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| Single Catholic guy “discerning”. |
Having witnessed a few mating dances at the Chesterton Conference this past weekend, the weird and distressing situation among single Catholics mystifies me.
A Facebook friend has drawn my attention to an article by Devin Rose entitled Single Catholic Guy – Wake Up!
Here’s how it begins …
It’s never been a better time to be a single Catholic guy.
Why? Because there are thousands of lovely, faithful young Catholic women waiting for you to step up to the plate and court them!
Yet many Catholic guys are unsure about themselves, uncertain, dithering, wavering, vicissitudening. Stop it! In Christ, with the power of the Holy Spirit, you can change this and face your fears, be courageous, bold, and manly. It’s not about being a boor, or having enormous muscles (though it wouldn’t hurt to go work out), or swaggering around like you’re Tom Cruise after a Scientology retreat. It’s about being yourself and living up to who God made you to be.
… the rest of the article features more or less stupid advice, but the above is on the money.
It’s apparently pretty bad out there. Many beautiful, intelligent devout single Catholic women I’ve known have trouble finding anything but losers or ambi-sexuals who are too busy “discerning” to realize what God made them to be and to do. There seems to be a shortage of Catholic men who are simply men. Or, perhaps, who are straight. The lack of sexual activity during courtship doesn’t even seem to be a motivating factor for marriage for many of these guys – which is not a good sign.
In fact, I’ve known more than a few women deliberately marrying guys who were gay – or guys who were “struggling with same sex attraction” – thinking they could marry them and reform them.
This never works. It’s a recipe for disaster. Life long disaster.
And I’ve known other Catholic women whose husbands were straight, and who showed an interest in them, but who had such serious psychological problems that their lives together became a nightmare. Invariably, these women knew how disturbed their husbands were before marrying them, but married them anyway thinking they had no other good options.
And hard as it is to understand, this is perhaps the most significant area in which young Catholic women are called upon to trust God and to have the courage to engage in real life and real men. Unreality often dominates the lives of devout Christians, however, and Matrimony, which is dying in the secular world, also suffers greatly even in Catholic circles.
The vocations crisis is not just in the Catholic priesthood.
So you’ve noticed it too?
I’m no longer personally concerned about this issue, but it seems to me that there used to be men, and there aren’t any more men, Catholic or not, single or not.
As a conservative & chaste Single Catholic Man in my thirties who — to the chagrin of my parish who keep suggest that I go into diaconate formation, celibacy requirement for us or not — is actually seeking marriage and children, I was always wondering “where are all the Single Catholic Women?” until starting to reading into the Blogosphere recently and realizing that the question is presented the other way around usually. As I looked further into the characteristics of who was asking versus what I was used to, I started to get a theory…
Ironically, with all the talk against Modernism, the Catholic Blogosphere is very heavily Traditionalist. It makes sense, given that the Internet represents a haven both for the counterculture of our Catholic subculture and that it’s heavily used by the young (who are returning to or at least reinterpreting many older forms of liturgical device in their praxis, even among us Novus Ordo types). Yes, I said Novus Ordo types, as I think the problem isn’t that single men or single women aren’t out there, it’s that the “good” singles are to be found in different parishes.
We see the Single Catholic Women represented heavily online in churches with an EF focus, drawn to the beauty of the liturgy and the celebration of their chastity. However, the single men they find (a.k.a those not marrying right out of college) are either discerning or incredibly bitter about women and not in a position to date.
Single Catholic Men — the good ones — are meanwhile, in my experience in the more conservative Novus Ordo churches (the ones that the blogosphere derisively calls Neo-Catholic and some sites delightfully scandalize in a fashion that make me scratch my head before carefully washing my head-scratching hands to receive communion in them). Having been raised in-between a Catholic culture that teaches us chivalry to women and a secular culture that (on the rare bright side) teaches us equality with women, we’re chaste Cradle Catholic who remain in the parish seeking a possible wife through there after discovering that we don’t fit in dating in the secular world at all (while ironically many of our female peers have left and will return for their weddings to the Liberal Catholic men who ARE what the Internet speaks about).
Like two ships passing in the night (or two potential ‘ships passing in the rites), Single Catholic Men and Single Catholic Women have each found a place where they can survive in the modern Church, but neither is happy there per se since both rites are still built around couples & families. The irony is that minor issues of praxis that heavily divided a previous generation are keeping our generation apart because of simple location (modern young “rad-trads” have more exposure to modern praxis than their forebears, and modern “neo-cats” are more traditional than their forebears, and both sides are more involved in apostolic work and patristic & theological study than our parents’ generation was — leave the complaints about sex and catechism to the progressive parishes with the dancing and feel-good homilies…)
My suggestion remains pretty much what it’s been — singles should try visiting other parishes (for events or occasional masses) to see who they can meet, and they should branch out into the other rite/orthopraxis especially to see if that helps. I go to the local EF church for my daily Holy Hour five days out of the week (my parish and our ‘sister’ parish each have one day per week of adoration, so I attend those) and have been pleasantly surprised to see young women on occasion there. I’ve only been able to chat very briefly with one young lady who sat next to me and played the potential-interest card correctly, but I haven’t seen her since that afternoon (we introduced ourselves, but it’s hard to talk much with the Real Presence staring you down and making sure that you don’t even TRY to ask anyone out during a Holy Hour…). I’m going to have to get involved with some of that parish’s Singles Events — first sign of a parish with Single Women, actual Singles Events — once this semester starts up and my schedule get more stable…