The Saint Joseph Problem

Dear Auntie Seraphic

Have you ever seen this:

http://artofmanliness.com/2008/01/16/stop-hanging-out-with-women-and-start-dating-them?

A recently married male friend posted this on his facebook page and so I copied it, knowing I was risking the wrath of my male friends. Well, the men didn't say anything, but the women sure did! They loved it.

I wanted to share it with you to see what you thought.

I don't know what you see-and maybe you had a post about this somewhere along the way and I missed it, but do you see what he is saying? That many young adults are not dating? I find that at most of the young adult gatherings I go to, there is very little sexual tension. And I think that is a huge problem. And I think this guy's answers are right on.

It has almost made me consider that even as friends, I have made myself too available to the men. I'm a NCG, so naturally I'm not doing anything wrong, but I wonder if even the presence of easy friendship with women men don't have to do much work. That really gets my blood running! Why are all these 30-something men still single? I have little sympathy for them, I really do.

I'm at [traditional Catholic college] so maybe it's that there are so many great girls that the men feel they have several options. THEN ASK THEM OUT! But they don't!! I don't think it is just here, because I hear the same happens in [Washington] DC, [Minneapolis-]St Paul and Denver--all hubs for great Catholics.

What is going on? Why aren't the men pursuing? Why are they not searching out a woman to spend the rest of their lives with them? I don't mean this as a sob at all. I mean, yes. I'm rather bothered that someone hasn't snatched up someone as lovely and wonderful as me! :) (I'm not normally this harsh, in real life). I'm just bothered that there are so many wonderful, gorgeous, holy, normal, balanced, exceptional Catholic women who men just walk right by. Good grief. Some of my friends I can't figure why men aren't following them around and drooling. Really.

So, wondered what you thought of his conclusions. I liked them. And I liked that he was getting on the guy's case!

Snatchable

Dear Snatchable,

I enjoyed the link and its shouts of "Man up!" I like to shout "Man up!" myself at times, although there are few people more unattractive to a 20-something Nice Catholic Boy than a 39+ year old married woman who is not even his mother shouting "Man up!"

Although I do wish, wish with all my auntly heart, that more young men would decide, at the age of 21 or so, that it was time to go out and slay some dragons and win some princesses to help them rule their eventual kingdoms of house, car, garden, children, dogs, barbeque and Little League/Book Club, I can see why they don't.

Adolescence was once considered a regrettable stage, covered in awkwardness and pimples, to be got through as quickly as possible. We experienced the powerlessness of childhood, we hastened through a brief adolescence and we seized the reins of adulthood.

For men adulthood meant making a living. For women it meant making a living until a "good marriage" provided us with a house, garden (or farm) and family to work at instead. If our husbands didn't make enough to provide for them all, or if we got permission to make a little pin-money, married women worked at various part-time jobs, like scrubbing floors for richer women or taking in laundry. Life for most married women up to the 1970s did not look, in fact, like a Ralph Lauren ad.

Meanwhile, adolescence is now considered THE most desirable stage of life, and the Baby Boom generation was the first generation in the history of mankind to decide en masse to stay there. Adult freedoms and adult money with as little adult responsibility as possible has gone from being counter-cultural to completely cultural in the English-speaking world. New immigrants, especially hard-working Asians, must think we are insane. And sometimes we agree, which is why we say "To hell with this. I'm going traddie."

And now we come to what I call the Saint Joseph Problem. I mean no disrespect to Saint Joseph,to whom I give partial credit for getting me remarried at last and who is, after all, a great model of masculinity. The problem is that he is, for young trad Catholics today, too much our model of masculinity.

Young traddie women with housewifely ambitions rightly want a younger, sexier St. Joseph to take care of them, have a real job, bring home the money, protect them from the hooded claw, keep the vampire from their door. When the chips are down, he'll be around with his undying, death-defying love for them. Et cetera. But this is quite a lot to ask of a boy at [conservative Catholic college] who is, on average, 20 years old.

St. Joseph may have been descended from King David, but he was essentially a blue-collar worker. I don't know what he was doing at 20, but it wasn't tequila shots or an all-nighter on his Poli Sci essay. My guess is that he was already a professional carpenter and, anyway, we think he was pretty old when he became betrothed to Our Lady. I'm guessing his business was well-established and flourishing. How many 20 year olds do you know who can support a wife?

In short, the Nice Catholic Boy is caught between the rock of a society that tells him to stay 19 forever and the hard place of being expected to provide for a Nice Catholic Girl and their children in an economic environment turned upside
down. When married women took on (or stayed in) middle-class jobs, the cost of living skyrocketed. One salary plus one salary no longer equalled two. And when banks began handing out mortgages like cheap cigars, the price of housing skyrocketed, too.

On top of this, the Nice Catholic Boy is constantly insulted, day in and day out, by appeals to his sex drive. He is intensely visual, and images of naked or nearly naked women (and, in some neighbourhoods, men) are shoved at him 24/7. Imagine if advertisers sent out gorgeous men with growly voices to give women back massages and compliments. The advertisers are doing the equivalent to the Nice Catholic Boy. Meanwhile, it used to be very hard for him to find porn, which is very addictive; now he can hardly avoid it. So being confronted with real women, real live women in cute outfits, in a sexually-charged situation like a date, is now incredibly problematic for our Nice Catholic Boy, who very often can't afford to marry.

I had a 20-something devoutly Catholic male friend, very cute, who was terrified of getting involved with a woman lest he go too far and she let him do it. His ideal woman was a woman who would slap him if he went too far. Unfortunately he couldn't think of a safe way to figure out which women would do that. Now he's a male religious. Sigh.

All this, and I haven't even got to feminism yet. Let's just say that young men, nice young men, nice young Catholic men, have many reasons to be deeply afraid of women. They open a door; they get screamed at. They don't open a door; they get screamed at. Eventually young women will stop screaming long enough to realize that the great majority of their colleagues are not The Oppressor and are, in fact, the most ripped-off generation of men in history. Meanwhile, they're scaring them.

Therefore, I encourage you and other NCGs to stop blaming Nice Catholic Boys under 25 for not pursuing you. I encourage you to be friendly to them without making them your Bestest Buddies and wait for them to mature as best they can in a world that tells them not to.

Making a man your Bestest Buddy strikes me as being a form of castration. There was an appalling trend in the USA of 20-something mixed sex pyjama parties where college-age boys and girls snuggled chastely under comforters, watching movies, eating popcorn, all being girls together. Have we gone insane?

A final tip: men do not seem to have a problem courting women a decade younger than themselves. And the older men get, the more likely they are to be advanced in their careers. So if it is very important to you to marry a university man and not, say, a successful tradesman (like St. Joseph), and yet stay at home with babies, you might want to ponder men in their 30s and 40s.

I hope this is helpful.

Seraphic