Attention Again D.C. Readers

Hello, dear readers of Washington, D.C.! I have had an email from a new girl who has moved to D.C. for work. It sounds like a great job in itself, but she is tired of hearing people around her spout anti-religion nonsense . She needs some Catholic networking, and I know you gals are connected. So volunteers please! Who wants to organize a Seraphic Singles meet-up in D.C.? I know the Catholic scene in D.C. is huge, but our girl hasn't found it yet.

The Importance of Girlfriends When You're a Girl

This is should be short because it is B.A.'s birthday and I have to clean, shop, cook, bake and possibly get to Polish Mass because it is also the Feast of Our Lady Queen of Poland. Not being Polish, I feel no obligation to celebrate the Feast of Our Lady Queen of Poland, but I would like to anyway. (Update: Whoops. I am credibly informed that although it is the Feast of the Queenship of Mary, the Feast of her Queenship of Poland is some other day.)

When I was in Gdańsk I went to Mass every day because my hostess Marta tries to get to Mass every day, and I thought this was very beautiful. It is very easy to get to daily Mass in Poland because there are churches everywhere, and usually at least one person praying in any city church at any time of the day, and the priests show up to say Mass in such a way that you know they would show up even if nobody else did.

This was splendid and heartening, and what was also splendid and heartening was spending four days with a cradle Catholic woman my own age. I know many of my readers really prefer the company of men and feel like fish out of water when with fellow women, but I am definitely the kind of woman who enjoys being around other women. This is not to say I don't like men, but--.

Hmm. How to explain that "but"?

The wonderful thing about being in all-girl groups and activities, like Girl Guides and girls' school, is that although you compete a bit, you also work together and there is no mental adjustment for the presence of men. There is also no competition for men. You can just forget all that for as long as you are in the all-girl environment, learning how to tie a parcel or prepare a slide for the microscope. And you can talk endlessly, effortlessly obeying the social conventions around women's conversation you hopefully have mastered by the time you leave primary school.

But at the same time, for 99% of women, you pin your hopes for romance and family life on men, which means there is (or should be) a certain amount of detachment: you don't go out of your mind with jealousy when your friend falls in love with some guy. Sure, you might feel a bit neglected, but your heart doesn't snap in half. And this means women can relax around each other in a way we probably shouldn't around men. For example, you can tell a woman all about the lingerie your other friend got at her bridal shower and have a good laugh, whereas you can't tell a good male friend all this stuff without him silently asking the perpetual silent man question, "Why is she telling me this?"

From a cradle Catholic point of view, it is relaxing to be around other cradle Catholics because you don't have to talk about Catholicism so much. I spend a lot of time with convert men, including my husband, and I adore them all, but my goodness, do they talk a lot about Catholic stuff. Not usually about Our Lord or Our Lady, but about churches and liturgies and processions and what Pope Francis did and what Pope Benedict said and what convert Catholic wrote what about who.

Cradle Catholics, the ones who try to be faithful, don't have to talk so much. We can silently swim in a great sea of Catholicism, beyond words and sometimes even beyond thought, just believing and praying side by side. And this is what I did in Gdańsk with Marta. I am 100% sure it beat getting drunk with your mates and some Australian blokes on the beaches at Tenerife, the stereotypical modern British mini-break.

I do not, by the way, want to put up any kind of wall between cradle Catholics and convert Catholics. Unless they became Catholics just to please their fiances, convert Catholics have had an amazing experience, an at times painful and frightening adventure, and are often very impressive. Most of my favourite British Catholic writers were converts. There are a lot of leading American Catholic apologists who are converts. But there is something about growing up in a Catholic home and perhaps even a Catholic ghetto or Catholic society that is unique. Many of us North American Catholics are, by the time we leave home, Catholics In Name Only. But a Catholic childhood is a Catholic childhood, and Catholicism is in our cradle Catholic bones and blood and teeth and hair. (But I suppose that is also why cradle Catholics who hold heretical views are so confident in their heresies. You know the drill: "Well, I'm a Catholic, and I think...")

Then there is the generational thing, about which I felt a lot when I was with Marta, especially in front of the shipyard at Gdańsk, the birthplace of Solidarity. When the strikes were going on, Marta was right there. But I was watching them on TV, seeing the photos in Time magazine and observing the Polish priest who suddenly turned up in our parish, out of harm's way, so I remember too.

Generation is about what you remember. Generation gap is about memory as much as it is about "new" ideas and new technology.  

Anyway, it is funny to write so much about the joy of spending a long weekend with a cradle Catholic woman of my own generation when it is my convert Catholic husband's birthday. (Happy birthday again, B.A.!) But the point I am making is that even married women (perhaps especially married women) need female friends our own age who know and remember many of the same things we do.

This is why, perhaps, it is hard to make new women friends when you get older or move to another city: the majority of them, native to the city, are so busy with work and their families that when they have time to spend with friends, they choose their oldest friends, the friends who share the same background, values and memories. Childhood friends. High school friends. College friends.

Hard, though, does not mean impossible.

When She Chooses Him Over You

Here's one of the most painful facts of female existence. There are women who will put their latest romantic/sexual relationship before any other consideration in life: before their friends, before their children, before their jobs, before their marriages, before their health, before their sanity.

Sexual infatuation is a drug, and some women become addicts. Other women are just--well--ordinary human women. Most women naturally want a special man in their lives and make him their Number One priority. Marriage is supposed to make this tendency a safe, good one.

But it does hurt at least a little when your best friend falls in love or gets married. Quite obviously she loves some guy better than you, even if she has known you for twenty years and him for six months. Whoa. Ouch. Life.

If you are under twenty-five, the tendency of women to privilege some man over their female friends may come as a shock to you. If you are over twenty-five, you may have noticed this already. If you are over thirty, you're probably used to it. Life--you know? (Shrug.) Whadayagonnado?

Pop music is full of wonderful songs about "men come and go, but sisterhood is forever." It's a lovely idea, but come on. Although women don't usually compete with each other with the same bloodthirsty gusto as men, women do indeed compete with each other, and if it has something to do with a man... Whew! Look out. Even the nicest, kindest, women-loving women can go crazy with jealous rage.

But I should stress that not all women battle or compete much or often over men. One of the most annoying things about being a Single woman is going to a party of married couples where the Married women act like a you are a vixen in the hen-house just because you are having a conversation with one of the Married men. I should also stress that not all Married women are like that, either, although few things annoy Married me more socially than watching a Single woman chase any man around a party. "Sit still, woman," I think. "If he wants to talk to you, he'll talk to you."

But I'm not really thinking about the occasional social unpleasantness between the Married and the Single. I'm thinking about young women discovering that they have been displaced in their girlfriends' affections by their girlfriends' boyfriends. I am especially thinking about the young lady whose friend is now dating her ex-boyfriend.

Treason, we howl. Treason! How dare she? How can she be on his side, let alone at his side? AAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!

Really, it hurts. It really, really hurts. But it happens. And only if you are really lucky will she discuss it with you first. She is much more likely to sneak around or lie about it because she doesn't want to hurt you or feel like a bad friend, etc., etc.

So what do you do? Well, there are a number of things you might do.

First, admit to yourself and God that you feel betrayed and disrespected and even disbelieved, if you told your friend that your ex-boyfriend is a rat-fiend from hell.

Second, admit to yourself and God that as you fell for the guy, you know better than anyone how easy might have been for your friend for fall for the guy.

Third, ponder the faults of your ex, and feel compassion for your friend because now she has to deal with them. Pray for her. Go talk to a good priest about it all.

Fourth, draw some boundaries for yourself and for her. Her love life is her love life. You don't have any right to know what she does with her love life, and she has no right to impose her love life on you. If you don't want her to talk to you about Scooter, say "Because Scooter is my ex-boyfriend, I don't feel comfortable talking about Scooter." If you don't want Scooter in your place, tell your friend that as much as you care about her and want her to be happy, you don't want your ex-boyfriend in your place. She, of course, is always welcome.

This is not forcing your friend to "choose between her friend and her man"--that staple of so many boring and painful high school and college dorm dramas. This is you choosing to remain friends with your friend, but not being forced to have a relationship with her boyfriend.

It's a tricky situation, one that calls for compassion, patience and strength. Friends respect their friends' boundaries, so if the girl who is dating your ex still wants to be your friend, she must respect your boundaries: if you don't want him in your living space, or to have to talk about him, then you must say so as kindly yet firmly as possible, and she must respect that. And you must respect that her love life is her business, not yours. It is not for you to complain about to mutual friends, and you can't tell her what to do or not to do.

Fifth, allow yourself to grieve a little--in private or with someone paid or trained to keep their mouths shut. The juiciness of "Mary's dating Anne's ex-boyfriend, and Anne is totally gutted" is too much of a temptation for the average college student not to share. "Mary's dating Anne's ex-boyfriend, and Anne seems totally cool with it" is not only a million times classier, it's too boring for others to want to talk about much.

It may be that you will never see your friend in the same light again. I know. And that's sad, and maybe she dreads that, but truth is what is, as Saint Thomas Aquinas taught. Forgive her and also remember that you have other friends. She wasn't put on this earth to be your Lifelong Special Confidante; you probably have other women in your life to confide in, women who won't tell your ex what you said about this or that. (Another newsflash: women often talk to our boyfriends and husbands about what our friends did or said unless doing so feels like real betrayal.) Meanwhile, continue to do whatever girl-time stuff you could still enjoy together: studying, watching films, going dancing, baking a cake, organizing mass pedicure parties, messing around with chemistry sets, electric guitars or fabric scraps.

So. Compassion. Boundaries. Forgiveness. Adjusting. And hope.

***
Help B.A. support his colonial wife's unpaid-blogging lifestyle by pre-ordering Seraphic's Ceremony of Innocence today! 

Mrs Thatcher

Oh dear. This is a non-partisan, apolitical blog, but I feel a need to post something about the late Baroness Thatcher. Obviously this is a view of a Canadian, and not of a Scot and certainly not of an Irishwoman, an Argentinian or even an Irish-American who gets high off  grievances borrowed from unknown third cousins twice removed.

It is this. I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, and Margaret Thatcher was the only woman in public life I knew whose leadership was taken as seriously as that of a man. And, unlike so many women in public life, she did not derive her career from a man.

Indira Gandhi was the daughter of an Indian Prime Minister. Benazir Bhutto was the daughter of a Pakistani Prime Minister. Hilary Clinton, who didn't quite make PM class, is the wife of an American President. Sonja Gandhi is the widow of Indira Gandhi's son, another Indian Prime Minister.   Margaret Thatcher's father owned a grocery shop, and her husband was a businessman. Both her father and her husband supported and encouraged her, but she was not at all in their shadow or got to be Prime Minister through any legacy of theirs.

(Kim Campbell, by the way, was a short-lived novelty act who made the achievement "first female PM of Canada" meaningless. Her dumb faux-nudie photo lost her--and perhaps other Canadian women--credibility.)

As a child, it really meant a lot to me seeing Margaret Thatcher on television, and hearing her praised or excoriated as a person of real, political importance. Princess Diana was also talked about quite a lot, but not as if she were really all that important. She was gossamer; Thatcher was steel.

Margaret Thatcher had the dubious honour of being admired or hated the same way men are admired or  hated. She was not admired or despised for what she looked like, but for her political decisions. She was loved or hated for her brains and her will. She didn't try to look younger than she was, or prettier than she was, or stupider than she was, or any of those rather obvious ways in which women show our principal weakness: our longing to be loved, admired and cherished, sometimes at any cost.  Margaret Thatcher did not seem to care for that stuff. She had male friends, but the only man she seemed ever to had eyes for was her husband Dennis. There's a great strength in that, too.

And meanwhile, she wore skirts. She carried a handbag. She wore pearls. She did not attempt to deny or signal that she was anyone other than a woman, a middle-aged conservative woman with a businessman husband and two children. But she did not, as is the deplorable modern custom, borrowed from the Americans (although Canadians do this too, alas), show off her family on TV.

Here is an obit that very much resonated with me. My only observations concern the idea that she somehow neglected her children. First, English children whose parents could afford it have been raised by servants and schools for generations. Second, lots of stay-at-home mothers neglect or even sacrifice their children in all kinds of horrible ways. Some mothers drug themselves into a stupor with heroin, booze or even just TV. Others care about nothing except their latest sexy romance with their latest thuggish boyfriend.  Still others beat or belittle their children constantly. Running a G8 nation is not really in the same class.

Girl Girls

My right arm still really hurts, alas, so I will condense my "Pet" post into three sentence: I'm now officially not allowed to have a pet in the Historical House, so my baby substitute options are definitely limited. Does anyone know of a plant that is like a pet? Is there a plant that purrs, or is that only on Star Trek?

The post that I've wanted to write for days is about young men who will tell you that you are not a "real" woman for some reason, and how you should correct and ignore them.

First of all, although some young men may think they are being very objective when they formulate theories about women and femininity, they aren't. So if a man tells you you aren't very feminine, you can take this as saying more about his subjective impressions of reality than about you, even if you are a tanker trucker.

Boys' and men's irrational and subjective thoughts about women can be very damaging to the female psyche, as we naturally want to get along with men, and many of us are prone to self-doubt. The most terrible and extreme example I know of is a little girl whose inevitable but horrible elementary school nickname was, through no fault of her own, "Whore." This poor girl was one of the girls singled out for the elementary sexual experiences of the boys in my class, and was the most despised.

As I scroll through my memory for the usual reasons an innocent girl gets tarred with the "class slut" label--the first to get breasts, willingness to curse, the crime of listening to the wrong music or wearing the wrong clothes, the rumour of an older boyfriend--all I can see is the fact that this girl's nickname was "Whore." That's it. That is why, according to the spirit that ruled my classroom, she could be treated like crap.

And, incidentally, I was too wrapped up in my own problems to think very much about this girl at the time, and it was only after someone else in my class--a girl who had been treated with affection and respect by the boys--told me about seeing her years later, that it occurred to me how much she must have suffered. (In short, the first woman saw the second, turned white as a sheet, and crossed the road.)

My own painful brush with irrational male categories of femininity occurred when I was a teenager, the sort of Dumb Smart Girl who does boys' homework for them because they seem so desperate and only she can save them. I hung out with fellow baby neo-conservatives in a movement where the very word "feminist" was hated, and because I argued the feminist cause, I was considered perhaps a bit of a loose cannon. As luck would have it, my most vociferous critic was the boy I helped with his homework most. He wanted to be seen as an intellectual, and he certainly wasn't one, so I suppose it is no wonder that he hated my guts. Very irrationally, I was quite fond of him and wanted him to like me. (Sigh.)

He was the kind of boy who puts on chivalry like his older brother's jacket and one day bragged at a party that he always treated girls very well.

"But what about Seraphic?" demanded my friend. "You don't treat her very well."

"Oh," scoffed Mr Chivalry. "Seraphic's not a girl girl."

My therapist became very familiar with this story. Possibly my readers are already familiar with this story. Unfortunately, this is one of the defining stories of my life. And why, I ask, did I allow the stupid remark of a teenage dirtbag who begged and pleaded for me to fix his stupid essays to bother me quite that much?

And I suppose I must have thought boys were allowed to define who the "real" girls were, and as generations of women believed, that the greatest feminine accomplishment is to "make boys like you," and so, if you failed in this, you weren't that feminine.

How terrible. And how untrue. But that is enough for today because of my poor arm.

Friendships with Reserve

Men and women can be friends, but men can't be women friends and women can't be men friends. Let us be clear on this.

I have had some interesting correspondence about the following situations:

1. The man has a crush on a girl. He tells another girl all about it. He gets over his crush on the first girl. He develops a crush on the second girl. The second girl doesn't take him at all seriously.

2. The girl has a crush on a man. She tells another man all about it. She gets over her crush on the first man. She develops a crush on the second man. The second man doesn't seem to be interested anymore.

We could chalk this up as a tragedy of bad timing, or we could posit that there is something unwise in telling members-of-the-opposite-sex friends about our crushes.

If there is one thing I have learned about men, it is that they are not girls. And if they are attracted to girls, they do not appreciate being treated as if they were girls. Sometimes they resist this quite vigorously. But sometimes they do not because, being attracted to girls, they will cut girls a lot of slack. But, in general, they don't like being made to feel like the palace eunuch. Their semi-conscious resentment could be expressed in the parlance of the neighbourhood of my youth as "What am I? Chopped liver?"

Male friends who identify as gay do not seem to mind as much, but even then you really must understand that they are not "just some of the girls" even if they say they are. They are men, with male sexuality, and whereas their advice might be have an internal logic as far as men who identify as gay are concerned, it might make absolutely no sense for women, particularly chaste ones. Whenever men who identify as gay give me or tell me about relationship advice they have given other women ("And I told her, Darrleeng, you should take a lover"), my hair stands on end.

I like my guy friends so much, I don't treat them as if they were girls who might enjoy talking about girl stuff, e.g. my feelings. Possibly I slip occasionally, and bore them senseless, for which I apologize.

There's a fine line between treating all nice young Single men as if they were just Husband Potentials/Impossibilities and treating them as if they were girls. I call it Friendship with Reserve. It's respectful, it's kind, and, if this applies to your state of life, it keeps the options open.

It Never Grows Old

Girl 1: So what are you going to wear?

Girl 2: I don't know. Maybe my black gypsy dress again...

Girl 1: Oh, that's a beautiful dress. I really like it. It's beautiful.

Girl 2: So what are you going to wear?

Girl 1: Well, I don't know. Either my blue velvet dress or my long skirt.

Girl 2: Oh, you should wear your blue velvet. It's gorgeous.

Girl 1: Thank you! I really like it.

Girl 2: I'll tell you what! I'll wear my green velvet dress. I mean, it's cold, it's almost winter. So I can wear it. I'll wear my green velvet dress--

Girl 1: And I'll wear my blue velvet dress! That's great! Oh, that's great.

Girl 2: Yes, we can match.

Girl 2 giggles. She is on a mobile in a cafe in Edinburgh, 39+ if she's a day, and thoroughly conscious of what a high school conversation this is.

Girl talk. It never grows old.

Young Man's Darling

I wrote a novel about a woman in her mid-thirties who is romantically involved with a young man in his early twenties. Ignatius Press tells me it will be out in 2013, but I am not sure exactly when. If you wish to know exactly when, ask Ignatius Press.

This week I have had requests to talk about Younger Women Dating Older Men and Older Women Dating Younger Men, and I had to squish up my inner eye and stare into the dark shadows of my memories to try to see this all from a younger woman's perspective. For lo, I am 39+ and married, and incredibly tolerant about both situations.

If you are being pursued by an older man, and his grizzled charms make you go weak at the knees, by all means go out with this older man. If you are being pursued by a downy faced infant and you think his blushes are adorable, by all means go out with the infant.

By infant, I mean an infant over the age of 18, of course. And by you, I mean adult readers.

The older you get, the less age gaps seem to matter. When you are eighteen, it seems wrong to date a fourteen year old and worrisome to date a twenty-two year old. But when you are thirty, nobody worries if you date a thirty-four year old, and dating a twenty-six year old may seem a bit of a coup.

Incidentally, the age gap is not as pronounced in Europe as it is in North America. Europeans are just not so obsessed with age. It is not unusual for European university students to seek friendships or romance with people much older than themselves. Attractiveness is not equated with youth. Catherine Deneuve is in her 60s, and young men still fall down and worship her. Behold:



The title means "You or No-one", btw.

But even in North America young men can find older women attractive, and one of the most charming couples I know became a couple after the surprised woman decided that the younger man wasn't, as he complained, "just some kid."

Frankly, I think such younger man-pursues-older woman relationships very likely to succeed, if the woman actually does like him, because women are usually too inhibited prudent to chase men much younger than themselves. Therefore it is definitely a case of a man going after what he wants, and being determined to win in the face of a stupid obstacle, which is the woman wondering if he isn't too young for her. It is not a case of a self-deluding woman chucking herself at Mr Rapidly Being Spoiled.

That said, some women are just not attracted to younger men. I think this mad, as younger men are much better looking than older men. And as an older woman it is so much easier to deal with all their young man storminess. The sulks, the rants, the poses, the politics, the confusion that so oppress you when you're their age are much easier to deal with when you're over 30.

But I can see that a very gentle woman might want to give youthful Sturm und Drang a miss altogether and just date a kindly older man. It is not a hideous insult to be wooed by an older man, by the way. If you want to see him, see him. If you don't, say "No, thank you." All you have lost is your right to complain that nobody ever asks you out.

If he tries to make you feel bad for not wanting to go out with him, however, tell him to go to hell, gramps.

I was once in a marriage-track relationship with a man ten years older than myself. It didn't work out because he wasn't Catholic. Also, he had non-age related health problems and my mother was worried I was going to end up his nurse. Well, if you love someone, you don't mind being his nurse, but if you don't, you do. So it wasn't just that he wasn't Catholic but that I wasn't just that into him.

But a pal of mine married a man about 20 years older than herself--a big, funny guy with a motorcycle and a receipt showing an enormous bar bill taped to the wall--because she was that into him. We had a conversation about how they might not have a really long time together, given his age. She was a bit sad about that, but that's just how it was. And is. Sure enough, he got cancer five years later, but it looks like he's pulling through, thank God.

I realize that people are always jabbering on about "Is he too young for you?" or "Is he too old for you?" but once you are both ADULTS, and nobody become a really, truly adult magically at the age of 21 (let alone 18), these questions make little sense. In the case of teenage girls, everyone is terrified that Mr Older Guy is going to seduce her with the shameless lies teenage boys haven't yet figured out how to tell convincingly.

Yes, most of us westerners are adolescents until we are about 25. Girls mature faster, apparently. I didn't. But if you are a 30+ year old woman, the only thing you need to worry about is if your under-25 boyfriend is an adult yet or not. And maybe you are the patient kind who can put up with adolescent sulks and storms, and the smart one who isn't going to be his Older Woman Who Initiated Him Into the Sweets of Love, like an 18th century courtesan, only unpaid.

"I'm not going to be one of those b*itches who ruins children," said Brett, Lady Ashley in The Sun Also Rises. Words to live by.

As for older men, I could barely see them until I was over 30. I thought it was an age thing, but now I think it was a North American thing, too. But anyway, it was only after I was 30 that I would ever ever ever have considered going out with someone as old as 40.

It is traditional to complain that men always want women much younger than themselves, but I don't think this is true. Single men generally pursue women their own age, and most Single men are in their 20s. Most Single women are in their 20s, too, which may be why older Single men are so willing to try their luck with them. And I don't think older men who think twenty-something women are luscious are any less moral than older women who think twenty-something men are toothsome.

It has also been complained that playboys suddenly panic at the age of 40 and then start looking for women to have their babies. Well, more fool them. The way not to be hurt by playboys is not to go to bed with them. Indeed, quite a lot of modern misery could be solved by just not going to bed with men. Complaining because a man has had 20 years of strings-free fun and now is looking to settle down strikes me as a waste of breath and ink.

I shall end with my usual kind of advice.

* Do what you want as long as it isn't a sin. Smoking a cigarette or eating meat is not a sin. Going for coffee is not a sin. Heavy petting is a sin. When in doubt, check with your confessor.

* Don't chase men. Wait and see who shows up. Say Yes to what or who you want and No to what or who you don't want. It's your right.

*Stay rooted in reality. Don't delude yourself. If a man walks you home after dark, it is not a sign that he is that into you. Particularly not if you asked him to walk you home in the first place.

Update: I acknowledge the screams of horror from Women Younger Than I at the idea of (female) young things giving (male) old cougars the time of day. The idea is that older men are wily and experienced and wicked.

And to be honest, I was thinking of 30 year olds dating 40-plusses, since I can't imagine why a 20-something would want to date some guy with orange peel skin when she--unlike me--has access to all those toothsome 20-something hotties.

No offense, 20-something hotties. You're not supposed to be reading this blog.

Anyway, I have put up two new surveys. The top one asks "How old is too old?" and the one underneath wants to know how old you are, so that I will remember that some of you are bouncing babies.

Charm

Poppets, my hair stood on end. And I have a lot of hair, so you can just imagine what that looked like. Read this well-written article by "Lucy Simmonds" on altcatholic.net. Then read what Jeff in Sacramento wrote just beneath it. Do not tear your eyes away from the response by Jeff in Sacramento because I was profoundly moved by the testimony of Jeff in Sacramento and am going to write about it.

Go read. Then come back and read my thoughts below.

There are many reasons why men do not marry, and the comment stream is full of men saying what they are. The biggie is the absolute heartbreak of divorce, which is usually initiated by women, and the resultant loss of property, income and even children. That's what they say, so I'm not going to argue with them on that. I don't really enjoy arguing with men. There is no fun in arguing with a man you're not going to sleep with afterwards. Oh dear. Did I type that out loud?

But my principal thought, while reading Lucy's "I blame men" essay, is that the men she describes simply haven't fallen deeply in love with anyone yet. Nobody expects Western women to marry men we don't love. Well, I don't expect Western men to marry women they don't love. One might think out of sheer sexual frustration Catholic men might just pick the nicest girls they know and make the best of it, but it seems that they're not usually that sexually frustrated after all. Men, too, love love. Well, Keats was a man, so we shouldn't be surprised.

In Lucy's essay, Catholic American Manhood stands in the dock. All eyes are upon him. Lucy, the District Attorney (for the trial takes place in the USA), has accused him. We are the jury. Kerry Cronin (whom I know personally, a very sweet woman) has given her evidence. And now Jeff in Sacramento, counsel for the defense, steps before the bench and says "Is it not true that American women lack charm?"

Sensation in court.

One of the things about being happily married is that I can listen to Jeff in Sacramento without having ten thousand fits. Jeff in Sacramento could go on all day long about what he doesn't like about American Catholic women today and I wouldn't turn a hair. Even if he wound up by saying "And that goes for Canadian women, too, since I can't see much of a difference", I would merely nod and say, "Thank you, Jeff, for putting that so plainly." It's not my ego on the line. It's Lucy's. It's yours. So I will proceed cautiously.

I am on Lucy's side. And I am on Jeff's side. I am on the side of all authentic Catholic Singles and other Singles of Good Will. Fundamentally, Lucy and Jeff are on the same side, too. The war between the sexes is evidence of the Fall, not part of the Gospel message. In Christ there is no man or woman: this isn't some cockamanie argument for wimminpriests--it asserts the UNITY of Man and Woman in Christ.

"I blame men," says Lucy, and I cannot imagine a phrase more likely to lose her the sympathy of male readers. I used to blame men for stuff, too, and in fact my publisher at Novalis was a bit taken aback at some of the things I had to say about some men. But I figured out long ago that if you are Single and love men and want to marry one eventually, it is a very bad idea to sound like a Lesbian separatist. In fact, men are so battered and beaten up nowadays, the smartest thing a man-loving woman can do is tell men how marvellous they are. It is like rain falling on a wilted plant.

(Of course not all men are marvellous, but I am lucky in that all the men in my family are marvellous and that my husband is marvellous and we socialize only with marvellous men. If you're male and you're invited to my house for supper twice, you're marvellous. It's official. I should publish my guest list so that women can study it keenly.)

Another thing women should do is stop thinking men are anything like their schoolteachers. Our schoolteachers told us that if we studied hard and seized opportunities, we could be anything we wanted and could be the First Woman Blah-Blah-Blah and they would be proud of us. In fact they were already proud of us. Heavens, I can hear the words echoing from the past: "I'm so proud of you, girls!" But in general men do not give a tinker's damn about what women's grade are or what we do for a living. They usually don't care. Pretty face beats Harvard degree. Radiant smile trumps making partner. This is not to say that men think Harvard degree and making partner useless in a woman. These are just the cherries on the cake. B.A. did not marry me because I write well. But if I sell an article, he just happens to mention it to everybody.

And Lucy's schoolteachers would have loved her essay. It's well-written. It's thoughtful. It's honest, funny, and true. It sparked 47 comments. But it did not get her what she most deeply wants, and I heartily congratulate her on using a pseudonym.
However, all is not lost, because there is Jeff in Sacramento to tell her How to Get Traditional Catholic Men. Apparently the way to Get Traditional Catholic Men is to be charming.

I know a lot of Traditional Catholic Men*, and therefore I take Jeff's testimony quite seriously. But I also suspect that the Filipina and Polish women who marry ordinary white, non-Polish American guys do so in part because they are sick of the hyper-machismo of both the Philippines and Poland.

Women in hyper-macho cultures have it underscored to them every day and in every way that they are women, and they learn that they cannot take on men the way men take on men. And therefore they develop the feminine wiles men say they hate when they realize they are feminine wiles. If they don't know they are feminine wiles, men call them charm. And I bet you the Filipina and Polish women Jeff in Sacramento talks about turn them on instinctively the minute their American husbands get out of line.

Charm looks very nice, and indeed it is great fun to be charming. But underneath lies a not-so-pretty realism, the understanding that men are different and you cannot be 100% honest with them because they are men. Do you remember that scene in My Big Fat Greek Wedding when Toula's mother and aunt snow her father into thinking he had come up with a solution to a problem?




In some ways that was absolutely horrifying. But that's charm. And that's life. If you think it is absolutely terrible ever to be disingenuous with men, then you wipe off that lipstick, missy, because your lips ain't that colour neither.

Thanks to Ashley for bringing the article to my attention!

*Update: In this context I mean The-man-is-the-head-of-the-household-my-wife-shouldn't-have-to-work guys, not guys who prefer the Extraordinary Form of the Mass. These include neo-con guys. In fact, they are usually neo-con guys. Sorry for any confusion.

P.S. Here's a photo of Auntie being charming. The smile is real. The cigarette is fake. The lipstick is Russian Red by MAC.

Too Nice?

Poppets, I am a bit nervous about this particular subject. Such a can o' worms. Such a conflict between the world as it is and the world as it should be. I'd rather tell you about the party I went to on Saturday night. Apparently given very bad lighting, a dress she has to stick on with double-sided tape and the absence of her husband, your old auntie gets chatted up a lot. Of course I am way too advanced in holiness to think that was awesome, but actually it was pretty awesome. (Needless to say, Auntie mentioned Unkie when the conversation turned to "And why do you live in Edinburgh?")

Anyway, the party is still too fresh in local history for you to tell you all the amazing insights I gleaned, so I will hang it up in the cellars of my mind to be seasoned and preserved and just get on with the painful topic of niceness.

Can a nice guy be too nice?

Hitherto I have written about soi-disant "nice guys" who are actually passive-aggressive b*stards. They are easiest to spot in advice columns because they like to write letters like this: "Dear Abby, I'm a nice guy but I think I should't be because apparently all women like men who treat them badly."

Such "nice" guys lack self-knowledge, and men who lack self-knowledge are alarming. But to ignore Mr Seething "Nice Guy" and to move onto truly nice guys, is there such a thing as being "too nice"? And incidentally, by "too nice" I mean "too kind."

Frankly, I do not think men can be too kind. I think they can be boring, of course. But kindliness does not mean dullness, just as abrasiveness does not mean excitement. True kindliness includes kindliness to oneself, which is something that some men lack when they are dealing with women. Women tend not to respect men who do not respect themselves. However, putting women down is not exactly evidence of healthy self-respect.

Sorry to mention them again, but men who are involved in the pick-up artist movement believe in technique called "negging." "Negging" is paying a girl a backhanded compliment so as to stand out from all the men who pay her proper compliments and to knock her from her pedestal of self-confidence. The p.u. artist idea is that every real woman is longing for some guy to re-establish the proper order of creation in which the man is boss and the woman obeys him and thinks he is marvelous.

Yes, go ahead and make those gargling noises of disgust, but we have a eensy problem in that a lot of women are actually like that. Why do so many fourteen year old girls defy their parents to date some guy their parents despise? Why does such a girl want to please her boyfriend more than she wants to please her parents? Why do women do such stupid, shortsighted things "because I love him"? And why do I get so many letters from readers, Nice Catholic Girls who go to church and know the rules and want to live up to them, who admit to having slept with their boyfriends or now-ex-fiances? Okay, sure, they did it because they wanted to, but my hypothesis is that a big reason they wanted to was because they wanted to please those boyfriends and ex-fiances. They wanted to give that which wasn't really theirs to give yet.

Simone de Beauvoir was feminist royalty, but I read somewhere that she used to buy Jean-Paul Sartre fancy notebooks while she bought cheap notebooks for herself. She wouldn't marry her American lover Nelson Algren because she was so attached to Jean-Paul Sartre, who left control of his intellectual legacy to the mistress he adopted as his daughter. Jean-Paul never married Simone, of course. The whole "open relationship" was his idea, and apparently when he suggested it, he didn't think she'd agree. But she did and the upshot was that she spent her life as his high priestess, editing his work, and insisting on being buried in his grave despite the Algerian mistress-(ahem) "daughter," and it's all very depressing.

Saint Edith Stein wrote about both masculinity and femininity, noting that they were adversely affected by the Fall. Since the Fall, masculinity has had a tendency to tyrannize over women and femininity has had a tendency to let it. But nature, twisted after the Fall, is both healed and perfected by Grace, which is to say that the Incarnation ushered in a new order. This new order recognizes the truth revealed in Genesis that women are, as much as men, made in the image and likeness of God. Both Saint Edith and Blessed John Paul II underscore the dignity of Woman, offering Our Lady as the exemplar.

They don't put it like this, but Eve was a wimp, submitting to the snake, whereas Our Lady is a heroine, crushing the snake with her heel. Our Lady didn't listen to snakes but to God, and instead of falling for tricks, she responded to an invitation to become the Mother of God.

In light of this, I would say that to fall for negging and to admire men who push you around and to want to submit to them in whatever way to make them like or love you is to be in cahoots with the Fall and not to be in line with the Gospel.

Meanwhile, I haven't got a psych degree or anything like that--just my wee M.Div/STB--but I will go out on a limb and suggest that the women who are most likely to fall for guys who insult them are women who are emotionally unhealthy and who are so used to being insulted that they think it is normal. They might also be so lonely that they are amazed by and grateful for any masculine attention, no matter how negative. (I certainly know women like this.) But emotionally healthy women are irritated by men who insult them and will flee them for men who are honestly kind to them.

Update: I have just had a horrid memory of a woman who clearly loved the young man abusing her in public and so put up with it. The kicker is that the woman was the young man's mother. They were in front of my counter at one of my government jobs. I think the woman must have forgotten some essential paper, for the young man told his mother she was a waste of space. I snapped, "That's no way to speak to your mother" and the woman, whose head was bowed and who looked very ashamed, looked at me and then at him.

"Yes," she said. "That's no way to speak to your mother."

"Waste of space," muttered the young man rebelliously.

The woman gave an unhappy giggle.

Some women love men despite their bad behaviour. Not because. DESPITE.


Incidentally, my husband is one of the kindest men I know. And he is kind to everybody.

The Brave Women Retreat

That sounds like a pun or an admission of defeat, but of course I am talking about the "May Picnic for Women" hosted by the Redemptorists in Krakow! The theme of the retreat was "A Virtuous Woman, Who Can Find Her?"--only in Polish the Hebrew word for "Virtuous" comes out as "Brave." And it seems apt because there were a lot of brave women at this retreat.

And--sorry to toot my own horn--I was brave myself. When I discovered that I had missed my Edinburgh to Krakow flight--because I am not only brave but also occasionally stupid--I booked a flight to Gatwick, there to sleep until the first UK flight to Krakow left the next morning at 7:45 AM.

Monday Night, 30 April

Oh, poppets. The horror of trying to sleep in Gatwick. There are, in Gatwick, a few rows of seats without any arm-rests, so people can actually lie down. But the lights shine down relentlessly and old men talk without ceasing and other travellers get the good seats before you, and it is all very unpleasant. However, eventually I did manage to get a row to myself and I wrapped my head in my scarf against the bright lights and stuffed earplugs in my ears against the old men. And thus I managed to get some sleep, if not the deep, deep, sleep of the enviable Polish couple to my right.

Incidentally, the ankle-length denim skirt does have its uses. If you are going to sleep on the floor or seats of Gatwick airport, an ankle-length denim skirt is a good thing. Meanwhile, I went to sleep clutching a postcard of Our Lady Queen of Poland as a protection against Bad People.

Tuesday, 1 May

First I put in my contact lenses. Next I went to Costa coffee and had a "flat white." Then I flew to Krakow, muttering my Polish speech over and over. The correct way to pronounce the name of our beloved late pontiff JP2 in Polish is, more-or-less, Bwogoslavee-ON-ee Yan PAV-ey-oh DRU-gi.

At Krakow airport was Father Pawel, who whisked me away out-of-doors, where it was over 25 degrees Celsius, which is to say absolute heaven after cold and rainy Britain. I took off my tweed coat and wool hat and turned my face to the sky and made noises of joy and gratitude. The sun shone down, the sky was blue, the population of Krakow jammed the highway as they headed for the mountains, and thus we took a country route to the Redemptorists' house.

At the Redemptorists' house I was shown to my room and given half an hour of free time, which I used to wash and change and recover from my eight prone hours in Gatwick airport. Then I was whisked to dinner, which I gratefully munched, and where I met other people in the retreat team. Then I was carted off to an interview in the Homo Dei office, which never happened, and then I went for a lovely sunny walk along the Vistula with beautiful Alicja, who was giving a lecture on Wednesday afternoon.

Then there was a meeting in a board room, and this was very amusing because, of course, I understood enough Polish to know what was going on, but not enough to know exactly what people were saying. Which must be like how it is for some Poles in Scotland. But fortunately I never felt left out or despairing, and when asked if I had anything to say, I croaked out "Cieszę się, że jestem tutaj." This means I am happy that I am here, which was perfectly true.

And at last the retreat began in the little retreat house, which had a nice big room with windows, and it began with prayers and Praise and Worship music, led by the music team, a married couple, the wife playing the electric keyboard and the husband playing the electric guitar. I had a strong sense of "Toto, we aren't in Trid Land anymore." In fact, I had a sense that this was a natural extension of my M.Div. years. And say what you like about P&W, it's very repetitive and therefore ideal for learning theological Polish.

Then was supper. Then was Mass in the 16th century church in which JP2 used to ask for the help of Our Lady of Perpetual Help on his way to his Nazi-occupation era manual labour job. And then there was a lecture about "The Brave Woman, Who Can Find Her?" and women in the Old Testament by Dr. Kantor, who was also my translator. I stayed for ten minutes, but then I was simply too exhausted. Off I went to bed.

Wednesday, 2 May

There were prayers and P&W music the next morning after breakfast, and then it was time for me to do my thing. So I got up and looked at the seventy lovely women who had decided to spend their May vacation on retreat, and said "Dziękuję bardzo. Cieszę się, że jestem dziś z Paniami tutaj w Krakowie." And to my joy, it actually came out Polish-sounding, and the ladies were astonished and applauded warmly. In M.Div. language, I felt very affirmed. So I read out the rest of my 90 word speech and was warmly applauded again. Their generous response was reward beyond my wildest dreams for my six months of ego-squashing linguistic toil. Then I told them all about St. Edith Stein.

Dr. K translated after every sentence, so we all got 74 minutes of St. Edith Stein.

Then there was a break, and then to my relief almost everyone came back and I gave part one of "How Not to Go Insane While You are Single." This was much lighter fare than the thought of St. Edith Stein. By then I had figured out that I had two audiences. One audience could understand whatever I said, and the other audience depended on the translator. This knowledge helped me a lot in delivery.

And then there was dinner--hurrah! The Poles have their main meal in the middle of the day, which is extremely sensible. There was soup and meat and potatoes and veg, all delicious.

After dinner there was Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, confessions with Fr. Pawel and one-on-one chats with Alicja in one room and me in another. I had some very heartwarming chats. There was another short P&W service, and then it was time for Alicja's lecture about Single Life and prayer. Polish-Canadian M very kindly translated for American R and Scots-Canadian me.

Then there was Mass and a little P&W service of healing, but my Gatwick vigil caught up with me, and I didn't make it through the healing service. Zzzzz.

Thursday, 3 May

Breakfast. P&W service. Me. This time my intro was a simple Dzien dobry (Good day) and then I told us all about Mulieris Dignitatem. After an hour, I stopped and we all had a good break. Then I gave Part 2 of "How Not to Go Insane While You are Single", which I think we all enjoyed more than Mulieris Dignitatem, as it was funnier and much less brainy.

Then we went to a scheduled parish Mass in the church. It was the feast day of Our Lady Queen of Poland, and instead of P&W songs there were a lot of hymns featuring the words "Maryjo" and "Polski" and "Polska". And then there was the concluding meeting in the retreat house and delicious dinner. People began to say good-bye and to leave. And then I packed and was taken by tram to the train station, Father Pawel lugging my monster suitcase all the way, and put on the train to Warsaw.

Only when the train was zipping north-east did it begin to rain. Ahh...! I'm telling you, the weather was perfect. Okay, Thursday afternoon was a bit muggy, as there was shortly to be a thunderstorm, but I enjoyed even the mugginess because late April in Edinburgh was miserable.

So what else can I tell you about the retreat? I greatly enjoyed signing books because it gave me a chance to speak one-on-one to many of the women, most of whom were shy about their English, which was always better than my Polish, so they needn't have been shy. And I was very grateful to Dorota and Margareta of Homo Dei for they baked me a big box of kokosanki (coconut cookies) and thus, later on the week, when I was hungry and stuck on a slow train, I had something to eat.

Oh, and I am also very grateful to the porter, for when I returned to the Redemptorists' house from central Poland to spend the night before flying back to Edinburgh, he said, "Ah! Pani (Miss) [Seraphic]!" like I belonged there.

Update: I don't want to stress this, this being a blog for Singles, but I have to say that the hero of the hour(s) on Monday evening was B.A. Even though I was in floods of self-hating tears, B.A. coped extremely patiently and supported all my plans, including buying last minute flights. He came with me to the airport by bus and was cheerful and kind and observed that it was nice that we never have terrible rows in a crisis.

"That is because in a real crisis I go into a catatonic state," I said.

And as this is a blog for Singles, I will say that my dad would have done the same thing. There is something to be said for wanting to marry a nice guy like your dad, if you are so lucky as to have a good dad.

Giving Too Much

To continue the conversation begun yesterday with a passage from St. Edith Stein, I am channeling Cynthia Crysdale's Embracing Travail. Unfortunately my copy is in under a box under a lot of other boxes in a closet under a staircase in my parents' house. (When it came to shipping I made the heart-squeezing choice of china over books.) However, I do remember Crysdale's strong hint that "giving too much" is a particularly feminine sin, whereas "taking too much" is a particularly masculine sin.

We are all aware, I think, that being selfish is sinful, but we are less aware how giving too much is also sinful. But it is. It is sinful to be a doormat. It is sinful to "act like a martyr". It is sinful to be a coward. Cowardice is sinful.

Of course women are capable of being selfish, and men are capable of being passive aggressive doormats. But we women are usually quicker to ask "Oh, how can he take advantage of me like that?" than "Why am I allowing myself to be taken advantage of like that?" And the latter should be a serious question. Why do you allow yourself to be taken advantage of? What is it that you are getting out of it? What reward do you expect? And is that really fitting to you as a creature made in the image and likeness of God?

Germaine Greer's The Whole Woman (also in a box under boxes under stairs across the sea) also points to women's vast unquenchable torrents of love and need to give, give, GIVE. I seem to recall some poor granny or auntie she mentions knitting endless jumpers for younger relations who never wear them. Her hypothetical granny was not knitting for the pleasure of it or the pleasure she imagined the jumper might give to her young relation, but in order to give.*

The Rules, to add pop culture to this list of saint, Anglican theologian and feminist pundit, warns women not to give men expensive presents. Men are apparently suspicious of expensive presents and subconsciously smell in them an attempt to buy their affections. The Rules does not suggest this is a form of psychological transference, in which men impute their own sneaky motives to women. But neither does The Rules deny that women do try to buy affection with gifts.

Oh dear. The time (and money) I have wasted trying to find The Perfect Present for some male object of my affections. It makes me sad. With female friends, you don't have to look and scheme and dream. You just see something and know "Oh, that's just so Such-and-Such" and, if you can afford it, you buy it. You don't buy it as a symbol of your love or to remind her of you forever or to make an impact on her life. You just buy it because "it's so her", and she will enjoy it for itself, and that's good enough for you.

My husband hates "stuff" and doesn't read the books I bought him as symbols of our shared commitment to Thought, so I now I give him gin or whiskey and try to save for holidays abroad. So much for give, give, GIVE. Let's face it: when you're married to someone you love and who loves you, you don't have to give to get. You just get and give all the time without thinking about it much, and giving and getting are not in direct relation. Marriage is a remedy for all kinds of concupiscence.

So giving, giving, GIVING is more of a Single girl's temptation, and I'm sorry, I've been there, and it sucks. I know Single women who run themselves ragged trying to do something for everybody or everything for somebody, and I grieve for them.

P.S. There is, of course, a Golden Mean. As I write this, I am looking at a beautiful, cotton, lace tablecloth that took my mother over a year to make. It represents hundreds of hours of crocheting and is a Second Year Wedding Anniversary to B.A. and me. (We got our Third Year Anniversary present last year, as an injury slowed Mum down.) It is in the sitting-room because we wanted to show it off to our dinner guests without risking them upsetting wine on it. We absolutely love it, and as it is clearly in the family heirloom class, I have already mentally bequeathed it to my niece in the event that we have no children of our own.

I am sure I don't have to explain how it is fitting for a keen needleworker to spend a year making a tablecloth for her daughter and son-in-law's Second Wedding Anniversary but not fitting for a single woman to spend hundreds (or thousands) of dollars (or hours) on a similar tablecloth for her love interest.

Women and Symbols

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Type Versus Reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boundaries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Is it?"

"Yes."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conceptual Art

Yesterday's car conversation reminded me of the literalness of men-in-general and of the multi-layered thought processes of women-in-general. For example, for an American man a man's car is a man's car, an expensive object upon which he has to lavish money. For an American woman a man's car is a symbol that a man has it together enough to take care of his and his future family's basic transportation needs.

Women-in-general are great decoders, antennae bobbing towards any possible hidden meaning. Girls who are not good at reading micro-signals are, therefore, rather out of the loop in schoolyard conversations. Innocent-seeming questions like, "So do you think you look pretty in that?" are, in fact, challenges to battle. The trick (I see in hindsight) is to answer back immediately, e.g. "Yes, I think I look smokin'!", instead of goggling in silence wondering if the question is a trap.

Boys and men don't usually say one thing when they mean another. This is why you should never say to a man, "Sure, I'm okay with this," when you're not. He won't get from your tone, watery smile and red eyeballs that you're not okay with this unless he has dated a lot or grown up with sisters. Incidentally, this is why you should listen carefully to what men say and take their words literally. When a man says, "I have a drinking problem", it means he is an alcoholic. That's all it means, and he means it. Don't think "Oh ha ha. He's exaggerating." Believe me on this one.

(Of course men lie a lot, but they mean you to believe the literal meaning of their lies. Which makes them more dastardly liars than we are, because when we say things like "Of course I love you" most woman within two yards could tell we mean the opposite.)

But what interests me today is not so much the figurative nature of female speech but the figurative nature of the female sexual imagination. Women are simply not as visually-oriented as men are when it comes to sexual attraction. Our imaginations are more important than our eyeballs, and as evidence I will scoot right down to the lowest common denominator, which is porn.

Women do not surf for internet porn (later correction: as much as men do). Women do not buy pornographic magazines. Women do not go to strip joints, except maybe once or twice in their lifetimes for a laugh. The tired, lonely businesswoman does not mosey up to a barmaid and say, "Tell me, pal, where can I see some boys in this town?" And the barmaid does not slip her a card that says "Boyzboyzboyz! 135, Rue St-Catharine" on it.

No, what the tired, lonely businesswoman is much more likely to do is sit in her hotel room and take from her briefcase a fat paperback book with a woman in 18th century partial dress on the cover.

This woman's hair is whipping in the invisible breeze that somehow does not even ruffle the sails of the pirate ship behind her. Just behind her, with his nose just above her hair, is a man in 18th century partial dress. He might be a pirate, or he might be an officer in the Royal Navy, or he might be an officer in the Royal Navy who is a pirate in his spare time. He is probably not a mere Able Seaman, anyway.*

No woman on earth would confuse this book with Treasure Island. This book is an example of the bestselling fiction genre on earth: the erotic novel. Women buy millions upon millions of copies of this trash.

To get a sexual thrill, our businesswoman cannot just look at a picture. She has to decode a whole lot of text in her imagination. And the text has to convey important symbols to her subconscious. It is not enough to have a hero who is nothing but a man. He must be an officer (not an able seaman) because a man who gives orders is higher caste than a man who takes orders (A pirate chief beats his boatswain for the same reason.) An officer must be a British officer, not a Portuguese officer, because really, Portugal was rather a waning power in the 18th century, so--unless you yourself are Portuguese--who cares?

And so on. Women are not very good at compartmentalizing at the best of times. We usually cannot separate erotic enjoyment from feeling proud of the object of our erotic attentions. A famous funny-looking guy like the French premier is a zillion times more attractive to women than an unemployed male model who can barely read. (Newsflash to men with SSA: women don't think like you, so don't kid yourselves.) Undergrads of my generation thrilled when the uber-flirty 80-something former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau smiled at pretty little them in the street.

Men do not really get this. They look at the women who throw themselves at Manchester United's Wayne Rooney and sneer that he is so ugly, the women are only after his money. Er, no.

And when Wayne caves in to the women but his wife doesn't divorce him, the men sneer again that his wife is only after his money. Again, no.

The women are throwing themselves at Wayne Rooney because he is one of the best football players in England. He is famous for it. He is better than almost all men at something millions of men think is the most exciting job on earth.

I am sorry that Colleen Rooney has to put up with women throwing themselves at her husband, but imagine how she felt when Wayne gubbed Arsenal on Sunday. (Probably something akin to how I felt when my husband managed to gub David Hume in a BBC special on Hume so cleverly that the gubbing wasn't left on the cutting room floor. Ah ha ha ha!)

Women want to be proud of the men we date and especially of the men that we marry. That's all there is to it, really. If a rural woman wonders why a man doesn't have a car, it's not because she's materialistic. It's that she doesn't want to end up with a man she can't respect because he keeps getting rides from friends.

Today my husband is giving a lecture on the Italian Renaissance. He is giving it at a rather high profile, high status place of learning. He wondered if I would like to go along with him and hear it. I was already thinking out my outfit.


*Scottish Note: The romantic heroes of The People's Friend magazine are almost all good-hearted working-class types. They are all incredibly capable. Most either run their own businesses or have decided to run their own businesses by the end of the story. However,
style="font-style:italic;">The People's Friend is read mostly by Presbyterianish ladies over 60 whose fathers were Communists and their bored visiting grandchildren. There is no sex in The People's Friend. I would love to write for The People's Friend but you cannot have a sense of humour do to it. I would be incapable of writing a story in which the nice carpenter did not turn out to be a wicked rake and the handsome banker up from London a saint.

Update: I've had another anonymous "shame on you" comment, which I won't put up because I won't put "shame on you, Seraphic" comments on my blog, even from recovering porn addicts. However, I think the thoughts of Catholic women who have somehow found themselves with an overwhelming attachment to porn worth reading. (I wonder if this is a fruit of the internet age because I never, EVER, EVER heard of a woman compulsively viewing porn before the subject came up.)

At any rate, my reader says she recovered from porn not by "just stopping" and "talking to a priest" but through years of therapy. And although I don't like "shame on you, Seraphic" emails, I think she deserves credit for turning her life around.

And now that we know some people--women--get hooked on internet porn, we have absolutely no excuse to click on it even once out of curiously, do we? Because when we do that we are supporting a disgusting industry from which we can draw a straight line to the sexual abuse of adults, children and even babies.

Refraining from viewing porn is not just about our own personal chastity. It's about social justice. It's about other people.

Germaine Greer Says Something Sensible

Holy cow! A Catholic blog with a link to Germaine Greer! But as a matter of fact, Greer's The Whole Woman (1998) impressed me enormously for her myth-trashing attitude towards men.

Greer blunted stated that men are just as nasty to weaker men, if not more, as they are to women. She also stated that women want to hang out with men more than men want to hang out with women. She observed that the only female relational role anyone seems to care about nowadays is Wife, and in stirring terms she described women's lust to give, to pour out our endeavours as love-gifts (like a great-aunt constantly knitting unwanted pullovers) before our at least somewhat oblivious or ungrateful male beloveds.

Greer's advice was to stop being so obsessed with being where the men are. "Stop chasing men," she seemed to say. And in the Telegraph article to which I link above, she seems to say that is okay for men to be on their own some of the time. It is okay for them to have their own clubs. It is foolish to force private clubs to welcome members they don't want just because those members are female.

This, I think, is enormously sane. I was about to write approvingly about Boys' Nights Out, but then I was distracted by the memory of my Girls' Night Out, which was last night. Three 30-something Women of our Parish (if you count me as 39 + 1) met at the top of Harvey Nichols department store, surveyed its boring bar and left for the much more inspiring mock 1890s black-and-gold cocktail lounge around the corner. As our pregnant member preferred "an early night" we joined the thin, quiet, after-work crowd. We were dressed somewhat soberly, but to the nines, incidentally. The non-pregnant wore pumps.

Three well-educated expat Trad Mass-loving women all chatted merrily together under a very Art Nouveau ceiling with cocktails for the non-pregnant and soda for the pregnant. It felt all very sophisticated, grand and grown-up. But then there was a loud shriek from the doorway from the bar-lounge to the restaurant where we were now seated.

A woman in the prime of life and flashy clothes paused there dramatically with her arms outstretched to the rather large group of bottle-blondes at the biggest table. I wouldn't swear to this in court, but her cry sounded like "PETE-ZAAAAAA!" Her pose reminded me of Samantha returning to her friends in Sex & the City the Movie (don't, I beg you, see it). There were answering female cries from the table, and the tone of the classy joint dropped like a can of fake tan.

The bar-lounge was now packed with groups of noisy women. There were some groups of men, and there were one or two mixed groups, but women definitely outnumbered the men. This surprised me, for this is never true of the pubs my husband frequents. The pubs are quieter, too, the patrons less flashy.

So as I think approvingly of Boys' Nights Out, the great amusement my husband has in occasionally meeting up with his university pals and drinking stunning amounts of beer while looking at old photos and repeating old jokes, I think somewhat less approvingly of the loud Girls' Nights Out in my new town. Do they have to be so noisy and unpleasant? Obviously they don't, but they so frequently are that I wonder what the participants are trying to prove? If it's that they can be as brash and noisy as men, they have rather exceeded their goal. If it's that they don't care what men think, they have rather forgotten that they are visible (and audible) to both sexes. And, if that's what women act like in groups nowadays, it shouldn't be a surprise that exclusive men's clubs don't want us.

What I hope for is a happy medium. We shouldn't chase men, but we shouldn't go out of our way to disgust them either.