Lots of problems out there, but today will be a very busy day for me, so I will just respond to Charming Disarray's combox wail and then put up an amusing video from Youtube.
C.D. complains that it just shouldn't be this complicated. No, it shouldn't. But it is. It is because although on a certain level human beings are the same way, and on another level men are different from women in recognizable ways, there are cultural factors complicating matters and, oh, every human person is unique.
Men are not women.
Germans are not Americans.
Poles are not Germans or Americans.
Chad is not Steve. Matthias is not Volker, and Wojtek is not Bogdan.
Grasp this, and you have grasped the fact that there is not one all-encompassing solution to the Problem of Men.
And then there are the complicating factors. From the beginning of the 20th century there have been papal encyclicals warning that the direct result of A and B would be X and Y. Casti Connubii was very concerned about what would happen it there was widespread divorce and remarriage: the devaluation of marriage and the family. Humanae Vitae warned what would follow widespread use of artificial birth control: the devaluation of marriage, women, the family and early human life.
And guess what!
Catholics, even trad Catholics, don't live in a bubble. The only place I can think of where native English-speaking Catholics are not a minority is Ireland. So of course we are going to be affected by all the widely promoted anti-family, anti-marriage, pro-lust, pro-selfishness trends out there. We are either going to absentmindedly adopt some of them ourselves, or we are going to react against them in ways that might seem anti-social to the majority of people around us.
And the counter-revolution does not always work well together: if Catholic women have to argue with Catholic men that just wanting jobs we enjoy that will support us financially do not make us poor marriage prospects, then we have a serious problem. Fortunately, such men are rare. They are mostly to be found on the internet, not at parties or in class. Life is simpler if you don't feed the trolls.
So this is where we live now. However, each of us is a unique person loved by God, and God has a plan for each one of us. Hopefully we do not get in the way of this plan, but even if we do, He can work around us, if He chooses. Meanwhile, we look for advice and comfort from other Catholic women and from other sympathetic women of good will.
We should live in reality, not in dreams. That's the part I want to add to the conversation. I have a lot of ideas and what-not-do-tos based on life experience, and I learned a lot from my M.Div. years. But what I think is most important is to get women to stop operating from a place of wishful thinking and to remain rooted in reality. It is very important to try to see your social interactions from a detached and reasonable part of your brain.
For example, it is not reasonable to panic because a random guy talked to you after Mass because you're not sure you'd ever want to marry him.
And it is not reasonable to plan a future with a man whom you think is cute and funny if he has never shown you any interest.
And it is not reasonable to start fights with men in the manosphere (Charming Disarray), any more than it is reasonable to walk into a strip joint and start arguing with the men in there. You'll see only their worst side, and they'll wrongly think they see evidence of what they've been complaining about.
Incidentally, I can only write what I write without massive problems with male trolls because (A) I avoid them and their blogs (B) I erase their comments, (C) I stress, over and over again, that men are the caffeine in the cappuccino of life. They are. Of course they are. If they weren't, I wouldn't have so many Searching Single readers. And yet men are quick to think we hate most of them. Bizarre. If they thought a lot of us are terrified of them, fair enough. But hate? Come on.
Someone mentioned the other day that [presumably English-speaking] men don't seem to like women anymore. I think for many of them (the decent ones, who deep down like women very much) it's a defense mechanism. Such men are so terrified of rejection, they have their finger on the trigger so that they can reject first. It makes them feel big and powerful and free for, oh, about 30 seconds.
I'll tell you what is not complicated, however. A situation in which you just live your life and one day the right man or the right religious order or a revelation that you are content with your single state suddenly appears in that life as easily and astonishingly as a ray of sunshine on a rainy day. And I pray every Sunday that that moment appears for you all sooner rather than later.
Okay, and now for the amusing video from the original, British Bedazzled (1967). The first singer is a short-order cook who has sold his soul to the devil for Eleanor Bron (the pixie cut girl with the big watch). The second is the devil. Keep that in mind.
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