OK, there seems to be some confusion in Catholic circles about how to handle this whole thorny issue of dating and romance. As an expert on Life, a fully-fledge EWTN Matinee Idol, and as a man who has spent almost twenty years traveling the country with young actresses, I can help set a few things straight.

LOVE AS A VOCATION

First of all, finding the man or woman of your dreams is a great mystery. I mean that in the most complete metaphysical sense. It is a mystery because it is a Vocation.

What is a Vocation? A Vocation is an invitation from God to love Him more closely by becoming the person He has made you to be; it’s a call to a fidelity to true development of character and to heading in the right direction toward the destination toward which He has made you to yearn (we’re told in pop psychology, “It’s the journey that matters, not the destination”, but a true journey is meaningless without a destination, and a destination and a destiny have much in common). A Vocation happens when He calls us by name for a specific task (a calling in life) or to love a specific person in marriage (also a calling in life). Those who have Vocations to the priesthood or religious life can tell you that a hallmark of a Vocation is your misery when trying to deny it, your frustration when it remains unfulfilled, and your contentment when you find it and follow it. Kind of like love. (That’s because a Vocation is all about love).

Now here’s the thing. Even if you discern a vocation, say, to the religious life, you must discern to what particular order God is calling you. The same is true for secular “vocations” or career callings. If you discern a calling to (God forbid) be an actor, you must discern how you can do this and eat as well as what troupe you must find or what shows you must do. God is not into the Vague and the Blurry; Liberalists are into that, and so is the devil. God is into incarnation, which is always specific and particular. Thus we are not called to love just anybody or do just anything; we are called to love a particular person, and do a particular thing, for each of us is a particular person – this fact itself being a profound mystery. The peculiarity of what God wants us to do and who He wants us to love mirrors the peculiarity of who He has made us to be, the mystery of our own identities. What we do and how we love defines who we are. This cannot be fully understood; it is truly a mystery.

And the other great oddity about this mystery is why it should be so darn hard. Why do so many of us go astray? Finding true love is harder than anything else in life; it is a minefield through which parents or authors can not lead you.

Nevertheless, this author will not be intimidated. I will lead you. Ladies, I may not be able to lead you in the right direction, but I can sure the heck help you avoid the wrong direction, for I have seen a lot over the years.

WHY I KNOW SO DARNED MUCH

My wife Karen has perhaps foolishly allowed me to support the family for the past 16 years by travelling the country performing two-person murder mystery dinner theater shows. The shows feature an actor (me) and an actress playing multiple parts. We perform regularly from Minnesota to Kansas to Kentucky and Tennessee. Therefore, I often find myself going on long car trips with pretty young women in their 20’s. And while I have resisted the temptation to become sexually intimate with these girls, still for many years I was foolish enough to do something almost as stupid. I would actually to talk to the actresses while in the car. That’s right, I would talk to them! Big mistake. I eventually realized this, and now I play audio books instead.

But what would happen when I would talk to them for hours on end, invariably, would be that I would get a kind of perspective on women that guys almost never get. I would find out about the most important things in their lives – men. And I would find out how incredibly MESSED UP the men in their lives were. And how MESSED UP these girls were in dealing with these MESSED UP men.

GUYS, WE HAVE NO IDEA

Parenthetically, I must say this before going any further. Guys, we have no idea. Guys, we think pretty and intelligent girls will never talk to us. We think we’re such losers that we’ll never get noticed. We would never make their radar screens.

The truth is just the other way. There are countless pretty and intelligent young women out there who sell out, who settle for anything that comes their way, who go after the lowest blip on the radar screen, regardless of how far his craft has sunk in altitude. None of them seems to realize what a hot prospect she is, and how if she’s the least bit pretty or charming or smart she could have any guy she wanted. Guys aren’t that picky, and girls don’t seem to know that. We’ll settle for what we can get! We can’t imagine that a young woman would do the same. We suspect any girl can have any guy she wants – by virtue of simply being a girl!

They don’t think that way.

CASE HISTORIES

I have changed the names of each person that follows and a tiny detail here or there to protect identities. But I am not making any of this up, nor am I exaggerating.

ROXY was a former beauty pageant winner who had had only one love in her life, Henry. She wanted to marry Henry until she found out he was using and selling cocaine. She wisely dumped him. But she rebounded to Max. Max was a scrawny public school teacher with bad teeth and a worried look in his eye. Every time he called her on the cell phone, she seemed mildly annoyed to talk to him. Once she told me of how he had been calling her every ten minutes the night before, begging her to come over to his place. She kept telling him she couldn’t see him that night, as she had to prepare for her trip and show the next day. And so he drove by her house, sat in his parked car across the street staring at her house and calling from his cell phone every ten minutes begging to see her. She seemed surprised when I told her she was crazy if she kept dating him.

RACHEL had never had a boyfriend she was in love with. When she turned 30, she panicked, paid $3,000 to join a dating service and started hyper-dating. She went on a lunch date and a dinner date every day for thirty days straight – sixty dates, from which she picked a guy to marry. Once, on a trip with me she was worried because Mr. Fiance was a health nut who insisted she work-out three hours a day at a gym or treadmill, just like he did. “I have new tennis shoes and I’m afraid I’ll get blisters if I run on the treadmill at the hotel, but he wants me to!” she told me. Eventually, Mr. Fiance insisted that Rachel give up acting. He did not want her to have a life outside of him. She not only thought this was a good thing, but she seemed to think this meant he loved her very much. My wife Karen said, “Once they’re married, he’ll start beating her and she’ll be miserable.” She invited Karen and me to her wedding, but I told her I thought she was making a mistake by marrying him (something apparently nobody else in her life had the guts to tell her) and she has not spoken to me since.

MARTHA was a very devout Catholic girl. Her boyfriend was a radical traditionalist. He got the idea from a book that not only did chastity mean not having sex before marriage, it also meant not kissing. So they never even kissed – even after they got engaged! Two months before the wedding, after the showers, after the invitations had been sent, after the wedding and reception were planned, he called her to tell her he had discerned a vocation to the priesthood, and would not marry her, thus dropping a nuclear bomb into her life. In dating this guy, Martha kept her virginity but lost her innocence.

BETTY spent years dating a guy in theater that everybody but Betty herself knew was gay. Her heart went out to this man, but they became nothing more than friends. She got him in bed once and dreamed if she could do it again, he would start to love her. She got angry when other people would tell her he was gay, and that other actors were running into him at the gay bars. I eventually learned that her first husband had left her for another man – though Betty insisted he just moved in with this other man because they were close friends who spent way too much time together and both liked to star in musicals. I also learned that Betty’s father, a pastor at a Protestant church, caused a scandal in the 1950’s by becoming too close to one of the teachers at the church school. The teacher her daddy became too close to, I eventually found out, was – you guessed it – a man.

KAREN spent nine years dating a guy who was in theater and who made almost no money. She was very self-sacrificing and kind to him, and they were clearly meant for one another, but it took this loser nine – count ’em nine – years to realize she was the gal for him and finally to marry her. And yet she put up with him all that time!

Oh, wait, that last one’s my story! I should have changed Karen’s name to something else. My excuse is I was not Christian at the time, and oh yes, I was also a total idiot.

THINGS TO WATCH OUT FOR

These stories can go on and on, and there’s little point to that. So, dear ladies, let’s pass from anecdotal evidence to conclusions and rules we can draw from all of this. I now present THE WARNING SIGNS.

1. If a guy is addicted to drugs, cross him off your list.

2. If a guy has a thing for guys, cross him off your list. Sure he’s a great friend, but the closeness you feel with him comes from the fact that there’s no sexual tension between you.

3. If a guy is not happy with you having a life outside of him, cross him off your list. Possessiveness and control is NOT a sign of love; it’s a sign of a dangerous man.

4. If a guy starts to stalk you, cross him off your list. Stalking is NOT a sign of love, it’s a sign of a nasty sickness.

5. If a guy is either obsessed with sex or else obsessed with avoiding sex – if you can’t tell him no or he never gives you the opportunity to tell him no – cross him off your list.

6. If a guy shows the least hint of wanting to “discern a vocation to the priesthood or religious life”, don’t cross him off your list, but break the entire relationship off until he’s certain he’s called instead to marriage. Then, if he wavers again after “finally discerning marriage” and is the least bit “not sure”, cross him off your list.

7. Do not listen to the puritan-Catholics who tell you that dating is evil, courtship is good. Dating is casual courtship, which is fine as long as it doesn’t lead to casual sex (or formal sex, for that matter). You do NOT have to go out only with men who are serious prospects. In fact, there is no way of knowing a man is a serious prospect until you spend some casual time with him. Dating should be fun and the guy should be fun. If he’s not, cross him off your list.

8. DATE AS MANY GUYS AS POSSIBLE before becoming engaged. Do NOT have sex with as many guys as possible (in fact, do not “make out”, but do kiss), and do not believe the lie that fornication is OK if you really love each other. In fact, if you have sex with a guy before you marry him, you stand a fine chance of him dating you for nine years before he gets off his butt and does the right thing. But DO DATE A LOT. Only by dating a lot of guys will you know what men are like and what to watch out for.

9. Do not panic. You can’t do a thing about finding love, other than putting yourself in the right environment (avoid pick up bars and community theater, for example). If there is any proof that the ways of God are beyond mere mortals, it’s the fact that we can’t work our way up into finding the right person to love.

10. It’s a humbling thing, and it will NEVER go smoothly!

Well, that’s all I have for now. I may yet start a syndicated column 

of advice for the lovelorn, but that’s still to come.

I will leave you with this, by Hilaire Belloc.

“Because in your Mortality the most
Of all we may inherit has been found –
Children for memory; faith for pride;
Good land to leave; and young love satisfied.”

“Young love satisfied” is a beautiful, tender, wonderful gift, rarely 
received or found. May God grant it to us all!