think we should define our lives by our sins, or allow anyone else to define our lives that way. And I don't think we should allow our sins to determine our history. We should define our lives and make our decisions by love. Not by sin. Not by the sorry stream of tatty decisions and experiences we dump on a priest and at the foot of the Cross in the confessional. By love.

We are far less likely to find ourselves called to religious life for the same reason German women in 1919 were far less likely to find themselves called to married life: historical circumstances beyond our control. In the case of the German women (Frenchwomen, Englishwomen, et alia), the men of their generation had been slaughtered on the battlefields of the First World War. In the case of the women of my generation, the upheaval immediately preceding, during and following the Second Vatican Council almost completely destroyed the traditional life of women religious. I do not know of a single Canadian woman my own age who became a nun although two of the boys I knew from local boys' schools became priests.

The situation of women's orders has improved, though, enough to inspire silly Seraphic to call up the Tennessee Dominicans, and to inspire two of the most wonderful women I know to join the Benedictines at Ryde. If a woman is really fascinated by religious life, particularly the historical Rule of a particular religious order, then I suggest she talk to a good priest about it, no matter what her past sins have been.

*When I was 5 or 6, I thought Sister Mary Anthony, IBVM was the bees' knees. When she retired as principal of my elementary school, I cried and cried. I was inconsolable. Possibly I was not just crying for the loss of Sister Mary Anthony but prophetically for the historical circumstances that made it unlikely that a nun would ever be principal of that school again.

Update: My eye just fell upon the idea of wanting to experience sexuality in a married way. Eek. Whereas it is absolutely good and normal to want to reserve sexual acts to marriage, it is not good to get married for "an experience." Marriage is not an experience but a way of life. It certainly has more stability and trust (or SHOULD!) than a non-married relationship in which sexual acts feature, but it is not a infinite font of exciting experiences. Sexuality in the broader sense is who you are as a woman and how you, as a woman, interact with men and the idea of men. In itself it is good, but of course as a created thing it has also affected by the Fall.

Update 2: Note that I am talking about past sins. It is hard to read God's writing at all when you are in a sinful state, and you can't assume God is going to grab you by the shoulder and shout "Hey, you!" He might, but He might not.

Imaginary Vibes?

I got a great email today, which can be summed up as "Are these vibes? Am I just making it all up? How do make myself stop making stuff up?"

What was brilliant about this email was that it was evidence of a woman, one rather like me as I began to read the philosophy of Bernard Lonergan, S.J., slowly realizing that her thought processes might not be rooted in reality but in wishful thinking.

Is there any adventure more thrilling and important than the great hacking through mental fog towards understanding things and people as they really are and not just as we would like them to be? Is there any battler nobler than the great clash between Intellect and Will, in which Will, like an unruly dog, must be brought into proper submission and yet friendship with the Intellect?

Well, I suppose Virtue vs Sin is even more thrilling, important and noble, but personally I want season tickets to Intellect vs Will.

As far as I know, I am the only Lonerganian in the world to consistently apply Lonergan's thought to dating. You should see my Lonerganian paper on gas-lighting and emotional abuse. I got an A + from Robert M. Doran, SJ, people!!!

Anyway, my correspondent cited a number of things which made her believe in the existence of vibes between her and men around. They included glances and group invites and such other things that, frankly, suggest that my correspondent thinks men are as subtle as shy women.

In general, men are not as subtle as shy women. When a man is interested in a woman he is obvious about it, and even if the woman is oblivious (because, for example, she is busily measuring the vibes between her and some completely uninterested guy), he is still obvious to onlookers.

But the first thing we have all got to understand is that unless we are very pretty or very charismatic most men are not going to fall in love with us. You know your friend, the one that multiple guys are always in love with? Most of us are not like her. No. Most of us are The Friend of Beautiful. But that is okay because there are something like 3 billion men in the world, and even if we appeal only to 0.001% of them, that is still 3 million men knocking themselves out to bring us a coffee.

(Jeepers! Can that be right? Never believe any number I put up without testing it, girls, because I have dyslexia of the number, I really do.)

So do not be down at heart about being The Friend. Be happy and chipper and agree with Single male friends when they growl that picking up women "is all a numbers game." God has a plan, of course, but I don't see any harm in going to respectable places where you may meet new people. Look at me, exposing my sunny personality every day to hundreds of people on the internet. (Um, not that married I am looking.)

HOWEVER when you meet these new people you must think in terms of friendship, not of courtship, because there is a strong possibility that none of them will belong to the Golden Three Million and you do not want to make an ass of yourself.

If some guy belongs to the Golden Three Million, he will eventually try to bring this to your attention. There is no need for you to sift through his every word and glance. He will do the following:

He will consistently come up to you at gatherings and start conversations.

He will not go away at once when another guy comes up to speak to you. He will linger about. He may look faintly annoyed or distressed that you are speaking to another guy.

He will give you things. Not big things, I hope, but small things that cost very little money, e.g. his jacket because you look cold, his pen because you might need it, a coffee from the coffee table, a glass of wine from the buffet table.

He will ask for your phone number. He will use it.

He might blush. I would love to write that only good men can blush for no discernable reason (lots of men good and bad go red with anger), but I don't know if this is true. But at any rate, it is a sign of sincere interest.

He will get you alone in some sneaky way. He might ask you out to something. If it is a group thing, he will plot in advance how to get you alone eventually.

He will offer to walk you all the way home, without you asking, before sunset. After sunset, he might just be a nice, gentlemanly man you can be proud to know, but he is not necessarily that into you.

He will do at least three of these things. Please don't assume Scooter is in love with you just because he rushes up to you at every party and sticks to you like glue. Scooter might just be too cowardly to talk to anyone else.

You can seriously mess up your own ability to recognize one of the Golden Three Million if you take matters into your own hands and go after men who have not shown three of the above behaviours.

Again apologies for comparing men to dogs (although I very much like dogs), especially after comparing the Will to dogs, but if you set chicken before a dog who prefers beef, he will eat the chicken anyway because it is there. But when he smells beef in the vicinity he will rush off towards it instead of eating chicken again.

Oh dear. That didn't sound very elegant. But you know what I mean. Don't go after a member of someone else's Golden Three Million or you will be sorry.

Anyway, trust in God and trust in your own attractiveness to at least three million men worldwide.* Don't get impatient and make stuff up. As some other lady, one richer than I (I hope), said "You can't hurry love. You just have to wait." Put your energies into work, school, community service, hobbies and having fun with friends. Be open to meeting new people, but don't hunt them down. And, especially, make sure your Will is in the keeping of your Intellect, not the other way around.

*Don't think they are all abroad, however, as actually most men apparently are attracted to women of their own (or their mother's) ethnic group or race and this increases as they get older, as an over-40 Chinese guy made sure to tell me the one time we went to a restaurant together.

Bad at Relationships?

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.

Supporting Soldiers

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.

Boundaries

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."

The Overwhelming Question

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.

Kind Readers!

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.

Sending Stuff to Servicemen

In general, I think it is a mistake for single women to give attractive single men gifts. However, I have concluded that it okay to send stuff to servicemen--and servicewomen, for that matter. It is traditional and patriotic. During the World Wars, young ladies sent care packages to servicemen they didn't even know. My American grandmother kept up a correspondence with a young soldier after the Americans entered the First World War, when she was 13 or so. (The poor doughboy was under the impression that Grandma was much older and wrote her telling that when he came home they'd paint the town red. But I digress.)

Gift-giving is a big deal. One of the problems of our age is saying stuff is "no big deal" when it fact it is and always has been. Hostess presents aside, if a man offers a single, unrelated woman a gift, it is often a sign that he finds her attractive. It's a nice clue to watch out for. Of course, women should turn down overly expensive or personal gifts from men-not-our-husbands unless we want to end up the subject of some misogynist rap song. A good line is, "Oh, no! Thank you--that's so kind of you!--but my parents would be distressed if I accepted such a personal/expensive gift." (Inevitable reply.) "I don't keep secrets from my parents."*

But it strikes me that a more pressing problem is the issue of the female desire to give. I wrote about this on Friday, when I was musing about what Germaine Greer gets right. Germaine Greer writes in The Whole Woman about women constantly giving giving GIVING to somehow relieve their brimming hearts of their burden of love. She describes elderly ladies knitting unwanted woollens for young male relations; I think of women thinking in June about what to give their crush objects for Christmas.

Various advice-givers I respect warn that men resent overly personal or expensive gifts, for they make them feel a woman is trying to buy them. (This makes me draw conclusions about what men think they are doing when THEY give women overly personal or expensive gifts.) One could throw a hissy fit at such uncharitable ingratitude, or one could ponder if that is in fact what the besotted women are trying to do.

Too many young girls have conversations with themselves that begin "He'll love me if I..." It comes as a big shock to discover that boys and men either love you or they don't, and it has very little to do with anything that you do. If you are a good person, who doesn't embarrass them, and are respected and thought well of by people they respect and think well of, then that's good. But whether or not they fall for you is completely up to their mysterious psyches.

Looking like the first girl/movie star/teacher they ever had a crush on is a good bet, but this is not exactly something you can control. You can't buy love with homemade cookies or--God forbid--a free housecleaning service or woolly jumpers or stuffed toys or silver cigarette cases or your body or anything else, really.

Thus, it is best to proceed with caution before buying a gift for a man who is not a family member unless he is a serviceman abroad. I was going to type "--or a priest" but I think you should be cautious there, too.

Eventually some nice woman is going to get mad at my constant devaluation of the female love of giving. And I would counter by saying that I have no problem with women giving, I have a problem with women giving TOO MUCH and to the WRONG PEOPLE.

It's funny how slang works. When I was 14 I went to a teenage party that featured boys I didn't know. It was very thrilling to be invited to a party in a far away neighbourhood given by a schoolmate who knew boys I didn't. (I spent my adolescence enamored of the concept "Cute New Boys", which strikes me now as very silly and pointless, but I don't suppose I, at 14, would have listened to me, aged 40.) Although new, these boys weren't cute. They seemed rather rough, and they used bad language, for which they were censured by the young hostess.

Apart from a vague feeling of disappointment and alarm, I remember only one more thing about this dreary party. One of the boys, in tones of mingled excitement and contempt, said of an absent girl whose reputation had been presented for dissection, "I hear she gives, man. She gives."

*Men look for cues from other men as to how to treat women. If decent men think you are valued by your father and brothers, then they will subconsciously value you, too. Also, giving the impression that you come from a good (by which I mean a caring) family, makes you more marriage than mistress material, if you see what I mean.

Young? Popular? Overwhelmed? Run Away!

I had an interesting letter the other day, too bursting in personal detail to print, but in a nutshell it involves a recent university graduate in a small community who has discovered that multiple men are interested in her as a potential spouse.

Now some of you are yelling, "Cry me a river!", but I am waving away your yells because this is not always a very comfortable situation in which to be. When I was 23-24, I was in a similar position. (I never was again, and thank goodness.)

Although on paper it looks thrilling to have three men scheming and plotting against each other and you, in real life it can be very uncomfortable indeed. I recall a lot of screaming and yelling, and at the time I was interested in somebody else who, of course, went into the seminary, only to drop out a few years later.

It is very uncomfortable to discover, too soon, that men want to marry you. If you have spent your youth feeling either invisible or clumsy next to your sparkling, more popular-with-boys girlfriends, it can be staggering to find yourself the object of attentions you're not sure you want. It is particularly staggering if you are under 25 and scarier if your suitors are much older than you. You may be pretty sure you want to get married, but you are not sure you want to marry one of these guys.

What to do?

Well, the first thing to do is to be very careful to whom you go for advice. I tried telling a priest about how overwhelmed I felt by my three suitors, and he laughed at me. It was obvious that he thought I bragging. Hmm... Maybe it wasn't such a pastoral tragedy when his own personal life became overwhelming and he abandoned his post to get married. Not that I am still bitter. No.

Unless you know a priest very well, and he knows you very well, I think in this circumstance you should talk to an older married woman, especially one who was the belle of her family, and/or who married later in life.

Secondly, you should try to remove yourself from the stressful situation as much as you can, so as to get some perspective. I know first hand how difficult this is if you and all your suitors are at the same school. Limit how much time you see them. Create a hiding place in a little-used library in which to do your work, or work in your room and let your phone take all messages. Go to Mass earlier or later. Go home for weekends, if you can.

If you like your suitors, tell them that, but tell them you're feeling overwhelmed if you're feeling overwhelmed. Try not to have intimate conversations with them as if they were your girl friends. It is terribly painful when you value a man as a trusted and witty friend, and no more than that, and he persists in seeing you as his next girlfriend or future wife. So cultivate some detachment and exercise some reserve. Yes, this is hard.

And for heaven's sake, don't think you are Anne of Green Gables pursued by Gilbert or Harriet Vane pursued by Lord Peter Wimsey and that the script says you have to give in eventually. You don't. You do exactly what you want to do, and you'll know when you've done it because your heart will be full of joy--not relief, joy.

Thirdly, if you can afford it, go on holiday abroad. There is nothing like an airplane for getting a rest from your troubles. You leave the ground and your love life at the same time. But don't go to a holiday resort like a Club Med. No, no, no. You must go somewhere where the language or at least the culture are so different, you will be constantly challenged by your new environment. Go to Florence and look down at the city from the Piazza di Michaelangelo. Go to Berlin and try to find your way to Unter den Linden. Go to Montreal and walk through the francophone streets until you find Schwartz's Deli and are struck by the sudden blast of almost-forbidden English, shocking in its minority status.*

Travelling does many things. It furnishes your mind with imagines and experiences that you will be able to draw upon for the rest of your life. It challenges your resourcefulness, and forces you to make snap decisions and to make yourself understood to strangers and to make sense of their replies. It gives you some important distance from your ordinary life so that you can get some much-needed persepective and take stock. It helps you grow up.

There was a philosophy professor at the Edith Stein conference--I've forgotten his name--who was all for early marriage. Well, I don't have a problem with early marriage, per se. But I believe marriage is for grown-ups, and it takes longer for some of us to get to grownuphood. This is not necessarily our fault, just as it isn't our fault if we don't reach our full adult height until we're 25. But we can encourage our own growth in maturity if we travel to foreign cities and make our way around.

If you want to get married, but you're not ready to get married, and you're feeling overwhelmed by pressure to get married--travel. Don't, in heaven's name, travel with one or more of your suitors. Find a girlfriend or--shocker--go on your own. If you can't take being alone with yourself 24/7, sign up with a tour group, or a language school, or stay with a friend or trusted friend-of-a-friend who lives in the foreign city, or at least arrange to meet up with one. Consult at least two travel guides, and be safe.

Meanwhile, I say, keeping an eye on the fuel situation, international travel may never be so cheap again.

*Order a medium smoked meat sandwich, fries, and a black cherry soda. Get there by 11 AM or after 2 PM to find a table.

Update: Blogger has erased some of my votes. I do not know why. The self-described anti-Catholic troll is gone, and I don't know if I should feel sad or relieved!

Real Hair, Fake Hair

This is not a Single Life post. But I was asked a question about black hair, and the difficulty black Nice Catholic Girls in growing their hair long. (This was in response to my observation that more men are attracted to long hair than short.)

Now this may make black NCGs hit the Comment button in indignation, but I actually do know what it is like to worry about real hair versus fake hair because I have extremely kinky, fuzzy hair that grows only so long and then stops. If I didn't keep my hair as long (and therefore heavy) as I could, it would rise up and froth around my head in an afro.

Black girls with afros look great; white girls with afros look weird and inappropriate. And yet I spent long agonized years of my childhood with a short afro. Today I have to think about my hair every single day to make sure it does not turn into its natural frizzy kinks. If I neglect it--dreadlocks. Heck, I have a dreadlock right now.

O dear. I just remembered the summer I was super-lazy and my hair was all dreadlocks and I got my mother to undo them all. I can't even begin to tell you how much that hurt.

There is something called "the politics of black hair", and unless I am getting this way wrong, its central question is "How come black girls feel so much pressure to have hair like white girls?" And that's a good question. The one thing I have to add to the debate is that not all white girls have hair like white girls. And nobody took a hot iron to my head until I was 33, and it was a REVELATION, people!

I'll never forget it. I was approached in a cafe by two hairdressers from the Caribbean-Canadian salon down the street, and they basically bullied into making an appointment. They washed my hair, and combed it out (with much scolding), and moisturized it (more scolding), and partially dried it, and then blew-dry it straight and then took the hot irons to it, and for the first time in my life, I had "white girl" hair. It cost just over $100.

I could go and on about my hair. It is one of my life's obsessions. It is responsible for so many random encounters. Four examples:

Black girls on the bus (in Toronto and American cities) sometimes lean over to me saying, in hushed voices, "Pardon me for asking, but are you mixed race?" ("Oh look," said one Caribbean woman at one job I had. "There's a new black girl. I must meet her." Then I turned around, and she was stunned. If you're confused, many black women in my city dye or bleach their hair auburn.)

In Boston, if I wore my hair in a bun, I was invisible to black men, and if I wore my hair out, black men--bus drivers, students, guys walking down the street--would engage me in conversation, and one made me take his phone number.

Also in Boston, two white construction workers working away on the edge of a university began to sing "Ebony and Ivory" as I walked by. I was flabbergasted. I didn't know if I should have reported them or what, since the university had a no-tolerance policy on racism.

In Toronto, an elderly lady at my theology school asked me if I had a straight-haired sister there. I explained that I had discovered the magic of straight-irons (thank you, Dionne!), but that I couldn't afford to be ironed more than once a month. And the elderly lady said--hold onto your coffee mugs--"Well, I guess sometimes you have to be wild and woolly."

Wild and woolly? My blood froze. It utterly froze. My grandmother, who was born in Chicago in 1904, had hair like mine only thinner and brown. Racism was a positive psychosis in Chicago before 1975, and as a child my grandmother was called "N--- Wool." Staring at that elderly lady, "wild and woolly" ringing in my ears, I understood in my bones for the first time in my life what racist attitudes towards black women and their hair were like.

Anyway, what I have to say is that not all white women have "white women hair" and so it's not just black women who feel pressure to live up to the standard set by Rapunzel. And also, my attitude towards natural versus fake is that you have to figure out what is right for you and then tell everyone else to bug off.

It is not easy to go through life with a big afro, but if you want to, you should. It is sometimes infinitely easier, if majorly more expensive, to go to the salon and have your hair cut short, ironed flat, braided or extended. The bad part is people accusing you of not being true to your roots, no pun intended.

Personally, I love braids, and I think they look amazing, with extensions or not. I would never use extensions (which have become very popular with white British women) myself because they are absolutely murder on your real hair. I hate chemical straighteners, and I have never, and would never, use them. My grandmother fried her hair with harsh chemicals.

Bottom line: figure out what's right for you and then do it. Tell critics to shove off. If you look best with short hair, have short hair. If you look best with long hair and you are willing to have the work done, get the work done or do it yourself.

Time for photos! So as not to look completely self-obsessed, I'd put in a photo of my baby sister, too, but she'd kill me.

MANAGED HAIR: See Blog Profile photo. To get that look I washed my hair, dried it in loose braids, redid the braids tightly and then took them out when I got to the restaurant without combing my hair. I just ran my fingers through twice. The photo was taken within half an hour after that.

IRONED (i.e. FAKE) HAIR: Oh, actually see the video on the side. That is freshly ironed hair. It's not as flat as it could be, but it is very flat. I screamed when snowflakes began to land on it. Snowflakes are made of water. And water is the enemy of ironed hair.

An authority figure once called my ironed hair "professional hair" and I was almost overwhelmed by the temptation to tell her I was mixed race, for then she would have died of white liberal guilt.

NATURAL HAIR: I love costume parties. At costume parties--and anything 1970s revival--I can just be me. By the way, as far as I know, I am not mixed race but 100% northern European, and my hair grows only that long. Of course, it looks longer when ironed.

Feel free to sound off in the com box about the part of your local beauty standard that makes you do nutty or expensive things.

The Demands of Friendship

I always stress how important it is for Singles to have friends and friendly acquaintances, to get out there (or at very least into the blogosphere here) and be a presence in the community or communities. If you live in a small village or tiny Catholic community, then it is a good idea to travel a bit or surf the web to make more acquaintances and potential friends. As Singles, you have more freedom to do that than married people, especially married people with children.

Recently I got an email from a long-term Single reader puzzling out her friend situation. She mentioned a good female friend, a soul mate, who is married with two children. When the second baby was born, the friend said she didn't have any time to get together, or even email. She had time only for Facebook.

Now, my brother has two babies under three, and one of my best friends has one baby under two, and a friend in Scotland has a baby under one. Thus, I understand where your fellow reader's married friend is coming from. She literally has only enough social time for Facebook, possibly between 2 AM and 3 AM, the only time she can be relatively sure both her children are asleep.

Your fellow reader, unsurprisingly, is disappointed that her friend--torn between the demands of husband and two separate children--has no time to meet or even email her. But what surprises me, is that instead of meeting her friend on Facebook, the only place she can, she dissed Facebook relationships as shallow. Speaking as someone who lives across the ocean from most of the people she knows, I love Facebook. It never occured to me that it was shallow. For me it is a magic window that helps me keep tabs on 150 people. I hope your fellow reader changes her mind. Facebook isn't everything, of course, but it is better than nothing.

One problem in Single life is expecting everything or nothing. A Single might go to a Catholic singles event expecting to see a host of good-looking, smiling Catholic bachelors from whom she might pick a future boyfriend or even husband, and be horribly disappointed to see only a few ordinary-looking Catholic men talking to their friends or lingering at the buffet table. The next time she won't go at all because, she says, there is no point. In so doing, she has missed out on a chance to make some acquaintances, to hand out her business card, maybe to meet someone who might make a good friend, and at very least to hear an interesting lecture and drink a fine glass of beer in company.

When it comes to ordinary social life--I'm not talking about courtship here--you take what people can offer. If your married girlfriend says she can't come out dancing, but she can host a tea party, you go to the tea party. If your married guy friend says he can't get out for a guys' night until May, you arrange a guys' night for May. If he cancels because his kid is sick, you reschedule. If you want to be or remain friends with people, you have to meet them where they are. It is very important for childless Singles--and I include male and female religious in this--to remember that married people are not as free as you are.

The last thing a young mother needs--a young mother with one or two almost-perpetually screaming babies, and a huge hamper of dirty laundry, and a husband who wistfully wonders where the loving has gone, and a boss or mother-in-law who tells her that she looks tired in a slightly accusatory way--is yet another person making her feel bad for not living up to their demands.

Be kind and merciful to your young married friends. Invite them to events, and be happy and welcoming when they accept and show up, but don't bank on them accepting and showing up, especially if they have children.

Now that I am married, not Single, I have figured out why married people have dinners without Singles or conversations that make Single people feel left out. Married women, for example, don't often have time to meet up even with each other. I was horrified the other night to discover that a set of my friends get together now only four times a year, tops. Some are married now, and some are very busy Singles. And here was me, over in Scotland, fondly thinking they were getting together for cocktails every Friday, going to gether for pedicures, etc., etc. Apparently not.

And one thing about having a few recently married women in a car being driven by a Single woman, as happened on Saturday night: the marrieds, including me, all talked about how we argue with our husbands. I don't mean what we argue about, but why and how we argue. For example, when each of us gets upset about something, our husbands tell us we shouldn't be so upset, and then we get even more upset because we think our husbands are attacking our right to be upset.

When we marrieds, who really can't talk about this with anyone else, discovered we shared the same pattern, we all laughed merrily. It was such a relief to say it to our closest friends, and to realize that this sort of argument was completely normal to our collective married experience. But the conversation did, of course, leave out the driver. I am hoping she was too busy dealing with traffic during a blizzard to notice.

It is important to have friends in your state of life. So if sometimes you are not invited to a married lady party, understand that sometimes married ladies need to chat about married lady stuff without worrying about hurting Single girls' feelings. Don't let this keep you, however, from inviting married friends to stuff you yourself arrange or at very least to be your Facebook friends. One thing I keep hearing from busy young marrieds and mothers is how much they really miss their friends.

An Educated Catholic Woman

Although I have always been Catholic, I was a committed feminist from the age of 12 to 22. At the age of 22 I was thrown out of a Women's Day parade for carrying a sign reading "Pro-life is pro-woman." I was picked up by two muscular women with buzzcuts who identified themselves as abortion rights activists and dumped me on the side of the road. This was witnessed and duly recorded by student journalists, so it won me five minutes of moderate fame. But it did rather end my longing to hang onto and rehabilitate the word "feminist." And when I got to theology school I discovered that many women of colour had already abandoned the word and preferred to use the term "womanist." Me, I prefer to use the word "Catholic."

The Church is not given much credit by the world for the help and support and honour she has given women since her birthday at Pentecost. It goes unremarked that she has referred to herself in the feminine for millennia, and that there are just as many woman saints in the canon as there are men. There were were female Doctors of the Church long before there were female Doctors of Oxford University. (Update: I was wrong on this one; although of course St. Teresa of Avila was born before there were female D.Phils, there were no female Doctors of the Church named until 1970.) The love and respect of Ecclesia for one woman, the Blessed Virgin Mary, is called an attempt to force women to live up to an impossible ideal; nobody mentions those saints and teachers who hailed Our Lady as a model, not just for women, but for men.

Great male mystics like St. Bernard of Clairveaux have refered to their own souls as "she." Our Lord himself is described in one beautiful verse in Scripture as being like a hen who wishes to gather her chicks under her wings. Theologians have identified the feminine figure of "Wisdom" in the Wisdom texts of the Old Testament with Christ. Great women like Teresa of Avila and Dorothy Day have lived shining lives of Christian holiness in utter loyalty to the magisterium while asserting their God-given roles in society: Teresa as a foundress and writer; Dorothy as a lover of the poor and a partisan of peace.

It is therefore surprising that there are young Catholic men and married Catholic women who discourage young Catholic women from higher education. Women, no less than men, are rational beings. We are capable of intellectual advancement, which can go on all our lives. (An absolute dunce at philosophy at 22, I read Lonergan's Insight at 33 and got A+ on my term paper.)

Or is it surprising? The post-Boomer generations inherited a terrible social mess. The Boomers gave us mass divorce, mass desertion from the priesthood and semininaries, mass abortion, AIDS and heaven knows what else. Unsurprisingly, increasing numbers of young Catholics look at the gifts of the Sixties with a jaundiced eye. And the one of the biggest scapegoats is feminism.

As my anecdote should illustrate, feminism is not a love and respect for all women. It is an ideology. Christian feminists have examined some of its ideas and principles and worked out how they might be compatible with the Christian faith; unfortunately this sometimes means stretching out Christianity on a Procrustean bed.

However, the Woman Question is over a hundred years old, and theologians whose first loyalty is to Christ have examined it in the light of Christ. Such a theologian was John Paul II, whose Mulieris Dignitatem you must read after you finish this post.

Feminism purports to be about choice, and many a Christian woman has wished that she really did have a choice and could snap her fingers, marry a good man at 24, have five children, and stay at home with them, creating a wonderful dwelling place for the whole family, with delicious meals and clean laundry smelling of lavender, and yet still having energy to go out to a concert or film now and again with her husband. This was the privilege of the average Edinburgh labourer's wife in 1960, never mind richer women. Her life did not, I hasten to add, look like a Ralph Lauren advert: there was one heck of a lot more housework and one heck of a lot less money.

Many young people, their own families having been, perhaps, less than traditional, wish to reclaim the good they observe in the 1960 family structure, while, of course, rejecting the serious problems with domestic abuse. And as far as that goes, I think that is fine. If young women find Mr. Right at any age, and then retire from the rat race to keep house, raise children or chickens, or write all day long, I think that is marvellous. But I don't see why this should discourage women from learning all they can about anything that interests them, especially if it is theology.

My one caveat is to beware of wasting your life and substance in graduate school for the liberal arts. Many take out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans, dreaming of becoming a tenured professor at a time when the places for graduate students outnumber the vacancies for university professors. If you are actually brilliant--and I mean head and shoulders over everyone else in your year--or as stubborn and hardworking as a mule, and as insensitive to stings and pricks as a baking tin, then go right ahead. But if what you really want is to become an educated person, then get a library card for the best library in your city and read whatever you can. Many universities sell memberships in their libraries to non-university folk.

But I will say this. Once when I worked for a statistics gatherer, I had to do a survey on children's early education. It was a massive project, involving thousands of people. And one question I had to ask was "How much formal education did the mother have?" There was NO similar question for the fathers. The social scientists did not care how much education the father had. How much education the fathers had had much less (if any) effect on children's early education than the mothers' education did.

Not only is it important for women to be educated for their own sake and, I'd point out, to make them interesting companions for husbands in companionate marriages, it is important for the intellectual development of their children.

So the next time some stupider-than-average young fogey, or a nice lady so in love with motherhood that she can't see the value in everything else, tells you women don't need higher education, feel free to use any or all of the points in this post.

Now go read Mulieris Dignitatem, so you can quote it, too. It's long, so grab a coffee.

In the Path of a Speeding Freight Train

Can you ever save your girl friend from a really bad man?

This is one of the toughest questions in female friendship. And it has gotten me into all kinds of trouble. I once got into trouble because a much younger female friend confided in me that she was being pursued by a man who did not share her religious values, argued for atheism, and had been sexually active. She was very worried about this.

"Beware," I cried. "Beware!"

But then she went out with him anyway, and since they later moved in together, I assume they eventually slept together, and guess who she sent inexplicably harsh friendship-ending emails to? Yes, me. She even suggested I was racist, which was ridiculous as her boyfriend, like me, was white. From a psychological point of view, it was fascinating, but at the time I was heartbroken. They were said to be "engaged." Haven't heard if they ever got married. But I will always wonder if my young friend was so nasty to me because it was easier than being nasty to her real mother.

Then there was the friend whose supposedly religious boyfriend was pressuring her for sex, and the rest of our set was wailing over it. So I called her and left a message of support ("We've all been there!") on her answering machine, and got back a furious email. I was out of town, so there was no way of patching it up face-to-face, so I just left it. I was very embarrassed and hurt by her rejection.

Then there was another friend whose definitely non-religious boyfriend was pressuring her for sex, but she adored him, so she wouldn't break up with him. Once again our set wailed and wrung their hands. Some went to meet him. They hated him. They couldn't see what she saw in him. But the girl clung on. Me, I could hear the freight train coming.

"What if she sleeps with him?" texted one girl.

"You can't stop it," I texted back.

"I think they're getting married," texted the friend.

"In that case, it won't be so bad," I texted back.

"But we hate him."

"You don't have to marry him."

In some cases, women simply cannot see what other women see in their boyfriends. The best they can hope for it that the man isn't an out-and-out toad. An otherwise nice man brought up to assume that sex is always part of love and the way you show love is to use a condom might be astonished to discover that his Catholic girlfriend's Catholic girlfriends think he is Jack the Ripper.

Meanwhile, there are very few people who can sit down with a woman and say "The man you love is an out-and-out toad" without ruining their friendship. The problem is, those who can often love the woman so much, they are not willing to risk their relationships ending. Even mothers are afraid because mothers know that their daughters are going to run right back to their slavemasters and repeat what they say, either to complain about Mom or as a weak form of rebellion.

Girl: My mother says you shouldn't talk to me like that.

Boyfriend: Your mother is a complete bitch who hates me because I'm [not her ethnic/social group].

Girl: Oh, don't say that. My mother isn't bigoted.

Boyfriend: Oh, yeah, right, sure. I don't think you should see her so much. Every time you go home, it's the same thing. Nag, nag, nag. We always fight afterwards. Is that what you want?

The ironic thing is that girls often do listen to and obey their mothers. My parents' generation was brainwashed into thinking that whatever they told their children, their children would do the opposite. However, my generation was actually quite biddable, which is why there are a number of Catholic women my age still mouthing "Spirit of Vatican II" type stuff. Heck, when I was in high school in the 1980s, we were listening to The Beatles. We were doing the Twist to "Twist and Shout." We felt bad that we had missed the Sixties. In university we sat, openmouthed, at the feet of the Sixty-Eighters. In that case it is to gag, but it is true.

So I think mothers should not be so quick to abdicate their responsibilities to their daughters, and start talking about what a good man is like when the girls are still small. A good basic line to repeat once a month is "If a man ever hits you, you must leave at once." However, this isn't enough. I used to hope a man would hit me so I would have the strength to break up with him, which is definitely screwed up. So another good line is "If a man isn't willing to wait, he doesn't love you." Another is, "If a man tries to isolate you from your family and friends, he's a dangerous power freak." The idea is to drum these ideas into daughters' heads, so that when dodgy guys come around, the ideas will spring spontaneously into the forefront of the daughters' minds.

Sisters, I think, also have a responsibility to each other, although like mothers they are also frozen into silence by fear of losing the woman they love so much. Sisters need to say things like "Are you happy?" and "I don't think I hear happiness here" and "Personally, if a guy ever said that to me, I would walk, and he would never hear from me again." Little tiny sisters, and possibly nieces, would exude a lot of power. If only it could be harnessed! Ah for a four year old to say "I don't like [X]--he scares me" and then burst into tears. Ah...

Brothers! Why are brothers such an overlooked commodity today? Back in high school, Sister Wilfreda told us always to introduce our swains to our father and brothers because they would know if they were bad guys. Of course, fathers and brothers often think that good guys are NOT GOOD ENOUGH, so it is hard to find the golden mean here. There is also the danger that brothers sometimes get banged up for assault. Still, many a man has been scared sensible by the idea of big, angry brothers. Listen, you brothers out there, have you met your sisters' boyfriends yet? Do the boyfriends know you exist?

Then there are best friends. Best friends, too, are in a position to say the right thing at the right moment. Best friends have probably had fights and made up again, and so of all people they are the ones who might have the most confidence speaking their minds. It still is tricky, though. I am not denying that. Sometimes all you can do is say your piece, make sure the woman knows that you are loving her, not judging her, and then scrape her off the tracks when the train hits her. Painful? You bet.

Other friends, in my opinion--I'd love to be wrong, believe me--can't do much. I suppose that they can orchestrate casual conversations about abusive relationships and books they've read about psychological, verbal, and physical abuse. Good luck.

And then there are complete strangers. Complete strangers have absolutely nothing to lose by saying to a woman--when the bad boyfriend is nowhere around, e.g. the ladies' room--"Listen, I couldn't help overhearing what that man said to you. You don't deserve that, honey. There are nicer men out there." The shock of being addressed by such a complete stranger may drive the ideas right into the woman's foggy mind.

Also, complete strangers have nothing to lose by saying, "My, that's some black eye you've got there." Battered women go through life wearing dark glasses and heavy foundation and yet wonder why nobody notices that they are being battered. I notice. And if I can, I always say something about a woman's black eye. Now I pretend it's because I used to box. Really, if you work with the public, safe behind a desk or counter, it is so easy to casually respond to bruises and then end the conversation with, "You take care of yourself now."

I recommend that all women read up on the cycles of domestic violence and the different ways in which abusive men get women under their power. That way, if it ever happens to them, it won't hit them like a freight train. I will NEVER forget the moment I read a pamphlet on domestic violence--I got it at church--thinking I'd like to work with battered women, and realizing that most of the checklist described my current relationship. At the time, I just thought I was a bad person who didn't deserve the really smart man I always made so mad.

I don't have time to get into it all, but I will say something about isolation. As a friend, you want to make sure that your friend can always get in touch with you after she begins a serious-sounding relationship. Control-freak husbands and boyfriends consolidate their power by separating "their women" from the women's family and friends. Good husbands and boyfriends have no problem with their wives and girlfriends spending time with family and friends. In fact, they often welcome this and plot some serious guy time.

Oh, dear. It's so sad. I sprang into the world after high school graduation convinced that my generation was smarter and better than my parents' generation, and that we would never become alcoholics, battered wives, single mothers, etc., etc. How very wrong I was.