Actually LEARN From Your Mistakes

I am a big enemy of wishful thinking. Wishful thinking gets women (and presumably men) into a lot of trouble. One particularly dangerous form of wishful thinking is believing that the man with whom you are infatuated is an angel, a saint or just as decent a human being as you are when there is just no evidence of the above. All around you are hinting madly that Rufus is to be avoided, but you block them out. Rufus is attractive and therefore Rufus must be good. And, dear me, the painful explosion in the pit of your stomach the day you learn the hard way what a snake Rufus really is.

"Oh no," you think as panic swirls around your stomach and threatens to travel north. "Oh no, it can't be. It can't be true. He can't be doing this! Not after all [I've done/we've been through/his promises/I've suffered already].

But it CAN be true and Rufus CAN be doing it because feelings are not facts, and reality is what is and not what you want it to be.

If Rufus proves himself to be a snake, it is best to escape Rufus, for if you do not, Rufus will probably bite you again and again and, although you do not like it, you will get so used to being bitten that, should Rufus slither away from you, you will instinctively look for another snake, because snake-behaviour will seem normal and comfortable.

(By the way, never take particularly seriously an abused or used woman's opinion of what normal is. Many of my readers are made miserable by sexually-active-yet-unmarried college women telling you that your lives of quiet piety and chaste friendships aren't normal. Don't believe them. You are perfectly normal and a lot more in keeping with the past two thousand years of the history of, at very least, women who weren't prostitutes of one kind or another.*)

Once upon a time, after a breakup, I sat down with a pen and paper in a cafe and listed every man with whom I had gone on at least two dates, what they were like, whether I had courted them or if they had courted me, and why and how we broke up.

This was a very instructive exercise. It was akin to an exercise I did after a particularly horrible break-up with an alcoholic. Because women who date one alcoholic tend to go on to date other alcoholics, I thought very hard about who in my past life abused alcohol. And I remembered that one hard-drinking flame back in my undergrad days had told me that sometimes the only way he could get to sleep was to drink whisky until he passed out. And because of this and other memories I at 29 concluded what I at 21 had no way of knowing, which was that this flame was an alcoholic.

Sure enough, a mutual friend called me up a year or two after this exercise and sat, "I hope you're sitting down. [Ex-flame] has announced that he is...."

"What, what?"

"Well, I know you're sensitive about this right now, but he says he's an alcoholic."

"Oh," I said, vastly relieved. "I knew that."

Anyway the point to this story is how helpful it can be to clearly grasp the patterns of your life, particularly your social life, by sitting down in a cafe with a pen and a paper and the whole afternoon before you.

But this is just a start. What you need to do, if you have not done so already, is develop a tough kind of mindfulness than hangs on to unpleasant facts about people rather than flinch away from them. This does not mean getting anxious about them. It does not mean becoming bitterly cynical. It just means being in possession of the facts.

For example, I have a friend who tells random fibs. The fibs are lazy and irrational; there is no reason for them as far as I can see. I wish my friend did not tell fibs, but she/he does.

Thinking about these lazy, silly fibs, I ponder my own relationships with the truth and whether I am word-perfect in my own representations of reality, or if there is room for improvement. In short, I look for the beam in my own eye, having observed the mote in my friend's. However, I do not forget my friend's fibs in the process, and although I am very fond of my friend, and he/she has many excellent qualities that make me glad he/she is my friend, I do not place more reliance on him/her than I think wise.

And to get through all this verbiage to get what I really want to say, If he let you down terribly once, and he has let you down terribly again and again since, what on earth makes you think he won't let you down terribly, or in an even worse way, later? Because the chances are that he will, and that you are setting yourself up for even more misery. Please put aside your hopes for a second to look history in the face. A leopard does not change his spots.


*One of the worst-paid kind of nineteenth-century prostitutes weren't "really" prostitutes but laundresses or servants who slept with university students for little presents or tips. But of course poor women tried to avoid such things unless they were desperate because, of course, they might get pregnant or some horrible disease [or lose their reputation, lose a quiet conscience, lose their self-respect, offend God, etc.]

Update: I see that it is the Feast of the Assumption. Dear me, what a thing to write about on the Feast of the Assumption. Better go to an appropriately pious blog for true edification this holy day. By the way, it is a Holy Day of Obligation in Scotland, so to Mass with you Catholic Scots and everyone else had better check to see if it is a HD of O in your area.

Good-bye, Cosmo Girl

Helen Gurley Brown, the author of the women's sexual liberation movement has died. Here is her obituary in the New York Times.

Brown wrote for Single girls. She was very funny. She loved her husband. Other than that, she was my exact opposite.

Sex and the Single Girl was published in 1962, which is slightly ahead of my chosen Year It All Went Wrong, which is 1963. It had very sensible things to say about working hard to advance in the work world. It had harmful things to say about sexuality. For example, Brown encouraged women to shrug off the immorality of affairs with married men. In her view, the fault was entirely that of the adulterous married man, and if you weren't having an affair with him, somebody else would, so why not just enjoy him?

As editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, Helen Gurley Brown sold women a revolution that was half fantasy: just use protection, girls, and nobody will get hurt. When I was growing up, she was still at the helm, and her magazine always featured a heavily-made up model with big hair and her cleavage slashed to her belly-button. The articles, I gathered, were complete trash, and reading Cosmo had to be a serious sin.

Thus, I don't think I have opened more than three or four copies of Cosmopolitan in my entire life. The one article I remember reading was about how to have an adulterous affair and get away with it. I have forgotten all details except to check that your jealous lover is not deliberately leaving evidence for your husband to find. Heavens. That is just so wrong on so many levels.

I do not think badly of Helen Gurley Brown although of course I think her philosophy was terribly dangerous and indeed responsible for a litany of miseries: the proliferation of sexual diseases in girls and women; many premature deaths due to cervical cancer; the staggering number of abortions performed every year; the as-yet-unknown effects of mass use of the birth control pill; damage to health due to breast implants and other cosmetic surgeries; the erosion of marriage; the unhappiness of children; the death of modesty; the ruin of souls.

I do not think badly of her because I don't think she knew that's what would happen. I have read both Sex & the Single Girl and Sex & the Office, and I gathered that she really, truly, honestly wanted to improve women's lives. Well, maybe not the lives of stay-at-home (so to speak--they also ran a lot of errands and did volunteer work) wives who husbands might fall into the beds of Cosmo girls, but she certainly cared about her readers. And she perhaps correctly divined that what her readers wanted more than anything was to catch a man, to have interesting work, to have an income and to not feel guilty. And Helen thought the key to all this was sex.

Sex is, of course, one of the reigning idols of our time. It is a religion, and it is almost the state religion of both the UK and the USA. As the Scottish government is willing to ignore the 67% of those Scots who wrote in to plead for the traditional definition of marriage and the American government is willing to trample the religious rights of Catholic employers to make them pay for abortifacients and artificial contraceptives, I think I am justified in saying that.

At any rate, Helen was a true believer in Sex as God, the giver of all good things. She was wrong, just as wrong as anyone thinks that nuclear power is God, the giver of all things.

But she was funny and engaging and hardworking and darned successful in her publishing and writing careers. I never sneeze at book sales, and Sex and the Single Girl sold two million copies in three weeks. As a writer she caught the interest of a mass readership, and that is the business we writers are all in. It's such a shame she was fighting under the wrong standard. Kyrie eleison.

I think it was wrong for the NYT to make those cheap shots about her cosmetic surgeries. I bet the NYT won't mention Gloria Steinem's cosmetic surgery when she dies. But I suppose it points to the fact that although Helen Gurley Brown helped to transform women's lives, she also cheapened them.

The End of Parents?

Last week I went to a play called "Angels" by Ronan O'Donnell. It was a spellbinding, hour-long monologue by an actor playing a young, working-class Edinburgh security guard hauled into the local police station for questioning.

The security guard has a number of flashbacks, and one of them is of the one and only time his grandfather ever hit him.

It was clear from the monologue that the security guard was raised by his mother, grandmother and grandfather. This was not an unusual arrangement for working-class Scotsmen of my husband's generation. It is not all that unusual for a Canadian boy of my nephew's generation. God knows a boy needs a father figure in his life, and if he doesn't have a responsible father or even a grandfather, he's very likely to go looking for a father in all the wrong places, e.g. the local gang.

The grandparents in the play were married. I think this is significant. I think it is significant that single mothers (and presumably single fathers) lean on their married parents to help house and raise their kids. But I have suddenly been struck with the thought that we can no longer rely on older marry couples as parental stand-ins. I had this thought when reading this.

Okay, so the grandfather has only been charged. Innocent until proven guilty. But we in the UK have read dozens and dozens of stories about mothers' "partners" being charged in connection with the murder of children. This is the first time I have come across a story about a grandmother's "partner" being charged. Oh, and he's 37.

A partner, incidentally, is a politically correct term in Britain for a person another person acknowledges as their primary object of sexual expression. It is a way of eroding the differences between boyfriend, fiance and husband. It can be even be used of someone else's husband by the woman who is now sleeping with him. Presumably if you leave your husband for his father, and everyone knows it, your father-in-law becomes your "partner." Incidentally, you don't have to live with your "partner" for him to be your partner.

No Boyz Allowed

Serious Singles can have a good laugh at this next post and ignore it. If you are a Serious Single you are free from one of the most annoying obsessions of female, nay, of human life in general. I have a lot of admiration for Serious Singles, the Zen masters of social life.

When I delve into the problems of Serious Singles, people who are quite content to live a celibate (and chaste) existence, the worst one seems to be employers and colleagues trying to make them do more than their fair (or paid) share of work because "you're Single and don't have a family."

Of course such employers and colleagues are to be resisted because Serious Singles have lives and families like everyone else. It is up to the Serious Single to volunteer to help lighten the load for people with kids or to take on the night shift on Valentine's Day if they wish. They shouldn't be bludgeoned into it by the ignorant.

By the way, all unmarried adults should have a friend or relative or doctor look at their backs every once in awhile. I know a priest who had skin cancer on his back and he didn't know for ages because, of course, nobody, not even him, could see it.

But onto the subject of this post, which will be of interest to Searching Singles and to the eavesdroppers, because as a matter of fact nothing is more likely to get the attention of the eavesdroppers than a post called "No Boyz Allowed." Or so I gather from certain of my male friends who follow up remarks that they no longer read blogs with remarks about my latest post.

Oscar Wilde, who was so interested in and sympathetic to women that his wife changed her married name and that of their children, famously wrote that women are "sphinxes without secrets." This is, of course, complete nonsense. Women have a lot of secrets and retain an air of mystery as long as we don't reveal all our secrets. Some of our secrets we should never reveal, as a matter of fact, but ponder them in solemnity and take them to our graves.

This is not just because it is imprudent to tell certain secrets but because it is necessary, if one is the kind of woman who likes being admired by men, to retain some air of mystery. Otherwise men get bored. They are so easily bored, bless their little hearts, although not by "Mythbusters." If you don't know many men and want to find out what they are all about, watch "Mythbusters." In the UK, just consult the "Quest" channel on telly. I can barely unglue B.A. from it, and he taught philosophy for ten years or more.

This is not to say that the only popular women are the mostly silent ones who say little but mean much. Au contraire. Lots of chatty women win male hearts, from soulful philosophers to merry little bagpipes like me.

It depends on the individual, concrete male heart, of course. You would think from English literature that no man alive would fall for women who carry out breathless monologues featuring "And then she said [...] and then I said [....] and she said [....] and then when I next saw Paul he said [....} so I said [....]" but some men must fall for them because a lot of married women carry on like that and their husbands nod along approvingly and shake their heads at the perfidy of Paul or add such affirmations as "Can you believe that?"

So there is hope for chatty girls, although I personally would counsel not to chat so much, at least not about people your audience doesn't even know. I would also counsel against using unladylike, ungentlemanly language, as many men find it depressingly masculine and the sort of thing they hope to avoid by speaking with women.

Information about yourself you should offer only in small amounts, like sugar cubes to horses, and you should never, ever feel obliged to tell very personal information. Of course, you should certainly have an answer for general things, like your likes and dislikes at the ready, or else you will seem dull.

Dinner Host: And what do you do when you are not writing?

Seraphic: Well, I am learning Polish.

Dinner Host: Polish! How unusual.

Seraphic: It is certainly difficult.

Dinner Host: Dear me, dear me. And what else do you do?

Seraphic (thinking hard): Hmmm... Hmmm....

Weeks later, I realize the answer to that is "I go for long walks" and "I go to the Scottish Poetry Library and read Zbiegniew Herbert and writing magazines" and even "I do the laundry and tidy up a bit."

It turns out that relatively few people in Scotland are at all interested in the Polish language, so that can be a bit of a wash-out as conversation material. One of the most important things to remember, if you are a chatty type, is that listening is not as much fun as talking and therefore you must be very careful not to bore whomever you are speaking to, either with your subjects or with your apologies for your subjects. If you see your listener yawn or his eyes shift longingly around the room or body (especially feet) gradually turn in another direction, it would be a good idea to change the topic.

One way out of a conversational jungle is to ask your interlocutor a question about himself, one that he cannot answer with a simple "Yes" or "No." This works like a charm on men from chatty cultures, although it can fall flat with suspicious Central or Eastern Europeans.

Seraphic: And what will you do while you are on holidays?

Suspicious Central European: Why do you want to know?

Seraphic (feeling very tired): Please excuse me. (Flees.)

And that reminds me of the very great importance of women simply vanishing from time to time without much of an explanation. This is, I think, one of the great charms of the sadly disappearing (almost entirely disappeared) British custom of women suddenly rising from the dinner table and leaving the men behind.

This is commonly misunderstood as a misogynist custom. In fact it is a way for women to escape loud masculine conversation, which gets louder as the port gets passed around, and cigar smoke and, indeed, the table. It is not comfortable to sit at the table for hours on end. It is nicer to lounge about in the drawing room scarfing chocolates. And it is not like the men are gone forever. You get them back eventually, if you want them, and you can sober them up with coffee. And you have all the fun of looking at them, when they enter the drawing-room, as if they have just missed the revelation of the Greatest Secrets in Life.

Meanwhile, I got along with men much better when I stopped hanging out with men so much and started hanging out with girly girls. As much as I enjoyed being The Only Woman at dinner with male religious, I discovered that after all I more enjoyed being a girl among other girls and being chatted up by laymen at parties. I have no scientific evidence for this, but I think girly girls have some kind of magic man-attracting fairy dust that can rub off on their more outwardly serious-appearing sisters.

Update: Fruit of May's women's retreat in Krakow here. Go visit and increase AJ's hits exponentially!

The Age Poll

Sometimes shortly after I post a new poll, a more popular blog or blogs link to my site and messes with the statistics. So these polls are less scientific than ever. However, I think we can still learn something about ourselves from them, so here we go.

READER AGE

Replies: 272

Female under 21: 26

Female 21-25: 83 (30%)

Female 26-30: 77 (28%)

Female 31-35: 28

Female 36-40: 15

Female 41-49: 10

Female 50+: 2

A Kindly Priest: 2

An Eavesdropper: 29 (10%)

There were only 2 eavesdroppers and no priests until the link incidents. I believe there are only two priests who regularly cast a paternal eye over this blog, one in Ireland and one down the road from B.A. and me.

But even before the link incidents, I noticed that apparently more twenty-somethings than thirty-somethings read this blog, which surprised me. I originally meant my blog to be for women of about 35 who were panicked or unhappy about what might be their permanent Single status. However, that was back in 2006 before I was discovered by Notre Dame, Christendom, St Andrews, et alia.

It shouldn't surprise me because you are much more likely to be Single in your twenties than your thirties, not to mention messing around on the computer, procrastinating from your term paper.

ACCEPTABLE AGE GAP (i.e. How Old is Too Old?)


Replies: 272

I would date only men younger than me. 1

I would date only men my age or younger. 3

I would date men up to five years older than me. 72

I would date men up to ten years older than me. 135

I would date men up to fifteen years older than me. 38

I would date men up to twenty years older than me. 20

I would date men up to thirty years older than me. 2

I would date men over thirty years older than me. 1

Whew! Well, I think it is safe to say that men of 40 are quite justified in trying to date women of 31, as it would seem many women are open to dating men up to 10 years older than themselves. There is a sharp drop-off after that, however, so if they are 10 years or more older than the women who intrigue them, they might approach with caution and not too much investment.

A five year age gap does not look like a problem at all.

Good Men We Know

This morning I am pondering the fact that this is not a "Let's All Talk About Men" blog but a blog for Single women, about thriving in Singleness, whether or not that Singleness is temporary or permanent, virginity, widowhood or, er, something in between.

However, since over the past several days we have been pondering difficult or downright wicked behaviour of various men, I think it is time to celebrate the good men we know.

By the way, Charming Disarray, where is your guest post on a good man you know?

As I wrote earlier this week, my worldview changed and my life began to improve when I took a leap of faith that most men are good and the rotters are a minority. I certainly made a lot more male friends, especially when I went to theology school and met many male religious.

However, it wasn't just the male religious who were great. There was an engaged layman who was fantastic. He lit up rooms with his presence. He was unflaggingly cheerful and open-hearted and unabashedly in love with life and his fiancee, who was a cheerful, open-hearted girl. They were both incredibly friendly and laid-back.

"Wow," said my colleague to me one day, without a hint of guile or unfaithfulness or sexual interest or anything like that, "I just noticed that you have really pretty eyes."

As a matter of fact, I do have pretty eyes, which until then I hadn't noticed myself, and I was pleased to hear my colleague say so, particularly in that way, like a little kid. In fact, that particular compliment has stuck with me ever after and constantly cheers me, especially at the MAC counter.

My colleague and his fiancee were both Americans, one with a Southern accent and one with a Chicago accent, and they told everyone around how much they loved Canada, which naturally pleased us all very much.

Meanwhile, my colleague was very smart, although he would never have said or hinted so; in the toughest lectures and seminars, he had a sort of humble, cheerful, wait-I'm-not-sure-I-get-this air. If he didn't get something, he wasn't afraid to say so, but then he'd work his brain until he got it. He's now a university professor.

I don't know if there were any sighs among the women students over this clearly unavailable guy although I don't think there were among the under-30s, or I would have known. We just LIKED him, and we liked his fiancee, too, so much. I went to their wedding; they wrote their own vows and he cried when he read his. It was really sweet.

Anyway I am sure I have written about this colleague before because I'm sure I've written about a conversation I had with my spiritual director at that theology school.

I was in the middle of a "There are no good Single man" rant. It seemed to me that all the good guys I knew were male religious, and there were just no good Single men.

"But [Colleague] was once a Single man," said my Spiritual Director.

That ended my rant because there was no denying that [Colleague] was a great guy and had been a Single man.

"Oh, yeah," I said.

This thought gave me a lot of hope, and lo and behold some years later I met someone just as kind, cheerful and laid-back as my colleague, although in a different way.

Incidentally, my colleague's Christology was so low as to be tremendously heretical. I suspect I would have seizures if I read his work, unless his thinking has very much changed. But, socially speaking, I have met fantabulous Catholic men who are tremendously, ahhhh..., innovative in their theology, and I have met fantabulous Catholic men who are reassuringly orthodox. Oh, and at least one great Evangelical guy that I had a massive crush on. It wouldn't have worked. But that's okay; he was still a great guy.

Right! Your turn. In the combox, write about a stellar man you know. Make up a name for him, though, or the testimony will get very confusing.

Auntie Seraphic and the Countdown

I got an email, and it was a stumper. It was also depressing, and I know we have had plenty of depressing thoughts about men this week, even though they are the caffeine in the cappuccino of life and the good ones make our lives sing. But this is serious.

The question was one of those ethical issues akin to "I have two healthy kidneys. Should I give one of them to a complete stranger who might die if I don't?"

To reduce a sad--and not unusual--story to its basic parts:

A young woman met a young man who had recently split from his fiancee. Although she came from a Christian background, over the course of time, after some ordinary dating and hand-holding, they began sleeping together.

This changed the young man's behaviour towards the young woman, and he sent her nude photos of himself electronically and encouraged her to send him nude photos of herself. This (I am told) she wisely refused to do.

Then she discovered that her boyfriend had not broken off with his "former" fiancee. His fiancee is still looking forward to their wedding day. It is soon.

Our heroine confronted him and he asked her if this fact had to change their own relationship.

Our heroine dumped him.

Now our heroine is unsure what to do. She realizes that this man probably slept with other women during his long relationship with his fiancee. She believes she should warn the fiancee, who is a complete stranger to her, that this man, on least one occasion, has had sex with another woman--a woman who did not know he was still engaged to the fiancee because he lied. And lied. And lied.

She has never met the fiancee, but she has contact details. And she pities the fiancee, who might innocently marry a man she wrongly believes to be faithful.

However, she is frightened about what her ex-boyfriend might do to her if he thinks she revealed all to the fiancee. She certainly did not feel brave enough to say, "If you don't tell her, I will."

The clock is ticking.

What should she do?


And what should she do if she did send him those photos? No insult intended, but sometimes I get letters from girls who tell me half the truth and then only later, because of complications, tell me the real, much more horrible, story.

***
I will make a few remarks about vulnerability.

I read a lot of feminist literature in the 1990s when I was at the University of Toronto. This was at a time when the dominant voice of feminism began to shift from anti-porn to pro-porn. Women were simultaneously encouraged to protect ourselves from sexual violence but also to seek sexual adventures. There was a huge, heavy, ginormous emphasis on sexual pleasure, on "transgression," on experimentation, on politicizing our sexuality and sexualizing our politics.

Feminist voices told women not to be sexual objects but to present ourselves as sexual subjects. The look, however, was the same.

What got lost in the conversation, outside traditional religious enclaves, was the fact that sexual intercourse makes women (and to a certain extent men) vulnerable by its very nature. All the wishing in the world, all the tracts on empowerment, all the workshops, all the condoms, all the abortion "rights" cannot change that.

It is dangerous to have sex outside of a long-term relationship to which both people are deeply committed. Even marriage, unfortunately, is no guarantee in itself: both husband and wife have to WANT to be faithful.

Sex is like the sun: it gives life and warmth, but it can also burn and kill. People have sacrificed human beings in worship of both.

It is also incredibly dangerous to ever, EVER allow electronic photographs of yourself in naked or risque poses to be taken unless you do not care if everyone in the world sees them and sits in judgement upon you. A artist's model, for example, might not care. But everyone else should care.

(Parents should talk to their children about it. One thing they might want to underscore is that it is ILLEGAL for even underage children and teens to possess or send sexy photographs of naked underage children and teens.)

And even if you trust (rightly or wrongly) the person to whom you send such photographs, you should understand that the internet is not secure, and that mobile phones and cameras and computers can be lost or stolen.

To give you an idea of how secure the internet is, I will reveal that the apparently anonymous young man who has sent me four simple-minded, obscene and (in one case) illegal "comments" in the past two days, is a Facebook friend of a Facebook friend of one of my regular readers. He lives in Toronto and his service is provided by Bell Canada.