Scowl

I saw the nicest girls of my generation
destroyed by daring, weeping hysterical naked
hearts exposed to men who shrugged and shrank
into their cool guy collars, wishing to be elsewhere,

mother hearted lassies with acne-scarred faces surrendering
virginities to cripples out of love but
accused from wheelchairs of betrayals and whoredoms,

who trusted in talk, traded caresses for carapaces
of leather with letters of FOOTBALL, RUGBY, TRACK
title deeds of love that shifted from locker to locker,

who leaned on gentle, musical men,
misread their temperence, stocked hope chests as barren as
their boyfriends' intentions, found the notes, the empty
bottles, called the ambulances, will always be friends,

who took calls in the morning from moaning men whose mothers
lived
long
distance,

who shared readings and reflections with right-on religious,
were seduced by seminarians (not suited to celibacy) with
sympathetic psychiatrists ("and at least it was girls"),

who were good sports, big sis, great pals, just friends, their rocks, second mothers, right hands, girl Fridays, you knew where you were with them, they were

completely to be relied upon, there was

no nonsense about them, they were the

salt of the earth.

The bitches got rich or married young.

Auntie Seraphic and Older "Sis"

Dear Auntie Seraphic:

I have a dear male friend who is five years my junior, whom I affectionately think of as my little brother. He's a good man, and, being only 19, is rather mature and 'together' for a young man who's only a college freshman. We had breakfast the other day and he confided that he has gotten a reputation around the Catholic student center as a heartbreaker.

I inquired how this could be so, knowing he probably wouldn't hurt anyone on purpose, and he posed a question. "If you want to get to know a girl, just as friends, how do you do it? If we go for coffee or a meal or something, she thinks it's a date. If we spend too much time alone, people think we're together. How do I get to know girls better without actually dating them?"

Part of the unfortunate problem, I think, is that woman aren't often used to true gentlemen treating them as ladies. So when a man, such as my friend, holds doors open for them, lets them go first, offers to help carry things, and other signs of courtesy, they immediately interpret his intentions as romantic rather than polite, because few men have ever acted this way before.

I suggested that, unless he really does intend to date a girl, that he only see her as part of group outings, so no one can make assumptions. He seemed rather disappointed in this advice, and I can't say I blame him; you can't really get to know someone when you're with six other people at a bowling alley or a movie theater. So, dear Seraphic, I pass his quandary on to you. :-)

Older Sis

Dear Older "Sis",

Ah ha ha ha ha ha! That's what I say. I say it roughly and with cynicism. What your little "brother" needs is a deep and prayerful read of my reply to Modest Millie. And if he's cute, so do you. Why have you put this nice, mature, 'together' Catholic man in the "little brother" slot? Five years your junior, indeed! Breakfast, forsooth! What's the story, Morning Glory?

In Grown-up Land, asking a single woman out for a coffee is making a date. Asking a single woman out for a meal is making a date. Asking a single woman out to the movies is a making a date. Asking a single woman to the dance on Friday night is making a date. Date. Date, date, date, date. It's not a marriage proposal. But it's a date.

I assume your little, ahem, "brother" is a hottie, otherwise his date requests would have been swiftly answered with "OMG, just friends, right?" And he is nineteen years old. The happy, halcyon days of the playground are over. No longer can he splash naked in the girl-next-door's paddling pool. No longer can he send innocent valentines to every girl in the class. No longer can he kiss girls at parties with impunity. Childhood is over. It is time for him to grow up and drink the coffee.

Yes, it is nice to be made much of by girls, and pour one's manly hopes and dreams into an appreciative female ear, but that is what really-truly sisters are for, to say nothing of mothers, grandmothers and aunts. Most other girls like to know that there is something in it for them, e.g. courtship. Not all Catholic girls are interested in wasting their leisure time on cute men who just want to be friends. I am most definitely on the side of all the girls in this scenario, including you.

When and where was this magical mystical time and place in which young men were allowed unfettered access to young female friendship, anyway? 19th century Britain? No. 19th century America? No. 21th century India? Definitely not. The West in the 1960s? Yes. And see where that got us.

If your 19 year old hottie wants to get to know nice girls better as friends, he can do it in company like every other generation of respectable men before 1960. He can throw parties in which he invites lots of girls and, being a good host, spends just as much time on each one of them, to make sure each is having a good time. He could start asking two or three girls at a time to dinner or to coffee or even to the dance on Friday night, making it very clear he has asked the other(s) also. He could volunteer for committees heavily dominated by women. He could even squish maidenly egos left and right by ending every single social invitation with the phrase "just as friends, I mean?"

Or he can keep on asking girls out for dates, not ask them out again, and develop his bad heartbreaker reputation, about which he will complain to you at breakfast while being mistaken by other men, handsome men in their twenties, for your boyfriend.

Incidentally, I see that not only are you on this man's side against your fellow women, you assume that our heads are turned by door-openers because most other men behave like baboons. Alas.

But I will go easy on you this time because you have wisely turned to me, young padawan. You show knowledge, insight and auntie-potential. To deepen your wisdom, I recommend a girls-only slumber party, complete with pedicures and group viewing of Moonstruck.

Update (March 8): It just occured to me that a man's having a heartbreaker reputation (if undeserved) in Catholic circles is not necessarily a bad thing. I was warned (by a Discerner) that B.A. was a heartbreaker at whom women threw themselves, and of course my curiosity was aroused. I wanted to see this heartbreaker for myself. And if he thought I was going to throw myself at him, he had a another think coming! Humph, humph! The rest is history.

Deliciously Dark Chocolate Pudding

The principal cookbook of my Single Life was Moosewood Restaurant's Low-Fat Favourites.

Until I began my studies in the USA, I was most tremendously fit and slim. As long as I had a good-paying job, I had a gym membership. And as long as I was studying in Canada, I had access to the the university athletic centre. But in the USA, I discovered I couldn't really afford a gym and would have had to pay a heavy fee to use the school's athletic centre, so I worked out my frustrations with Messrs. Ben & Jerry instead. Alas. I got out of the fitness habit and can even be seen eating what my husband calls potato crisps which, believe me, never happened between 1996 and 2005.

During the turn of the century, when I was definitely Single but not yet Seraphic despite being most tremendously slim (which was not, it turned out, the secret to happiness), I worked out almost every day and ate very little fat indeed. And my principal dessert was Moosewood's Dark Chocolate Pudding.

The recipe says it serves 4, but actually I ate it in two big helpings of 218 calories each. I would pour half from the pot into a bowl and put the bowl in the fridge to cool. And I would pour the rest into another bowl and eat it hot. Yummy, yum, yum.

I can just see my skinny self sitting alone in my scrupulously tidy bedsit, crosslegged on my folded up futon eating that pudding. Gosh, I was tidy then too. Slim and tidy yet sad. Dear me. I did not have my big Seraphic Single Revelation until 2006, you see.

Well, anyway, here is one of the joys of my pre-Seraphic Single Life:

Deliciously Dark Chocolate Pudding

3 Tbsp cornstarch
3 Tbsp sugar
2 Tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder
2 cups skim milk*
1 tsp pure vanilla extract

1. Combine cornstarch, sugar and cocoa in a saucepan.

2. Add the milk and stir until smooth.

3. Cook on medium heat, stirring CONSTANTLY (this is the boring part) until the pudding comes to a boil.

4. Lower the heat and gently simmer, stirring continuously, for 3 or 4 minutes.

5. Stir in the vanilla.

6. Pour the vanilla into bowls and either put the bowls into the fridge for 2 hours to chill and set, or eat the pudding hot. Garnish with raspberries, if you like them.

*If you are not madly calorie counting, you can use 1% or 2% or even whole milk.

The Best Cure

The best cure for a broken heart that I know of is international travel. There is something purifying about the nerve-wracking rituals of getting on an airplane and flying across an ocean. Unfortunately, this is a cure available only to the rich, or at least to the employed, the employed who get 2 or 3 weeks of vacation time.

My heart has been broken several times, and although it has been fully refurished and restored, if you look under the brilliant new paint and clever plasterwork there is still a scar or two. However, I was able to heal up some wounds very quickly by simply going on vacation.

My first international trip by myself was to Italy, a place for which I had longed since I was six years old and had first seen pictures of Florence. But my interest in that country really blazed up when I took Italian classes in secondary school. So when, at last, in my twenties. I had enough money to go, and an achy-breaky heart to heal, to Italy I went. I booked a tour with a youth travel company.

There are those who can travel the world with a backback, sleep anywhere, and make friends wherever they go. I have never been among them. So I was grateful to have the company arrange not only the carrying of my luggage and my bedrooms, but my company.

The one difficulty was that my company was intensely conformist. The average person on this tour was American of Italian descent, who spoke no Italian and was terrified of the South. The girls on the bus, apparently warned by grandparents of goodness knows what horrors, almost shook as we approached Sorrento and rushed from the bus straight into the hotel. They would only leave it in twos and threes.

The star of the group was a stockbroker from Manhattan: the attempts of the American girls to charm this matrimonial prize were comical. I wonder how far they went? (One American girl and one Australian boy embarked on a very noisy affair, so we all knew how far they went.) The ticket to the "in" crowd, for the tour group was so intensely high-schoolish as to have an "in" crowd, was to join in the courtship dance around Mr. Manhattan. I refrained.

The Canadians angered the Americans by making rude remarks that absolutely floored the latter. I think it must have been their very first introduction to the anti-Americanism widespread outside the USA. Keeping out of such unneighbourly battles, I nevertheless managed to anger the American girls on the tour by brazenly chatting (in Italian) with Italian men who haunted tourist bars, even in the dangerous South. Strangely, although just as guilty in this as I, a very pleasant Italian-speaking Australian girl did not suffer the same censure from the others. I think, however, that she was more companionable and less likely to run away down quattrocento alleys on her own.

I had a goodly number of adventures in what could not have been more than 10 or 12 days. It would take a very long blog post indeed to do any one of them justice. The juiciest ones occured in the dangerous South, where the Australian girl and I had many Italian conversations, including with two intensely handsome plainclothes police officers in a bar. (One was a dead ringer for Marcus on Babylon 5.) We asked them to prove they were police, and they showed us their firearms. Then I got hopelessly lost on the island of Capri, sought rescue at an auto repair shop, and was driven to civilisation by a handsome, bespectacled, mechanic on the back of his motorcycle as a dozen mechanics, milling about like children, cheered. It was the first and last time I have ever ridden a motorcycle.

When the trip was over, I left Italy determined to go back in some long-term capacity: perhaps to graduate school. This I never did, although after another romantic disappointment, I rushed off to Florence for a week. And, after that trip, I did not go again to Europe, until five or six years later when I got funding to study for six weeks in Germany. And that trip was also balm to the heart, only this time to a heart battered by disappointments of a philosophical, not romantic, nature.

Lately, I am combatting stress over the release of my lovely book by taking bus rides all over Edinburgh. For only 3 pounds, anyone can climb to the top of any city bus and explore the town thoroughly from a great height in perfect comfort. Truly, travel is a great medicine and takes you right out of yourselves towards the sublime.

Shackin' Up

You probably know this already, but it doesn't hurt to read it again, and it's that living together is not the same thing as marriage.

The American Centres for Disease Control have done a study of who gets to their 10th wedding anniversary, and people who lived together before marriage were at a slight disadvantage. And fewer than 30% of bidie-in relationships last 5 years. However, this is in part because 51% of bidie-ins make honest men and women of each other within three years. I suppose the rest simply break up and move on.

I was excited to see that 76% of marriages between people over 26 last ten years, although I am perturbed to see that the standard is now ten years, not, you know, twenty-five years, or "until death." And I was vastly amused to see that people who have babies "at least eight months after" their wedding stay together for ten years. Of all my Catholic friends, I know only one couple who had their first baby fewer than nine months after the wedding, and I'm not even hinting who that was. (When I was dumb enough to blurt, "What, already?", the beaming grandmother said, "We work fast in our family!")

Anyway, weddings and marriage and babies are a messy jury-rigged business, but at least they are real. What do not strike me as real are common law arrangements or living together, except among out-and-out communists. By communists I mean people who have deep-seated, tightly held, agonized ideological DOUBTS about matrimony as a legal institution. I recognize that this is not the correct use of the word communist. The biggest communist in Edinburgh has been married for at least 60 years. But you know who I mean. Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins types, only now Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins have broken up, which made me sad, actually.

My friend Fishie, who isn't married, once said, "If a man loves a woman, he marries her." I think this is sound, but I would stress the word "man" to show we are talking about a grown-up here. And I'd have to throw in "of certain traditional beliefs". If a man of certain traditional beliefs loves a woman, he marries her. (A boy might love but dither until it's too late.) At best, the man marries the beloved woman before she (or he) moves in. At least, he marries her eventually. But I feel a bit weird about that. The pressure to marry the girl you're living with must be intense, especially if your family really likes her and thinks it's time for you to have children. If you moved in with a girl just because it saved on rent and it's nice to share a bed, marriage is an entirely different ball of wax. Heaven help the woman whose boyfriend likes living with her, but harbours secret dreams of the Perfect Woman.

Fortunately, I know perfectly happy married people who lived together before they got married. Even years and years together cannot wreck the love between some bidie-ins. But for reasons obvious to devoutly religious folk, I still don't think it a good idea. And what I think a perfect destestable idea is settling for living with a man when really you are madly in love with him and want to marry him instead.

Of course, there are women who will settle for much less than this. It makes me very sad, what little women will settle for, and how much they will give to get it. I think it is much better to sleep alone and with dignity than to put up with anything from a man other than 100% fidelity and commitment. And this, of course, is what he promises in marriage.

Update: Here is a memory of bidie-ins that haunts me to this day. I was visiting an unmarried couple in England some years ago. A census-taker or someone like that came to the door and asked for my host. The woman of the house said she was his wife. And then came his voice from the sitting-room, "I'm not married to you, Paula!" It sounded again, slightly louder. "I'm not married to you, Paula!" Blah. It makes me shudder with embarrassment, imagining that ever happening to me.

Update 2: Have you considered joining the Seraphic Singles Fan Page? It was founded by two loyal Single readers. There may be discussions and things... And it will update any Seraphic Singles the Book events as they are arranged!

Criticism and Rejection

I don't know if I want to read my reviews or not.

Apparently there will be reviews. And I have seen enough films in which actors crowd around the morning papers after a wild cast party to know that reviews are eagerly expected things. But the very first review of my column I ever read--a letter to the editor--was so acid that I almost quit right then and there. It insinuated that I could be an anti-Semite, and it touched upon the dark days of 1930s Germany. Needless to say, the writers of this letter seemed to have entirely missed the point of my article, which was about a conversation I had with a sweet teenage Jehovah's Witness girl with whom I sat on a seven hour bus trip.

Happily, the editor cut out the worst bit of this letter before he ran it. And, even better, there followed two or three letters defending the article and my writing in general. I was sincerely grateful, for the first letter really hurt, and I had an enormous row with my editor over it. He simply could not understand what the problem was, and at last we realized that decades in the newspaper biz had given him an skin like rhinoceros hide and I was still a baby, um, rhinoceros, small and tender.

This morning my friend sent me this cartoon, and I wondered why criticism always outweighs compliments in our minds. I also wondered why we hate and fear criticism so much, when some criticism is helpful.

Take, for example, my fuzzy red hair. I have more hair on my head than most people. Possibly twice as much. And as a child, there were two camps: adults, who loved my hair and said they wished they had it, and children, who mocked my hair and said
I was ugly. My poor mother tried to convince me, day after day, that there was nothing wrong with my hair and that I was not ugly. So why, I wonder, did I side with the children against the adults? Even today I sidle into hair salons feeling deeply apologetic.

Then, in contrast, take a certain high school newspaper writer. He was by far the most attentive of all the students who came to hear me talk one day. He presented me with his work afterwards, and after reading it, I said "Hmm...lots of clichés".

The boy's face fell, and I could have kicked myself. For teenage writing it was probably very good. From the way his teachers hovered, I guessed that he was probably one of the lights of their lives, and that he was unused to criticism. So I told him what was good about his article, too, and I hope he is still writing. How awful if I have been the frost that killed a flowering talent. He, too, was still a baby rhinoceros.

But, you know, the boy did use a lot of clichés, and I would have been remiss not to point out that fact. There is a huge difference between honest criticism and personal rejection, even if we tend to blur these things in our hurting minds. Letters to the editor, and maybe book reviews, can fall into either camp.

What I wish I could do, and what I think is a useful goal for anyone who has not yet mastered it, is to be able to shake off rejection and embrace good criticism. A rather "progressive" theology prof of mine once praised the humility of a rather "progressive" theologian, who, when asked about the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith statement about his dodgy writing, said that he had learned a lot from it. That, I think, is the right spirit to take letters from the CDF, and if I ever have the stature and the dodginess to ring alarm bells at the CDF, I hope I will learn from them too.

One problem is that our wellwishers are not always brilliant communicators and so their criticism can come across as rejection rather than as useful. So I guess it would be helpful, in moments of doubt, to ask for further clarification.

Critic: Hey fuzzhead! Didja stick your finger in a light socket?

Seraphic: I'm not sure what you mean here. Are you concerned for my health?

Critic: Freak! Did you know your publishing house once published a book by Hans Küng?

Seraphic: I still don't think I get you. Are you concerned that I have written untruths about the faith?

Critic: Lefty! Fuzzhead! Pinko commie traddie fuzzhead freak!

Oh, my darlingses. It is a jungle out there, and we're all just baby rhinoceri, trying to flourish. May we all grow in skin thickness and judgment.

Incomparable

The easiest way to make yourself feel bad, short of a hammer, is to compare yourself to others.

I'm not suggesting you not have any heroes. Christians have a lot of heroes, right from when we're kids: there's Our Lord, His Blessed Mother, and all the Saints. The saints are to be admired and, as much as we're able or called, emulated. (Nobody seems to be called to sit on a pole anymore. What must St. Simon Stylites be thinking? "Kids today...") I wish I had known, as a cast-off wearing kid, that Dorothy Day wore nothing but cast-off clothes for most of her adult life. Kids in particular need heroes, models and guides.

What I am suggesting is that you not see how you measure up to other people your age and younger in day to day life. You can drive yourself nuts doing that. And not only that, if you have a problem with self-absorption already, as Single people often do (alas), you lose sight of the person to whom you're comparing yourself. You can't see them; you just see what they have, which you want, and you don't got and why don't you, etc., etc.

As you probably know, I'm 39. I don't repeat this over and over again because our society rewards a woman for being 39. No. I repeat this over and over again because most of you are much younger than I am and worried because you haven't yet been called to marriage or religious life or permanent Single Life, including (but not limited to) the priesthood. Well, I wasn't called until I was 38. And I don't have any kids yet despite being 39. And nevertheless the sun is shining in through the window, and I am enjoying a nice cup of tea, and I am pondering what I shall have for lunch, and life is very good. So I keep telling you that I'm 39 so you will feel better about being 27 or whatever you are.

But if I decided to compare myself to a younger woman, a younger woman with children, one who makes tons and tons of money through her writing, I would go simply bonkers. So I don't. And the one time I did complain that I wanted to publish my first book at 14, not 39, a kind friend said Tolkien published his first book at 63. I mean, Tolkien. 63. Wow! It makes you think.

Recently a young Single friend of mine was wigging out about her situation in life. She was definitely wigging. (I wig enough to know wigging when I see it.) She burst into a furious monologue about another woman she knew. It went something like this: "She's only two years older than me, and she's got a charming husband, and she was wearing three massive diamond rings, and she's got a baby. My life is utterly hopeless, hopeless, hopeless."

Now, I just did not know what to say. I mean, I was a meelyon years older than both these girls, and whereas I do have a charming husband, I cannot call Ringzilla massive, and I most definitely do not have a baby. But I decided that this was one of those times I should keep my mouth shut, and the very next day this young Single friend got a fantastic, fantabulous career boost.

We are often encouraged to compare ourselves favourably to those poorer than we so that we will count our lucky stars. I disagree with this technique too. It seems so freaking patronizing. (I'd sure like to know whose brilliant idea it was to ship crates and crates of condoms to Haiti, crates of condoms that slowed down the distribution of food aid.) When charity tourists come back from their Liberation Theology trips to El Salvador or wherever, they usually say something like, "They're so poor, but they're so happy." Well, then.

I suspect I may have been pitied by a bondslave. There I was in a nail salon in Brighton, Massachusetts, one staffed by Vietnamese girls working under the steely eye of their older Vietnamese bosses. These girls didn't speak much English, and as Brighton's aerobicized and sun-bedded bottle-blondes chatted to each other, the Vietnamese girls crouched at their feet, polishing away and exchanging remarks in Vietnamese. The youngest of these girls used to test her pidgin English on me, and one day, as she dug away at my cuticles, I discovered that what she liked best about America was watching the cars go up and down the street outside the salon. Apparently that was all she had seen of America since her husband had brought her from her tiny village. I hid my horror under a smile.

"Are you married?" asked the possible bondslave.

"No," I said. "Not yet?"

"Ooooooooooh," said the girl. But then she reflected, "Plenty time. How old are you?"

"Thirty-six," I said.

The girl looked up swiftly. And there, in her widened eyes, was definite, sincere, and absolute pity.

So, anyway, that is my message today. Don't compare yourself to others, and don't compare what you have to what other people have. This is not exactly an original thought, and when our Lord had it, he told us to compare ourselves to birds and flowers instead.

Update: Speaking of comparisons, Seraphic Singles' Amazon.com ranking yesterday was 128,958. This morning it is 59,692. I have no idea what this actually means, but it feels good. Thank you for buying my book!