The Importance of Girlfriends When You're a Girl

This is should be short because it is B.A.'s birthday and I have to clean, shop, cook, bake and possibly get to Polish Mass because it is also the Feast of Our Lady Queen of Poland. Not being Polish, I feel no obligation to celebrate the Feast of Our Lady Queen of Poland, but I would like to anyway. (Update: Whoops. I am credibly informed that although it is the Feast of the Queenship of Mary, the Feast of her Queenship of Poland is some other day.)

When I was in Gdańsk I went to Mass every day because my hostess Marta tries to get to Mass every day, and I thought this was very beautiful. It is very easy to get to daily Mass in Poland because there are churches everywhere, and usually at least one person praying in any city church at any time of the day, and the priests show up to say Mass in such a way that you know they would show up even if nobody else did.

This was splendid and heartening, and what was also splendid and heartening was spending four days with a cradle Catholic woman my own age. I know many of my readers really prefer the company of men and feel like fish out of water when with fellow women, but I am definitely the kind of woman who enjoys being around other women. This is not to say I don't like men, but--.

Hmm. How to explain that "but"?

The wonderful thing about being in all-girl groups and activities, like Girl Guides and girls' school, is that although you compete a bit, you also work together and there is no mental adjustment for the presence of men. There is also no competition for men. You can just forget all that for as long as you are in the all-girl environment, learning how to tie a parcel or prepare a slide for the microscope. And you can talk endlessly, effortlessly obeying the social conventions around women's conversation you hopefully have mastered by the time you leave primary school.

But at the same time, for 99% of women, you pin your hopes for romance and family life on men, which means there is (or should be) a certain amount of detachment: you don't go out of your mind with jealousy when your friend falls in love with some guy. Sure, you might feel a bit neglected, but your heart doesn't snap in half. And this means women can relax around each other in a way we probably shouldn't around men. For example, you can tell a woman all about the lingerie your other friend got at her bridal shower and have a good laugh, whereas you can't tell a good male friend all this stuff without him silently asking the perpetual silent man question, "Why is she telling me this?"

From a cradle Catholic point of view, it is relaxing to be around other cradle Catholics because you don't have to talk about Catholicism so much. I spend a lot of time with convert men, including my husband, and I adore them all, but my goodness, do they talk a lot about Catholic stuff. Not usually about Our Lord or Our Lady, but about churches and liturgies and processions and what Pope Francis did and what Pope Benedict said and what convert Catholic wrote what about who.

Cradle Catholics, the ones who try to be faithful, don't have to talk so much. We can silently swim in a great sea of Catholicism, beyond words and sometimes even beyond thought, just believing and praying side by side. And this is what I did in Gdańsk with Marta. I am 100% sure it beat getting drunk with your mates and some Australian blokes on the beaches at Tenerife, the stereotypical modern British mini-break.

I do not, by the way, want to put up any kind of wall between cradle Catholics and convert Catholics. Unless they became Catholics just to please their fiances, convert Catholics have had an amazing experience, an at times painful and frightening adventure, and are often very impressive. Most of my favourite British Catholic writers were converts. There are a lot of leading American Catholic apologists who are converts. But there is something about growing up in a Catholic home and perhaps even a Catholic ghetto or Catholic society that is unique. Many of us North American Catholics are, by the time we leave home, Catholics In Name Only. But a Catholic childhood is a Catholic childhood, and Catholicism is in our cradle Catholic bones and blood and teeth and hair. (But I suppose that is also why cradle Catholics who hold heretical views are so confident in their heresies. You know the drill: "Well, I'm a Catholic, and I think...")

Then there is the generational thing, about which I felt a lot when I was with Marta, especially in front of the shipyard at Gdańsk, the birthplace of Solidarity. When the strikes were going on, Marta was right there. But I was watching them on TV, seeing the photos in Time magazine and observing the Polish priest who suddenly turned up in our parish, out of harm's way, so I remember too.

Generation is about what you remember. Generation gap is about memory as much as it is about "new" ideas and new technology.  

Anyway, it is funny to write so much about the joy of spending a long weekend with a cradle Catholic woman of my own generation when it is my convert Catholic husband's birthday. (Happy birthday again, B.A.!) But the point I am making is that even married women (perhaps especially married women) need female friends our own age who know and remember many of the same things we do.

This is why, perhaps, it is hard to make new women friends when you get older or move to another city: the majority of them, native to the city, are so busy with work and their families that when they have time to spend with friends, they choose their oldest friends, the friends who share the same background, values and memories. Childhood friends. High school friends. College friends.

Hard, though, does not mean impossible.

New Green Shoes

Beautiful new shoe found on sale

The social highlight of my week is Sunday Lunch. Sometimes Sunday Lunch is an extravagant, crowded affair, and sometimes Sunday Lunch is simple and select. It depends on who has offered to have Sunday Lunch that week, and how much of an effort he or she wants to make, and who is available for an invitation, and how many friends he or she would like to bring with him or her.

There is sometimes a difficulty when Sunday Lunchers gather themselves up from After-Mass Gin to go to Sunday Lunch only to discover that nobody has cooked it, or that half the party has mysteriously disappeared without a word to the other half, and is probably on its way to a super-exclusive Sunday Lunch at some deliciously exotic location. On such unhappy occasions the forlorn remnant usually straggles off to a pub.

However, as the weather has been so beautiful since July muscled out soggy old June,  a group of us Lunchers recently had a most glorious picnic instead. We sat on a hill in a park clad in all our Sunday Fogey Finery and hid our bottles from the view of a ranger, who turned out to be much more opposed to the smuggling away of pond turtles by the party next to us than to bottles. The charm of novelty and the simplicity of just chipping in £10 each at Waitrose enhanced the charms of the sunshine and the view.

This Sunday, however, there were so few Sunday Lunchers around that the other woman present and I just sloped off after Gin to George Street to "do errands." Errands included taking a pair of linen trousers back to its shop to have its stubbornly lingering security tag removed, mooning at clothes purportedly "on sale" and eating lunch in an elegant and lady-like restaurant studded with Mediterranean ceramic plates.

Although we would not want to forego the company of gentlemen Sunday Lunchers more than once or twice a year, my friend and I found the change as good as a rest. In its way, it had the same charm of novelty as our picnic, and there was no-one around to make off-colour comments unsuitable for ladies' ears, St. Alban.* And after lunch was eaten and paid for, there was no dissenting deep-timbred voice to prevent a stroll to the shoe shop in Frederick Street.

As a matter of fact, I do not buy shoes very often, being love rich and cash poor. This makes buying new shoes a most delectable treat comparable only to buying new shoes. And being able to find such pretty shoes as the above on sale for only £25 made it even more delightful, as this is the east coast of Scotland, where we brag about how cheap we bought things on sale, in contrast to the unspeakable sybarites of the west coast, who perversely brag about expense. And to top things off, these new shoes are my husband's favourite colour, so there was a very good chance that he would exclaim "How nice!" before "How much?" when I got them home.

Slightly too big but sacred indoor shoes.

Finally, the green sneakers I wear with green finery when outdoors--like many Canadians, I carry my indoor shoes around in a bag--fell completely apart on the way from the restaurant (where I wore my indoor shoes) and so I had to buy new shoes or walk to a bus-stop in my slightly too big but sacred indoor shoes.

Therefore, finding the above shoes in my size and in my husband's favourite colour for only £25 was one of those rare shoe-buying miracles one hears about. In fact, the self-destruction of my sneakers even made the Sunday shopping the correct response to an emergency as opposed to a venial sin. "I'll wear them out," I said airily to the clerk of the new shoes, meaning no irony.

Finally, I virtuously remembered to buy groceries for my husband's supper, and so went home in a glow of satisfaction, smelling of roses, at 6 PM, which was also a nice change from going home at 1 AM in a fog of booze, smelling of cigars.

*That said, so many young women these days curse like troupers and make so many naughty jokes in mixed company that much must be forgiven of those boys who did not grow up around trad Catholics, homeschooled girls or Miss Marple. I crossed out "these days" because an elderly Englishman I know drops the F-bomb in mixed company with such regularity that I assume the women of his generation do too, or did.

***
July donations: Thanks very much to R.C. That was a very nice Canada Day present.

Befriending Families

I've written before about how migratory Americans and Canadians are (and always have been) compared to Europeans until very recently. We seem to have this feeling that we can just pick up and leave Chicago for New York or Toronto for Montreal, and everything will be fine. However, the older we get, the more difficult it is for many of us to make friends. Real friends, that is. Naturally we have colleagues at work, but those don't always turn into friends.  (The test is whether you still get together after you have left the job.)

The Poles, incidentally, have at least two words for friends, differentiating between best friends and everyone else. I admire their hard-headed ability to reserve przyjaciel (m.)/przyjaciólka (f.) for the few and apply kolega/koleżanka to the many. I would not be surprised if there were further gradations, e.g. kumpel/kumpelka. I bet there are further gradations in Germany, too. Central Europeans are simultaneously blunt and sentimental. How they survive social life in the UK, having to cope with the Anglo-Saxon conversational stream of polite nothings, is a question.

Anyway, most of the people we native English-speakers call our friends are really just our colleagues or our acquaintances, and there is nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is to take our friends, first class (przyjaciel/przyjacióka class), for granted, and to assume we can make new friends in a new town right away.

Since I migrated to Scotland, I have made two attempts to have a social life outside of my husband's circle of friends and acquaintances. There was my writing circle, in which virulent anti-Catholics unintentionally made me extremely uncomfortable, so I quit, and there is now my Polish class. Besides Polish class, I have church, writing, travel and occasional forays into the Edinburgh art scene. Thus, I feel a bit isolated. At least there are more under-50 women at church now. There were very few when I arrived.

My hometown friend Lily suggested that I go to a local Novus Ordo Mass to meet more women, but I am such a Usus Antiquor junkie, I really didn't think I could bear that. Also, Catholic women my age (39++) tend to have complete social circles already. Women who don't move from town to town settle in among their relations, their grade school friends, their high school friends or their university friends, get married or get a partner, and divide most of their time between their place of work and their home. Many have children who take almost all the emotional energy the women have to give. And happy the partnered woman who does not spend 7 out of 7 nights keeping her man company in front of the telly.

After some dithering and feeling sorry for myself, I decided that I would stay put and see who God sent, and every once in a while God sends the parish somebody new and disposed to find new friends.Thank heavens for coffee hour. Every parish should have coffee hour, so it doesn't have to dread one day hearing, "I was a stranger, and you didn't welcome Me."

And those six paragraphs lead to my advice to the Single woman who wants to befriend families: give up your dream of meeting families and accept the friends God sees fit to send you. The truth is, I cannot imagine why a busy family with small children would go out of their way to befriend complete strangers, unless the parents of the family were unusually gregarious souls. Couples with children are emotionally stretched, sometimes to the breaking point, and if a mother of babies has any time to herself, she wants it for herself, or for girl-time with old friends.

I could be wrong, of course. But I honestly don't think a married woman with kids is going to bond with a new single woman just because the single woman seems to like her kids. There has to be something else to bond over. If the married woman is a keen tennis-player, and the new single woman is also a keen tennis-player, then that would be something, especially if the married woman has been stuck for some time for someone with whom to play tennis. However, only in chatting with a married woman can Single you find out if you have such interests in common, so by all means strike up conversations with married women with children after Mass or wherever else.

Birds of a feather flock together. With one hometown exception, my friends with children were my friends before they had their children. I have babysat for only two young families because only two young families here know me well enough to ask. Most of the people I socialize with are childless, like me. Most of them are Single. Most were not born in Edinburgh. We share the same interests and the same basic lifestyle. Orphaned by geography, I turn to two older friends for motherly advice, and childless by accident, I mother younger friends when called upon to do so. And maybe sometimes when not. And if sometimes I feel isolated and lonely, that's the price most migrants pay for migration.

Falling Out 2

How many times can a heart break? Seven times seventy-seven, I'd say. My heart has been broken so many times, I've lost count. And it is interesting what broken-heartiness can do to you. It can make you into a tough, angry, insensitive person, and it can make you into a caring, deeply creative, sensitive person. Or both.

I had a particularly bad break when I made a new female friend in my early thirties. She was twenty or so, talented, fun and both amused and frustrated to find herself a fish out of water. She was as brilliant and enthusiastic as the sun on a July day. Always the youngest around, she gravitated towards me, and although I was much older, I learned all kinds of things from her: new kinds of food, new dances, even how to use crayons. (She: "Are you AFRAID of the crayon?") I read over her papers. And I offered a listening ear when she told me about a troubling atheist classmate. I gave solemn advice about the atheist classmate. Atheists, ick.

As luck would have it, she started dating the atheist classmate, and my earlier sympathetic denouncements of the atheist classmate came back to haunt me. My young friend worried that I would not like her classmate-boyfriend, and although he seemed like a nicer guy than she had first described him, I could not be sufficiently enthusiastic. The upshot was her out-of-the-blue, incandescent-with-rage email that accused me of, among other things, racism.

In my town, the worst thing you can call someone, especially a white person, is a racist. And I hadn't started writing for the CR yet, so I was still very thin-skinned. The unfairness of the email struck me so violently that I burst into tears, and as soon as I could, I went to see my spiritual director and cried my heart out. I hadn't felt so betrayed by a female friend since elementary school, and I was completely bewildered. I decided that the easiest explanation was that my friend had not really seen me as a friend but as a mother/mentor figure and had had to violently break ties with me so as to bond with her new man without getting mad at her real mother. Or something. And I said I would never be friends with someone so much younger than me ever again.

But the next term, Lily arrived. Lily was not much older than my friend (who had left town with her man) and she was even more beautiful--model-beautiful, in fact--but she was a lot quieter, a lot deeper and an old soul. Somehow we became friends, and we still are friends, even though we have had at least  one really bad fight. Fortunately, that fight was on the phone, not over dratted email.

As Single women in your thirties, chances are that you are going to make friends with people much younger than yourselves because you are more likely to share the Single lifestyle with them than with women your own age. This can be challenging because many of the young are still in flux. They are still working things out, and their adult brains may not be entirely hooked up yet. Although you may think you are equals, they may even project all kinds of ideas onto you---"mother figure," for example. Mothers are not just loved by the young;  they are avoided, rebelled against and sometimes even hated. Being a mother-figure when you are not actually old enough to be your friend's mother is a recipe for disaster, if you ask me. It's safer if your young friend has an old soul.

It is safer, too, if you stop yourself from ever writing an angry email to a friend. In the case of younger friends, I belatedly think you should avoid anything at all contentious. "Hey, you know, you will have a  lot of trouble in life from Macedonians if you make such anti-Macedonian remarks to Macedonians" is best saved for the phone.

Meanwhile, I suppose you have to watch against a tendency to turn your younger friends into your children. This is more of a murky area for me, for I never had any older friends who did this. I imagine, though, that some older friends could become overbearing, especially if they are much richer or successful or advanced in their careers and convinced that they know better than you what is good for you. They might completely underestimate their effect on you, too, as pop culture constantly tells us (especially women) that our social value to the young decreases us we age. (This, incidentally, is nonsense, but it is hard to forget that it is nonsense.)

In that case, I think the best thing to do is tell your older friends exactly what you are thinking, only in friendly language. "I love the time we spend together, but I feel X when you say Y" is a good start when talking to an overbearing older friend. Overbearing older friend might not have any idea she is overbearing. I rarely have any idea of what effect I am having on people, as one of my theology profs once observed. (Apparently I often intimidate people [like left-wing priest-professors], and I really don't understand why, as I am so small and powerless.* Maybe it's because I say whatever most things that come into my head, e.g., "Not only was Cardinal Ratzinger completely right about the liturgy, he was terribly handsome," because my filter is rather eccentric.)

Anyway, I very much wish my young friend had told me right away when she felt annoyed with me instead of letting her discomfort build up until she wrote me that horrible, friendship-ending email. A nice coffee date and an explanation that she had to work through a lot of issues as she got so intimately involved with a man so different from her would have been nice although, I suspect, too much to expect. As for me, I think I could have listened more carefully and to what she said about at least one issue on an earlier occasion.

When sex is in the air--as I suspect it was--older woman friend is rarely a match for wily young lover. Sex is a freight train, and sometimes when your friend is stuck in the tracks, looking with avid interest at the steel behemoth racing towards her, all you can do is skip out of the way.

*That said, any adult who assumes he or she is powerless should do a good examination of conscience. Some priests assume they are powerless flower petals ground down under the boots of the parishioners, entirely unaware of the emotional and spiritual power they have over those very same parishioners. Some young women have absolutely no idea that their clothing, conversation and behaviour are driving male friends to distraction because "I'm so ugly/famously pure, it doesn't matter what I wear/say/do."  At any rate, if a friend is driving you crazy, it is most charitable to assume she doesn't know and to tell her--but very probably not by email.

Update: Tomorrow is Gentleman's Day, so send me some question for les gars and I will post them up tomorrow. If any men are still reading, they may answer them and ask their own questions for you to answer on June 1.

Single Friends and Stability

I answered an email today that made me think about friendships. I have a number of friends who are Single and probably always will be Single. And this means they have a lot of time for their friends, and their friends--particularly the Single or childless ones--have a lot of time for them.

Singles often worry about not being a priority in other people's lives--although presumably they rank somewhere in the affections of their family members--but I can tell you that my Single friends are top priority with me. (Well, top after B.A.) This is probably because I don't have children, but even if I did have children, I would certainly want adult friends to talk to after a long day or week of shrieking and baby talk.

The North American reluctance to have friends much younger or much older than oneself strikes me as foolish and shortsighted. I did not realize now normative it was for me until I spent a summer in Germany and discovered that 20 year old boys were happy to hang out with 30-something me. I was happy but troubled enough to talk it over with a fellow foreign student, a priest, and he told me that's how Europeans are. And how awesome is that?

B.A. and I recently had two Canadian Trid girls to stay, and they were astonished that our set acted as if we were all the same age. That said, we were all of us over 23. It's not like there were any children around, or teenagers who should not have been downing the Tesco plonk we guzzle by the bottle or listening to our endless thoughts on the O'Brien scandal.

What gives the multi-generational set stability are the Elders, as we over-39s have been for convenience called. We Elders have deep, deep roots in the community, and although we go on holiday, we come back to our homes.  The younger members, especially the foreign students, leave Edinburgh on holiday or permanently, but they eventually come back, if only for a visit. Foreign students who return to their old haunts (e.g. Toronto) sometimes discover that everything has changed and their old friends have dispersed and moved on, or have no time for them. This isn't likely to happen with us Elders, for we are old and stable. Our sentimental young can fly free confident in the knowledge that as long as the Elders live, we will be up for a drink and a chat.

As a thirty-something Single, I found myself with a lot of twenty-something Single friends. I put this down to the fact that I was were twenty-something Singles are, i.e. grad school, and that we had the same lifestyle: Catholic, no kids, feverishly studying, longing to party, wondering where The One was. But, of course, I expected and hoped my twenty-something friends would get married because that's what they wanted to do. My surprise when I got engaged (age 37) before some of them did! And then I ran off to the UK. How very unstable and unreliable of me. Fortunately, I had a reputation for mad pranks and surprising behaviour. My friend Lily's summation of B.A. was, "I'm so thankful. I was worried he'd be too normal."

But now I am definitely old and stable and set in my ways, and even if I did have a baby, the walls of the Historical House are super-thick, so he or she could wail away comfortably in his or her room while the rest of us guzzled Tesco plonk in the dining-room.

What I am saying here is that if you are a twenty-five year old Single, of course most of your friends are going to get married and go. And therefore you must not put all your friendship eggs in the youth basket. You should go out of your way to be friendly to interesting and interested older married couples whose children have flown the nest, or to middle-aged couples who haven't had children, or to older Singles who love being Single but are also sociable. It is especially helpful, I think, to make friends with Catholic Singles who honestly enjoy their Catholic Single way of life and live it to the hilt.

You can also set down roots yourself as you grow older, and become a sort of bird house for younger Singles to visit occasionally as they flit about in their unstable, adventurous, youthful way. I adore the younger members of my set, but I am rooted in reality and realize that they have a lot of flitting to do before they settle down, and they are very likely to settle somewhere else. This is not as painful for me (age 39++) as it might be for you, not only because I have B.A. (a very big because), but because I know I have older friends who simply aren't going anywhere. Well, the grave, I suppose, but there's no need to worry about that quite yet.

Poor Boston

I feel awful. All those hurt people, and at least three people killed. I feel particularly sad for the man whose 8 year old son rushed to hug him as he approached the finish line and... 

This morning I got a message from Boston Girl, and she and her family are all okay.

That made my day. And compared to the suffering in Boston, all my woes seem pretty small--laughable, even.  I keep thinking about Boston Girl's Facebook photo, which is of her hugging her husband and little baby, and of the two of us--before the husband was met or the baby a glimmer--hanging out, laughing at Talledega Nights until we cried, and of all the little adventures and conversations I wrote about in Seraphic Singles.

What a horrible, cowardly, nasty thing for someone to do: to place bombs--bombs full of ball-bearings--where large crowds of strangers will be gathering to congratulate their loved ones for managing to run 26.5 miles. Such an innocent, happy occasion, and such a tribute to the spirit of self-mastery, a marathon.

But I suppose someone thought his thrill or his cause or his feelings of righteousness or his message was just so much more important than the innocent happiness of ordinary Boston folk. That's what evil looks like: my thrill, my cause, my message is more important than your innocent happiness, than your life, than your loved ones.

Update: Glad I saw this.

When She Chooses Him Over You

Here's one of the most painful facts of female existence. There are women who will put their latest romantic/sexual relationship before any other consideration in life: before their friends, before their children, before their jobs, before their marriages, before their health, before their sanity.

Sexual infatuation is a drug, and some women become addicts. Other women are just--well--ordinary human women. Most women naturally want a special man in their lives and make him their Number One priority. Marriage is supposed to make this tendency a safe, good one.

But it does hurt at least a little when your best friend falls in love or gets married. Quite obviously she loves some guy better than you, even if she has known you for twenty years and him for six months. Whoa. Ouch. Life.

If you are under twenty-five, the tendency of women to privilege some man over their female friends may come as a shock to you. If you are over twenty-five, you may have noticed this already. If you are over thirty, you're probably used to it. Life--you know? (Shrug.) Whadayagonnado?

Pop music is full of wonderful songs about "men come and go, but sisterhood is forever." It's a lovely idea, but come on. Although women don't usually compete with each other with the same bloodthirsty gusto as men, women do indeed compete with each other, and if it has something to do with a man... Whew! Look out. Even the nicest, kindest, women-loving women can go crazy with jealous rage.

But I should stress that not all women battle or compete much or often over men. One of the most annoying things about being a Single woman is going to a party of married couples where the Married women act like a you are a vixen in the hen-house just because you are having a conversation with one of the Married men. I should also stress that not all Married women are like that, either, although few things annoy Married me more socially than watching a Single woman chase any man around a party. "Sit still, woman," I think. "If he wants to talk to you, he'll talk to you."

But I'm not really thinking about the occasional social unpleasantness between the Married and the Single. I'm thinking about young women discovering that they have been displaced in their girlfriends' affections by their girlfriends' boyfriends. I am especially thinking about the young lady whose friend is now dating her ex-boyfriend.

Treason, we howl. Treason! How dare she? How can she be on his side, let alone at his side? AAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!

Really, it hurts. It really, really hurts. But it happens. And only if you are really lucky will she discuss it with you first. She is much more likely to sneak around or lie about it because she doesn't want to hurt you or feel like a bad friend, etc., etc.

So what do you do? Well, there are a number of things you might do.

First, admit to yourself and God that you feel betrayed and disrespected and even disbelieved, if you told your friend that your ex-boyfriend is a rat-fiend from hell.

Second, admit to yourself and God that as you fell for the guy, you know better than anyone how easy might have been for your friend for fall for the guy.

Third, ponder the faults of your ex, and feel compassion for your friend because now she has to deal with them. Pray for her. Go talk to a good priest about it all.

Fourth, draw some boundaries for yourself and for her. Her love life is her love life. You don't have any right to know what she does with her love life, and she has no right to impose her love life on you. If you don't want her to talk to you about Scooter, say "Because Scooter is my ex-boyfriend, I don't feel comfortable talking about Scooter." If you don't want Scooter in your place, tell your friend that as much as you care about her and want her to be happy, you don't want your ex-boyfriend in your place. She, of course, is always welcome.

This is not forcing your friend to "choose between her friend and her man"--that staple of so many boring and painful high school and college dorm dramas. This is you choosing to remain friends with your friend, but not being forced to have a relationship with her boyfriend.

It's a tricky situation, one that calls for compassion, patience and strength. Friends respect their friends' boundaries, so if the girl who is dating your ex still wants to be your friend, she must respect your boundaries: if you don't want him in your living space, or to have to talk about him, then you must say so as kindly yet firmly as possible, and she must respect that. And you must respect that her love life is her business, not yours. It is not for you to complain about to mutual friends, and you can't tell her what to do or not to do.

Fifth, allow yourself to grieve a little--in private or with someone paid or trained to keep their mouths shut. The juiciness of "Mary's dating Anne's ex-boyfriend, and Anne is totally gutted" is too much of a temptation for the average college student not to share. "Mary's dating Anne's ex-boyfriend, and Anne seems totally cool with it" is not only a million times classier, it's too boring for others to want to talk about much.

It may be that you will never see your friend in the same light again. I know. And that's sad, and maybe she dreads that, but truth is what is, as Saint Thomas Aquinas taught. Forgive her and also remember that you have other friends. She wasn't put on this earth to be your Lifelong Special Confidante; you probably have other women in your life to confide in, women who won't tell your ex what you said about this or that. (Another newsflash: women often talk to our boyfriends and husbands about what our friends did or said unless doing so feels like real betrayal.) Meanwhile, continue to do whatever girl-time stuff you could still enjoy together: studying, watching films, going dancing, baking a cake, organizing mass pedicure parties, messing around with chemistry sets, electric guitars or fabric scraps.

So. Compassion. Boundaries. Forgiveness. Adjusting. And hope.

***
Help B.A. support his colonial wife's unpaid-blogging lifestyle by pre-ordering Seraphic's Ceremony of Innocence today! 

Love of Friends

Love of place, love of music, love of family, love of friends....

I've noticed that a number of popular television shows center on casts of friends. I wonder if it represents a shift from shows about families. In the Eighties, "Cheers" seemed to be unique in that it portrayed a loyal group of friends rather than a loyal family. But in the wake of "Friends" and "Sex and the City", today we have "How I Met Your Mother" and "The Big Bang Theory"  among the other shows that advertise themselves on the television in the Historical House.  And I am wondering if the fantasy of a family whose problems can be solved, forgiven and forgotten in 30 minutes has been replaced by the fantasy of a group of friends who never break up because their problems can also be solved, forgiven and (mostly) forgotten in 30 minutes.

Could it be that it has become romantic to have a big group of friends?

To be a migrant is to have part of your heart in one country and the other in another, and it is rare to feel that your heart is whole. This week my heart has been whole because for once I have been in Canada with B.A, who brings Edinburgh with him wherever he goes. The only time this trip  I have pined for Edinburgh was Monday morning when I heard about the abdication and wanted desperately to organize an emergency dinner party so that my EF friends could gather together in an upper room (so to speak) and drink a lot of gin while we made sense of the business.

But otherwise I have been very happy and, having had a good visit with all my family, have begun to go out and find my Toronto friends.

Yesterday B.A. and I went to my Canadian theological school to see a priest friend, and we were summoned to his office for, said the receptionist, he said there was another friend there who'd like to see me.

What a surprise I got.

"Hello, Old One," said a twenty-something year old man in a chair.

"Hello, Small One," I said. "I mean, Young One."

Some years ago I was did an internship as an assistant college chaplain. Among the students who liked to hang out in the chaplaincy offices was a teenage discerner. Somehow we began to call each other "Old One" and "Young One." He says now that this is because I hated being thought of as old, and that there is nothing a teenage undergrad hates more than being reminded that he is young.

I am not so sure of this interpretation. Personally, I think young men love being cheerily insolent to older women if they can get away with it, and certainly I enjoy putting young men in their place, if only with the information that I am older and therefore naturally wiser than they. And, ironically, although Young One constantly called me Old One, he was the friendliest of the bunch, the one who most seemed to enjoy the company of the Old.

Amusingly, the sympathy between Young One and Old One led to the one-and-only-time I earned a professional rebuke for ministerial boundary-crossing. If I remember this correctly, I encountered Young One on his way to Mass during some college break, when almost all the undergrads but he had gone home. It may have been Easter Sunday.  Afterwards I was going to lunch with a number of fellow theology students, including men of the religious order Young One was discerning, so on impulse I invited him along. Young One accepted the invitation with alacrity, as otherwise he would have had a boring and lonely afternoon, so off we went to lunch.  

I do not remember how this came to the ears of my immediate supervisor. Perhaps, I told the supervisor myself. But I do remember I got a LECTURE.

Personally, I thought it  ridiculous that it could be wrong to invite a bored and lonely undergrad to a restaurant Sunday lunch with a bunch of grad students of theology, some of whom were male religious a serious discerner quite naturally might like to meet.  I speak as one who had already listened to no fewer than three seminars on Healthy Boundaries in Ministry. Of course you cannot get romantically or sexually involved with those to whom you minister, even if you are a Single laywoman, but we cannot allow paranoia to stop us from being friendly.

That is my one exciting story about Young One, who is now Young One, [Initial, Initial], and it reminds me of this article I wrote for the CR, which you might enjoy.  

Single people, more than anyone else, must rejoice in their friends.

How Singles Can Annoy Married People

I will have to breathe in and out for a bit to get my composure. I made the mistake of entering into a Facebook conversation about Singledom.

There was a complaint that the Church does "nothing" for Single people, which is what I was going to write about, but then I caught a remark directed at me that contradicted my feelings of being alone on New Year's Eve.

I had volunteered that my husband and I were alone on New Year's Eve because most of our friends were at a party for Singles, and how great it was that Singles could take matters in their own hands and plan events for themselves. The divorced person pointed out that I was not really alone, as I was with I was my husband. ":-)"

I saw red.

One should never write anything when seeing red, so I clicked away from Facebook.

I will not go into the reasons (yet) I saw red, or a defense of my feelings of loneliness on New Year's Eve, which actually had nothing to do with the Singles' party and something to do with being 5,338 kilometers from home and family. Instead I will try to write something constructive.

I have been writing for Singles for at least six years, and I was Single from birth until 25 and then (arguably) from the age of 26 to 38, although the annulment didn't come through until I was 28. So that's at least ten years of dithering What-Is-My-Vocation? and Where-Is-He? Single Life, plus much correspondence with Single people. And, admittedly unusually, most of my social circle in Edinburgh is composed of Single people. I want you to keep that in mind when you read my following remarks.

One of the biggest complaints of Singles that I come across is that they are left out of social events hosted by Married Friends. I imagine this is true of some Married Friends, including B.A. and me, although we have no policy of shunning Single friends. Our resources are limited, so we invite some friends some times, and others other times. We invite Singles alone or with other Singles or with Married people, or entertain just one or two Married couples, and we don't think marital status is much of a guest list issue. (I might briefly ponder the kindness of a guest being the ONLY Single there, and the danger of being suspected of setting up the ONLY female Single guest with the ONLY male Single guest.)

B.A. and I entertain unusually often for Married People, and here is something Singles often don't get: Married People don't usually have much time or inclination for non-family parties.(Married men are notoriously wedded to sofa and TV.)

This is particularly true if they have children. Children are often so embarrassing and their behaviour so non-adult, that it seems to their parents a kindness to inflict them only on their relations, who love them, and on other adults with children, who are guaranteed to understand/be immune.

Also, the Married State is so different from the Single State that Married People often find a relief in the company of Married People we do not find among Singles. There is just so much that can be explained without words.

And then some Single people (not all, obviously, since my own Single friends tend not to do this) annoy Married People by constantly talking about being Single, and how sad it is to be Single, and how much better it is to be Married, and how lucky the Married friend is.

Some Married People (like me) do not mind talking to Single People about their Single state. Others can't stand it.

Some Married People, perceiving the Singleness as a problem to be solved, offer thoughtful spouse-hunting advice, which the Single tearfully rejects. Some Married People, thinking one should look on the Bright Side of Single Life, suggest ways in which other Singles have found happiness, which the Single tearfully rejects.

Some Married People invite a Single woman and a Single man to the same parties, thinking these Singles will be pleased, only to be berated later. Some Married People avoid matchmaking entirely, only to be berated eventually.

With some Singles, some Married People think they just can't win.

In short, it's not necessarily because a Single is Single that she or he isn't invited to parties.

One of the things about being Married is that you see Single life from the other side, and can report back to Single friends about what useful information you can now see. So here is what I've learned:

Here are ways to annoy a Married Person:

1. Deny or belittle her experiences or feelings, particularly with the remark "Well, at least you have a husband."

Married Woman: I miss my family so much.
Unusually Clueless Single: Well, at least you have a husband.

Married Woman: Actually I was in hospital. Miscarriage.
Unusually Clueless Single: I'm sorry. Well, at least you have a husband.

Married Woman: Paid work, housework. Paid work, housework. Paid work, housework. Visit parents. Visit in-laws. It never ends, and I never have time to myself, and sometimes I wish I could just run away to Paris for a weekend.
Unusually Clueless Single: Well, at least you have a husband.

2. Tell a Married Person what marriage is supposed to be like (beyond non-abusive).

Unusually Clueless Single: Sex isn't really that important to a marriage, is it?

Unusually Clueless Single: The work of marriage should be 50-50!

Unusually Clueless Single: The most important thing is that sex be romantic!

Unusually Clueless Single: NFP is just so easy! Why would anyone ever be tempted to use anything else?

3. Upbraid a Married Person for noticing that some of the 3.5 billion men she is not married to are attractive. Trowel on the shame. Go on. She deserves it.

Married Woman: Ah, that new usher is certainly a charmer!

Unusually Clueless Single: I'm really shocked to hear you say that. You, a married woman!

4. Upbraid or gossip about a Married Person for inviting you to a party in which you were the only Single, or the only Single your age, or one of two Singles, the other being male.

5. Upbraid or gossip about a Married Person for not inviting you to a party in which you would have been the only Single, or the only Single your age, or one of two Singles, the other being a male who could have been the One.


In general, people like people who are happy, upbeat, don't complain much and don't take swipes at them for their way of life. And most of my Single friends are like that, which is one reason why I have so many Single friends.

Don't worry. I will soon write another post on ways in which Married People Can Annoy Singles, although readers will be much more up-to-date on that than I!

Four Parties in a Row...

Goodness me. I found myself crawling into bed after 2:30 AM yet again. It's a Christmas Party Marathon. Christmas Eve. Christmas. Feast of St. Stephen. Feast of St. John. Today is the Feast of the Holy Innocents, but I don't think B.A. and I are going to any parties. I'm going instead to my favourite cocktail bar for a Girl Drink.

Squinting back into the past, I am absolutely sure my parents did not go to many parties (or any cocktail bars), so I think all this partying--at least at my age--is an offshoot of being childless. (I'm mentioning childlessness again as it is something most of my Single readers and I still share and, indeed, something that you do risk if you wait past the age of 35 for The One--although how much worse if you marry The Zero at 25 and still don't have kids?)

Christmas is apparently a time of great gloom for many, so I think the best things anyone can do are to (A) plan ahead to ensure oneself and those under one's influence a happy, emotionally supported Christmas and (B) concentrate on what you have instead of on what you lack.

I have a lot of parties.

Not to be a Smug Scot, but parties are more fun here than they were in North America. I think this is because they have structure. The usual, North American stuff-everyone-in-the-same-room-and-pour-drink-into-them model just didn't work for me. What really work are dinner parties. Dinner parties involve a clear plan, easy rituals, procession, recession, a three part structure.

For example, dinner parties at the Historical House involve aperatifs in the sitting-room, then a procession to the dining-room for supper, and finally a recession back to the sitting-room, sometimes in two parts: if dinner conversation has been terrifically male-dominated, the ladies leave first, to be joined by the gentlemen when they have finally grown tired of what it was they were talking about and are curious to know what the ladies are talking about. Otherwise, we all leave for the sitting-room together.

Personally, I like to end a dinner party with a film, which breaks up the very long after-dinner drink fest, and adds something to think about.

Another wonderful after-dinner activity is to sing around the piano. There was singing around the piano after a dinner party I went to yesterday, and as we sang Christmas carols, this was particularly enjoyable, for us, if not for the neighbours.

I hasten to mention that life in North America and, indeed, Single Life, is perfectly suited to dinner parties. I had occasional dinner parties when I was in my early and mid-twenties, living with Mum and Dad: all I had to do to secure permission was say, "May I have a dinner party, Mum and Dad?" and make sure dining-room and kitchen were left cleaner than I found them. These dinner parties started at a later hour (say 8), which gave my family a chance to eat their own dinner.

As I had a large family, family dinners were arguably dinner parties in themselves. And this in itself is an incentive to those, like me, who grew up with a lot of people and now find themselves living with only one or two. It's a return to the normal life of childhood, with a lot more drink.

Update: The research on gender differences in conversation is incredibly interesting. The more women there are in a group, the more comfortable women feel speaking, apparently, and one Harvard study revealed that women students at Harvard were more likely to speak up in class if their lecturer was a woman.

What this suggests to me is that at work and school, women should do our best to assert ourselves in conversations and classroom discussions, but in private life to take more of a conversational back seat and become famous good listeners. It strikes me that the centuries-old libel that women talk too much is bandied about by some of the men who want to talk even more than they do and feel frustrated and hurt when they don't feel sufficiently listened to. Bless their little hearts.

Incidentally, we already know how useless it is to talk to 90% of the men of the world about their feelings, right? Just remember this is not because they don't have any; it's just that male feelings are not that connected to male knowledge and male speech, especially when the males are young.

Non-Reader: But how do you FEEL?

Honest Young Male: I don't know.

Non-Reader: What do you mean you don't know? How can you not know?

Honest Young Male: I don't know.

Non-Reader: But that's crazy! Meanwhile I NEED to KNOW how you FEEL!!!

Honest Young Male (extremely uncomfortable): I'm leaving.

Very often, the least helpful way to figure out how young men feel is to ask them.* It's a better idea to pay attention to both their body language and then what they do. I remember one young man getting dead drunk at a wedding while punching his male pals boisterously and glaring at the pretty girls and yelling "I'll never put my head in a noose!" Dear, dear, dear. What a lonely soul.

*I suspect this is much more true in dating relationships than in friendships. Although men are usually reluctant to tell you exactly how they feel about you, they often have no problem telling you how they feel about other girls, at least if they have no reason to believe you will get mad at them for it.

Who Gets the Keys?

I'm not posting the letter that inspired them, but I had many thoughts this morning on how women make themselves emotionally vulnerable to men. Men make themselves emotionally vulnerable too, sometimes, so I'll add something about that to the end of the post.

The easiest way a young woman can make herself vulnerable to a young man is to tell him that she is crazy about him and wants him to be her boyfriend.

The best case scenario is that the young man is beside himself with joy because he never dreamed that Suzy-Q felt the same way about him as he felt about her.

Then there a number of unhappy scenarios, each worse than the last.

1. The Good, Sensitive Man

The young man is shocked because he never thought of her this way. A very sensitive man, he now wonders if he has been leading her on without knowing it, and is sorry. Mindful of her feelings, he says that this is the greatest compliment he's ever had, but he doesn't want to date her. One great face-saving remark is "I don't want to ruin the friendship."

This sensitive young man then avoids the girl for the next month or two because he intuits that his presence may be a source of pain to her. He keeps her at a friendly distance, and then slowly returns to his normal schedule. He is careful not to give her any encouragement, and if she renews her advances, he says "No, I'm sorry" very firmly.

2. The Good, Insensitive Man

The young man is shocked and says he doesn't want to ruin the friendship, but he just carries on as before. He doesn't understand that he and the girl are no longer on the same page. He doesn't understand that she isn't one of the guys and that treating her like one of the guys is a constant source of pain. He might even call her up to tell her all his personal problems, just as before, and all about the girl he has a crush on.

3. The Emotional Opportunist

The young man is shocked because although he has been working on his cover his entire life, he always thought this girl might have guessed that he was a closeted homosexual.

He realizes that her regard for him is compatible with his lifelong goal of not being suspected of being gay. So he either agrees to become her boyfriend--a paragon, too, as he will never initiate kissing, let alone pressure her for sex--or he will hold out a carrot to keep her hooked. In the case of one of my readers and her closeted gay love interest, the carrot was "For now, just friends."

Then they go everywhere together (when he wants) and are the very bestest of friends and only the girl's most sophisticated friends are quizzical rather than envious when she brags that Boyfriend has never even tried to kiss her. Meanwhile, she wonders why she has never met his best friends in the city, or what he does on holidays, or why she has never met his parents, or why he has so many gay friends.

By the way, I know perfectly well not all closeted gay men act like this. But some darn well do, especially in communities where gayness is still such an issue, e.g. ours.

4. The Sexual Opportunist

The young man is not shocked because her feelings have been obvious to him for some time. In fact, he is rather amused. He knows that her feelings will not go away just because he says No. In fact, if he says "No" but acts "Yes" he can always point to the butt-covering fact that he had said "No" and she was free to do what she wanted. Then he proceeds to play her like a violin, and if he drives her crazy enough, she will eventually offer some kind of sexual intimacy, and off come the clothes faster than you can say Chloderlos de Laclos.

And that's my worst case scenario: you make yourself vulnerable to a cynical, clever, sophisticated, monstrously selfish man, and he takes both emotional AND sexual advantage of you. It probably happens every day, most often to sweet, innocent, religious girls who had no idea men could act like that.

So even if you do not believe, as I do, that you should never, ever make a first move as obvious as "I like you, be my boyfriend", for heaven's sake--and your own--consider both the reputation of the man and if there are any very, VERY clear signals from him that he likes, admires and respects you before risking making a fool or a victim of yourself.

Now a word about innocent men. All the scenarios I've listed above can be flipped, so that the besotted person is a man and the startled beloved is a woman. I will state for the record, however, that I have never heard of a closeted young Lesbian using a besotted, oblivious young man for cover.

You may have come across classic novels in which young women are very proud of the suitors they have and dangle them on a string. You may remember, for example, beautiful Philippa Gordon of Anne of the Island, trying to decide between Alec and Alonzo. You may also remember the heroine of An Old-Fashioned Girl deciding not to lead on her rich admirer anymore because she had learned her best friend was in love with him. Their behaviour was never strictly condemned, possibly because both plain Lucy Maud Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott wished they had that kind of power over men themselves and because it was the only power 19th century women really had.

But it is the 21st century and we are full citizens who can vote, work, save and spend money. Whatever men can do by law, we can do by law. There is no longer an excuse for using men's feelings to get the thrill that power brings.

It is not okay to jerk men around for a thrill or because you are too cowardly to give one a plain and firm "NO." Men are just as human as you and I. The Golden Rule applies.

Friendships with Reserve

Men and women can be friends, but men can't be women friends and women can't be men friends. Let us be clear on this.

I have had some interesting correspondence about the following situations:

1. The man has a crush on a girl. He tells another girl all about it. He gets over his crush on the first girl. He develops a crush on the second girl. The second girl doesn't take him at all seriously.

2. The girl has a crush on a man. She tells another man all about it. She gets over her crush on the first man. She develops a crush on the second man. The second man doesn't seem to be interested anymore.

We could chalk this up as a tragedy of bad timing, or we could posit that there is something unwise in telling members-of-the-opposite-sex friends about our crushes.

If there is one thing I have learned about men, it is that they are not girls. And if they are attracted to girls, they do not appreciate being treated as if they were girls. Sometimes they resist this quite vigorously. But sometimes they do not because, being attracted to girls, they will cut girls a lot of slack. But, in general, they don't like being made to feel like the palace eunuch. Their semi-conscious resentment could be expressed in the parlance of the neighbourhood of my youth as "What am I? Chopped liver?"

Male friends who identify as gay do not seem to mind as much, but even then you really must understand that they are not "just some of the girls" even if they say they are. They are men, with male sexuality, and whereas their advice might be have an internal logic as far as men who identify as gay are concerned, it might make absolutely no sense for women, particularly chaste ones. Whenever men who identify as gay give me or tell me about relationship advice they have given other women ("And I told her, Darrleeng, you should take a lover"), my hair stands on end.

I like my guy friends so much, I don't treat them as if they were girls who might enjoy talking about girl stuff, e.g. my feelings. Possibly I slip occasionally, and bore them senseless, for which I apologize.

There's a fine line between treating all nice young Single men as if they were just Husband Potentials/Impossibilities and treating them as if they were girls. I call it Friendship with Reserve. It's respectful, it's kind, and, if this applies to your state of life, it keeps the options open.

And How Was Your Weekend?

I just met a deadline this morning, so I am not in a chatty mood. Also, I am a wee bit tired from last night's Sunday Lunch.

My church friends tend to have a Sunday Lunch almost every week, and yesterday it was B.A.'s and my turn. This meant a Saturday of meal planning, shopping, tidying the flat, cleaning the bathroom and the kitchen, taking out the recycling (always a chore as it goes way out past the woods), cooking, baking and mild argument.

Sunday morning included carrying two big tables from beyond the woods into the house and setting them up in the dining-room before going to Mass.

The results were, of course, very much worth the effort: drinks and then a sit-down traditional British Sunday Lunch for eleven people, of whom only B.A. and I were married people. Yes, we fed nine Single people (one of them ordained) yesterday, so think about us the next time you suspect all Married people drop their Single friends. Not true.

Meanwhile, we were certainly not setting any of them up together. Setting Single people up together at our parties would never occur to us B.A.; what an appalling idea. At least, what an appalling idea for a Sunday Lunch. Sunday Lunch is about being Catholic friends together without any love stuff to make us blush. Down with love stuff, that's what I say. At least at Sunday Lunch.

Now you. What did you do?

It Never Grows Old

Girl 1: So what are you going to wear?

Girl 2: I don't know. Maybe my black gypsy dress again...

Girl 1: Oh, that's a beautiful dress. I really like it. It's beautiful.

Girl 2: So what are you going to wear?

Girl 1: Well, I don't know. Either my blue velvet dress or my long skirt.

Girl 2: Oh, you should wear your blue velvet. It's gorgeous.

Girl 1: Thank you! I really like it.

Girl 2: I'll tell you what! I'll wear my green velvet dress. I mean, it's cold, it's almost winter. So I can wear it. I'll wear my green velvet dress--

Girl 1: And I'll wear my blue velvet dress! That's great! Oh, that's great.

Girl 2: Yes, we can match.

Girl 2 giggles. She is on a mobile in a cafe in Edinburgh, 39+ if she's a day, and thoroughly conscious of what a high school conversation this is.

Girl talk. It never grows old.

My Readers

Well, poppets, what a fuss yesterday. The last time my traffic bounced like that it was on account of Mark Shea, who was so charmed by little me that he thought someone ought to marry me pronto. From this it is clear that Mark was not a daily reader, but I was delighted all the same.

Yesterday was not like that. Yesterday a blogger used my blog and--I might add--my thoughts as an excuse to sound off on What Catholic Girls Should Expect From Us Catholic He-Men and, to add insult to injury, revealed--clumsily, without malice--that he thought my readers were risible.

A bull in the china shop of the heart, perhaps?

The silver lining is that some Single women must have found my blog through his link and that they will find interesting things to read here and also the fellowship of my readers.

I blog here at least five times a week, and am not paid a dime to do it. Once in a blue moon, I put up a tip jar. And I've stopped counting how many emails I've received asking for advice. I'm sure it's over 100, but not how much over 100. In the past, I did not have an honorarium for speaking engagements, but just let whoever invited me give me what they thought fair. (Thanks to the contemporary realities of writing life, and my looming old age, I've changed my thinking on this.)

Meanwhile, I'm never, ever going to get signed on as a staff writer by a big Catholic Singles site because they deal in Catholic dating websites and, poppets, you know what I think about that. If it weren't for B.A., I would be the proverbial starving writer. (Of course, if it weren't for moving to super-secular Scotland, I'd probably have a great job in Catholic publishing, but let's not go there.)

In my six years of writing about the Single life, I've been married for three. So why do I blog on the Single Life?

Answer: You.

It's hard to say for sure, but I think I have a core readership of 200-250. These are the girls and the two or three guys who read every day or almost every day.

My elementary school had 250 students, so it's a staggering thought.

Meanwhile, I can't keep you girls straight because I get so many letters and so many comments and since you write to me of such personal stuff, I've trained myself to forget who says what.

But I do remember that somebody American said that she and her roommate start their day by reading my blog out loud. And since the majority of my readers are in the USA, I try to have my article done by the time the East Coast wakes up.

Writers love to write, but we also love being read. And what I love about blogging is that I get almost immediate feedback from readers. And what readers!

You're doctors. You're surgeons. You're scientists. You're professors. You're grad students. You're poets. You're professional singers. You're lawyers. You're soldiers. You're homeschoolers. You're high schoolers. You're engineers. You're mothers. You're teachers. You're lay ministers. You're PR pros. One of you may be an astronaut. One of you is a top mathematician.

You work in publishing. You work in laboratories. You work in studios. You work in schools. You work in sales. You work at home.

You're in the USA, most of you, but you're also in Canada, in the UK, in Poland, in Germany, in Australia, in New Zealand, in France, in South Africa, in Russia, in Asia, in the Caribbean.

Apparently most of you are in your twenties. Most of you are Roman Catholics, but some of you are Anglicans and Protestants and East Orthodox, and if Jenny from my town is still reading, at least one of you is a Jew. (And at least one is a Catholic Jew when Dawn Eden comes by.)

You're mostly women, Single women. And from your emails and your comments,I know you're pretty darn bright. And it is because of your emails and your comments that I am still writing this blog.

Incidentally, my blog readers have done more to promote my books than anyone else with the possible exception of the team at Homo Dei. The invitations to speak in the UK and the USA? The opportunity to lecture at the Edith Stein conference? Readers. You girls.

I met my husband because readers alerted him to my existence. The reader who set off the astonishing chain reaction of our romance is now a cloistered nun

I'm not Single anymore, but I am still childless, which is sometimes a burden, to be honest, since I seem to have grown into a motherly type, very interested in younger people, especially if you are bright. And somewhere along the I-93, the wheels of my shiny academic career fell off, so I don't have students either. What I have are readers, and you are such a gift to me. You, Science Girl, and you, Med School Girl, and you Charming Disarray, and theobromophile, and Nzie, and Aussie Girl in New Zealand, and Urszula, and Tess, and the girl whose email I answered when I got up this morning.

It's very humbling, actually.

Aw, shoot. Crying. It's Tess's fault for being so sweet.

And it's also the fault of that young woman from Warsaw. During the Krakow conference, there was a session where I was booked to hear women's concerns and to give Auntish advice. This young woman from Warsaw came in, wreathed in smiles. She didn't have a concern. She just wanted to say thank you and that she and other Single women in Warsaw had created a support group called the Anielskie Singles.

Trying to remain rooted in reality here. For after all, this is blogging. Blogging is somewhat removed from the real, physical world, and you can't know a whole person just over the net, as I've said a hundred times. But you can know something, and one thing that I've noticed is that my readers sound a lot like themselves in person. Berenike, for example. Benedict Ambrose.

So I feel like I know my regular readers, just from your comments and your emails over the years, and I think you're fantastic. Sure, you make mistakes. Sure, you commit sins. Sure, you lose it on men-in-general and wallow a bit in vinegar. But you're sorry, and you pick yourselves up, and you trust in God, and you keep going.

I'm crying again. The eavesdroppers are rolling their eyes at such girliness. Well, I am a girl, so they can go boil their heads (bless their little hearts).

Anyway, that's why I lost it a bit on Ryan yesterday.

Thanks, girls, for everything.

Young Man's Darling

I wrote a novel about a woman in her mid-thirties who is romantically involved with a young man in his early twenties. Ignatius Press tells me it will be out in 2013, but I am not sure exactly when. If you wish to know exactly when, ask Ignatius Press.

This week I have had requests to talk about Younger Women Dating Older Men and Older Women Dating Younger Men, and I had to squish up my inner eye and stare into the dark shadows of my memories to try to see this all from a younger woman's perspective. For lo, I am 39+ and married, and incredibly tolerant about both situations.

If you are being pursued by an older man, and his grizzled charms make you go weak at the knees, by all means go out with this older man. If you are being pursued by a downy faced infant and you think his blushes are adorable, by all means go out with the infant.

By infant, I mean an infant over the age of 18, of course. And by you, I mean adult readers.

The older you get, the less age gaps seem to matter. When you are eighteen, it seems wrong to date a fourteen year old and worrisome to date a twenty-two year old. But when you are thirty, nobody worries if you date a thirty-four year old, and dating a twenty-six year old may seem a bit of a coup.

Incidentally, the age gap is not as pronounced in Europe as it is in North America. Europeans are just not so obsessed with age. It is not unusual for European university students to seek friendships or romance with people much older than themselves. Attractiveness is not equated with youth. Catherine Deneuve is in her 60s, and young men still fall down and worship her. Behold:



The title means "You or No-one", btw.

But even in North America young men can find older women attractive, and one of the most charming couples I know became a couple after the surprised woman decided that the younger man wasn't, as he complained, "just some kid."

Frankly, I think such younger man-pursues-older woman relationships very likely to succeed, if the woman actually does like him, because women are usually too inhibited prudent to chase men much younger than themselves. Therefore it is definitely a case of a man going after what he wants, and being determined to win in the face of a stupid obstacle, which is the woman wondering if he isn't too young for her. It is not a case of a self-deluding woman chucking herself at Mr Rapidly Being Spoiled.

That said, some women are just not attracted to younger men. I think this mad, as younger men are much better looking than older men. And as an older woman it is so much easier to deal with all their young man storminess. The sulks, the rants, the poses, the politics, the confusion that so oppress you when you're their age are much easier to deal with when you're over 30.

But I can see that a very gentle woman might want to give youthful Sturm und Drang a miss altogether and just date a kindly older man. It is not a hideous insult to be wooed by an older man, by the way. If you want to see him, see him. If you don't, say "No, thank you." All you have lost is your right to complain that nobody ever asks you out.

If he tries to make you feel bad for not wanting to go out with him, however, tell him to go to hell, gramps.

I was once in a marriage-track relationship with a man ten years older than myself. It didn't work out because he wasn't Catholic. Also, he had non-age related health problems and my mother was worried I was going to end up his nurse. Well, if you love someone, you don't mind being his nurse, but if you don't, you do. So it wasn't just that he wasn't Catholic but that I wasn't just that into him.

But a pal of mine married a man about 20 years older than herself--a big, funny guy with a motorcycle and a receipt showing an enormous bar bill taped to the wall--because she was that into him. We had a conversation about how they might not have a really long time together, given his age. She was a bit sad about that, but that's just how it was. And is. Sure enough, he got cancer five years later, but it looks like he's pulling through, thank God.

I realize that people are always jabbering on about "Is he too young for you?" or "Is he too old for you?" but once you are both ADULTS, and nobody become a really, truly adult magically at the age of 21 (let alone 18), these questions make little sense. In the case of teenage girls, everyone is terrified that Mr Older Guy is going to seduce her with the shameless lies teenage boys haven't yet figured out how to tell convincingly.

Yes, most of us westerners are adolescents until we are about 25. Girls mature faster, apparently. I didn't. But if you are a 30+ year old woman, the only thing you need to worry about is if your under-25 boyfriend is an adult yet or not. And maybe you are the patient kind who can put up with adolescent sulks and storms, and the smart one who isn't going to be his Older Woman Who Initiated Him Into the Sweets of Love, like an 18th century courtesan, only unpaid.

"I'm not going to be one of those b*itches who ruins children," said Brett, Lady Ashley in The Sun Also Rises. Words to live by.

As for older men, I could barely see them until I was over 30. I thought it was an age thing, but now I think it was a North American thing, too. But anyway, it was only after I was 30 that I would ever ever ever have considered going out with someone as old as 40.

It is traditional to complain that men always want women much younger than themselves, but I don't think this is true. Single men generally pursue women their own age, and most Single men are in their 20s. Most Single women are in their 20s, too, which may be why older Single men are so willing to try their luck with them. And I don't think older men who think twenty-something women are luscious are any less moral than older women who think twenty-something men are toothsome.

It has also been complained that playboys suddenly panic at the age of 40 and then start looking for women to have their babies. Well, more fool them. The way not to be hurt by playboys is not to go to bed with them. Indeed, quite a lot of modern misery could be solved by just not going to bed with men. Complaining because a man has had 20 years of strings-free fun and now is looking to settle down strikes me as a waste of breath and ink.

I shall end with my usual kind of advice.

* Do what you want as long as it isn't a sin. Smoking a cigarette or eating meat is not a sin. Going for coffee is not a sin. Heavy petting is a sin. When in doubt, check with your confessor.

* Don't chase men. Wait and see who shows up. Say Yes to what or who you want and No to what or who you don't want. It's your right.

*Stay rooted in reality. Don't delude yourself. If a man walks you home after dark, it is not a sign that he is that into you. Particularly not if you asked him to walk you home in the first place.

Update: I acknowledge the screams of horror from Women Younger Than I at the idea of (female) young things giving (male) old cougars the time of day. The idea is that older men are wily and experienced and wicked.

And to be honest, I was thinking of 30 year olds dating 40-plusses, since I can't imagine why a 20-something would want to date some guy with orange peel skin when she--unlike me--has access to all those toothsome 20-something hotties.

No offense, 20-something hotties. You're not supposed to be reading this blog.

Anyway, I have put up two new surveys. The top one asks "How old is too old?" and the one underneath wants to know how old you are, so that I will remember that some of you are bouncing babies.

Neither Gods nor Monsters

I was greatly amused to read this piece in Crisis, for it is written by a theology professor at the University of Saint Thomas in Texas. There is no theology in it; it reads like one of my blogposts. Hey, I should be writing for Crisis.

(By the way, your Auntie Seraphic is rather broke at the moment. Does anyone know of any lovely magazine where they need someone to fill in a page or two? Are you yourself procrastinating at your desk at Elle or the National Catholic Register, perchance? Have you just had to fire a writer for drunkenness/incoherence? Contact ME, Auntie S, by email.)

Anyway, I found the article amusing also because it described how adolescent males don't understand women, and thus I learned something about adolescent males.

Poppets, sometimes teenage girls write in asking for advice about teenage boys, and I stare at the screen like a bunny in the headlights because I have no clue. I went to an all-girls school, and so busy were my brothers as teens that I saw them only at meals, really. I was absolutely clueless about teenage boys, whom I saw very rarely, and was wont to think of them either as gods (the few chosen by my imagination to fixate upon for months or years on end) or monsters, since everyone knew teenage boys were as horny as toads.

I was not particularly rooted in reality.

Since then, I think I have figured out adult men, but adolescent men have still been a mystery, except for the fact that many adult-looking men are actually still adolescents. And I do not mean this in a nasty, "shame-on-you" way, but as a statement of fact, as in "Some people do not get their wisdom teeth until they are in their 40s." Some people are just very young for their age. (I am very young for my age. This is good and bad: good because I retain the lightheartedness associated with youth, and bad because I don't know how to drive, am broke, etc.) Dr. Smith says in his article that he knows adolescent males aged 35.

That was not a revelation to me. The revelation was why adolescent men moan, complain, and fight with women and then wonder why the women get mad.

Young men think of themselves as treating their guy friends with respect all the time, even if they've shoved them around the basketball court, sworn at them to high heaven, and told them how ridiculous their ideas are. For some strange reason, young women don't generally see it that way. For some reason, women tend to get offended when you shove them around, yell at them, and tell them how stupid their ideas are. Strange, I know, but it's a fact of life, so we'd better get young men used to it early, or we'll find them, as we so often find them today, utterly baffled as to why so many young women in their lives are upset and offended all the time.

Baffled and misogynist. I recently heard a young man complain that he could not tell a woman that her ideas are stupid without her getting angry, which is why this paragraph jumped out at me. The young man's theory, however, was this was because women are illogical and less able to argue abstract ideas in a dispassionate way.

As I studied epistemology in some depth at theology school, and got top marks, I found his theory personally annoying, which might have proved his point. I then had a conversation with B.A., who used to be a lecturer in philosophy, about women in philosophy, and found myself getting annoyed again.

But I think this is because--like many women--I can see the far-reaching implications of ideas faster than the average man can. The average man hones in exclusively on Point A, for example, whereas the average woman immediately sees Point A in relationship to Points B, C, W, and Z. The average man might not remember, for example, that for thousands of years women were kept out of higher education, careers, jobs teaching philosophy*, etc., on the grounds that we were supposedly much stupider than men.

But that's another post for another day. The point for reflection is that young men manhandle their male friends, cuss them out and tell them their ideas are stupid, and their male friends don't take this personally. And therefore when young men feel friendly towards young women--and not tongue-tied, frightened or angst-ridden--they feel confident in a bit of rough-housing, cussing and telling you your ideas are stupid.

I find this quite a relief because occasionally young men I like very much tell me how stupid my ideas are, and I wonder if they simply despise me. At best, I assume that they think I am just some kind of token man, i.e. not a real woman. However, it would appear that young men talk like this to women not because they despise us or think we aren't really women, but because young men think this is just how one speaks to all people with whom one is on friendly terms.

Well, well, well.

The fallout, of course, is not just that young men alienate the very women whom they like best. It is also that those young women who think being told they are stupid is all they deserve are going to giggle, cling to the young men and go along with their half-baked ideas of what women are supposed to be like. Dr Smith thinks that this is a recipe for unhappy marriages, and so do I. He thinks the solution is for parents to actually educate their sons about women, and so do I.

Of course, adolescent males being adolescents, they are likely to reject what their parents say. And this is too bad because it is then up to adolescent females to try and civilize Mr Rough-house, Cuss and Insult. What a lot of work for successive girlfriends on behalf of the woman Mr Rough-house, Cuss and Insult actually does marry in the end.

Happily for me, B.A. was perfect when I got him. And, of course, he wasn't an adolescent. I don't know when he made the transition from adolescent to adult because I wasn't around to see it. For all I know, it was just before I showed up.

Honestly, I don't think "adolescent" is an insult. It's just a stage. Not everybody matures at the same rate. Whether or not you have the patience to accompany an older adolescent through his painful acquisition of adulthood is something only you can decide.

*Saint Edith Stein could not get a German university post because German philosophy departments did not accept women as faculty until 1949.

Made for Friendship

Now that Lucy, Jeff and I have got you all riled up, I will calm you down with some soothing thoughts borrowed from Saint Edith Stein.

By the way, thank you very much to those readers who have written in to say that they have responded to my nagging and actually read Saint Edith Stein's essays on women. One of you mentioned feeling a bit mental because of wanting to talk about her with somebody, and I now recommend throwing a "Brainy Evening" party in which everyone invited has to read the Stein essay you send them and then talk about it during the party. Of course not all the guests will actually read it, so write key quotes on cue cards and hand them out with the drinks.

Suffice it to say, Saint Edith would neither write "I blame men" nor agree to a thesis that "American [or German or Wrocławian, in her case] women lack charm." What Stein did do was examine masculinity and femininity in light of Scripture and philosophy, observing the gifts of each and the ways in which both had been warped slightly by original sin.

Stein thought that both masculinity and femininity brought necessary gifts to all of human life, including the factory floor, and emphasized that both men and women are made in the image and likeness of God. Humanity is a unity of two. And this is where it gets interesting.

Stein was not that interested in the subject of marriage, per se. When she thought of marriage, she thought in more general terms, of Man being wedded to Woman in the species called Human. Much more important to her than the husband-wife bond was the mother-child bond. In fact, she speculated that it was something erotic in the Adam-Eve relationship that brought about the Fall, which gave her posthumous orthodox editors a few seizures.

Saint Edith holds up Mary, Mother of God (and of us all) as the great model for women. And she sees that women have two choices in regards to our not inconsiderable influence on men: we can be sexy Eve and seriously mess them up, or we can be motherly Mary and lead them to Christ. Obviously she thinks we should be Mary, exercising either our biological or spiritual motherhood to help men--and other women--flourish.

This emphasis on motherhood is, I think, a very good corrective when men and women see each other as nothing more than erotic turn-ons and turn-offs. Very few of us would want to marry Jeff. Okay, but what can we do for Jeff? Jeff is a human being, our brother in Christ, a fellow Catholic, a fellow TRAD Catholic for some of us. What can we do for him?

We cannot do much, really, as long as Jeff is fixated on whether American Catholic women are worth marrying or not. One might want to ask Jeff if American Catholic women are worth befriending. After all, that is what Christian life is all about: "I call you friends," said the Lord. Friendship between men and women who are not related by ties of blood or marriage is part of the first century Christian revolution.

(I am suddenly reminded of a Jesuit classmate who met a Muslim acquaintance, a fellow student, on the streets of Toronto and made the "mistake" of addressing the Muslim student's wife, demurely tucked behind him. The Jesuit classmate felt badly for being so insensitive. He was glad the Muslim student had just pretended it hadn't happened. Auntie's snarled response to her Jesuit classmate: "This is TORONTO." She might have also said, "We are Christians.")

I hope Jeff has female friends, women who like him without feeling an overwhelming erotic attraction, for perhaps they will sit down with him, like the spiritual mothers they are, and explain why he is unlikely to attract any adult American women with his views.** If he understands that they truly desire his good, and he is grown up enough not to sulk that they don't desire him, then he might learn something and thus become more attractive to his fellow Americans.

Before I read the work of Edith Stein, which was not that long ago, I used to say that I didn't have many men friends. I would mention about B.A.'s friends, which caused some hilarity among B.A.'s friends, who are actually, although in a different way, my friends, too. (And reading this blog even though they know perfectly well it is for girls.)

I had a much narrower view of friendship than Saint Edith's, for my idea of friendship of necessity included a certain kind of emotional intimacy. But Saint Edith's thoughts on spiritual motherhood made me think about that again. It is possible to care for many men without becoming too attached to them or expecting them to behave like female friends or scandalizing anyone or annoying your husband, if you have one.

In other words, men are not just the caffeine in the coffee of life. And this reminds me of one of my men friends who occasionally addresses me as "Hen."

"Hen" is the Scottish, or maybe just Edinburgh, working-class term of endearment for neighbouring women. It is like American "honey" or "hon." Local wifies (women) address each other as "hen," and local men address local wifies as "hen" if they think they won't get into trouble. Apparently it is now a bit politically incorrect for men to call women "hen", although I can't imagine why. I certainly like being called "hen" better than "pal", which is how working-class Scottish men address each other.

Anyway, I thought for a long time how to respond to my friend's cries of "Hello, hen" or "How are you doing, hen?" because they are usually outbreaks of banter and the laws of banter demand the ability to banter back. So I listened very hard for how local women address local men and finally found a near equivalent for "hen".

"How are you doing, hen?" asked Friend, age 50.

"I'm doing fine, son," I replied.

**UPDATE: Sciencegirl brings up a good objection, so I will emphasize "the spiritual mothers they are"[already]. Spiritual motherhood is not some external-to-you spiritual-mother-costume you put on. And it is not sounding like Marmee in Little Woman or Jo in Little Men. If you're me, Spiritual Motherhood can sound like what I write here (although I don't talk to men like this). If you're Jeff's female friend, Spiritual Motherhood might indeed sound like, "Hey, Jeff, how are those Polish lessons going?"

Update 2: Erased two updates. Dear me. How exhausting. Sometimes when men leave comments I coldly rub them out. But sometimes when men leave comments I get really angry, but then feel badly later for getting really angry when this is supposed to be a friendly blog.

Too Much Flirtation?

Oho! My electronic spy tells me that I was discussed on Reddit yesterday. There was a girl with a crush on a discerner, and our long-term reader Irenaeus posted links to three of my saltier diatribes about discerners and seminarians-who-date. The girl was grateful, but another reader was gravely disturbed. "Chip on shoulder" and "bitterly" were words he (I bet it was a he) employed to describe your wonderful Auntie.

Poppets, I cannot blame him. If all you've read of my blog are my thoughts on seminarian psychodramas, you are indeed going to think I am some sort of Miss Haversham, sitting in my faded wedding dress, scheming against men as my ancient wedding cake crumbles before me. But of course I am not. I am exceedingly bitter about academia, but not about men. I like men, and some of them I love. I've been married to a very amusing example for three years. And, as I always say, men are the caffeine in the cappuccino of life. Life would be sooooooo boring without them, especially the attractive ones.

"How much flirtation is too much?" I demanded of my husband last night.

"That's a girl question," said B.A, hedging.

"Aw, come on."

"I don't know," said B.A. "Maybe when someone says, 'So when are you going to leave Seraphic for me?', there has been too much."

"Oh!" I said, nonplussed. I hadn't been thinking in terms of B.A.'s flirtatiousness but of mine. I ruffled through my mental filofax of B.A.'s female acquaintance for a moment and felt satisfied that there was no need for alarm. So far no woman has shot death ray glances at me or, worse, gazed at me with brimming, envious eyes because I am Mrs B.A. No. Instead women laugh merrily at his jokes and groan at his puns and ask me if he is always like that and how I can stand it, etc.

Such good-hearted griping is in the tradition of Scottish banter. Scottish banter is related to flirtation in that it usually expresses liking of a person while also provoking their attention and making them laugh. In our Sunday crowd, it is apparently good form for husbands and wives to make jokes at each other's expense. B.A. says that this is perfectly normal for Scotland. I am not so sure of this, but it seems to be normal for our crowd, which is, um, composed mostly of Single people. B.A.'s theory is that when husbands and wives insult each other at parties, they are assuring everyone around that their marriages are rock solid, etc. Meanwhile, it is not just me being picked on at dinner parties, and nobody banters with anyone they aren't clearly fond of. We beloved foreigners at the table just have to work out how to banter like Scots.

Banter is insults that aren't really insults and statements that are more amusing than true; flirtation is come-ons that aren't necessarily come-ons. Both are difficult arts, and both can go horribly wrong. The good banter artist or flirt knows when and when not to banter or flirt, with whom not to banter or flirt, and where to draw the line. The best banterers and flirts can get away with murder, by which I mean that they can say what they like, to whom they like, and everyone laughs, and nobody gets mad.

Generally I save my most over-the-top remarks for my husband and my younger female friends. Same-sex 'marriage' is legal in Ontario, so before my marriage I occasionally implored an engaged pal to leave her fiance and marry me instead. Now I occasionally tell B.A. that I am leaving him for X or Y. I just take sheer delight in saying such outrageous things, knowing that my hearers will not get mad but merely laugh or think of something equally outrageous to say in response. B.A. is particularly good at this game.

Sadly, my tolerant younger female friends are now far, far away, which leaves just B.A. and the more tolerant of my men friends. And, frankly, it is much easier to hint that my men friends are terribly, terribly attractive than to jokingly abuse them. My rule is that the men friends actually have to be attractive. Life's too short to flirt with ugly men. And too dangerous to flirt with strangers. Or married men. Or men who might take me seriously and pity B.A. for having such a ghastly wife.

Oh well, enough about me. What do you think? How much feminine flirtation is too much? Is it charming for elderly or middle-aged women to flirt with younger men, or is that creepy? Is it charming for young women to flirt with middle-aged or elderly men, or is that unfair? What sort of men must one absolutely not flirt with? Are there any expert flirts out there? Give us the benefit of your wisdom.

Don't Be a "Kind Friend"

There you are, eating your sandwich with Mary and Jane, when Jane says something about an old acquaintance of hers. This friend is called Anne. Jane does not know that you know Anne, and she has not named Anne, and Jane is telling the story only to make a point. Still, you don't think Jane should be telling this story. You think about how hurt Anne might be if she knew Jane was using her story--however anonymously Anne appears in it--to make a point.

So what do you do?

"I think Anne ought to know," you say and go out of your way to contact Anne ASAP.

Or maybe you resist the temptation and keep your mouth shut. Perhaps later you send Jane a quick email saying that you know Anne, and you know Jane would hate it if she inadvertently hurt Anne, so with all the good will in the world--for you do see the importance of the point Jane was making--you hope Jane does not mind if you suggest she be even vaguer in the example she gives! You hope Jane isn't too embarrassed by your email. Let's get together soon. Yours sincerely, You.

Alternatively, especially if you honestly don't like Jane for whatever reason, you can do and say nothing except reflect that Jane's chatter is going to get her into trouble one day.

One of the lessons age brings, my little poppets, which is why I know to tell you, is that it is never good to be the bearer of bad news.

Sometimes you have to be the teller of bad news, but almost never do you have to be the BEARER of bad news. Advice columnists all seem to be at one on the subject of "I saw my friend's husband/wife in a cocktail bar/restaurant with another woman/man. Should I tell my friend?" They all say NO. But they also say that if your heartbroken friend asks you directly, "Did you ever seen my husband/wife with another woman/man?" then you are free to say, "Yeah, I did."

It is fun to share news. I pester my husband and friends back in Edinburgh for updates. And I think a certain amount of warm-hearted gossip (e.g. Sally won the President's Medal; Hector convulsed the table with his jokes; Cyril refused to undo his tie even though the room was baking) is both inevitable and harmless. Indeed, I would go so far as to say it is a good thing.

However, it is wrong to sow discord and strife. First of all, it hurts people and second of all, it subtly changes how people feel about you. Traces of the pitch of the bad news you bear sticks to your hands.

The traditional name for a person who needs to tell Anne what Jane said about her to Mary is "tale-bearer." But another one, said with irony, is "kind friend." We don't want to be "kind friends"--we want to be kind friends. And a kind friend does not think "Gosh, that would hurt Anne if she knew" and then makes darned sure Anne finds out.