My Cure for a Broken Heart

I got an email the other day that I am not at liberty to post. In short, it was by a brokenhearted woman who is dating again and thinks that in order to have a relationship with a new man, she must make herself "vulnerable." Now, "vulnus" means wound, and it strikes me that this woman needs to heal the wounds so recently inflicted on her heart before she does any such thing. And I am deeply suspicious of any view of male-female romance relationship that talks about a need to accept wounds anyway. The essence of trusting a guy with your heart is a deeply informed and correct opinion, formed over time, that the guy isn't going to reject you

If anything, the male-female romance relationship is the LAST relationship where you need to court vulnerability. Vulnerability is for mentors and protegees, bosses and employees, teachers and students, editors and the edited. When you hand over your intellectual work, or your creative work, or your paid work, to someone for evaluation, you are pretty darn vulnerable. And you have to take whatever is said by mentor, boss, teacher or editor on the chin. And mentor, boss, teacher or editor will have to field your reaction. It used to be said that men could accept that their work was something separate from themselves, but women took criticism of their work personally. I don't believe that: I think we ALL take it personally, and most of us have to work to A) become detached B) accept justifiable criticism.

"Don't despair when you see all the red," said Polish Pretend Son last night, as he prepared to embrace the beckoning Edinburgh night. He was talking about his correction of my "Teolgia Kobietości" essay, and since I have corrected the English in any number of essays, I thought, "Hey! That's my line!" I was highly amused, and this morning I am even more amused to read Polish Pretend Son's comments. The reasons for my wondeful detachment are that I completely trust Polish Pretend Son's opinions regarding Polish style, and at this point I have few expectations of my Polish prose. As Polish Pretend Son pointed out, there's quite a distance between reading Julek i Julka and translating theology into Polish.

But imagine if I were a great Polish stylist, and my ego was wrapped up in my ability to turn out Polish prose. Perhaps I had won a gold medal in university for it, or something. And, flushed with the compliments of my teachers and professors, I wrote a masterful book about the Polish countryside, and all over Poland, critics tore it to bits. My professors backtracked. My friends who said they liked my book were obviously lying. Would I, heartbroken, be handing over my essay to Polish Pretend Son within six months and snickering at the sea of red and the snarky remarks about my alleged linguistic feminism? No. I would be weeping in my coffee.

In short, if you get your heart smashed, the last thing you want to do is make it "vulnerable" to some man again. And you shouldn't want to. Your heart needs a good healing, it needs to be as detached from the opinions of strangers as I am from my Polish prose, and you need to get your equilibrium back before you pop back out into the world with an eye to attracting suitors. It takes as long as it takes. However, I think there is one way to speed things up.

Travel across a body of water, preferably an ocean. There are study programs and work programs for foreigners under 30, and if you are over 30, well, a ten day holiday in Tuscany, religiously saved for out of your earnings, can work wonders. Oh, and go alone. I forgot to mention that part. If going alone is too scary, sign up with a tour group you'll meet up with when you get there, wherever there is. The idea is to go away from the scene of your heartbreak into a totally new place, a place with no memories of the ex, and ample opportunities to put your adult skills of self-reliance to the test. (If you go with a female friend. you will talk to her about the ex, which defeats the purpose of this exercise.) If you are forced to speak another language, so much the better. Reading maps, asking strangers questions, finding food, finding shelter--your brain will be too crowded to contemplate your aching heart and every time you achieve something, you will feel like you have scored a goal.

"I have fallen in the shower, and I need some ice," said Seraphic, age 27, in Italian to a hotel receptionist over the phone somewhere outside Venice, and not only did the ice ease my aching limb, it soothed my wounded heart. Look what I can do!

If you really, really, cannot leave home now or within any imaginable length of time (but if in England, why not France? If in New England, why not Quebec?), then I recommend you find something new to do. Take a night school class, particularly in a language. Take a second job, part-time, somewhere you think is cool--cafe in an art gallery, office in a charity. Do something that speaks to your sense of adventure to remind it that romance is not the only adventure.

And I think this really goes to the heart of what was wrong with my attitude to romance when I was growing up. For a long time, romance was the only adventure for most women. If one doesn't work out, well then, start another. And another. And another. And unsurprisingly, this gets old. It gets boring. Serial monogamy, even if completely chaste, gets to be a drag. And if you are now shouting "Yes!" at the computer, then why not get off the old treadmill of romance? Find another adventure. Get out of Dodge. Take a night class. Get a second job. Try a martial art. Challenge yourself to something utterly new and absorbing. Not only will you heal, you'll grow.

The Fittingness of Fitness

Last year someone wrote in asking how my fitness regime was going, and I did not reply because the wheels had fallen off my regime and I was wallowing in food and sloth. However, this year I have done a lot better, so I am happy to write about it.

We all know the physical dangers of eating disorders and the spiritual dangers of being obsessed with our looks. (My Calvinist great-grandmother told my mother that if she looked in the mirror long enough, she'd see the devil looking out. Calvinist grannies have a picturesque way of speaking.) However, there are also physical and spiritual dangers attached to wallowing in food and sloth. The Greeks have something like 109 fasting days, just for the sake of their souls.

There is no bar to the out-of-shape getting married, and indeed I have seen some big brides in my time. Some were objectively beautiful and arguably the plumpness was necessary to their beauty. Some were not, except insofar as that almost all brides are beautiful on their wedding day. Whatever the reason for you not to be married, it's not your looks, let alone your weight. You could have an eye in the middle of your forehead, and in the fullness of time Cyclops could come along and sweep you off to his cave.

Personally I think the secret to getting married sooner rather than later is to hang out where marriage-minded men hang out. This means where men who are serious about Christianity or Judaism or Islam--not just some vague sense of ethnicity, like CINOs--hang out. But I digress.

The secret to being attractive to nice men, I am utterly convinced, is being happy and confident. (The secret to being attractive to women of all kinds is to be confident and happy.) And good health does much to make you happy and confident. Good health here means good health for YOU. If you have some chronic health issue, good health means you at your healthiness. And we can achieve our maximum healthiness with proper stewardship of our brains and bodies.

Meanwhile, it is impossible--for me, at any rate--to get around the fact that Western Woman stares critically at herself in the mirror (hopefully not long enough for the devil to look out) and is either happy or sad about her objective appearance. Coco Chanel said that anyone over 20 who looks in the mirror to be pleased is a fool, but I certainly enjoyed observing that my Canadian Size 8 dress fits beautifully.

It fits beautifully because I have been dedicated to "the Fast Diet" since mid-January and lost ten pounds in ten weeks. (I didn't weigh myself in the first weeks because I couldn't bear to.) The diet's authors claim one should lose one to two pounds a week, which I found rather thrilling, and some weeks I do indeed lose two pounds, although other weeks only one or none.

Of course, this is slightly confused by the fact that I have taken up regular Pilates workouts since the end of January, thereby developing muscles (and muscle weighs more than fat), and have returned to running at the gym. This time, though, I have replaced my thirty minute jog with twenty minutes of intervals, as intervals are more efficient, and I discovered I needed something to really distract me from the awfulness of MTV. I need music to run or jog but half an hour of MTV is really too depressing. Anyway, loss of inches is probably a better measure than loss of pounds, and as I always lose my tape measure, I just try on dresses.

But the real benefit of my fitness regime was revealed on Tuesday, when I left the house rather late for my appointment with a beautician hired to fix my eyebrows. Between the Historical House and the bus stop is a rather long, somewhat winding path in the woods. Well, I was wearing sneakers (tennis shoes) and for the first time ever, I ran full-throttle down that path. And to my amazement, I could do it without pain or shortness of breath. I was at the stop in time to catch the nine-thirty, and was in the shop at nine-thirty-seven.

And it strikes me that this is what all this intermittent fasting and Pilates and running are REALLY for: my body doing what I want it to, and doing it well. Okay, yes I am happy to look slimmer.

I am never going to have an hourglass figure; in fact, only 8% of women have hourglass figures. Like 46% of women, I am rectangular. It is unfortunate for the 92% that the "ideal" female shape is the most unusual, the hourglass. On the other hand, I would rather dress like "Betty Draper" than "Joan Holloway." And, as I said, the whole point of having a trim body is to enjoy running around and getting to appointments on time. It helps make you feel happy and confident.

Update: Forgot to mention the sugar. I have fallen back into sugar-eating ways, but I will this minute get back on the no-added-sugar wagon. Sweet desserts only if served at others' dinner parties. This is pretty convincing. By the way, do any of my Polish readers have AUTHENTIC Polish cake recipes? British and Canadian cake recipes are too sweet for Polish palates, and I need some good recipes for Poles, not Polish recipes adjusted for an English-speaking sweet tooth.

A Clarification About Clothes

Well, it has come to my attention that there has been some grumbling on the internet regarding my attitude to clothing and girliness. It occurs to me that I have perhaps been a too bit "wear this, wear that" so I will try to make up for it.

If you are a Serious Single, and honestly, hand on heart, would just rather not be bothered with men, let alone get married, you go ahead and wear any old thing. Obviously, you'll need to wear professional clothes to work, and I can think of many modern nuns who look very professional. They have short professional hair, sturdy professional glasses, professional pantsuits, sensible shoes, and maybe a pin that signals to those in the know that this is a Sister [of community X]. Naturally they don't wear makeup, perfume or sparkly earrings. They look tidy, capable, comfortable, professional, no-nonsense, and if a man ever tried to chat them up on the bus, I would fall over from shock.

If, however, you are a Searching Single, you might just want to consider telegraphing "Hello, I am an attractive woman who would love to get married one day" through your clothing.

Again, really, honestly, truly don't care what men think? Then practical haircut, pantsuit, denim overalls, mohawk, shaved bald, nineteenth century ballgowns with denim jackets, days-of-the-week tracksuits --whatever. Go for it. And good for you--Saint Augustine, were he still alive, would totally approve. Saint Augustine thought that trying to attract a man was the worst part about being Single, if you couldn't become a nun, which naturally he thought was the best person you could be. After a martyr, of course. Presumably Saint Augustine would have extolled Elizabeth Taylor had she, at the last minute, proclaimed the Gospel in Tahrir Square and been shot.

Ah, Elizabeth Taylor. Now there was a gal who dressed for men. She claimed all those jewels were presents, although apparently she sometimes gave her husbands the money to buy them. Sparkle, sparkle, sparkle!

Now, as I wrote not too long ago, one of my teachers counselled my punker classmate Kathleen that if she persisted in dressing like that, she'd attract punker guys. He thought this a terrible fate. Kathleen thought it wonderful. I think it one of the few sensible things that teacher ever told us.

If you are interested in attracting and marrying traditional men, e.g. men who are willing to get married without a test drive, then I recommend dressing in traditional women's clothing. This does not necessarily mean the dreaded denim jumper of doom. I mean blouse & skirt or dress, tights, cute shoes. In the UK, a nice tweed jacket would not go amiss, if you're looking for a tweed-wearer. In the USA, a string of pearls sends a message pleasing to the eye of Young Republicans and not so much to the Young Democrats, apparently. (One of the useful things I learned at Boston College.)

That said, I have known tall, slim young women who looked great in denim jeans, pairing them with rather more hello-I'm-a-girl stuff, like pink scooped-necked T-shirts and silk scarves.

Again, I am addressing Searching Singles here. Serious Singles don't have to care. Except on the job, naturally. On your off-hours, anything. Star Trek uniform. Actually, I bet you could meet guys, especially computer programmers, if you wore a Star Trek uniform in public. So if you don't want to be bothered, comfy sweatpants. College hoodie.

If you love poetic beatnik guys, go to an Open Mic and see what the popular girl poets are wearing. Get the general idea and make it your own. If you love athletes, see what girls popular with athletes are wearing and, if you aren't flat-out embarrassed by their outfits, get the general idea and make it your own. If you love male feminists--the kind who actually read Kate Millet, Gloria Steinem, Naomi Klein et al--then dress like a teenage boy. This probably works best if you have the figure of a teenage boy, mind you.

The whole point of this piece is not to TELL you what to wear but to REMIND you that men can see you and that your clothes send a message. Whether you want them to or not, your clothes gossip about you to complete strangers. They say "She belongs to your club", "She's a real professional--24/7", and "Ideally, she'd like to be invisible." Naturally, your clothes might be lying about you. There are probably a lot of soccer moms who are goddesses at heart and are puzzled as to why no-one can see this. And the girls of Edinburgh who wear tight blue denim shorts with black tights are probably not trying to show off their bottoms, although that's what their lying shorts are telling me.

I earnestly believe, that as the differences between men and women are ignored more and more, one key to attracting men as suitors is reminding them, primarily visually(since men are extremely visual), that women are different from them. And since religious women naturally dislike doing this through clothes that scream I HAVE BREASTS AND BUTTOCKS, clothes-or-accessories-that-straight-men-would-never-wear strike me as the way to go.

Incidentally, your clothes gossip about you most loudly in uncrowded churches, e.g. at the Trad Mass. Woo! During my EF Mass, the tight jeans simply do not shut up. The priest is, like, "Oremus" and the congregation is like, "What did you say, jeans?" Don't get me started on the sports bra that spelled out "Sexy" in rhinestones. Fun at that nightclub no-one will take me to, no doubt, but not good for making friends at a church people travel two hours to get to because their parish mass depresses them in its modernity.

By the way, I haven't finished reading it, but I finally got my hands on a copy of Verily. Verily does not airbrush models and photographs clothes on non-models, so ordinary women can see how the clothes under discussion might look on them. It treats women as if we have both brains and limited budgets. It is a breath of fresh air, but more on it anon.

Going to Visit Nuns

B.A. and I are shortly going to visit some Seraphic Sisters, so that's it for my blogging this week! As usual, I will not be taking my computer, so nobody do anything emotionally risky while I'm gone. If you're strongly tempted to telephone, Skype, text or write to a boy to clear the air and express your feelings or to get him to open up, phone the friend most likely to stop you.

Unsolicited Advice

In my extreme youth I was courted by a fellow in my neighbourhood who had a summer job at the same amusement park where I had one.  He was not an NCB, and he bragged that he had once dropped LSD. Being ill-disposed towards recreational use of hallucinogens, I decided that I did not want this guy to be my boyfriend.

His courtship was a tad strange, anyway. He would come to see me at my work station and walk me home from the bus stop--there was a lot of lurking and walking going on there. But the most memorable thing he ever said, which I enjoyed repeating to my friends in an imitation of his nasal drawl, was "If you did something about your hair--and your clothes--you could really be quite attractive."

Dear me, that still makes me laugh. Now I laugh harder, though, because I have learned one of the secrets of life and it is that you do not have to look conventionally beautiful to be attractive. You can be attractive "in a strange way" as a near-stranger said of me behind my back to my pal Lily. And this is a matter of personality and probably some derring-do in the fashion-and-make-up department.

Ladies with powerful personalities sometimes focus the power of those personalities on women we like, particularly younger women, and give you a lot of hearty advice. And having grown up in societies which now devalue older women and our wisdom, experience, etc, younger you very often reject this advice and even resent it. And no wonder. It is not pleasant when someone remarks upon your Single state and says, between the lines, you're Single because you're not attractive enough to men. Oh, thanks. Thanks very much, bossy older lady.

However sometimes--not always, maybe not even often, but sometimes--the bossy older lady may know what she's talking about. That is worth taking into consideration. It is also worth taking into the consideration the motives of this bossy older lady.  I once met a charming if bossy older lady who told me how beautiful I was and how I really ought to "get my colours done." She would do it herself, and here was her card. So she did my colours, gave me a make-over, sold me a ton of make-up and---eventually tried to sign me up to her pyramid scheme.

But another older lady, a very sweet older lady, once told me that my problem with men was that I talked too much. It practically killed her to say it; in fact, she blurted it out just before I went on a date. And although my feelings were hurt, I absolutely knew that this lady liked me very much and just wanted me to find a nice man and get married and have babies before it was too late for babies. It was, however, some years before I realized that she had been right. I talked too much--not as a woman in a world run by men who prefer to do all the talking, but as a person. And if I didn't watch it, I would still talk too much. (Look at how much I blog.)

Other older people have told me that I sometimes frighten people, and I am always taken so aback by this, that I always always always forget to ask that so-important question, "Why?"

And "Why?" is a question you might want to have near to hand when bossy older ladies give you advice about men. It should be a sympathetic, curious "why?", your tone indicating that you really want to know. An older woman of experience is giving you advice for free--make the most charitable assumption that she is not insulting you, and that this is not one more incident of oppression in your unlucky life, but that she might be on to something. And if you ask her "Why?", you will be better able to judge if she is or if she just enjoys the sound of her own voice.

Older Bossy Lady: You have such pretty eyes. You should use make-up to make them more visible.

You: Why?

Older Bossy Lady: Because eyes are the first part of the human face other humans look at. Also, men seem to find large eyes more attractive. There are two theories about this: one is that large eyes are a sign of estrogen production and the other is that large eyes are a neotenous feature.

You:  A neo-what?

Older Bossy Lady: It's a feature that makes you look younger than you really are. It's linked to our love for babies, even baby animals.

You: Oh, er...

Older Bossy Lady: Rust-orange eyeshadow is fantastic for blue eyes. It makes them really pop!

At heart I am the bossiest older lady under the Scottish sky, but I have learned through much trial and error that bossiness is not an attractive trait. Therefore, I try very, very hard never to give people advice in real life until they come to me and ask. And meanwhile I have my blog. Really, blogging is such a blessing. And if I could figure out how to do it without going back to school, I would be happy to take money from such girls and boys who ask my advice. Maybe I could get a gypsy caravan and a sign: "Madame Seraphic. Your Love Life Assessed.  £40/hr."

The operative assumption of older bossy ladies is that you don't like being Single and very much want a man. If you do like being Single and do not very much want a man, then feel free to tell bossy older ladies so. They might be a bit shocked and, heaven help us, feel judged because they are married and very much wanted a man at your age, so you might preface this with "I have so much respect for married ladies, especially mothers, as motherhood is really the Most Important Vocation, but for myself I enjoy the tranquility of the single state."

But if you are among the man-wanting majority you have at least two options. You can say, "I know you mean well, but this is very hard for me, and I'd rather not discuss it" and burst into older-lady shaming tears. Or you can lean forward and say, "Tell me what you know. May I take notes?" If option 2, ask "Why?" a lot.

When Mom Nags

One of the absolute worst things about the Single life is having one's own mother nagging one about being Single. It is a betrayal on a massive scale because Mom/Mum is usually the person you instinctively go to when you are feeling down and out or sick. This sometimes has absolutely nothing to do with the woman herself, but some infant instinct in our brain that still occasionally wails "Maaaamaaaaa!"

So it is awful when you are having a good day, or a lousy day, and you are enjoying your proximity to your mother, your first home, and suddenly she starts in on you about being Single. It's bad enough if you intend to be Single and are purposefully Single; when you don't want to be Single, it's a knife to the heart.

For the record, my mother did not nag me about being Single after I got divorced, even when I got my annulment and was theologically Single again with papers to prove it. She did second-guess my decisions to end dating relationships, however. Not being a mother, I am not sure why mothers do this. Maybe it's caused by an overflow of worry or resentment for having been in the orbit of yet another younger-generation drama.

I am trying to put myself in a mother's shoes, and see Singleness from a nagging mother's perspective. I never had any children, but I have twenty-something friends whose mothers are near my age, so I can imagine having a twenty-two year old daughter, at oldest. And frankly I would not give a darn if my twenty-two year old daughter were Single. In fact, I would rather that she were Single--especially Single and not dating---and concentrating on her university courses, her apprenticeship program or her fledgling business.

I would be much more annoyed if she were wasting her time chasing boys, or dating some happy-go-lucky simpleton, or (worse) a snarling control-freak, and that is where the temptation to meddle would probably get the better of me. I would write long blog posts for her, pretending that they were not for her, should she actually bother to read them. ("No, darling, what are you talking about? I was writing generally.")

But I like to think that once my darling daughter was established in her career, trade or business, that I would leave her alone, and hold my counsel, unless she came timidly to me for advice, and then I would let her have it, both barrels.

Sitting here in my imaginary mother-chair, I am open to the idea that mothers sometimes know what they are talking about. I know this is a radical idea, so I will quickly state that mothers very often haven't the foggiest clue.

If your mother married at twenty and had six children and her world is mostly church, the family business, the supermarket, the library and the mall, she very likely does not have a grasp of what it is like to be a Single woman your age. She thinks she does because she watches TV, but she doesn't because TV is not real life. Cute physicists with great jobs but lots of time just to hang out do not live across the hall from you. Nor is there a man at work who looks just like Angel, that is, David Boreanaz.

I think about what Single Life means for you every day, and yet I do not quite know what it is to be a Single woman your age. You are the experts on that.

However, mothers do know a lot, so it is absolutely worthwhile to listen to what your mother says as impartially as possibly and sort out the sense from the nonsense. For instance, it is nonsense to think that men would fall at your feet if only you cut your bangs (fringe). However, if your mother says you have pretty eyes, than it is indeed possibly that you do have pretty eyes and should show them off.

Meanwhile, since it is one of her principal jobs, your mother is aware of how your moods, behaviours, relationships and choices affect the rest of the people in the household. That can always be a big ol' shock to a young woman: the fact that her personal life, which she thought so private, actually has an impact on those with whom she lives. I can see how a daughter's ignorance of, or indifference to, this would drive a mother crazy.

It can be hard to grasp this, but mothers are just other women. They happen to be the women who affect you more than any other women in the world, but it is helpful to remember that they are really just women with lives of their own. They form their own impressions of the world, and they repeat them if they think this won't get them into trouble. Sometimes these impressions have great merit, and sometimes they don't.  Some mothers have great advice, and some mothers do not. Some mothers feel confident about their place in the world, and some tyrannize over their kids because this is the only way they feel any power.

Anyway, sound off in the combox. What advice has your mother given you that was really great? And what advice has she given you that was utterly lousy? Feel free to be anonymous today.

The Narcotics Post

Once upon a time, a young relative left for university. I forget if they asked for advice, or if I just gave it. I may have begun the discussion with "Listen, about clubs..."

I believe the young relation smirked and said something like, "Don't get drunk?"

And I said something distinctly unPauline like, "I don't care if you get drunk, as long as you're with your friends, and you are always with your friends until you get home, and as long as you always keep an eye on your glass. No, I want to say, Don't take club drugs. They're horrible and you never know what's really in them."

So the young relative took that advice with him or her to university, and is still alive and sane today.

I was brought up in an ordinary (if rather old-fashioned and divorce-free) middle-class family, and although I have had economic ups and downs and various social crises and professional disappointments, I have always been okay, and I am sure this has something to do with the fact that I have never touched cocaine, heroin or the various club drugs on offer in the fair streets of Toronto and Boston and presumably in Edinburgh, one-time AIDS capital of the UK (not Europe, that was Barcelona).

This is not to say that I have not drunk too much on occasion, for I certainly have, most memorably at one party when I was 21, although my best friend Trish remembers that incident better than I do. Oh dear, dear, dear. Nor have I left the room in horror when the grass has come out although I must say seeing a 6'2" guy felled by the stuff like a tree was rather scary.

This is merely to say that there seems to be some fearful alchemy in narcotics that removes whatever magical protection lifelong middle-class-ness seems to provide and can send you to an earthly hell, so I have not messed with them.

I also have not messed with them because I always wanted to keep the moral high ground for conversations about drugs with my children, if I had any. The Baby Boom generation looked a bit foolish when it tried to have serious conversations about drugs with its children because of all the stuff it did at college. My mother, however, told us at least five times that she had once been invited to a party where there had been marijuana, but she hadn't gone because she had just washed her hair and it was in curlers.

Hello, whatever, when I was seventeen, I was hearing about coke parties from my fellow barista down at the cafe. And although I had a keen desire to have wonderful adventures, I didn't want to go anywhere near coke parties, thanks all the same. It wasn't just that Regina in the Sweet Valley High books died right after her first wee snort. It was the nasty criminality around it all, plus the fact that coked-up men often get violent. And a priest called "The Junkie Priest" came to my high school to warn us in advance about crack, which (believe it or not) hadn't reached the streets of Toronto yet.

Crack made cocaine affordable and even more addictive than usual. Whereas cocaine was trashy in a decadent evil rich people way, crack was trashy in a one-way-ticket to gutter and brothel way. And, no word of a lie, the only crack users I have ever to my knowledge met, were the extremely jittery shells of human beings who queued up before me at one of my government jobs for their support cheques. Their fingers were dyed black from burnt tinfoil or whatever it was. The cop standing by, apparently to protect me, made wisecracks about them and pointed out the prostitute among them. Have a nice day.

(I contrast in my mind this young Canadian cop with a young Slovak nun who worked with recovering heroin addicts in Europe, and his voyeuristic contempt with her compassionate love.)

Being involved in the Spoken Word scene in the 1990s, it was only a matter of time before Ecstasy (MDMA) came my way, although amusingly, when a poet turned up outside a club with a handful of the pills, he said somewhat apologetically that he hadn't brought me any, for he assumed a devout Catholic wouldn't take Ecstasy.

I don't think Ecstasy is mentioned in the Catechism, but as a matter of fact I had read up on the side effects of Ecstasy, and at the time everyone thought it could make you permanently depressed. ("And it was illegal," points out B.A., to whom I have read this post aloud.) Also, the poet looked so embarrassed, I patted him on the shoulder and said, No, no, that was quite all right, I had no interest in E. What I soon had interest in was ear plugs as, dear me, that rave was LOUD.

As for Edinburgh, I am about to shock local eavesdroppers by linking to the Guardian, but all you really have to do is recall Trainspotting to get an idea of how nasty life in Edinburgh can be if you are dumb or bored or depressed enough to get involved with heroin. Very occasionally I have seen a seriously strung out junkie staggering along Leith Walk or even--heaven help us--early Sunday morning on Heriot Row.

It's interesting how even drug-use has class implications. Alcohol is the most democratic. Cocaine is associated with successful (if louche) professionals like lawyers, film directors and poor Father Corapi. Crack is associated with the homeless, possibly because it generally makes you homeless. Heroin is associated with the formerly-working classes, thieves and prostitutes, possibly because it can make you a thief or prostitute. Marijuana is associated with slackers and students. E is associated with middle-class kids with money for clubs, particularly the ones who die after taking it. Gasoline fumes are associated with the poor, rural Innu.

As an urban Canadian who was in university for a very long time, I don't blink at booze or the occasional use of grass although I would go mental if my niece or nephews touched the first before they were 18 (except wine at home) and the second before they were 25. (And even then I might moan at them about the dangers of chronic use. "And it's illegal," says B.A.) I also think chronic users make lousy boyfriends--at very least for ambitious girls with places to go and people to see and babies to have.

I am not at all blase about the other stuff and, in fact, would not associate with anyone who used them, except in a professional capacity, as indeed I did when I was handing out the welfare cheques or reading funny stories at Spoken Word events. They are just too darned dangerous, they make people dangerous, and they funnel money to dangerous people.

As someone who drinks coffee and wine almost every day, and enjoys the occasional cocktail or glass of vodka, it would be hypocritical to condemn the human fascination with altering consciousness. However, anyone who thinks honestly has to admit that when short-term pleasures inspire long-term damage and human misery, not only to oneself but to society--of which the heroin-fuelled AIDs crisis in Edinburgh is but one example--it is best to give them a miss.

Nota Bene: B.A. keeps pointing out that it is illegal to consume illegal substances, and as Catholics we are obliged to follow just laws. I point out, however, that there are all kinds of substances that the law doesn't in fact cover, and we should avoid them anyway.

Update: Children in Britain are allowed by law to drink alcoholic beverages at home with their parents' consent once they are five. Five?

Christmas Party Survival Guide

What I absolutely hated most about being Single, other than not knowing why I was Single when I was so obviously a splendid catch, was going home by myself after parties. Or work. Or anywhere really. But going home alone after parties really rankled. If I had ever learned to drive, I think it would have been different. I could have had a rockin' CD to go home with, and a heater to turn on, and protection from the hooded claw. On the other hand, I guess I wouldn't have been able to drink at the party. Hmm.

The solution to this is, quite obviously, taxi cabs. I think it absolutely worth it to factor taxi cabs into your December budget, particular if you have a nice fur wool coat and want to avoid being harassed by the avengers of the mink sheep family. It is also comforting if you can get a handsome young man to see you to your cab and say "Corby Hall, driver" (or wherever) in that commanding yet amiable voice handsome young men all seem to have in films. Then you can wrap yourself in your mink serviceable wool coat and settle back with a sigh of comfort. Make sure it's a real cab, mind you, with a driver who actually knows the neighbourhood.

Then you should have something really nice waiting for you at home. Home should be tidy, first of all, as it's so nice to come back to a tidy home. And you should have a clean nightgown or pyjamas and your robe set out instead of scrunched on the bathroom floor. And there should be a tempting new DVD set out, in case it is still early enough for a DVD when you return, and a delicious pot of barszcz in the fridge or good quality cocoa on the shelf. Hopefully you have warm slippers for outside bed and a hot water bottle for inside bed. Beside this bed should be a reading lamp and an uncomplicated book. (Recently my own uncomplicated book has been Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos. I heartily recommend it.)

My experience of life is that you have to take better care of yourself when you are Single than when you are married, unless you are unhappily married. In that case you must take very, very good care of yourself indeed. But that is a subject for a different blog altogether.

I see that I have started backward, i.e. when you leave the party. Well, in my end is my beginning. The beginning of a Christmas party is you preparing for when you leave the Christmas party. Having prepared your home to receive you from the party in its warmest embrace, you can now get yourself ready for the party, which means turning yourself into your best-looking version of you. It can be difficult to gauge what this is, but although I am much older than most of you, even I have moments when the image in the mirror passes my critical gaze.

At the party you greet whoever it is who lets you in, introducing yourself if the person doesn't know you, and repeating his/her name back when he/she tells you what it is. Then you silently associate this name with something about them, e.g. if his name is David and he is very well dressed, mentally dub him Dapper David. Then you find your host or hostess, who will hopefully introduce you to whoever they are speaking to (repeat name, make up association), and take away your coat, leaving you speaking to the new people.

In general at parties you should not talk to the same people for too long at first, but circulate. Circulating is made even more easy if you grab a plate of hors d'oeuvres and take it from conversation circle to conversation circle. (This, by the way, is a good way to get out of a boring conversation, including your own. If you see the eyes of your interlocutor glaze over, say "Would you like a coconut shrimp? I myself am dying for a coconut shrimp." Then lunge for the plate of coconut shrimp and carry it around like the goodwill ambassador for coconut shrimp.)

You can also ask the host if you can do anything, and you can listen for cues from your host or hostess for things he or she might like you to do. Thus, at a party earlier this month, I found myself with a dishtowel stuffed into the top of my new-to-me 1930s evening gown making pierogi with a very interesting woman painter.

It is perfectly acceptable for you to sit by yourself on one end of the sofa or in a chair with a drink in your hand and silently watch the proceedings. If someone sits beside you, it is acceptable for you to introduce yourself and memorize their name and ask an open question like, "And how do you know our host/hostess?" But if no-one does, then it can be great fun to watch the party dynamics and try to guess who likes whom. It is kindly to keep an eye out for someone even shyer than you--the girl whose arms are crossed and whose legs are wound around each other like a pretzel, for example--and to go over and talk to her/him. If he or she bolts, it's not you; it's him or her. The body language for "shy" is remarkably like the body language for "I've just discovered my lover is cheating on me, and I don't know how to react."

I would counsel you to be particularly careful of how much you drink when you go to a party unescorted and to never, ever be alone behind closed doors with a man you have just met. Beware of any man whose chatting up technique is to insult or confuse you. If any stranger insults or confuses you, it is time for the coconut shrimp manoeuvre. You might also want to complain to the host or hostess, which gives him or her the chance to say, "I don't even know who he is. Scooter brought him." Your amount of trust in any guest uninvited by the host or hostess should be zero.

It is the host's or hostess's job to make sure that nobody is harassed or made to feel uncomfortable at his or her party. However, not all hosts and hostesses are created equal, so if a word in the host's or hostess's ear does not result in a better time for you, then it is time to call Mr Taxi and return to the warmth and comfort of your home.

If, however, you feel you are having the opposite problem, i.e. that instead of getting too much attention, you are getting none, you can comfort yourself that there may be reasons for that beyond your control. For example, I know a beautiful woman who went to a party in a lovely black dress and opera gloves, and a young man of 24 said to their mutual friend, "Who is that girl in black?" and the mutual friend said, "That's a Married Woman", and so this young man never spoke to me her again.

Lastly, you do not have to go to every party to which you are invited. I know perfectly well that many Single girls go to parties they'd rather not go to in case this is the party in which they meet The One. Thank heavens I did not think like this, as my One was living across the ocean and never went to a party in my town until after he was engaged to me. The only point to parties, I think, is to eat and drink yummy things in the company of people you already know and like, in the expectation that you will meet other people your host or hostess knows and likes. If you have good reason to suspect that a party will be deadly dull, or that your host or hostess has spotty judgement when it comes to guests, then you can save on your cab fare and just stay home in your clean pyjamas to watch that tempting DVD and drink that yummy barszcz or chocolate.

A Great Natural Anti-Depressant

One very good thing I continued to do during the slow and painful transition from badly married to church-approved (with papers!) Single again was go to the gym. For a while there, that meant both gyms: the YMCA and the boxing club. Boxing and I parted ways, eventually, but I kept on going to the Y. And great was my joy when I went back to university and discovered that the use of both of the two big gyms was covered by my tuition. I went with the bigger one, the one Olympic athletes train in. Then I worked out an hour a day, every second day: half an hour on the treadmill or the step machine, and half an hour with the weights and weight machine. When I tired of the shenanigans of immature undergrads, I took advantage of the Women-Only hours. Generally it was me and the Muslim girls. Peace at last.

Sadly, when I went to Boston to do my PhD, I discovered that graduate students had to pay hefty fees to use the college gym. So I joined a commercial gym relatively nearby, but somehow--what with the weather being as cold as it was, and it not really fitting into my schedule, and not being able to make ends meet--I stopped going. I also gave up on ten (goodness!) years of low-fat habits and used Ben & Jerry's ice-cream as an anti-depressant until I dropped out of the PhD and my doctor put me on the real thing

Oh, my pills! I loved them. I got so much done. Listen, I love anti-depressants. Before I went on them, I was like, "Oh, I don't want to lose my personality, weep, weep" but afterwards, I was like "I love you, little pills!"

When I got engaged to B.A. the first thing the various doctors in my life said was to get off the little pills because there are few things worse for little baby brains--should you get pregnant--than my friends the pills. You have to give them up as soon as you get engaged, so that they can gradually leave your system. And at the time I gave them up without a care because B.A. is an anti-depressant in himself.

However, melancholy is the writer's lot, and I also have Nerves on top of it, and the practically pharmaceutical nature of falling in love wears off after three years, so B.A. and I decided that this time I really should go back to a gym and stick to an exercise regimen. So I have.

From failed experiments in this direction, we have learned that the most important aspect of a gym is that it be within a twenty minute walk of our house. After that it is important that the gym has everything I like--treadmill, row-machine, standing weights, free weights and stoical men who are serious about working out and so barely notice if women are around. Then it has to be affordable, which was a bit of a poser re: nearest gym until I discovered that it has a special, lower fee for those who come in only between 9 and 4. Yay!

One thing I noticed the first time I worked out in this gym is how mad my upper back was when I did chest flies. It shrieked a bit. I wondered why the heck that was, and I suspect it was from being at the computer for hours and hours a day. Fortunately, it is better now, or at least beaten into submission by the new exercise regimen formulated for me by an immensely wiry Scottish trainer.

Since I was Single for most of my serious gym-rat days, I was reminded of those days today, and it occurred to me that I would have been a lot worse off mentally, not to mention physically, if I had not worked out so much.

So today's Auntie Seraphic advice, keeping in mind that Auntie Seraphic is not a doctor, is to think about joining a gym, if you do not belong to one already. If money is an issue, see how much it costs to use your college gym or if the local YMCA has a sliding scale. Not to get all socialist here, but if governments were serious about universal health care, they would subsidize gym memberships and slap warning labels on chip shops, pie shops and burger joints. As a friend of mine with the Ministry of Health used to say, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

Seraphic Takes a Holiday

Well, my dears, I am going on holiday tomorrow. Benedict Ambrose and I are going to Poland, and I will not have any internet access. I'm going to rest my wrists and just enjoy life without pontificating or giving any advice, except perhaps on Saturday, when I appear at the Kraków bookfair and on Sunday, when I meet the Brave Women in Kraków.

So from Thursday to Monday, we will be in Kraków. From Monday to Tuesday night, we will be in Wrocław. Then on Wednesday we will go from Kraków to Częstochowa, where I will pray for you all, and on Thursday--All Saints' Day--B.A. and I will go with a friend to visit the graves of parents of John Paul II.

There is no Hallowe'en in Poland; the Poles find it shockingly unchristian, which I suppose it is. I never really thought about it before, since it always seemed to me so obviously secular and a harmless tribute to the Celtic heritage of so many Americans and Canadians, including me. At any rate, there are many important traditions in Poland around All Saints' and All Souls', and I am glad to have the opportunity to find out about them.

As usual before I get on a plane, I am thinking about my own death and what I would have to say for myself if death arrived mid-flight. Obviously I'm not going to share that with you, but as I ate my morning porridge, I wondered what I would want my last words to you to be. What would be the absolute best advice I could give to Single women, particularly the Single women who don't want to be Single?

And this may make you laugh, but what I thought was "Be clean and don't talk too much."

We live in public, and the number one law of life in public seems to be to present a pleasant appearance. And this does not mean looking like the next Cindy Crawford, but simply not looking or smelling dirty. I'm sorry if this seems so obvious, but it is so excruciating to discover that one has been unknowingly breaking this prime rule of social life, that if you have been, your friends are very unlikely to tell you. So always make sure you are scrubbed and maybe you should not wear that shirt for the third day in a row and maybe mouthwash is not an expensive frill.

Also, quit smoking if you can. Unless you are a non-smoker, you probably do not know how awful it is to be in a small enclosed space with an elderly lifelong smoker--unless it's your grandma. Somehow I never minded Grandma, and when I first smell cigarette smoke I always think of my grandma. Cooped up in a small car with an elderly man who is oozing tar from every pore, I think only of death and how sweet it might be and whether or not I will throw up before we reach our destination.

Younger smokers don't seem to present so much of a problem for me, but you never know about others. If you aren't ready to give up smoking, consider how best to eradicate the smell.

But however scrubbed and sweet-smelling you are, you will lose friends and not influence people if you talk non-stop. It is a sad fact of life that not everyone is as interested as you are in your life, your family and your interests. And, generally speaking, men are not as interested in some subjects that women find infinitely fascinating, like the feminist movement, natural family planning, child psychology and ballet.

I write as a reformed chatterbox myself. If I did not blog, I would probably talk as much as I blog now, and that would be disastrous to my social life. I love a good conversation as much as anyone, but I have discovered that less is more, unless I am deliberately trying to shut someone up. Occasionally I slip and deliver a monologue that is basically a verbal blogpost, but for the most part I try not to do that, because it is a terrible sin to bore people. If you bore someone enough, he will want to kill himself or you, and thus you are tempting him to indulge in sinful thoughts.

If you are worried, now, that you talk to much, go and ask your bluntest, most honest friend (the one who thinks telling white lies a confession-worthy sin, as did St. Augustine) if you do. If she says "Yes", that might be painful, but not as painful as having an older female friend, who desperately wants you to get married, shout "Let HIM talk!" when you tell her you have a coffee date.

There are many reasons why you might talk too much, if you do. There is nervousness, or discomfort with silence, or an unfortunate idea that men prefer child-like women who prattle like children, or that a man who does not interject his own thoughts is admiring your wit rather than planning his escape. Whatever it is, you might want to consider how to get over it. You might even want to (all together now!) talk to a therapist.

This is not a "Woman know your limits" type lecture. In my experience, men talk just as much as women do, if not more, when they are in company. There are studies showing that men in Britain talk more in groups than women do. B.A. certainly talks more than I do, and when he is not talking, he is singing or whistling or coughing or generally making a noise, unless he is reading, in which case a deathly silence must reign. And I have given enough dinner parties to marvel at much how much men can talk compared to supposedly chatty womenfolk. Fortunately, my loquacious guests are not usually boring; no one voice dominates.

And, as we say in Scotland, that's me. Have a lovely week, and if I am spared I'll be back in early November.

--Seraphic

Frank Talk on Money, Long Engagements & Religious Guys

Today I present you with a three part post because that is the mood I am in.

MONEY

It strikes me that the wrong men are worried about how much money they make and what women think of it all. Young men, the ones who wish to marry young women, should indeed plot and scheme to get a good job with opportunities for career advancement so that they will be able to support a wife and family.

Yes, most young women are also interested in getting good jobs with opportunities for career advancement, but most young women are also interested in having babies. If they are devout Catholic women, they are usually going to have babies sooner rather than later. This will take them out of the work force for months or years, and someone has to pay the bills.

But middle-aged men, the ones who wish to marry middle-aged women, should stop worrying so much about how much money they have because middle-aged women don't worry so much about that ourselves. If we are still Single, we are used to supporting ourselves anyway. And if we don't have children, we know that we are unlikely to have more than one or two at this point. And at this point, we just want someone to lean on, to leave parties with and to love. Middle-aged women have more confidence than young women, so we are less worried about "being taken advantage of". So what if we work 9-5 and he just potters around his pottery kiln, selling the odd figurine to the odd tourist? So what? Who cares? If he's kind and funny and attractive, that's enough for us. The older I get, the more looks seem to matter.

I'm not touching the subject of young men who wish to marry older women and of middle-aged men who wish to marry young women because that's two whole other blog posts.

LONG ENGAGEMENTS

I think long engagements are stupid and cruel. If you are so much in love with with somebody that you want to marry him/her, you probably want to sleep with him/her. Sexual passion is one of the strongest forces known to man, so it is really hard to keep it bottled up. It is easier to keep it bottled up if you know the exact date drinks may be served.

For the record, the "Priest must be informed one year before the wedding" instruction in parish bulletins is cruel, uncanonical and unenforceable. Ever since I was an undergrad I noticed that the most pious Catholics got married in a matter of months. They would call up a priest-uncle or priest-cousin or priest-pal and have a nice little wedding in record time. It was the more lackadaisical Catholics, or half-Catholic, half-nothing couples who dated for a very long time and then were engaged for a very long time. These couples would be mainly concerned about "the hall." Never mind the diocese and its stupid "One Year" rule (which you can challenge, btw, as it is uncanonical). Some couples were willing to wait two years for the perfect hall of their dreams.

When I was younger and as innocent as a newborn lamb, I was surprised at the pious for their unseemly haste and impressed by the couples who could patiently wait for so long. Now I am a woman of the world, and know that although the pious were dying to have sex, the not-as-pious were often already having it.

Nancy Mitford joked about the size of an engagement ring being the measure of how much a man thought your virtue was worth. This suggests that even in the 1920s, engaged couples were sleeping together. And I believe there are parts of Italy where it is so assumed an engaged couple are sleeping together, that bickering couples marry and divorce rather than just break off the engagement, for otherwise the woman's reputation would be ruined.

So I am not throwing stones at engaged couples who sleep together, the love-struck little poppets. I just think they should get married ASAP if the temptation is that bad. And obviously they'll have to go to confession first.

Meanwhile, B.A. and I tried to strong-arm my parish priest into marrying us in four months after I first talked to the priest. He looked at my annulment papers and quailed. The marriage tribunal wrote somewhere or other that I'd better know the next guy I married real well. The priest looked at me hopefully when he mentioned this. We got married six months after I talked to him. There was no stupid hall. The reception was in my parents' house. I got a priest-pal to say the Mass.

I love to say that I don't believe in single men's words--I believe only in their diamonds. I figured unless there was a ring and unless he had told his mother, an engagement wasn't real. But now I am upping the ante and saying an engagement isn't really real unless there is a wedding date.

RELIGIOUS GUYS

In general it is stupid to sleep with someone unless you're married to him or at least there is a clear,fixed and widely-known wedding date. Men in general are so terrified of marriage, they either have to be promised something really good in order to go through with it or be terrified of what their mothers will do if they don't.

A girl might think religious men exempt from this because religious men are very pro-marriage and want nothing more than to please God by getting married, so seducing a religious guy is the way forward. But no.

It is my humble opinion that if a man really is that into you, there's not much you can do to dissuade him from marrying you, short of cheating on him or killing something or someone. So merely sleeping with your devoutly Catholic fiance will probably not ruin the whole relationship, although obviously it is a mortal sin, so you ought not to do it.

However, there are certainly a lot of religious men who would be so personally devastated at having committed a mortal sin with their girlfriends that they will never see their girlfriends the same way ever again. In fact, they might even consider it virtuous to break up with those satanic temptresses so as to marry pure girls, girls who have not gotten in the way of their primary relationship with God.

It is always a good idea to seem even more chaste than your chaste Catholic boyfriend, even if inwardly you are a volcano of lust. You know you are, and your best friend knows you are, and I know you are, but he doesn't know you are, and that's fine. By appearing as pure as a bowl of vanilla ice cream, at least next to him, you are inspiring him to be good, a better man than he is, etc., etc.

I am sure there are all kinds of depressing examples that you will now write in about your boyfriends to whom you were angels of purity and light who ditched you for flashing-eyed bad girls with roses in their teeth. But in general I would say to be particularly sensitive to the hopes and beliefs of deeply religious men and don't try to tempt them into things for which they will later be very angry with you.

I have found "Don't touch the hottie" to be a particularly effective mantra.

Let Your Yes be Text?

Technology continues at its hysterical pace, and nothing can date me as much as the admission that I never sent B.A. (or, I think, anyone) a text until 2009 when he gave me his old mobile phone. I am still rather lackadaisical about texting, however, and prone to leaving this phone behind on public transport. Fortunately, my phone is endlessly forgiving, and we always get back together again in the lost property offices of Europe.

Texting makes a nonsense out of the quaint advice of The Rules that one ought not to reply to a man's phone calls right away, for fear of looking too available. Thanks to the mobile phone, we are all too available, and everyone knows it. However, texts are cheaper than actual phone calls, so those are what we are most likely to get.

I was struck by the terrible dilemma of a reader who was asked on Tuesday for a date, and she said Sunday. She received a short text on Wednesday, which had no content, just an affectionate "Hi there, hot stuff" (not actual words). She did not return this text, and then received no further communication. Because there was no further communication, she wondered if their Sunday date was still on.

Remembering a time when all telephones were connected by wires to walls, I would have assumed the Sunday date was still on. If you say on Tuesday that you will meet Sunday, then it is obvious to me that there is nothing more to confirm. Let your yes be yes--that's how I feel about it. It would have been a bit odd, in the days of wires, to tell a man on Tuesday that you'd see him on Sunday, and then have him call you up on Wednesday just to say "Hi."

But these are the days of wireless, and men are more spoiled than ever. By the 1990s most young men assumed that most young women who would be seen with them would also sleep with them, and nowadays most young men seem to assume that most young women who would be seen with them will answer all their text messages. Technology, no less than the sexual revolution, has radically changed social communications AGAIN.

Well, we aunties must stay on top of these things, so I'm glad that this has been brought to my attention. I have given the matter some thought, and I think the wisest thing to do is to answer first texts (at least) from suitors the day you get them, but ignore all those that come in after 8 PM until the following morning.

Why 8 PM? The idea is to cloak your evening engagements (or lack thereof) in some mystery. If you rapidly answer messages from 8 PM to midnight, you might give the impression that you are moping at home with nothing better to do than exchange texts with him. This works against the impression that you are a busy, exciting woman with a fulfilling life, from which only an ambitious and attractive man with serious intentions could distract you.

However, I believe you must answer texts from suitors in a timely manner, and not simply ignore them, because men these days have a horror of being perceived as stalkers, and if you don't answer their first texts, they might not send you second attempts.

This does not mean answering every random follow-up thought or answering all messages ASAP. The flip side of modern men worrying about being perceived as stalkerish is modern men's rapid slide into satiation and boredom.

One feels sorry for men sometimes. (Bless their little hearts.) They demand more and more, and then when they get it too soon (even if not before they demand) and too much (even if not more than they demanded), they get all twitchy and irritated, and they don't know why. Young men are bad at expressing how they feel because they so often don't know how they feel, let alone why. And thus we have to do their emotional thinking for them. They can't help it, poor sweets; they just have lower EQs.

It is our duty, therefore, our responsibility to masculine fraility, not to allow them to become bored with us. It is one reason, by the way, why after marriage we must spend money--no matter how much husbands complain--on new hairstyles and new shoes and new clothes and alternate long periods of domestic tranquility with shouts about the state of the garage.

So when it comes to texts, I recommend answering their first texts in a text conversation in a businesslike way but not after 8 PM, if it is merely "Hiya, hot stuff" and not "I'll be there at 9."

Married women, of course, must answer all their husbands' texts ASAP. Women should band together to create a culture in which a man thinks the only way to get a woman to be really super nice to him is to marry her, and married women should do our bit by being demonstratively nicer to our husbands after the wedding than we were before it. This, however, does not preclude the buying of new shoes, etc., for the reason I mention. It is not nice to allow your husband to become bored.

Update: I am swotting away at Polish, and it appears that poet Wyslawa Szymborska agrees with me: "Piękna jest taka pewność, ale niepewność piękniejsza."

"Perhaps to a point," says Father Bernard Lonergan from heaven.

Tea Lady

It was like something in a Lucy Maud Montgomery book, poppets! Yours truly was asked to help serve tea after church. I felt as if I had definitely arrived.

In Canada (and, I think, Britain) before the Second World War, being asked to pour the tea at a tea party or any other social gathering was seen as an honour. And we are nothing if not anachronistic in my little Extraordinary Form of the Mass parish community. Not that there is anything anachronistic about the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, which transcends time. No, it's just that we tend to go in for tweed, mantillas, bicycles and old-fashioned courtesy.

I remember being rather confused, for the first 38 years of my life, whether the altar was more of an altar or more of a table. Since I went to ordinary post-Vatican II Catholic school, there seemed to be a lot of emphasis on "table" and "gathering around the table" when, in fact, the altar didn't really look like a table. No matter what, it looked like an altar. No matter how many people stood around it, what was going on did not look like a dinner party but like an intensely serious ritual.

But now this has all been cleared up for me, and I am strongly convinced that an altar is an altar and not a table, save in the the most analogical sense. However, I can see why people would want the altar to be a table. And to such people, who badly want their Sunday worship to be about people being in solidarity with other people, not about each person worshipping God, I strongly suggest they go to or found an after-Mass tea.

Mass is Mass, and tea is tea. At Mass you have a priest, an altar and some altar servers. At tea you have the tea lady, the table, and some table servers. Simples. From my neo-Tridentine point of view, men serve at the altar, and women serve at the tea. And, heaven knows, tea must be very important, since so many people want Mass to be tea: handshaking and fellowship and maximum participation and whatnot.

The Cup of Tea of Peace, as I like to call it, is usually presided over by the most senior women of the parish, although the eldest prefers just to wait until it is almost done and then help with the washing and sweeping up. But if some are away, then they ask younger ladies to help. This week, two were away, so the ladies who presided were one senior lady, me, and the eldest lady at the end. I got the teapot because it is heavy.

"Would you like a cup of tea?" I carolled again and again, and thus had the great pleasure of talking to everyone in the parish who wanted a cuppa. And it struck me that for a Single person this would a very good thing indeed. You can get involved in all kinds of parish activities, but the one job that guarantees you getting to know and becoming known by every sociable person in the parish is pouring out the after-Mass tea.

As a tea lady, you would have a built-in excuse to speak to even the most handsome and bachelory of the handsome bachelors and your lovely smile might inspire the more scheming of the ladies to drag their sons/grandsons/proteges to their Mass for the purpose of meeting you afterwards. Just don't dress like a mouse out of Beatrix Potter.

I suppose it is terrible to look immediately at the earthly benefits of serving at the tea table as opposed to the joy and peace inherent in service. And actually I did think a lot about Saint Edith Stein yesterday as I poured out tea and ran the ancient carpet-sweeper over the floor. Edith Stein would have agreed with me that a female theologian who is too grand to pour tea, wipe cups and push the carpet-sweeper is no theologian at all.

But this is, after all, a blog for Single ladies, so in case you haven't thought of it yet: say yes if you are asked to volunteer to serve tea or coffee after Mass, or after any other respectable gathering.

Update: Ooh la la! Just passed 10,000 hits for the month. I've never noticed that before.

Don't Be a "Kind Friend"

There you are, eating your sandwich with Mary and Jane, when Jane says something about an old acquaintance of hers. This friend is called Anne. Jane does not know that you know Anne, and she has not named Anne, and Jane is telling the story only to make a point. Still, you don't think Jane should be telling this story. You think about how hurt Anne might be if she knew Jane was using her story--however anonymously Anne appears in it--to make a point.

So what do you do?

"I think Anne ought to know," you say and go out of your way to contact Anne ASAP.

Or maybe you resist the temptation and keep your mouth shut. Perhaps later you send Jane a quick email saying that you know Anne, and you know Jane would hate it if she inadvertently hurt Anne, so with all the good will in the world--for you do see the importance of the point Jane was making--you hope Jane does not mind if you suggest she be even vaguer in the example she gives! You hope Jane isn't too embarrassed by your email. Let's get together soon. Yours sincerely, You.

Alternatively, especially if you honestly don't like Jane for whatever reason, you can do and say nothing except reflect that Jane's chatter is going to get her into trouble one day.

One of the lessons age brings, my little poppets, which is why I know to tell you, is that it is never good to be the bearer of bad news.

Sometimes you have to be the teller of bad news, but almost never do you have to be the BEARER of bad news. Advice columnists all seem to be at one on the subject of "I saw my friend's husband/wife in a cocktail bar/restaurant with another woman/man. Should I tell my friend?" They all say NO. But they also say that if your heartbroken friend asks you directly, "Did you ever seen my husband/wife with another woman/man?" then you are free to say, "Yeah, I did."

It is fun to share news. I pester my husband and friends back in Edinburgh for updates. And I think a certain amount of warm-hearted gossip (e.g. Sally won the President's Medal; Hector convulsed the table with his jokes; Cyril refused to undo his tie even though the room was baking) is both inevitable and harmless. Indeed, I would go so far as to say it is a good thing.

However, it is wrong to sow discord and strife. First of all, it hurts people and second of all, it subtly changes how people feel about you. Traces of the pitch of the bad news you bear sticks to your hands.

The traditional name for a person who needs to tell Anne what Jane said about her to Mary is "tale-bearer." But another one, said with irony, is "kind friend." We don't want to be "kind friends"--we want to be kind friends. And a kind friend does not think "Gosh, that would hurt Anne if she knew" and then makes darned sure Anne finds out.

Retire the Jumper

One day I will give up this blog secure in the knowledge that there are a lot of other dames writing about the Single life. Currently the Crescat is Single, and she had this to say about the Church as matchmaker. It is partly a response to the incomparable Simcha Fischer, mother of nine, who recently asked Single readers what it is that you want the Church to do for you.

But what really got my interest was the first comment on Kat's post, which was from a Single woman noting that more men seem to go to Traditional Latin Masses but that she did not want to wear a jumper. I'm assuming this woman is Canadian or American because in the UK a jumper is not a utilitarian frock but a sweater/pullover. And at the risk of being one of those Catholic bloggers who fixates on women's clothing, I'm going to fixate on women's clothing. (As a stunning innovation, I'll mention men's, too.)

Now, I have nothing against jumpers, per se. I had a very nice charcoal grey jumper (utilitarian frock) when I was four years old. There is a time and place for jumpers, like your elementary school photographs. For girls under twelve, I recommend the trusty old jumper, perhaps with a fetching ladybug pin.

I do not recommend the jumper for girls and women over twelve, and I am staggered that anyone would mention the TLM and jumper in the same breath. I suppose girls and women don these things as a sort of modesty uniform, a sartorial placard reading "I am a chaste and modest woman who would not have shoddy, unthinkable affairs with local tradesmen while you are at work." But I assure you that such modesty uniforms are completely unnecessary. Modesty is a good and noble thing, but it is all the sweeter when it is subtle. The virgin who reminds people constantly that she is a virgin is not as modest as the virgin who keep her mouth shut on such a personal subject.

And as a husband-attracting device, modesty is highly over-rated and always has been. Back in Jane Austen's day, elegantly dressed young ladies made their Empire-waist frocks stick to their bodies by spraying them with water. Desperate matchmaking mothers prompted their scandalized daughters to smile more, to flirt more, to give more encouragement, for heaven's sake, Laetitia. Modesty should of course be on the list of your womanly attributes, but it is down around #5. It is not #1, except in places like rural Afghanistan.

Now I go to a TLM myself, and being a reasonably observant woman, I note who else is there and what they are wearing, and who looks good, and who needs to have a little talk with me. And one thing I can tell you about my TLM community is that there are a lot of men in it. A goodish percentage of these men are bachelors under 40, and with the exception of the rebel in the rugby shirt, these young bachelors are sartorial romantics. They are dressed according to their personal, and yet shared, vision of what men dressed like in 1948.

They wear jackets, naturally. These jackets are usually tweed and very often bought secondhand, either from the internet or from a vintage shop. Occasionally a sharp piece of non-tweed tailoring--either made-to-measure or pret-a-porter--makes an appearance. Then there are the woolly pullovers (aka UK jumpers), for Britain is cold and there wasn't much by way of central heating in 1948. Less attention is paid to trousers, but they tend to be corduroy and sometimes bright red. (N.B. Bright red corduroy trousers are best left to broad-shouldered men, mes vieux.)

There are, of course, ties--including school ties, even if that school was a comprehensive, and university ties. Sometimes there are a bow-ties and a keen flutter of interest amongst the bow-tie fans when an new initiate takes the plunge. Then there are the socks and the shoes, the pocket squares and the handkerchiefs, and, I am told (for of course I never see these things), the braces, the sleeve bands and the sock garters.

And this all makes complete sense. If a man wants back all the beauty, romance and fittingness of the Mass before 1963, he might very well want back all the beauty, romance and fittingness of men's fashion before 1963. And if he is that interested in men's fashion before 1963, imagine how he thinks women should dress. The Well Dressed Woman of 1948 was not wearing what Americans call a jumper, people. You should not be thinking Laura Ingalls Wilder; you should be thinking Veronica Lake.

Now I know somebody is itching to write in and tell me that women don't dress for men, we dress for ourselves, and blah blah blah blah. This has to be complete garbage because I cannot think why any woman would wear a stupid "jumper" unless she were worried about her audience. I certainly dress for an audience, and it is for the sake of politeness as much as for anything else, like not wearing jeans to a Goth bar because it would ruin the ambiance for the Goths. And as too often I am the only woman at TLM soirees, I owe it to everybody to look as well as possible.

Besides, there is the singular thrill of giving men whiplash. You gorgeous young things are probably too, too used to this sort of thing, but it was a revelation for your belle-laide Auntie when she wore a dashing new hat and (she was told) every Young Fogey in the congregation craned his head to get a better look. Elderly widowers danced attendance; it was a very pleasant morning.

And that thought brings me back to the question of what the Church can do for Singles. As feminists say, when they are not calling the Church a "male monolith", WE are the Church--which is to say, helpful older married ladies like me. And I am telling you not to wear dumb, shapeless, what-Americans-call-jumpers to Mass, particularly not the TLM Mass. I am telling you to have a look at the best sartorial zeitgeist of your parish and then look wonderful.

You're welcome.

Suddenly Over Online Romances

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sex and Cancer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nagging Young Women's Boyfriends Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Nagging a No-No?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lady

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

Today's topic is "the lady."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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