Although I have always been Catholic, I was a committed feminist from the age of 12 to 22. At the age of 22 I was thrown out of a Women's Day parade for carrying a sign reading "Pro-life is pro-woman." I was picked up by two muscular women with buzzcuts who identified themselves as abortion rights activists and dumped me on the side of the road. This was witnessed and duly recorded by student journalists, so it won me five minutes of moderate fame. But it did rather end my longing to hang onto and rehabilitate the word "feminist." And when I got to theology school I discovered that many women of colour had already abandoned the word and preferred to use the term "womanist." Me, I prefer to use the word "Catholic."
The Church is not given much credit by the world for the help and support and honour she has given women since her birthday at Pentecost. It goes unremarked that she has referred to herself in the feminine for millennia, and that there are just as many woman saints in the canon as there are men. There were were female Doctors of the Church long before there were female Doctors of Oxford University. (Update: I was wrong on this one; although of course St. Teresa of Avila was born before there were female D.Phils, there were no female Doctors of the Church named until 1970.) The love and respect of Ecclesia for one woman, the Blessed Virgin Mary, is called an attempt to force women to live up to an impossible ideal; nobody mentions those saints and teachers who hailed Our Lady as a model, not just for women, but for men.
Great male mystics like St. Bernard of Clairveaux have refered to their own souls as "she." Our Lord himself is described in one beautiful verse in Scripture as being like a hen who wishes to gather her chicks under her wings. Theologians have identified the feminine figure of "Wisdom" in the Wisdom texts of the Old Testament with Christ. Great women like Teresa of Avila and Dorothy Day have lived shining lives of Christian holiness in utter loyalty to the magisterium while asserting their God-given roles in society: Teresa as a foundress and writer; Dorothy as a lover of the poor and a partisan of peace.
It is therefore surprising that there are young Catholic men and married Catholic women who discourage young Catholic women from higher education. Women, no less than men, are rational beings. We are capable of intellectual advancement, which can go on all our lives. (An absolute dunce at philosophy at 22, I read Lonergan's Insight at 33 and got A+ on my term paper.)
Or is it surprising? The post-Boomer generations inherited a terrible social mess. The Boomers gave us mass divorce, mass desertion from the priesthood and semininaries, mass abortion, AIDS and heaven knows what else. Unsurprisingly, increasing numbers of young Catholics look at the gifts of the Sixties with a jaundiced eye. And the one of the biggest scapegoats is feminism.
As my anecdote should illustrate, feminism is not a love and respect for all women. It is an ideology. Christian feminists have examined some of its ideas and principles and worked out how they might be compatible with the Christian faith; unfortunately this sometimes means stretching out Christianity on a Procrustean bed.
However, the Woman Question is over a hundred years old, and theologians whose first loyalty is to Christ have examined it in the light of Christ. Such a theologian was John Paul II, whose Mulieris Dignitatem you must read after you finish this post.
Feminism purports to be about choice, and many a Christian woman has wished that she really did have a choice and could snap her fingers, marry a good man at 24, have five children, and stay at home with them, creating a wonderful dwelling place for the whole family, with delicious meals and clean laundry smelling of lavender, and yet still having energy to go out to a concert or film now and again with her husband. This was the privilege of the average Edinburgh labourer's wife in 1960, never mind richer women. Her life did not, I hasten to add, look like a Ralph Lauren advert: there was one heck of a lot more housework and one heck of a lot less money.
Many young people, their own families having been, perhaps, less than traditional, wish to reclaim the good they observe in the 1960 family structure, while, of course, rejecting the serious problems with domestic abuse. And as far as that goes, I think that is fine. If young women find Mr. Right at any age, and then retire from the rat race to keep house, raise children or chickens, or write all day long, I think that is marvellous. But I don't see why this should discourage women from learning all they can about anything that interests them, especially if it is theology.
My one caveat is to beware of wasting your life and substance in graduate school for the liberal arts. Many take out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans, dreaming of becoming a tenured professor at a time when the places for graduate students outnumber the vacancies for university professors. If you are actually brilliant--and I mean head and shoulders over everyone else in your year--or as stubborn and hardworking as a mule, and as insensitive to stings and pricks as a baking tin, then go right ahead. But if what you really want is to become an educated person, then get a library card for the best library in your city and read whatever you can. Many universities sell memberships in their libraries to non-university folk.
But I will say this. Once when I worked for a statistics gatherer, I had to do a survey on children's early education. It was a massive project, involving thousands of people. And one question I had to ask was "How much formal education did the mother have?" There was NO similar question for the fathers. The social scientists did not care how much education the father had. How much education the fathers had had much less (if any) effect on children's early education than the mothers' education did.
Not only is it important for women to be educated for their own sake and, I'd point out, to make them interesting companions for husbands in companionate marriages, it is important for the intellectual development of their children.
So the next time some stupider-than-average young fogey, or a nice lady so in love with motherhood that she can't see the value in everything else, tells you women don't need higher education, feel free to use any or all of the points in this post.
Now go read Mulieris Dignitatem, so you can quote it, too. It's long, so grab a coffee.
Friday, 4 February 2011
Thursday, 3 February 2011
Auntie Seraphic & How Will I Know
This was a comment in the combox, and I loved it so much, I thought about it during my flight to Toronto and I reproduce it here as an Auntie Seraphic letter:
Dear Auntie Seraphic!
I have a request/idea for a future post: How does one *know*?
Lots of well-meaning priests and spiritual advisors have told us that you could be perfectly happy with more that one person and that having one single soul mate is a myth. This is reassuring, but a little confusing when you're trying to figure out who should be your mate, since most other people you ask say "someone you can't live without!," or "when you don't even think about anyone else" (unlikely, there are lots of attractive people in the world), or "you'll cry when you leave him to go on vacation" ;) or even worse, "you'll just know."
I ask this rather selfishly in part, because I'm in a "relationship" with a guy I love and trying to discern whether he's 'the one.' It's complicated by the fact that we've been together a long time, so the firework, can't think of anything else, swoony feelings that everyone claims are the main sign aren't even there all the time anymore, and he's the first person I ever dated, so I can't really compare.
(Plus, sometimes I like it when he's not around or when I go on long-ish trips with my girlfriends and without him. But surely that can't mean I don't love him?)
How Will I Know
Dear HWIK,
You don't have to marry this boyfriend.
That is the most important thing I have to say. I don't care how much you like him, or how long you've been together, or how happy you are when you get some breathing space away with your girlfriends, or how happy you are when you see him again.
I don't care if you've been talking about marriage for a long time, or if you've been kissing him so hard and so long, you have permanent beard rash, or if your boyfriend's mother has picked the names of your possible children, or if you've mentally picked the wedding hymns. You don't have to marry him. Dating relationships end all the time. That's okay. Marriages ending horribly in divorce, one or the other or both saying,"I never really loved you"--that's not okay. That's terrible.
Once upon a time, like 110 years ago, all Single women who weren't nuns were at a serious social disadvantage. They expected to marry, they learned from other women how well they were expected to do in the marriage market, and they were vastly relieved when their husbands turned out not to beat them or drink too much. They married young, quickly, and not necessarily for love.
Those days are behind us.
I cannot imagine why any woman in this day and age and hemisphere, when social forces attack marriage with all the power they can command, would marry a man unless she was head-over-heels in love with him.
Marriage is not a lifelong honeymoon vacation in a Caribbean resort. Marriage is washing dirty laundry, washing the kitchen floor, making boring everyday meals, sex, burping at inconvenient times, snoring, backing each other up in public, laughing at a joke you've heard 345 times, taking out the garbage because even though he said he would he didn't, picking up the snotty handkerchief, pregnancy 'moments' (or actual pregnancy), going to church, squabbling and laughing together almost every day. Laughing if you're lucky and in love, that is.
Sometimes relationships run their course. You date an exciting man for a year or more, and it goes flat. He's your comfortable habit. You're his comfortable habit. Or maybe you started dating in high school, and you grew up and he hasn't yet, or vice versa. You're great pals. Pals who make out. (Which you shouldn't be, as I have decided in my super-conservative middle age.) But if you don't want to marry him, you shouldn't marry him. You don't have to marry him.
I didn't have time to get bored with my husband. I fell in love with him something like 48 hours after we met in person, and he fell in love with me something like 48 hours after that. His heroines--including Dame Emma Kirkby, Helena Bonham Carter and Iris Murdoch--were a lot like me in some ways. My heroes--tweedy intellectual types--were a lot like him. And we both had something the other had always hoped to find in a member of the opposite sex. He was so cheerful, funny and friendly. I was so supportive of his conversion to Roman Catholicism. We were both adults--36 and 38 respectively, our homes were thousands of miles apart, and we both fell madly, crazily in love. We were married 8 (7.5?) months later. I gave up my country for him, and he gave up...hmm...the ability to spend his entire paycheque on himself.
Now it is over two years since we met, and it was all I could do to drag myself away from him this morning at Glasgow Airport. And, two years on, I know some things I didn't know two years ago. For example, he snores. Very loudly. So loudly I wake up and have to put on ear protectors. And he doesn't like how I wash dishes because it is not exactly the way his granny washed dishes, and he claims I leave greasy fingerprints on doorknobs. But he is the most beautiful person in the world to me, and probably around tomorrow I am going to have a hysterical sobbing fit because I am all the way over here in Canada, and he is all the way over there in Scotland.
Marriage is a calling, but it has several parts. You feel vaguely called to marriage in general. That's part 1, and nice, as it goes. But then you meet someone--a SPECIFIC someone---someone good and mature and kindly--with whom you fall madly in love and who falls madly in love with you. You both feel a strong conviction you're meant to get married. That's part 2. Then you marry in church, taking those binding, solemn vows before God and your community. That's part 3. You're not 100% called to be married until you take those vows to that specific person.
In short, if you don't KNOW--don't KNOW with all your heart--that you want to be married to this man, don't marry him. Travel. Get a job. Get a professional degree. Don't get married just for the sake of getting married. Get married because you think that if you don't marry the man who loves you as crazily as you love him, you will die.
Married love is friendship caught fire. A great blaze at the beginning of your marriage may settle down, but it ignites the logs of married life so that it burns brightly and warmly for decades. Sexual attraction is the tinder, good character, patience and maturity are the logs, but romantic love is the match.
Don't sell yourself short. I hope this is helpful.
Grace and peace,
Seraphic
P.S. If the well-meaning priest is in a religious order, ask him if he would have been as happy and fulfilled in a different religious order. If the spiritual director is a married woman, ask her if she'd turn her husband in for another, somewhat similar model. There might not be such a person as a soul-mate, but men are not interchangeable. I admire other deeply attractive men. (Marriage doesn't strike you blind and insensible.) I know lots of good, attractive, fun, intelligent, Catholic men. I wouldn't trade my own man for any or all of them, even if they came with a million dollars and the secret of eternal youth.
Dear Auntie Seraphic!
I have a request/idea for a future post: How does one *know*?
Lots of well-meaning priests and spiritual advisors have told us that you could be perfectly happy with more that one person and that having one single soul mate is a myth. This is reassuring, but a little confusing when you're trying to figure out who should be your mate, since most other people you ask say "someone you can't live without!," or "when you don't even think about anyone else" (unlikely, there are lots of attractive people in the world), or "you'll cry when you leave him to go on vacation" ;) or even worse, "you'll just know."
I ask this rather selfishly in part, because I'm in a "relationship" with a guy I love and trying to discern whether he's 'the one.' It's complicated by the fact that we've been together a long time, so the firework, can't think of anything else, swoony feelings that everyone claims are the main sign aren't even there all the time anymore, and he's the first person I ever dated, so I can't really compare.
(Plus, sometimes I like it when he's not around or when I go on long-ish trips with my girlfriends and without him. But surely that can't mean I don't love him?)
How Will I Know
Dear HWIK,
You don't have to marry this boyfriend.
That is the most important thing I have to say. I don't care how much you like him, or how long you've been together, or how happy you are when you get some breathing space away with your girlfriends, or how happy you are when you see him again.
I don't care if you've been talking about marriage for a long time, or if you've been kissing him so hard and so long, you have permanent beard rash, or if your boyfriend's mother has picked the names of your possible children, or if you've mentally picked the wedding hymns. You don't have to marry him. Dating relationships end all the time. That's okay. Marriages ending horribly in divorce, one or the other or both saying,"I never really loved you"--that's not okay. That's terrible.
Once upon a time, like 110 years ago, all Single women who weren't nuns were at a serious social disadvantage. They expected to marry, they learned from other women how well they were expected to do in the marriage market, and they were vastly relieved when their husbands turned out not to beat them or drink too much. They married young, quickly, and not necessarily for love.
Those days are behind us.
I cannot imagine why any woman in this day and age and hemisphere, when social forces attack marriage with all the power they can command, would marry a man unless she was head-over-heels in love with him.
Marriage is not a lifelong honeymoon vacation in a Caribbean resort. Marriage is washing dirty laundry, washing the kitchen floor, making boring everyday meals, sex, burping at inconvenient times, snoring, backing each other up in public, laughing at a joke you've heard 345 times, taking out the garbage because even though he said he would he didn't, picking up the snotty handkerchief, pregnancy 'moments' (or actual pregnancy), going to church, squabbling and laughing together almost every day. Laughing if you're lucky and in love, that is.
Sometimes relationships run their course. You date an exciting man for a year or more, and it goes flat. He's your comfortable habit. You're his comfortable habit. Or maybe you started dating in high school, and you grew up and he hasn't yet, or vice versa. You're great pals. Pals who make out. (Which you shouldn't be, as I have decided in my super-conservative middle age.) But if you don't want to marry him, you shouldn't marry him. You don't have to marry him.
I didn't have time to get bored with my husband. I fell in love with him something like 48 hours after we met in person, and he fell in love with me something like 48 hours after that. His heroines--including Dame Emma Kirkby, Helena Bonham Carter and Iris Murdoch--were a lot like me in some ways. My heroes--tweedy intellectual types--were a lot like him. And we both had something the other had always hoped to find in a member of the opposite sex. He was so cheerful, funny and friendly. I was so supportive of his conversion to Roman Catholicism. We were both adults--36 and 38 respectively, our homes were thousands of miles apart, and we both fell madly, crazily in love. We were married 8 (7.5?) months later. I gave up my country for him, and he gave up...hmm...the ability to spend his entire paycheque on himself.
Now it is over two years since we met, and it was all I could do to drag myself away from him this morning at Glasgow Airport. And, two years on, I know some things I didn't know two years ago. For example, he snores. Very loudly. So loudly I wake up and have to put on ear protectors. And he doesn't like how I wash dishes because it is not exactly the way his granny washed dishes, and he claims I leave greasy fingerprints on doorknobs. But he is the most beautiful person in the world to me, and probably around tomorrow I am going to have a hysterical sobbing fit because I am all the way over here in Canada, and he is all the way over there in Scotland.
Marriage is a calling, but it has several parts. You feel vaguely called to marriage in general. That's part 1, and nice, as it goes. But then you meet someone--a SPECIFIC someone---someone good and mature and kindly--with whom you fall madly in love and who falls madly in love with you. You both feel a strong conviction you're meant to get married. That's part 2. Then you marry in church, taking those binding, solemn vows before God and your community. That's part 3. You're not 100% called to be married until you take those vows to that specific person.
In short, if you don't KNOW--don't KNOW with all your heart--that you want to be married to this man, don't marry him. Travel. Get a job. Get a professional degree. Don't get married just for the sake of getting married. Get married because you think that if you don't marry the man who loves you as crazily as you love him, you will die.
Married love is friendship caught fire. A great blaze at the beginning of your marriage may settle down, but it ignites the logs of married life so that it burns brightly and warmly for decades. Sexual attraction is the tinder, good character, patience and maturity are the logs, but romantic love is the match.
Don't sell yourself short. I hope this is helpful.
Grace and peace,
Seraphic
P.S. If the well-meaning priest is in a religious order, ask him if he would have been as happy and fulfilled in a different religious order. If the spiritual director is a married woman, ask her if she'd turn her husband in for another, somewhat similar model. There might not be such a person as a soul-mate, but men are not interchangeable. I admire other deeply attractive men. (Marriage doesn't strike you blind and insensible.) I know lots of good, attractive, fun, intelligent, Catholic men. I wouldn't trade my own man for any or all of them, even if they came with a million dollars and the secret of eternal youth.
Wednesday, 2 February 2011
Packing My Bags...
I've almost finished packing for my trip to Toronto, South Bend, and Montreal. I've also wrestled the Christmas tree downstairs and swept up the fallen bits because today is Candlemas, and anyway I'm not leaving the house with the Christmas tree still up. Sweeping up the pine needles meant Cleaning the Stair, which is an Edinburgh tradition, and by Cleaning the Stair, I am at last a real Edinburgh wifie.
Tuesday, 1 February 2011
Teeny-Weeny Rejection
Sigh. As long-time readers know, I show solidarity with Singles, who face a lot of rejection ("It's not you; it's me"), by sharing my rejection letters.
I just got a rejection letter.
As rejection letters go, it was really a nice one. In fact, it could be summed up as, "It's not your story; it's our form of media, and I'm sure it'll be snapped up soon!" The editor said she really enjoyed it, and since she is an amazingly talented writer, I felt rather pleased.
The rejection part still made me sigh, though. Ay, me. That bit's never easy.
Off I go to look in the British Writer's Guide. The great law of writing is that you never, ever give up. If you give up, you never get paid.
Update (Feb 2): I'm sending out two submissions today.
I just got a rejection letter.
As rejection letters go, it was really a nice one. In fact, it could be summed up as, "It's not your story; it's our form of media, and I'm sure it'll be snapped up soon!" The editor said she really enjoyed it, and since she is an amazingly talented writer, I felt rather pleased.
The rejection part still made me sigh, though. Ay, me. That bit's never easy.
Off I go to look in the British Writer's Guide. The great law of writing is that you never, ever give up. If you give up, you never get paid.
Update (Feb 2): I'm sending out two submissions today.
Vocation and Valentines
And how are you spending the night of Valentine's Day? If you are a Single woman, I hope you have a nice indoor plan--meeting with Single friends or renting a good movie and buying yourself a yummy treat. Just as long as its something to look forward to at the end of a red-pink-and-white day, when all about you are having roses delivered to their desks. If you are a Single man, I suggest you pop into a fancy restaurant and notice how high the prices have been jacked up for that night. Valentine's Day is a restauranteur's license to steal.
I will be spending Valentine's Day all by my little self. Well, no. I suppose I'll be at home with Mum and Dad, unless Mum and Dad go out for Valentine's Day dinner. Maybe I'll watch Moonstruck again. Of course, I now have it memorized, so maybe I will recite Moonstruck. The thing is, I will be in North America, and my husband will still be in Britain. I have the Notre Dame conference on February 11 and 12th, and when I fly north on February 13th, it will be to Toronto, not Glasgow. My husband, meanwhile, has a very busy month in February. He makes most of our money; he cannot go junketing off with me.
"Cry me a river," I hear someone say. "At least you have a husband."
Very true, and that is why I am going to spend V-Day all by my little self. There's no point in going to a Valentine's Day Singles' Solidarity Supper when I cannot fully participate in Singles' Solidarity. Sure, I could hang with girls who say, "Oh, how sad that you are so far from your husband on Valentine's Day," but the words "At least you have a husband" would bounce above us all in an invisible thought balloon, so forget it. I can't even hang with widows. Maybe I could find other women on business trips.
"It's not a business trip," said a cantankerous woman at church on Sunday. "It's a holiday, and you're abandoning your husband."
Yes, I'm afraid that even at my beautiful Traditional Latin Mass there are cantankerous types reminding us all that perfect happiness is only possible in heaven. And I suppose in a way she was right: first I decided I would go to Canada to see my family and friends, and then I hinted broadly that I ought to be invited to Notre Dame. Still, only a non-Canadian could call three weeks in a Canadian February a "holiday."
Actually, my life in Scotland feels like a holiday. It's going to Canada that feels like work because my husband, whom I didn't get to meet until I was 37, won't be there. I don't function well without him these days. The last time I went on a trip without him, I broke down within 24 hours and cried like a little girl.
"I'm so looking forward to going home," I said on my last trip to Canada. "I haven't seen my husband in weeks."
This was at a wedding, to a woman I know slightly. We were in a queue for the roast pig. She looked at me severely.
"I haven't spent a night apart from my husband in nearly thirty years," she said.
I thought that was marvellous. It's like Paul and Linda McCartney, who before Linda's death spent a night apart only because Paul was briefly jailed for marijuana possession. I hoped B.A. and I would be like that, too, but I am a writer, and these days what sells writing is appearances. So occasionally I make appearances in places where my husband is not.
Vocation is a falling in love. I am stealing the phrase "falling in love" from Bernard Lonergan, S.J., who rightly said that religious conversion was a "falling in love." But vocation is, too. In state-of-life vocation, you fall in love with a life of prayerful Singleness, either with the community you have fallen in love with (the Dominicans, perhaps, or L'Arche) or alone, or you fall in love with a person, or you fall in love with priesthood and say, "Here I am, Lord." But there are other kinds of vocation, too: you decide to do missionary work in Gambia, and you fall in love with Gambia. You pick up a crayon, and you fall in love with visual art. You feel an urge to write about the Single Life, and you end up writing a speech to give at Notre Dame in mid-February, thereby sacrificing your Valentine's Day.
I don't really mind sacrificing Valentine's Day, since what I really mind is leaving my husband for three weeks. It is the absence that will annoy me; the disapproving clucks of other married women are just silly. For most of his career, my father has gone on at least two business trips a year, and I would be flabbergasted to discover that some stalwart of the Knights of Columbus upbraided him for it:
"Australia for two months? That's not a business trip, that's a holiday, and you're abandoning your wife and kids!"
And even if you take the business part out of it, my father has on occasion headed south to his native U.S. to visit aging relatives while my mother held the fort at home. The idea of never spending a night apart from your beloved spouse is a beautiful one, but life doesn't work out like that for everyone.
No, the hard part is the separation, but although being married to B.A. is my numero uno vocation, I have been called to speak and write to Singles, too. It's ironic. It's a mystery. But it is true.
I will be spending Valentine's Day all by my little self. Well, no. I suppose I'll be at home with Mum and Dad, unless Mum and Dad go out for Valentine's Day dinner. Maybe I'll watch Moonstruck again. Of course, I now have it memorized, so maybe I will recite Moonstruck. The thing is, I will be in North America, and my husband will still be in Britain. I have the Notre Dame conference on February 11 and 12th, and when I fly north on February 13th, it will be to Toronto, not Glasgow. My husband, meanwhile, has a very busy month in February. He makes most of our money; he cannot go junketing off with me.
"Cry me a river," I hear someone say. "At least you have a husband."
Very true, and that is why I am going to spend V-Day all by my little self. There's no point in going to a Valentine's Day Singles' Solidarity Supper when I cannot fully participate in Singles' Solidarity. Sure, I could hang with girls who say, "Oh, how sad that you are so far from your husband on Valentine's Day," but the words "At least you have a husband" would bounce above us all in an invisible thought balloon, so forget it. I can't even hang with widows. Maybe I could find other women on business trips.
"It's not a business trip," said a cantankerous woman at church on Sunday. "It's a holiday, and you're abandoning your husband."
Yes, I'm afraid that even at my beautiful Traditional Latin Mass there are cantankerous types reminding us all that perfect happiness is only possible in heaven. And I suppose in a way she was right: first I decided I would go to Canada to see my family and friends, and then I hinted broadly that I ought to be invited to Notre Dame. Still, only a non-Canadian could call three weeks in a Canadian February a "holiday."
Actually, my life in Scotland feels like a holiday. It's going to Canada that feels like work because my husband, whom I didn't get to meet until I was 37, won't be there. I don't function well without him these days. The last time I went on a trip without him, I broke down within 24 hours and cried like a little girl.
"I'm so looking forward to going home," I said on my last trip to Canada. "I haven't seen my husband in weeks."
This was at a wedding, to a woman I know slightly. We were in a queue for the roast pig. She looked at me severely.
"I haven't spent a night apart from my husband in nearly thirty years," she said.
I thought that was marvellous. It's like Paul and Linda McCartney, who before Linda's death spent a night apart only because Paul was briefly jailed for marijuana possession. I hoped B.A. and I would be like that, too, but I am a writer, and these days what sells writing is appearances. So occasionally I make appearances in places where my husband is not.
Vocation is a falling in love. I am stealing the phrase "falling in love" from Bernard Lonergan, S.J., who rightly said that religious conversion was a "falling in love." But vocation is, too. In state-of-life vocation, you fall in love with a life of prayerful Singleness, either with the community you have fallen in love with (the Dominicans, perhaps, or L'Arche) or alone, or you fall in love with a person, or you fall in love with priesthood and say, "Here I am, Lord." But there are other kinds of vocation, too: you decide to do missionary work in Gambia, and you fall in love with Gambia. You pick up a crayon, and you fall in love with visual art. You feel an urge to write about the Single Life, and you end up writing a speech to give at Notre Dame in mid-February, thereby sacrificing your Valentine's Day.
I don't really mind sacrificing Valentine's Day, since what I really mind is leaving my husband for three weeks. It is the absence that will annoy me; the disapproving clucks of other married women are just silly. For most of his career, my father has gone on at least two business trips a year, and I would be flabbergasted to discover that some stalwart of the Knights of Columbus upbraided him for it:
"Australia for two months? That's not a business trip, that's a holiday, and you're abandoning your wife and kids!"
And even if you take the business part out of it, my father has on occasion headed south to his native U.S. to visit aging relatives while my mother held the fort at home. The idea of never spending a night apart from your beloved spouse is a beautiful one, but life doesn't work out like that for everyone.
No, the hard part is the separation, but although being married to B.A. is my numero uno vocation, I have been called to speak and write to Singles, too. It's ironic. It's a mystery. But it is true.
Monday, 31 January 2011
Who Wants to Live in Rome?
Are you a woman? Are you hankering to go and live in Rome for the rest of the year? Have you dreamed of studying at the Gregorian but are afraid to face the Roman housing market?
If so, perhaps you are Hilary White's next flatmate. She has a very nice apartment just outside Rome, and she works in Rome itself, as the world's nastiest, wittiest, most orthodox Roman Roman Catholic correspondent. I'm sure she'd be nice to you. In fact, she might just kiss your feet in gratitude for coming to Rome to share the rent.
Anyway, here's Hilary's latest plea for a flatmate. See if you can help Hilary. She is your fellow Single after all. And she is good peeples. If carnaptious in print.
If so, perhaps you are Hilary White's next flatmate. She has a very nice apartment just outside Rome, and she works in Rome itself, as the world's nastiest, wittiest, most orthodox Roman Roman Catholic correspondent. I'm sure she'd be nice to you. In fact, she might just kiss your feet in gratitude for coming to Rome to share the rent.
Anyway, here's Hilary's latest plea for a flatmate. See if you can help Hilary. She is your fellow Single after all. And she is good peeples. If carnaptious in print.
Getting Serious
Once again I read an article about how the prime baby-having years are between age 20 and 35 and how "career women" should stop putting off having children because they will be sorry.
My usual response to such articles is to click away or to write a snappy little comment about how the problem might not be "career women" as much as it is "lazy, commitment-hating men"--although, of course I know that that is not always the problem, either.
When I was 23, I had three suitors, each of whom would have married me, which I don't mind telling you for this startling situation has never been repeated. I didn't much like it, either, for I wasn't in love with any of them. Possibly I was a lazy commitment-hating woman. Possibly I had the emotional age of 12. And, anyway, God's plan was that I would marry B.A. at the actual age of 38, not that I knew that. I eventually caved, decided I was in love with one of the three, married him and was divorced by age 27. Yay, annulment tribunal!
At any rate, I always try to balance remarks about the strange social circumstances the Sexual Revolution has thrown us all into with thoughts about God's Plan. Many aspects of the Sexual Revolution fly in the face of God's commandments, but He allowed the Sexual Revolution to happen. It's a mystery.
What I think I can safely say is that men and women both waste a lot of time, energy and money on people who do not want to marry them. American-style dating, once a means to an end, has become an end in itself. Women sleep with their boyfriends, which in France would be known as "taking a lover," and this does not always translate into marriage and babies, although babies certainly happen and, if allowed to be born, usually stick around longer than their fathers.
Someone commented under the article I described above saying that infertility was women's fault because women drop their knickers too soon and too often, and this makes men immature and spoiled and unlikely to make commitments. I found this statement rather ahistorical because men have always managed to find women to have sex with them, even if only for pay. What is new, though, absolutely new, is the idea that any and every woman could and should have sex before marriage. This is absolutely unprecedented in the West. Even before Christianity, the Germanic tribes who roiled and boiled across Europe were very strict about female chastity.
The marvellous thing about female chastity--you might not think this is marvellous, but try to see it objectively--is that it often separates the sex tourists from men who just want to marry a "nice girl" and settle down. I don't want to get too romantic about this: there are lots of nice non-Catholic girls whose idea of chastity means not sleeping with their suitor for a solid six months after meeting him. (I always think it's a bad idea to ignore the fact that lots of premarital sex-having women marry their boyfriends and live happily ever after.) But sex touristy- type men do not hang around waiting for six months, let alone for wedding prep classes, unless they have a stubborn, sociopathic need to conquer, and these men—thank God—are rare.
But alongside physical chastity there is something called emotional chastity. Emotional chastity means not hankering after people who do not love you. Almost everything we have been taught to find romantic--unrequited love, going into a decline for love, writing impassioned love-letters, standing outside our ex-girlfriend's window holding up a ghetto blaster playing "In Your Eyes"--is actually irrational and extremely stupid. The early 19th century has a lot to answer for. I reserve special blame for Goethe.
This is why I do not think anyone should date a person for more than a year without discussion of marriage. Male psychology being what it is, I don't think the person to mention marriage should be the woman. And if the man doesn't as much as mention marriage within that year, I think the woman should dump him.
Now that I have more male readers, I expect a flurry of comments saying "How can you know within a YEAR?" And my answer is that if you are an adult, and out of university, you should know within a year. If you don't, stop wasting your girlfriend's time. Meanwhile, women should take the incredibly painful revelation that their boyfriends, whom they might very well and unwisely love very much, don't want to marry them on the chin. If he doesn't want to marry you, he is Mister Wrong, and continuing to date him or even to sleep with him or let him move in with you, is not going to change that. Get out while you're young.
If there's anything I can't stand and that I certainly hope to undermine, it is the boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. I don't think people (especial women) should make informal years-long emotional/sexual commitments to people who don't know if they want to marry them or not. I think people should make dozens of friends and acquaintances, and that women treat regard the men who court them as old-fashioned suitors--with kindness but with a certain reserve. "Can I call you my girlfriend?" is no substitute for "Would you marry me?", although these days, of course, the second question usually follows the first, if it is asked at all.
My usual response to such articles is to click away or to write a snappy little comment about how the problem might not be "career women" as much as it is "lazy, commitment-hating men"--although, of course I know that that is not always the problem, either.
When I was 23, I had three suitors, each of whom would have married me, which I don't mind telling you for this startling situation has never been repeated. I didn't much like it, either, for I wasn't in love with any of them. Possibly I was a lazy commitment-hating woman. Possibly I had the emotional age of 12. And, anyway, God's plan was that I would marry B.A. at the actual age of 38, not that I knew that. I eventually caved, decided I was in love with one of the three, married him and was divorced by age 27. Yay, annulment tribunal!
At any rate, I always try to balance remarks about the strange social circumstances the Sexual Revolution has thrown us all into with thoughts about God's Plan. Many aspects of the Sexual Revolution fly in the face of God's commandments, but He allowed the Sexual Revolution to happen. It's a mystery.
What I think I can safely say is that men and women both waste a lot of time, energy and money on people who do not want to marry them. American-style dating, once a means to an end, has become an end in itself. Women sleep with their boyfriends, which in France would be known as "taking a lover," and this does not always translate into marriage and babies, although babies certainly happen and, if allowed to be born, usually stick around longer than their fathers.
Someone commented under the article I described above saying that infertility was women's fault because women drop their knickers too soon and too often, and this makes men immature and spoiled and unlikely to make commitments. I found this statement rather ahistorical because men have always managed to find women to have sex with them, even if only for pay. What is new, though, absolutely new, is the idea that any and every woman could and should have sex before marriage. This is absolutely unprecedented in the West. Even before Christianity, the Germanic tribes who roiled and boiled across Europe were very strict about female chastity.
The marvellous thing about female chastity--you might not think this is marvellous, but try to see it objectively--is that it often separates the sex tourists from men who just want to marry a "nice girl" and settle down. I don't want to get too romantic about this: there are lots of nice non-Catholic girls whose idea of chastity means not sleeping with their suitor for a solid six months after meeting him. (I always think it's a bad idea to ignore the fact that lots of premarital sex-having women marry their boyfriends and live happily ever after.) But sex touristy- type men do not hang around waiting for six months, let alone for wedding prep classes, unless they have a stubborn, sociopathic need to conquer, and these men—thank God—are rare.
But alongside physical chastity there is something called emotional chastity. Emotional chastity means not hankering after people who do not love you. Almost everything we have been taught to find romantic--unrequited love, going into a decline for love, writing impassioned love-letters, standing outside our ex-girlfriend's window holding up a ghetto blaster playing "In Your Eyes"--is actually irrational and extremely stupid. The early 19th century has a lot to answer for. I reserve special blame for Goethe.
This is why I do not think anyone should date a person for more than a year without discussion of marriage. Male psychology being what it is, I don't think the person to mention marriage should be the woman. And if the man doesn't as much as mention marriage within that year, I think the woman should dump him.
Now that I have more male readers, I expect a flurry of comments saying "How can you know within a YEAR?" And my answer is that if you are an adult, and out of university, you should know within a year. If you don't, stop wasting your girlfriend's time. Meanwhile, women should take the incredibly painful revelation that their boyfriends, whom they might very well and unwisely love very much, don't want to marry them on the chin. If he doesn't want to marry you, he is Mister Wrong, and continuing to date him or even to sleep with him or let him move in with you, is not going to change that. Get out while you're young.
If there's anything I can't stand and that I certainly hope to undermine, it is the boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. I don't think people (especial women) should make informal years-long emotional/sexual commitments to people who don't know if they want to marry them or not. I think people should make dozens of friends and acquaintances, and that women treat regard the men who court them as old-fashioned suitors--with kindness but with a certain reserve. "Can I call you my girlfriend?" is no substitute for "Would you marry me?", although these days, of course, the second question usually follows the first, if it is asked at all.
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