Auntie Seraphic & the Reader Who Dreams of Happiness in Marriage

Poppets! Never forget that I am not an expert on marriage. I am rather more well-known for having been Single for a long time and not having forgotten what it's like. I'm kind of new on marriage stuff. Meanwhile, I can't just write whatever I think about marriage because (A) if I write that it is absolute bliss, I risk rubbing my Single readers noses in it and (B) if I write that I want to wallop my husband with a frying pan, he (and his friends) will read it and feel sad.

MEANWHILE, whenever I write about how fabulous female friendships are, and how girls rule, and how life is not worth living without female companionship, consider that I live four thousand miles away from most of my female friends and relations. I work from home, and I go to the Extraordinary Form of the Mass which is, incidentally, where all the boys are. I have no children. My only pet is a basil plant named Paweł, and he's looking rather peaky.

ALSO, I have been married for 4.5 years, and therefore see marriage rather differently than Single readers, or readers who have been married for 6 months, or readers who have been married for 45 years, or Alice von Hildebrand and other widows.

You must keep all these things in mind, and if you ever feel really lousy after reading one of my posts, I recommend snorting, "Ah! What does she know?" and finding a cute kitten video at once.

Dear Auntie Seraphic, 

Thank you for running this blog. It has a lot of good advice. This email originally started out as a comment, but once I realized that it was turning into a depressing monologue, I decided to Ctrl + C and post it into a good old-fashioned e-mail. :-)

May I say that I become increasingly sad (I am usually sad to begin with) whenever I read one of your posts on men & women, ESPECIALLY in marriage?

Frankly speaking, I have never witnessed a happy marriage. However, the little fairy-tale loving section of my soul just will not die, and I continue to hope that there IS such a thing as a happy, passionate, understanding marriage. 

I don't think you *intend* to do this, but you are slowly but surely convincing me that there is not such a thing.  To clarify, I know that love is not the way it's portrayed in Taylor Swift songs. I know that emotions come and go.  But you have shown me that: The passionate feelings experienced within the first couple years of a relationship will go away - and not come back.  A man will never understand you. This one BREAKS. MY. HEART. As an emotionally abandoned/abused child, all I've ever wanted in my life is to be understood. Also, I watched my parents "misunderstand" each other for 25 years. 

I do not know what to think. I am so sad. :-(

Reader Who Dreams of Happiness in Marriage

Dear Reader Who Dreams of Happiness in Marriage,

Don't be sad. Well, you can be sad, but there is no real NEED to be sad. The complete and total joyful understanding that you long for is available. 

The thing is, it comes from God. Your heart will be restless until it rests in Him, i.e. after you die. [Actually, some saints manage to be perfectly content with Him in this life, too.]

A good husband is a wonderful creature and a very great gift from God, but at the end of the day he is just another fallible human being and no husband (or wife) can fill the God-shaped hole in any human heart. Still, there's a reason we use "husband" as an analogy for God and "bride" as the analogy for Church, although I have to admit that these are problematic from a woman's point of view. (It helps that male mystics talk about even their souls being female.)

There are happy marriages, indeed! And as for understanding, understanding is built over time. But this understanding is not just "a feeling"or an understanding of a spouse's good points, but a deep understanding of his or her faults, too, and ultimately a coming to peace with the faults, or a noticing that the faults have gone away with work or time. Honestly, this takes TIME [and patience, humility, courage, patience, humility and courage. And patience. Also humility. And patience.]

As for "passion", the honeymoon craziness does wear off, but it flares up here and there, and anyway, it usually [with God's Grace, I should have said] leaves behind a kind of spiritual glue. The spiritual glue gets stronger and stronger. I think the reason why sometimes widows or widowers just turn over and die a week or so after their spouses die is this spiritual glue. Don't think this spiritual glue is less important than "passion." No way, Hosea. 

Meanwhile, if B.A. still acted and felt the way he did when we were engaged, he would probably starve to death: every time I went away on a trip, he would stop eating. And every time I went on a trip, I would cry and live for his phone calls and get nose bleeds, etc. Although that may sound romantic, eight months [actually, two years] of that was really enough. 

Crying for the passion of the early years of a marriage is like crying because it is June, not the first gloriously sunny day in April. For everything there is a season, even the passion of newlyweds. And in fact it is dangerous to think that passion is the be-all and end-all of a happy marriage because people who do tend to get divorced or run around until they realize that it is not. It is necessary to kick-start a marriage (a western marriage, anyway), including the sexual side of marriage, which continues with enjoyment, good-will and jokes, even if without the breathless passion everyone writes about in songs.  

I hope this is helpful. I like marriage very much, and I love my husband very much. I still think he is the perfect man for me, although I know that he is not perfect, and he most definitely knows I am not perfect either. If I sound rather more cranky than I should about the inadequacy of men to be more than just "a part of this complete breakfast", it may be because most of my female friends and relations are far, far away most of the time. 

Grace and peace,

Seraphic

I hope I got across the "spiritual glue" part. Passion is like a basil plant; it springs up and it dies (and you can get more). But love is like in the Song of Solomon: "strong as death." That's the spiritual glue.

A Man is Not a Substitute for All Women

Last night I watched a made-for-TV movie called Housewife, 49. It was sweet but predictable. A plump, ground-down middle-aged married woman with a grouchy carpenter husband is recruited in the early days of the Second World War to the Women's Volunteer Services, even though her husband tells her she won't fit in. And indeed at first she does not, because the other women are all madly middle-class, and one or two are snooty, but then the most patriotic social maven takes her under her wing, and our heroine feels she can ignore both her disapproving husband and the the norms of the class system.

So at 49 she begins to blossom and when the Germans bomb the Lake District and her grey-moustached husband admits, from the uncertain shelter of their Morrison (which turns out to be a big cage you set up in your house), that she is "everything" to him, she looks as bored and irritated as you can look when Jerry is dropping jolly big bombs on you.

In short, the happier Housewife, 49 gets, and the more she enjoys the company of her women friends, the more contemptuous she is of her husband. (I have to admit, I didn't much fancy him myself.) There's a sense that she is feeling rather a cut above him, now that... Hmm, now I see why he told her she wouldn't fit in. It might have been because he was afraid she would.

I don't think this sent a good message to the men of Britain, so I hope they didn't watch it. Frankly, I was quite relieved that Housewife didn't leave her husband. Almost completely demoralized, the poor old ex-king of his bombed working-class castle says he hopes she'll continue "to put up with" him. She says, "Well, why not? You have to put up with me." A very good point. All the same, it's quite clear that she doesn't realize that men are scarce and many a war widow wouldn't scoff at a nice carpenter with a home of his own, even if he had to pay alimony to his social-climbing frump of a first wife.

Oooh la la. That is not 1945 thinking! Is even Auntie Seraphic a product of post-1963 decadence? No doubt. Because divorce is just too easy these days, and therefore you must not be  contemptuous of your husband, if you have one and want to keep him. Possibly you can be rude occasionally if you apologize within a reasonable time frame. But you may not be contemptuous.

One way not to be contemptuous of your husband or, indeed, of any man whose company you enjoy, is not to think he is a substitute for all women friends. Demanding that your husband be both a man and a woman is really too much. You can remind him that you yourself are not a man and therefore should not be expected to deny your feminine genius (e.g. crying when there's something worth crying about), but you cannot expect him to be a genius at listening and commiserating the way women are. You can ask him to try, of course, but you cannot expect him to be just like your female friends.  

I think this follows for boyfriend and other men friends, too. And this is why it is such a good idea, among other reasons, not to neglect your female pals when you fall in love or "start a [romantic] relationship" with a man. You'll need them.

Ostatnia Nigella

This morning I woke up to terrible headlines about two British celebrities who actually deserve to be celebrities, an important art collector and a beloved television chef. Charles Saatchi is a successful businessman and patron of the arts and Nigella Lawson is a successful businesswoman and daughter of Lord Lawson. We are not talking the sort of accidental celebrities who are made by appearing on reality shows or taking their clothes off for Page 3.

Charles Saatchi and Nigella Lawson are married, and the former was photographed appearing to throttle the latter and to tweak her nose as they sat outside a restaurant in London, arguing. Well, he was arguing; she apparently was trying to calm him down. And this being the UK, and they being celebrities, every national paper is running the story. Is Saatchi abusing Nigella? As stories go,  that's huge. The photos were released to the world on, ironically, Sunday.*

As Kathy Shaidle (don't click to Kathy if you are not a keen freedom-of-speecher) likes to say, the real story is in the comments, so I clicked to the Daily Mail for the vox populi. The vox populi was divided. Comments ranged from "Maybe he was just checking her glands" to "How dare the photographer take photos instead of step in to save the damsel in distress?" to... Actually, now that I think about it, the comments could be divided into "We should mind our own business" and "Saatchi is a wicked wife abuser."

I gave up on the comments before anyone said "If screaming, yelling and getting physical is their thing, they should save it for the bedroom" which was my second thought. My first thought was "Oh, poor Nigella! She's just putting up with it because she loves him and cares about her marriage." But my second thought was definitely in the realm of Choice C: "How awful for the other people at the restaurant."

As long-term readers know, I don't write much about marriage. I didn't like being married the first time, but I like being married now. However, I've only been married for four years, and that doesn't make me any kind of expert. But I do know that marriage depends on loyalty, and so if I get mad at B.A. for something, I'm not going to tell you. I'm not going to tell anyone. Well, I'm going to tell B.A., obviously, because I care enough. I'm here for the long haul and that means confrontation and reconciliation.

But the upshot is that I'm not going to write that much about my marriage because it is not just mine, it is B.A's. Also, I might make him look like an ass, and the worst non-criminal thing a wife can do is make her husband look like an ass in public. Meanwhile, the worst non-criminal thing a husband can do is humiliate his wife in public, which is what I think Charles Saatchi has done. The whole of the UK now thinks he thinks his wife is just property he can slap around.

I am confident B.A. would not mind me saying that physical violence does not play a role in our marriage. He might be a tad shocked to know that it plays a role in other people's marriages, and there are married couples out there who slap each other, grapple and occasionally throw things and laugh about it afterwards. And there are even some married couples would would think life would not be worth living if they didn't scream and yell and slap each other from time to time. It takes all kinds to make a world.

This dynamic is not the same thing as domestic abuse although I can imagine it could quickly turn into domestic abuse, and the minute one spouse says they are sick of scream-yell-slap, that should be an end to it.

I am not myself comfortable with violence-as-vehicle-of-sexual-expression, in part because I associate hitting with boxing and boxing with a code of honour. An honourable boxer hits people in the ring, never out of it, unless in self-defense, and you never, ever hit a girl a member of the opposite sex. Also, I know it is a supremely bad idea ever to hit someone whose first impulse is to hit back, e.g. a boxer in training, particularly when they are stronger and heavier than you, and men are usually stronger and heavier than you.

However, as I said, some married couples are okay with slapping, grappling and throwing things, and therefore [Update: if that is true], the rest of us should usually butt out---as long as they keep it behind closed doors. [Update: When it is public, then the public may certainly voice its displeasure, as the British public has certainly done today.]  Because that kind of consensual violence, cherubs, lurks in the murky shadows of the sexual realm, and not only should the public not see it, neither should the couple's children. [Update: B.A. is throwing all kinds of fits about this paragraph, just so you know.]

I notice that the British newspaper-reading public is always telling female celebrities to divorce their male celebrity husbands. Speaking as a Catholic and a former divorcee, I object to this. I think female celebrities should fight for their marriages and not give David or Wayne a chance to abandon them and their children for whatever brainless hussy managed to so fatally distract them for half an hour. Not only would such a capitulation be bad for the wives and their children, it would be certainly bad for David and Wayne, et alia, who would be eaten alive by brainless hussies until the money was gone and they were just pathetic and rather creepy old men in constant danger of hell. (Oh yeah. Hell.)

Meanwhile, it's up to Nigella to decide what she wants to do. If for whatever reason the shadowy corners of her sexual psyche enjoy the rough stuff meted out by her husband, then she is well in her legal rights to stick with him. If she's sick of it, then it's up to her to lay down the law or start divorce proceedings. But whichever she decides, I hope this couple calls an end to fighting in public. It's not dignified, and it puts other people off their lunch.

*Irony explained: Nigella is almost the Polish word for Sunday, niedziela.

Update: I am much more disturbed by reports that he says he doesn't like her food. The woman is a renowned chef, and spouses can hurt each other very much by belittling each other's proven accomplishments. I cannot see what he would gain from doing so. Surely he is a big enough man without having to diminish the woman in his life to feel even bigger?  I mean, he's Charles Saatchi. Hello.

Update 2: Fellow Catholic Cristina Odone weighs in. Normally I don't pay attention to celebrity gossip, but this is sort of the British equivalent of Guggenheim throttling Julia Child.

Update 3: After much vigorous debate, my husband B.A. weighs in here: "I think my major concern is that – prima facie – violence is bad.  Even if we can do “play” violence that genuinely causes no harm – because it is implicitly consensual and non-injurious – the default position should still be that violence is dangerous.  I can’t imagine any kind  of violence in the New Jerusalem: I conclude that violence as such is a post-lapsarian phenomenon.  So, when I hear that a man has been publicly violent to his wife and that she subsequently leaves in tears, my instinct is that something bad has happened – something which I might have been inclined to interrupt if I witnessed it.  Of course I could be wrong and find myself making a fool of myself by so concluding about any particular case.  But I think the default assumption in such a case is that harm is being done.  What, if any, mitigating assumptions might be justified – such as that the couple may find this kind of stuff fun in private – should take a back seat.  And this is precisely because that we have to have really  good reasons to think that any particular case of violence is “alright”.  That this was a man being  publiclyviolent to his visibly distressed wifevery strongly  suggests to me that something was probably wrong."

Update 4: I used to box. For almost a year, I was the only woman who trained at my gym. Men hit me (but usually pulled their punches). I hit them. It was not such a big deal. Therefore, I have a very nuanced philosophy about when physical force is okay and when it is not. I do not have as strong a sense as B.A. that "prima facie--violence is bad." But I agree that it is dangerous.

Update 5: Guardian columnist who thought Saatchi-Lawson event might not have been a case of domestic abuse eats words. I am not a Guardian columnist, so I don't have to worry about angry Guardian readers. I am, however, a Catholic Register columnist and have written a denunciation of Fifty Shades of Grey, of which over 70 million copies have been sold, mostly to women.

The Broken Tree.

When I started this blog I did it with the intentions of creating a place where I could fully express myself and talk about the things in my life that I struggle with.  So far, looking back at my posts all I have done is chronicle my life.  I have been avoiding the truths.   Today, I move past that.  I will be real.  I will be me. Here's the deal.My family is weird.and it has really fucked with my head. Growing up I had ten grandparents and three great grandparents.  NOT normal folks. My grandparents have all been remarried at least three times. Yep.  I shit you not.  I now have seven remaining.  That is still too many. And nobody gets along.  Swear to God.  They act like a bunch of damn kindergartners and don't know how to behave in public.  It is really no that hard to be civilized around each other for at least two hours.  Drives me nuts! Reason being why none of them were invited to our engagement party we had this past weekend. 

Don't get me wrong I love them all to death! I really do!

 My own parents then jumped on the band wagon and got divorced when I was ten.  That is a rough age anyway. Add divorce on top. And I didn't know what the hell was going on.It's hard enough for me just having to deal with my parents. Thank the good lord they both are commitment-phobes and haven't remarried...yet.uggh just looking at this written down puts my stomach in knots.Then there's my SamIam.  He handles everything much better than I do, of course.  His parents are also divorced.  His dad is currently on his fourth marriage and his mom is remarried as well.  Thankfully, he doesn't have any awkward siblings as remnants of those marriages.  It's just him and his brother who shares the same parents.His dad constantly reminds me how many times he has been married and likes to offer up marriage advice by saying things like, "What I have learned from all of my marriages..." NO. Just stop.  I don't want any advice from your failures.That is going to be one crooked and skanky looking family tree.  That's for sure.   Here's what all of that means to my relationship and my own little family... We WILL break the cycle. This is something that SamIam and I have talked about a lot.We are starting over.  Our children's family trees will not look like ours.When we get married it truly will be for forever. Our vows will stand true in our relationship and will never be taken for granted.  

That's all I have for today. 

 Just a little insight to my own personal crazy.

A Boy's House

I saw Ibsen's A Doll's House on the stage yesterday evening and feel wrung out. I had read the play and heard all about it in one or more of my university courses, but I had never seen it staged. I hadn't realized how incredibly offensive Torvald is. Of course, I had never been married when I studied the play.

The version I saw was set in Edwardian London, and it was only incidentally amusing that Edwardian London seems to have been populated by Scots. Torvald had been renamed Thomas and given the post of a Cabinet Minister. I'm not sure about renaming one of the most famously pompous husbands in world literature, but it made sense to put him in the Cabinet. I'm a little vague on the restrictions placed upon women who wanted to borrow money (essential to the plot) in Edwardian Britain, but I am willing to imagine they were not so different from those of Ibsen's Norway of 1879.

Ibsen was a genius, of course, and part of his genius was seeing things from women's point of view at a time when most men seemed psychologically incapable of doing that. Ibsen shook off any accusations (or praise) of feminism by saying that in Nora he was describing humanity. (Or so says wikipedia.) Well, good on Ibsen for noticing that a woman is a human being before she is anything else.  One can imagine Ibsen listening to a man roguishly teasing his wife about how much of his money she must have spent on Christmas tree decorations and wondering how the wife must feel. ("If it were me," I imagine Ibsen imagining, "I would want to punch him.")

Torvald (or, in this version, Thomas) is exactly the kind of man who gives his wife a hard time about how much money she has spent on Christmas tree decorations. He has no clue that his wife is actually an extraordinary good saver because (for reasons of the plot) she cannot tell him this. And because she knows what she knows, she puts up with his tsk-tsking with very good grace.

In fact, Nora spends her marriage pretending to be something she is not and is assisted in this by Torvald, who is happy to strut about, talk down to her and say such things as "You have no idea how important I really am" and "I own you." It is very important to Torvald that his wife be a sexy simpleton, and loyal Nora does her best to look like one. And, indeed, she is indeed simple in some ways: you become what you do, after all. She believes her husband loves her--after all, he keeps telling her he does--and he certainly finds her sexually attractive, and she has a gift for pretending and hiding, so she copes. And if she couldn't cope, every women in her society would assure her that of course she's not as stupid as her husband makes her out to be.

I'm trying not to put plot spoilers in here, so I will just say that Nora's big mistake is taking Torvald at his own estimation. Their family friend Doctor Rank tells her that Torvald is just a little boy at heart, and I think this is true. There is something stunted about Torvald--instead of acting like an intelligent, adult man, he acts like a boy pretending to be a man: lording it over his wife in a pompous way while completely wrapped up in his own interests, his own problems, his own friends, his own desires, and his own importance. He is also, as we discover, childishly spiteful.

Men so often exasperate women that I have counselled before that when we feel deeply resentful of them, we should try to imagine what they were like as babies or little boys. This is a variation on the "Bless their little hearts" strategy, and it's meant to get us in touch with that compassionate part of us that is also our greatest strength: motherhood. No-one on earth has as much power, emotional or physical, than a mother over her child. And no doubt that is why men really hate it when the wrong women attempt to "mother" them.

Still, I suppose it is hard to see men your own age as boys, and it is frustrating to find yourself stuck with a boy when you would rather be with a man. One of the good things about getting older is that the men my own age have had more time to grow up. Another good thing is that I see twenty-somethings from a completely different perspective. It is easier to see and remember that under the protective shell of adult masculinity, many of them are still boys with a lot to learn. And it is easier to love them for it. Twenty-something girls want twenty-something boys to be great husband-and-boyfriend material. Forty-something women just want twenty-somethings to have good manners and be reasonably amusing. Thank heavens young men are usually attracted to young women; if they weren't cougars would corner the market.

Plot spoilers ahead:

Nora's tragedy was that she was not mature enough to forgive Torvald  and accept him for the boy he still was. Her ultimate attitude was that of the teacher who flees the nastiest child in her classroom when the bell rings. Torvald's tragedy is that he did his utmost to treat Nora as a child, which prevented her from growing up enough to help him grow up. And as I once was Nora, I know what I'm talking about. The great mercy is that when I slammed the door, there weren't any real children on the other side of it.

College as Marriage Market

Andrew Cusack sent me this, as it was written by a friend of his at the New Criterion:

 In 2008, when I was a college junior, I went home to New Jersey one weekend to visit my family—and almost immediately regretted it. My mother seemed more interested in my romantic life than my academic life: "Have you found a boyfriend yet?"

I rolled my eyes and said no. With a healthy dose of young-adult arrogance, I explained that I was too busy studying, working on the college review, and helping out at my sorority. No time for men. My mother nodded, acknowledging that there was a lot going on.

Then she said calmly but forcefully: "You're in college. You're at Dartmouth. There will never be a better time to meet someone. I'm sure there are many interesting boys around. If you don't find one before you graduate, you might not find one at all—so start looking."

That reminds me of something my mother said when I was in college, and the result was my early divorce. 

I dated a lot in college, which really means that I usually had a boyfriend. I was fun and at least outwardly cheerful, got involved with a few groups and causes on campus, spoke up in class, had zany hair, got noticed. 

I was also intensely thoughtless, and had an idea at the time that the more boyfriends or admirers you had, the more successful you were as a woman. This is a really stupid idea, but that's the message I had taken on board, so I went out with guys way longer than I should have, for the sake of having fun, attentive boyfriends, and then broke up with them, sometimes rather abruptly. I looked Betty, but I acted Veronica.

Not being entirely heartless, I felt rather bad about my "fickleness." I was frustrated both with myself and with the guys I went out with. How come I got bored so easily? How come I never met a guy I wanted to permanently commit to? And even though I took an extra year to complete, graduation was looming, and my mother had said it was easier to meet men in college than afterwards. She, of course, had married a brilliant PhD student she met as an undergrad. 

I think I'll lightly skip over what happened next, for once. And--guess what? I discovered that there were still single men around after graduation. There were single men in grad school. There were single men at work. There were single men in parishes. There were single men all over the place. There was absolutely no reason for me to have dreaded my college graduation as the cut-off point after which there would be no more single men. (And for the record, I was better-looking at thirty than I was at twenty-four.)

What did make meeting good men more difficult, after college graduation, was being married (naturally) and then divorced because the experience of an unhappy marriage was the worst thing that had ever happened to me in my sheltered life, and it seriously messed with my head. The annulment procedure, though necessary, was for me traumatic. 

I know a woman, a beautiful woman, who married a college boyfriend who was awful to her, and even before she got divorced or her annulment, met a wonderful man. They were friends, nothing more, because, of course, she was married. However, when she got her divorce and then her annulment, they were free to marry, and did. Now they have children.

When she told me her story I was grateful because until she did I was the only annulled woman of my generation I knew, and until then I didn't know anyone who knew firsthand what I had gone through. But at the same time I was hit with a wave of despair because it had worked out okay for her in the end. Even before she had escaped her agony, she had met the right man. Did God love her more than me? I feared so.

This was foolish, and although it looks like I remarried too late to have children (the elephant in the Seraphic Singles room), I don't think God loves me any less than a woman who has children. Indeed, I think He may love me just as teensy-weensy bit more, for He sides with the poor, the ill, the widow, the orphan, the refugee and the barren, and He's just got a different job for me. 

And part of that job is to tell the truth about Single Life, and the truth is that your college graduation is NOT NOT NOT your marital expiry date. God has a plan for you, and it may involve you marrying a college sweetheart, but it just as easily may not. 

Sure, if you are inclined to early marriage, then you should be open to meeting guys at college and having "just a coffee" when asked, and giving a marriage-potential guy two more dates/chances before deciding if there's a spark. As soon as you know you just couldn't marry him, then let him know you don't see a future for the two of you. As Catholics or other Christians, we should be above having boyfriends just for the sake of having boyfriends.  But please, for the sake of your future happiness, don't force yourself into commitments because you think there's something wrong with you if you don't feel committed by fourth year.  Everyone is on a different schedule. As hard as it would have been, I was supposed to wait it out.

You Never Know What's Going On In Other People's...

Single people rarely live with your Married friends, so you very rarely get a ringside seat to what their Married life is really like. In many ways, this is a good thing. There is such a thing as private, family life, and few Married couples want their friends to hear their most personal remarks, e.g. "Your toenails are like daggers!" and "That's not how my mother makes spaghetti" and "Where the **** is my handbag, AAAAAAAAAAH!"

But this means that you see your Married friends most at their absolute personal best, e.g. when they are in their first flush of LOVE (sparkle) and engaged (sparkle, sparkle) and on their wedding day (sparkle, sparkle, sparkle).  After that, you might not see them that much anymore, especially if they have kids. All this may leave you with an idealistic view of what their married life is like.

Adding to the sparkle-sparkle-disappear factor is the loyalty of many Married couples to each other and the shared project (if I may call it that) called their marriage. Where I come from, you never, ever, ever complain about your husband to anyone but--in very trying circumstances--your mother, priest or doctor and--in the most extreme circumstances--the police, your lawyer and the judge. Meanwhile (where I come from) a wife expects her husband to be even more circumspect: not even the police and judge for him, poor man. All this, of course, is the (slightly problematic) IDEAL, from which one (even where I come from) sometimes falls short.

Then there are Married women who out-and-out lie. I once had a friend who was so loyal to her Project Called Marriage that she pretended to me that her life was absolutely perfect. Even sleepless nights with colicky babies were a joy---while they were going on. It was years before she admitted that they had driven her to breaking point. And I was convinced that there never was a happier marriage. I used to think, as I nursed the long hurt of my failed marriage, that at least she was happy, and at least there was one perfect marriage in the world.

"Why don't you have more children?" I asked one day as we met up for a long-awaited lunch. "Your kids are so beautiful."

She laughed. She told me that everything was so perfect right then, she didn't want anything to change.

Within a year she left her husband, and I finally heard the real story.

Well, what can I say? Marriage may be private but it is also public, and one of the building blocks of society. It's not just about a couple and their family; it's about the couple, their family, their friends, their neighbours, their parishes, their societies. Everyone. I put down the phone, rigid with horror and disillusionment. It wasn't just the unhappiness of a family I loved, and it wasn't just that I had been out-and-out lied to by a friend I trusted, it's that a sparkling symbol of my own hopes had just imploded.  

It's a truism that nobody knows how a marriage works, sometimes not even the two people in it. And I think it is salutary to reflect on the traditional sugar-covered almonds served at weddings. The sugar represents the sweetness of marriage, and the almond--which retains its bitter skin--reminds us of its sorrows. A wedding, with its new clothes, delicious food, joy and jollity, does not sum up marriage. It expresses hope for marriage. Very few married women, I think, say to a married couple, "I know you'll be very happy." What we almost always say, with great sincerity and sometimes with tears, is "I hope you'll be very happy."

The "How We Met" Post

There has been a request for a post in which Married readers tell Searching Singles how we met our husbands. I apologize if there is already a post like this because although it is a fun idea, this is a Singles blog after all.

At parties I don't like being asked where I met my husband because both "through friends" and "over the internet" sound too vague, although both are true. I prefer to say, "I'm a writer, and Benedict Ambrose wrote to me after reading my stuff" although that sounds a bit precious.

The truth of the matter is that I was in Canada talking to Aelianus of Laodicea in England over Skype while scrolling through his Facebook friends, saying, "Come on, Aelianus, who do you got for me?" when Aelianus said, "How would you like to live in a Historical House?"

And this was the first time ever I heard about B.A. Come to think of it, that would make a nice story for strangers at parties. I don't care if they think I sold myself for Georgian architecture. Georgian architecture is very soothing to the soul.

So today the few married lady and widowed readers are encouraged to chime in and explain how and where you met your husbands. (Maybe the engaged readers could also chime in to explain how and where you met your fiances.) If it was at college, and it so often is for those who marry young, say where at college, e.g. in the chorus of "The Mikado" in the Dramatic Society or at after-Mass tea with Cath Soc.

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!

Sin, Actually

Grace. One of the teachings of my Canadian theology school that resounds through my brain ten years later is "If you begin with sin, you end with sin. If you begin with Grace, you end with Grace." I think this is particularly true in all discussions of sexuality. Otherwise we end sounding like Euripides' Phaedra ("Only death can blot out the shame of my random crush!") and Hippolytus ("Why can't we just buy sons?") I think Catholic artists, in particular, have a duty to somehow illustrate the great beauty of Eros, which is above everything else an impulse to escape the prison of one's own ego to connect with someone or something else.

Of course, we live in a post-Fall universe, so sexuality has been at least slightly messed up along with every other created thing, and we have to pray and strive lest the wellsprings of Eros get clogged up with selfishness, greed, lust to dominate, fear and even hatred. And the terrific challenge to Christians, particularly artists, is that we have to school our very thoughts. But whoever thinks that this is just too hard should contemplate the clerical abuse scandals to see where "Oh, don't worry about such little things" has got us. Deliberately sustained thoughts very often lead to deliberate actions.

I was thinking all this the other day when a colleague put up this article on Facebook. It is from the Globe and Mail, an old Anglo-Canadian newspaper whose long legacy of anti-Catholic sneers once actually made me cry, quite hysterically, in the toilets at work. (When I called my mother for comfort, she said, "It's the Globe and Mail. What do you expect?")

The article, as you can see, describes the Toronto Newman Centre as if it were a cult. It "openly targets" university students, says the Globe and Mail article provocatively. Jeepers. I'd love to see if they could get away with saying Hillel "openly targets" university students. And of course the article insinuates that Courage is some sort of scary, scary group that forces its members to "resist homosexuality."

What Courage actually does is acknowledge that there are gay Catholics who have particular challenges in remaining chaste and thus want and need special pastoral care. The Newman, incidentally, also offers pastoral care to other Catholics who want to remain chaste, e.g. in the confessional. To which I am not a stranger.

When shaking its finger at Catholics' supposed reluctance to get with the equality program, the world conveniently ignores that our high sexual ideal is for everybody. Married people do not get a free pass. I imagine many married people have a polygamous/polyandrous orientation, and yet we suppress that all the time--even more than Single Catholics who go around snogging now this girl and that. If a Single parishioner in my parish casually and drunkenly snogged somebody at a party, my guess is that his or her confessor would go relatively easy on him or her. But if I or B.A. did that, our confessor would rip our heads off. (N.B. I'm not complaining. I'm just telling it like it is.)

Then there's the whole NFP deal, such a trial to young married Catholics who are really afraid of having large families but really do not want to be closed to life either.

Then there's the whole transmission-of-life deal, such a trial to old married Catholics who seek fertility help from specialists and embarrassingly and demeaningly have to spell out to strangers why we cannot do this or that.

But of course there are also the chastity challenges of the unmarried, both those who worry they will never get married and those who know that they will not. (And, yes, they are often, perhaps usually, maybe even almost always a tougher row to hoe.) One thing about chaste clerical celibacy and the chaste celibacy of nuns and monks: it puts even the non-gay majority in relatively the same position of gay Catholics who also want to remain chaste.

My dry remark to my colleague was that I remembered being urged at the Newman "to resist heterosexuality." The Newman discouraged heterosexuality in the same way Courage discourages homosexuality, and people should get their information about Courage from its members, not from the Globe and Mail.

Underneath our exchange, some wag wrote, "Resistance is futile."

I beg to differ, particularly when you have the assistance of Grace.

Vronsky's Wife

"Should I be concerned that you are watching the Anna Karenina preview on youtube?" asked B.A.

"Noooooooooo," I said. "I am checking to see if I still think Vronsky's dye job is funny."

Vronsky's dye job is still pretty funny. Dear me, how I laughed in the cinema. There must have been hundreds, if not thousands, of book-loving women who sat on the edge of our seats dying to see what the new Vronsky would look like and then all shrieked with horror or amusement when we saw the pretty powder-blue uniform, the deep blue contact lenses (I suspect) and the curly blonde hair. Someone please tell someone that women are not gay men.

I understand that the idea must have been to contrast Keira Knightley's dark eyes and hair with the blonde and blue-eyed looks of a made-over Aar*n Johns*n, and although in general I approve the aesthetic vision of the film, I think that was a pity--unless the whole idea was to make Anna's and Vronsky's mad passion somewhat ridiculous. I see that director Joe Wright is a married man. Hmm...

Out of curiosity, I next looked up Aar*n Johns*n to see what he really looks like, and he is a terribly good-looking, dark-haired young man of 22. He has also changed his name to Tayl*r-Johns*n since he married the mother of his children, a talented film director with an OBE. She is a striking blonde woman who was born in 1967.

"Holy cow," I said. Actually, I said something other than that, but I won't put it on my blog. I rechecked my arithmetic because, really, I am very bad at anything involving numbers, and Mrs Aar*n is still older than me.

Excuse me while I go stare in the looking-glass in the bathroom.

Okay, I am back. I am not too depressed. I had a good night's sleep and the miracle of Grandma's good genes blesses the skin of another generation. It is not beyond the limits of my own imagination that were I a talented divorced film director I could attract my...let's see now...2009...nineteen-year old star.

Nineteen! Nine-teen!

Excuse me while I go pour some Bailey's Irish Cream into my coffee. It's still Christmas, after all.

Nineteen!

How did a nineteen year old convince a forty-two year old woman to enter a romantic relationship with him? I'm asking you because if I asked friends nearer my own age they would say, "That's disgusting. Why are we even talking about this? Let's pray a novena."

When I was nineteen, a six-foot-something blonde Bavarian-Canadian of fifteen used to lurk me around me at my summer job, and I was, like, "No, thank you." I am not sure why, as he was really cute, and I would not have contemplated anything immoral or illegal, so I think it must have been convention. And it's not like he tried that hard, so actually there may have been some good sense involved, too. Adolescents are so volatile. Tattoo that to your brains.

Could it have been because Aar*n was playing a teenage John Lennon at the time? John Lennon was born in 1940, but surely that would have made the real John Lennon too old for a woman born in 1967? On the other hand, as she was 42, I would say no. After you are 40 there really isn't any such thing as "too old" for you if you love the person. But when you are under 30...

I suppose isn't any of our business, and we wouldn't know about the marriage if the married couple were not in the Arts, and people in the Arts are different from you and me, unless we are in the Arts, which I sort of am, in my small way. And so I know that one of the big questions that governs the Arts is "Why not?"

However, one answer to this is that although in the Middle Ages seven was considered the age of reason and teenagers were considered adults, in the 21st century most nineteen year olds in the West, despite having the rights to drink and vote and drive, are still children. Women are supposed to guide and protect children, not get involved with them. However, once a man has children, he is no longer a child, and the married man under this scrutiny now has two, so I will shut up...

...after I observe that quite obviously life does not end at 42. Whoo!

My New Flat

This is totally off-topic, but since a large number of you seemed to be interested in historical romances and houses, I thought I would tell you that for the next few weeks I will be dividing my time between a flat in an early seventeenth century house in the city and my usual flat in a late seventeenth century house (with eighteenth century improvements) in what is left of the most local countryside.

The city flat is very small and modern-looking, although it is at the very top of a very steep and narrow turning seventeenth century staircase and has views of other ancient buildings in Edinburgh's Old Town. Spires and towers and ball finials abound.

The flat has a tiny front hall, really an antechamber between door to stairwell and door to flat, a sitting-room, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a bedroom with two narrow single beds, somewhat like those of Bert and Ernie or married couples in old films.

The sitting-room has windows on both sides of the room, dressed with Jacobean rose-print drapes, a wine-coloured sofa and armchair, a modern tartan rug on the sisal carpet and a cunning electric fire in the nineteenth century tiled grate. It has a television with better reception than to that which we are accustomed, and there seems to be unlimited hot water, "Just like in Canada, darling."

Sadly, there is no coffee machine. And even more sadly, there is no internet access, so I will not be able to blog or read your comments. However, there is internet access at a nearby library, so I will not be out of touch.

Here is an article I came across about Other Singles of Good Will that I found very moving. It is in The New York Times, so read the combox at your peril. I quit when I got to the "imagine what a wonderful world it would be without religion" comment. Mmm, yes. Because 20th century experiments with that concept turned out SO WELL (sarcasm). So never mind the combox. There is enough in the article itself hinting at controversies within religious communities, shared by observant women of many religions.

Anna Karenina

Update: If you don't know the story already, there are plot spoilers ahead.


Yesterday I went with three Single girlfriends to see the new Anna Karenina, starring Keira Knightley, on the big screen.

I am so glad I did not see Anna Karenina with any male friend. So glad. Soooooooo glaaaad! I would have died of embarrassment forty-five times, each death more painful than the last.

I have not read the book, so all my remarks are confined to what Tom Stoppard left of it for this film which, I should say, was a fantastic adaptation. It was deliciously classic--the clothes!---and sharply contemporary and original at the same time. It was enthralling and devastating. My writer-painter buddy and looked at each other afterwards in the Ladies' with dazed, stricken eyes.

"If that doesn't teach us to be good, nothing will," I said.

And looking just at the film, I say that it is a film about marriage and married people. So it can be embarrassing for a married woman to watch with Single friends, rather in the way it is embarrassing to watch Sex and the City with innocent 19 year olds. This may be because married women can see Anna Karenina from the inside, so to speak, and know what the problems with the Karenin marriage were, and know why Anna would behave so stupidly, and also--shock, horror--why society had to ostracize Anna.

Somewhere or other online I came across one of you freaking out because someone suggested that married people know more about marriage than Single people, but this is in fact true, in the same way that an Olympian knows more about the Olympics than you do, even if your parents were Olympians and you watch them every four years. It is a big, life-changing, psychologically serious deal, quite apart from whether you love your spouse or not.

Love does not make your husband your husband. What makes your husband your husband is two acts (yours and his) of free will, a public declaration and the recognition of society that your husband is your husband. It is more than a personal, private arrangement, and this is not me saying what I think marriage should be, but what marriage actually is. So when Anna tells Karenin, her husband, that "Vronsky is my husband now", she is simply not rooted in reality.

It is really such a devastating story because [in the film] none of the principal characters are wicked or even that annoying. Karenin is a very good, very dignified man. Anna is a loving mother who wants to be good, but after her fatal decision, discovers that she increasingly can't be. (Her passions slip more and more out of her control, as the film brilliantly depicts.) Vronsky, to my great surprise, actually loves Anna. Anna's philandering brother is funny and full of life.

If there is a baddie, it is Vronksy's mother, who thinks it a delightful thing to have affairs as long as they aren't too obvious or taken too seriously. How angry she is when her son takes his affair with Anna seriously. Hypocrisy may be the tribute vice pays to virtue, but virtue is infinitely superior.

Hypocrisy, though, is better than total social meltdown, and that is what Anna seems to want. Anna doesn't just want to love Vronsky; she wants to rub everyone's nose in it. (Everyone's, that is, except her son's.) Anna thinks making plain her passionate love is more important than her husband's peace, her husband's standing in the community, the feelings of her community--which, incidentally, accords her infinitely more privilege than it does, say, the serfs, and her relationship with God.

"I'm damned anyway," says Anna, and yet is wounded when people treat her like the damned. After all, who is she hurting? Oh, yes. Her husband. To a certain extent her son. The feelings of her society. And you.

I don't want to chuck stones at Anna. She married at 18 to someone she didn't love but presumably found impressive, as Minister Karenin is quite obviously impressive, and must have been a terribly good catch. It is unlikely either Anna or her husband had any idea of the importance of eros in the married life when they entered into it, or Anna would not have had her head turned by Vronsky. So I feel awfully bad for Anna.

But I think you can draw a straight line from Anna's behaviour to current Western society, where my readers note that Yes, we now can vote now, yes, we now are equal to men in law, but we now wonder if we can get married if we don't put out first. Sex is no longer for marriage, but something to be indulged for its own sake, either in the throes of romantic passion, or for fun.

And if we don't go along with this, if we want to be as virtuous and cherished as Ekaterina Alexandrovna Shcherbatskaya (Kitty), we are thought of as anti-sex and mean or crazy. Outside conservative religious circles, there no longer seems to be a distinction, sexually speaking, between wife-material (like Kitty) and escaped brothel-workers (like Masha).

All those women being nasty to Anna in the film were trying to keep the social order at a time when even aristocratic women had very few rights at all. If married women felt it okay to leave their husbands and children, and run about Russia openly with their lovers, and respectable people opened their doors to them (thereby siding with them against the innocent husband) where would it end?

Unfortunately, I think we have all experienced where it has ended--for the moment. I don't think we have yet hit bottom, although Western civilization--inextricably dependent upon keeping the passions under the guidance of reason--seems ever closer to throwing itself under a train.

Too Picky?/Settling?

There's a fine line between being "too picky" and "settling" and it is difficult to describe this fine line.

This chap tries to explain it here, in terms that make a married woman (i.e. me) blink.

Talking about the Single life is much different from talking about the Married life, because when a married person talks about the Married life, the reader cannot help but look past the writer to their silent spouse. This is one reason why I will never have a Seraphic Marrieds blog, peeps! B.A. is really laid-back and tolerant, but there is a limit.

I didn't identify with Quinn's piece because I did, in fact, marry my soulmate.* That is, I fell crazy-insane in love and gave up my Canadian life to live in this cold and rainy (and very beautiful) country with Mr. Perfect for Me.

And when I say Perfect for Me, I mean that. For example, we are both over a certain age, so we no longer possess the radiant beauty of YOUTH. And one night after spending a delightful evening with some radiantly beautiful youths, I came home and looked at unconscious, snoring B.A. and was so thankful that, on top of having the same religious outlook, and sharing a love of art and literature and old stuff and people, we are the same age. He does not look at me and think "Old person." He cannot but look at me and think "Normal."

Living with another person, one who is on other levels extremely different, being male and a Scot, can be challenging, so these moments of gratitude are very important.

But I am a woman and therefore as deep as the sea. As far as what motivates men to marry, if they decide that that way forward is to find a pretty girl who seems nice, make a commitment to her and stick to it, great. Whatever makes men marry instead of flollop around aimlessly or acting as though finding a wife is just like finding the ultimate sound system.

Of course, it is probably not a great idea for them to write arresting pieces describing how their wives are not their soulmates. It might hurt their wives' feelings or decrease their status in the eyes of their peers.

It strikes me as something only a young man would do. But then it would be very unfair if young men possessed both radiant beauty and the wisdom of age, too.

*I am not actually sure of the definition of soulmate. I don't believe that there is only one person in the world you could marry and if you don't find him, it's your fault. That's ridiculous. I think that God might have a person or people in mind for you, as part of His plan for you and for all of us together. It's His job to bring you together, and your job to be good.

Update: You may be thinking, "But what about Hauerwas? He's no spring chicken, and he said it too." And my answer to that is that Hauerwas said it generally, about the random thoughts of married people in general. He did not say "My wife is not perfect for me."

The problem with "I married the wrong person" is not that most married people do not occasionally think this. Of course we do, especially if we are in a very cranky or selfish or lustful mood. (And academia is packed with men who ditched the wives of their youth for their sparkiest, tastiest graduate students.)

It's that sometimes--sometimes--the married people are right. Then the question is if the marriage really is a marriage, in which case you just have to come to terms with it, or if it isn't, in which case you may seek to be released from the false bonds.

Happy Birthday, Benedict Ambrose!

To tell you the truth, my husband B.A. is unlikely to read this until the next time he decides he had better check up on what I've been writing about lately. Ah, the stages of romance. First the guy starts reading your blog daily. Then he reads the entire blog archives. Then he invites you to stay in his 17th century pad across the sea. Then he marries you and stops reading your blog, except at intervals to make sure you are not planning an escape.

Of course, B.A. is not supposed to be reading my blog, for he is a man. On the other hand, the very fact that I can spend an hour or two every morning blogging is thanks to the fact he goes out and works at a proper job all day.

Since this is a blog for Single girls, I am not sure how much you want to read about B.A. and married life. Sometimes readers write to tell me they find my thoughts on married life inspiring, and nobody has written "How dare you get married? You have betrayed us" in years. But you can be annoyed enough by Facebook updates that say "Now that I'm married my life is complete and I am in total heaven. Sucks to be you, Single friends!" Do I want to add to that annoyance? No.

I think the saving grace of being a married woman continuing to write about Singleness for Single women is that I married at 38, although that is starting to look younger every day. And it might be inspiring that there was still a Single, devoutly Catholic man in his mid-to-late 30s around until I snaffled him. I think there might still be others, but they are probably in Glasgow. (Our current parish crop of bachelors are in their early twenties, their fifties, their sixties and their eighties. Note the ginormous gap.)

The thing about meeting B.A.--I hope this is instructive rather than triumphalist--is that I noticed almost at once how kind and cheerful he was. He wasn't just kind and cheerful to me; he was kind and cheerful to everyone. I don't know how you girls feel about perpetual cheer. I love it. Now that we've been married a bit, he feels free to take his coat off and grump when he feels a need to grump. But this isn't very often. He doesn't often complain and he isn't rude to waiters; in fact, I don't think he is ever rude without a very severe provocation.

Occasionally rude friends suggest that I married B.A. because he lives in a 17th century house. This is not true although I have to admit that it is a very nice house. Of course we do not own it and I cannot paint the walls or put up wallpaper or adopt a cat or dog because they might scratch something or chew the doors. I can't even hang up the laundry outdoors because it would ruin the view and tourists would take photos of it. No, I married B.A. because he was so kind and amiable, cheerful and funny that I fell in love with him. And he fell in love with me, too, probably because of my resemblance to Dame Emma Kirkby, but also because I would not give him a row about being a devout Catholic.

And this is the secret of why such an attractive man was still unmarried at 36. He simply kept dating women who gave him a row about his wanting to become a devout Catholic. (He was received into the Church during my first visit.) Isn't that ODD? But I must say this situation was very lucky for me.

(And I wonder how many other Catholic men are still wandering about in interesting, cultured, artsy, non-Catholic circles, pursued by the Misses Wrong, vaguely despairing that they will EVER meet a girl--she doesn't even have to be Catholic--who will put up with their rosaries, their intolerance of contraception, and their Gregorian-chant singing pals.)

Oh, and I think they wanted to change him in other ways, which strikes me as just mad. What's to change? Really, sometimes other women make me cross.

Obviously the man is not perfect. (Dark silence as Seraphic ponders the recycling still waiting to be taken out.) But he is perfect for me.

I will add for the sake of cynical eavesdroppers that he does not have a car and that my earnings (such as they are) pay for holidays and such treats as the Jacobean-inspired sideboard I bought him for his birthday. Women are less impressed by cars and moohlah than you are.

In short, I married him simply because he is a wonderful man--ask anyone--who happily also wanted to marry me, and was well worth the long wait to meet the Perfect Man for Me.

Doubts About Long Distance

I received an email about a long distance relationship the other day. All I'll say about this email is that a nice young woman has a long distance friend who became a long distance boyfriend, although I don't think there was an in-person, on-the-spot interview involved in this change. She described their relationship as "dating" although they certainly aren't going out anywhere: they live quite a distance apart and haven't seen each other for some time. He never comes to see her, and the last time she organized a trip to see him, her plans fell through. He did not seem particularly upset.

I don't have a problem with long distance relationships. I now have long distance relationships with my family and many of my friends because I moved to the UK from Canada so as not to be in a long distance relationship with my husband. What I have a problem with is long distance relationships that pretend to be something that they are not, e.g. romantic, marriage-track relationships.

The essence of a romantic, marriage-track relationship is being there for one another. Separations are avoided, but, if inevitable, made as short as possible. Everyone is different, of course, but as soon as B.A. and I started talking marriage, we started planning his first trip to see me in Canada. And while he visited me in Canada, we started talking about when I could visit him again in the UK. And while I was visiting him in the UK, we came up with various unfruitful schemes about how to get married right away. And when back in Canada, I went slowly crazy counting down the days until I could see him again, and he stopped eating. Here comes the groom, skinny as a broom.

For about eight months, our relationship was mostly long distance. He called me every day, and we wrote almost daily emails. Then we got married, and I never wanted to be separated from him again, but I had to be because of being FOREIGN. I had to go back to Canada for weeks and sit around waiting for my Spousal Visa. B.A. called me every day, and we wrote almost daily emails, and I cried a lot. BUT--listen to this--BUT after I got my Spousal Visa and flew home that night, being apart for relatively short periods of time was, and is, no longer such a big deal.

It is no longer such a big deal because (A) we are past the initial and painfully insane stage of a marriage-track romantic relationship and (B) we have been living together for three years. Long-distance is not the norm; being in the same flat is the norm. Long-distance is almost a holiday. (Three weeks apart is my absolute max, though.)

And therefore I will go out on a limb and say that long-distance can work for people who are in time-tested, proven, committed relationships. Heaven knows, there are (or were) many, many women in the UK whose husbands were (or are) on oil rigs in the North Sea for weeks on end, and they make (or made) it work. They make it work because they have something to make work.

And that's the problem. If you never go on a date with the man you're dating, you're probably not dating him. I'm sorry to say this, but there is a danger that what you are is free phone therapy or free entertainment. Heaven knows I have warm memories of my last ex-boyfriend Volker, but the major reason we were in a romantic relationship at all, he later admitted, was that he enjoyed my emails so much. How sucky is that?

I was not really in a relationship with B.A. before we met in person, and fortunately I never thought we were. When he started reading my blog, he was at the end of a psychodrama and had no energy for a new romantic relationship. He had his own stuff to deal with. So he left funny messages on my blog, and I left funny messages on his blog, and every once in a blue moon, he wrote me an email. I love writing emails, so it was difficult not to bombard him with emails, but I managed. Friendly but unobtrusive, that was me. My friend Lily would call this emotional chastity.

There is long-distance, epistolary flirtation, which is fun but fundamentally unstable. And there is long-distance romance between engaged and married people doing their best to keep the home fires burning. And there is even long-distance romance between established boyfriends and girlfriends who were together for quite a time before their separation. But I simply do not believe that an entirely long-distance romantic relationship, one that was always long-distance, and that looks like it will be long-distance for a long time to come, can be an authentic romantic relationship.

A man in love wants to be with the woman he is in love with and, unless it means hurting people to whom he has more pressing commitments (e.g. wife and children), makes it happen. End of.

The Money Thing

I never know what is going to touch off a blog post, let alone two. But this weekend it was definitely a five minute conversation in a grassy courtyard, between blossoming cherry trees, with two handsome men, one Polish, one Scottish, who didn't actually say that much. Our topic was this funny "How to Win Women" clip on Spotify, which I actually never saw, and I went smack into Auntie Seraphic mode. Dedicate an hour every day to something, and you become it. Believe ME. Let's just say they didn't have the chance to say much.

But one of them did say something, or maybe one or the other just thought it and I read his mind. I can't remember, and at any rate he didn't get very far, because although he said or thought it in the most general and polite way, the concept was "Money."

In a split second I thought about the hundreds of my readers, most working madly at school or at jobs or at careers, most paying their own bills, most longing for male company, for a man who would make them laugh and meet them at the airport at the end of a business trip.

"Women don't care about a man's money," I trumpeted. "We don't really care how much a man makes! We have our own money! We have our own jobs! We don't need men for money. We choose men for their looks. MEN ARE A LUXURY GOOD!"

That last sounded really great until I thought about how that might sound to someone like, you know, John Paul II.

"Don't tell anyone in Poland I said that," said I hastily to the Polish one.

Okay, so men are not a luxury good. They are our brothers, our spiritual spouses in "unity in two" (see Mulieris Dignitatem), our friends, our companions and co-creators of the future. And thus they are so much more to us than a source of income I do not even know where to begin.

"Of course women want men to work," I said. "Men need work for self-respect. But it is not about money."

Neither of them pointed out that my unusual and comfortable if simple lifestyle is not being supported by my meager Catholic writer's earnings but by my heritage sector husband, which was prudent of them. It's never a good idea to suggest to your hostess that she married for money although, actually, people constantly suggest that I married B.A. for the Historical House. I did not marry B.A. for the Historical House although I am awfully fond of the Historical House, which is a good thing, as the Historical House is the focus of my husband's career. It's like loving Christendom College when your husband is a professor there.

Career. Work. And, really, what adult Catholic Single woman really cares what work an attractive man does as long as he is doing it, he enjoys it, it isn't evil and it makes him independent? Yes, a young women who anticipates having a houseful of kids is going to ponder how she and a potential husband are going to best support those kids, but the majority of women are not thinking, "Oh wow. I just want a guy to pay for my Gucci handbags." I mean, hello?

Now, I admit there are probably some women out there who really do think of men as sources of Gucci handbags. My former housemate Jonathan swore up and down that women in the bars and clubs of Boston would crane their necks to have a look at his watch or go to some lengths to have a look at the label of his coat. He also claimed women sometimes ask complete strangers what kind of car they drive. It had never occurred to me in my life to do that, so eventually I asked a man what kind of car he drove, and he said "Whichever one is available", which I thought supremely clever.

I am trying to see life from the perspective of women who go to bars and try to figure out which men are earning a lot of money. For some reason, all I can think of is Margaret Thatcher supposedly saying that anyone who takes the bus after age 40 is a loser, or whatever she said that makes Scottish bus-takers and bicyclists so mad. I suppose these label-reading women might be trying to separate the men who have embraced what they think is adult life from the men who are content to coast through life as perpetual teenagers. And young men starting off in their careers tend to buy shiny toys like cars, watches and handsome overcoats. So I can well imagine a woman scanning a man trying to impress her in a bar and thinking "So where are your shiny toys, then?"

But, yes, I admit there are women who are looking for walking cash machines, although I don't think I know any personally. And I know a lot of single women. These are women who go to church. They have jobs. They don't usually go to bars, and if they do, they are surrounded by female friends. Most have put in a lot of time and work to get degrees or certification, and those who think they won't work after marriage think this will be because they have babies to tend. They have been told since they were old enough to grasp the concept that women SHOULD work outside the home, and that women SHOULD earn money, and it is actually very difficult for many contemporary educated women to grasp the concept that--as Saint Edith Stein wrote--women shouldn't HAVE to work outside the home. ("Family wage? Whaaaa-?") These are good women who are interested in men for themselves, not for their money.

In short, as long as a man has work, work he likes, or a job he doesn't like but he's willing to work at it until he can get work he likes better, then as far as money goes, he is marriage material. He is marriage material because getting and keeping a job, or working for himself, shows character,maturity and interest in life.

Conversely, a guy who sits around all day, not working, not studying, not doing something constructive (think the Hugh Grant character in About a Boy), is NOT marriage material, no matter how big his trust fund or personal wealth. But I suppose he will not go wanting for female companionship because he can always go and flash his watch at girls in bars, hopefully attracting only the ones he deserves.

As a favour to our brothers/spiritual spouses/co-creators of the future of the world, would you kindly write in the combox exactly WHAT it is you hope the right one will add to your life (if you do)? Anonymous comments will be, as usual, deleted.

Aktualizacja : To jest najnowszy wywiad ze mną: "Single nigdy nie są samotni".

Auntie Seraphic & Wedding Bell Hell

(Letter entirely rewritten for the sake of prudence.)

Dear Auntie Seraphic,

A girl I have always considered my best friend has gotten engaged. Sadly, I found out only because she sent a mass text to all her friends, including me, and then put the news on Facebook.

It is true we haven't been as close for a year or so, but we have always been like sisters. I am so hurt that she told me her news in such an impersonal way. I'm devastated.

This is not at all about jealousy over her being engaged. I'm reconciled, if not happy, about the fact that there is no man in my life. And I haven't even met her fiance.

How can I tell her, in a Christ-like fashion, how much she has hurt me? Of course I don't want to jeopardize the friendship, but I really am so disappointed and feel so rejected.

Sincerely,
Wedding Bell Hell


Dear Wedding Bell Hell,

I write this hoping that you have not done anything yet. St. Ignatius of Loyola wrote that we should never make an important decision when we are in a state of desolation, and you sound rather desolate to me!

It sounds like your friend was so excited about being engaged that she wants to tell the whole wide world at once. I hope she remembered that she and her fiance were supposed to tell their own parents first, before they texted, tweeted and facebooked the universe. I am sure her electronic methods were not a slight on you but merely a symptom of her being engaged going straight to her head.

She has now entered one of the most stressful and emotional periods of a woman's life: planning a wedding is absolutely fraught with hurt feelings, parental tantrums, pushy salesladies, sulky friends, helpless grooms and hysterical brides.

People will second-guess what she wants over and over again. The last thing she needs is a showdown with good friends over how she chose to share her happy news. If you send her any kind of reproach right now, yes, you will definitely jeopardize the friendship.

Her text does not trouble me as much as the fact that you have not met her fiance. It seems odd that such a close friend would not have met him before things got really serious. (Perhaps you two live far apart now?) I suggest that you send her a text or email back saying "I am so happy for you! I'm dying to meet the lucky man! When can we all meet up?"

As for jealousy, there is nothing like a friend getting engaged to make the other Single girls go into a short tizzy.

First of all, when a friend gets engaged, things are now different and always shall be. Her fiance is now her best friend, and that's the way it has to be. Second, as happy as we are for our friends, if we are Single, the thought lurks in the back of our minds, "What about ME?!" This thought makes us feel guilty and selfish, but as long as we don't say it to the bride, it shouldn't. It is perfectly normal, but unless we* acknowledge it to ourselves, we don't understand why we feel so crazy.

My advice is to sort out for yourself (in private) everything you feel hurt about, let go your unhappy feelings about how she chose to tell her news, and to signal that you want to continue the friendship by sending her best wishes and your hopes to meet her husband-to-be.

I don't think Christ ever did tell people how much they hurt Him, so I can't imagine how anyone would do that in a Christ-like way. I am very sure that He would like His fellow Singles to be protective of and kind to brides, though, as the first miracle He ever performed was at a wedding, and He did it so that that the wedding party would not be embarrassed before their guests.

I hope this is helpful.

Grace and peace,
Seraphic

*I say "we" because I experience something similar when I hear the news that a friend is expecting a baby.

***
It is such a fun conversation, the revelation that a friend is getting married, that I cherish very much the memory of one girl telling me in person. I have only one such memory, and I simply don't remember how I went about telling my own friends I was getting married. It couldn't have been by text because I didn't own a mobile phone at the time. I bet it was mostly over the phone--and Facebook.


Update: I stopped playing these meme games long ago, but here's a link to a Single's blog.