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.

Auntie Seraphic & Confused-Clueless II

This is the email I received in response to the answer I posted yesterday, and my response to that. Again, I will end with a few general observations

Dear Auntie Seraphic, 

You are so lovely. Thank you for responding to my msg! You are correct: I am 20 now but was 19 at the time when I was with him. He is 2- now and, yes, I know, we're both young.

Yes, I have gone to confession. That confession was very painful for me, but I needed it. It was freeing. Our faith is so beautiful! But it's been almost a year, and I still haven't forgiven myself, and it just kills me. I look at myself with such disgust sometimes, and I can't help but give in to the tears... 

I completely hear you about not telling my friends every detail about our relationship, and yes I honestly do feel like they treat it as a soap opera! "Oh! What does [C-C] have to say about [Scooter] today". And not really interested in why I'm really confiding in them. I do owe it to him to keep things confidential, but it wasn't my intent at all to betray him, I'm just desperately searching for words of wisdom and guidance.

I like him--a lot--and that's why it's difficult to talk to him as a "friend" when so many times that "friend" line  is crossed in conversation. What I don't understand is how he can so easily forget about the past and pretend that nothing ever happened. It's extremely difficult for me to talk to him and push the thoughts of the past out of my head and focus on just being friends. We rushed things when I was [at my college town], but as he said "we don't have a choice" because we had to see if we could be something together. And if we didn't try then we'd never know.

Telling you what I like about him could go on for quite a while. He is wonderful to his mother, and his relationship with his sister makes my heart melt. He takes her to movies all the time, they're so close and they are X years apart! He protects her and that's so beautiful to me. A man who can honour the special women in his life to me shows that he will do the same for his future wife, hopefully. 

I don't know if it's just the age aspect, or because his relationship with his father isn't very good, but I can't seem to figure out why he's so afraid of commitment. What blows my mind is, who travels to another city that is a 20+ hour drive away to see a "friend" who is a girl? He's been seriously working on trying to come see me, and his effort has surprised me. Does this mean anything? I still feel like he has feelings, but is too afraid to admit it and deal with them.

As you said, would I still look forward to talking to him at parties? I would. I would be very interested to see how he continues to grow in his faith, and what his dreams are, and what he's accomplished. What I love about him is that he has hopes and dreams now, that aspect reminds me of myself. We compliment each other very well, he's a little quiet and I'm crazy and outgoing and love adventure where as he'd rather stay home and relax. But when we were together, he wouldn't say "I don't want to go downtown and explore!" He'd willingly come with me because he knew it would be amazing and it's something he's never experienced before. I opened his eyes to the city he's lived in for years. Which leads me to where he's from. 

He was born in [a poor, non-English-speaking country] and I know that he is worried about what my family's reaction would be if he were to come to see me. Half of my family is [Southern European], and that's the side that he is worried about, even though I don't see [his background] as an issue. My brother [might]. Ah, I just don't know. I shouldn't even be thinking about that, because he is simply not mine. Because we are "friends".

But now I feel a dilemma. I know God has told me that I haven't been patient, so I am trying. Especially right now, when [Scooter] and I haven't talked in X days, which is absolutely mind blowing because we haven't gone a day without talking. I know you're probably laughing but it really drives me nuts! He knows I've been thinking a lot lately. Maybe he's giving me space, or our mutual friend mentioned what was on my mind to him, and he's backed off now. Either way, I am waiting "patiently" for him to msg me... 

But I'm getting anxious because I am leaving for Brazil on Wednesday! For World Youth Day! I'm sure you've heard! :)  But anyway, hmmm I just am not sure if I should even bother to msg him before I leave. I'm really quite shocked that he hasn't msged me yet.

Well, there is another novel for you to read. I won't continue to bug you after this, though, but when I stumbled upon your blog I just thought, "Wow, this woman has lots of wonderful words, maybe she can offer me some advice."

I will seek more advice from the older friend I've been talking to because I really don't feel like there's anyone else who can help me, especially not my mother!

Thank you for listening to me! God bless you!

 ,

Confused & Clueless

Dear Confused & Clueless,

One more email from me. If God has forgiven you, and you know He has, for you have felt sincere contrition, made your confession and no doubt done the penance you were assigned, you must forgive yourself. At least, you must stop regretting whatever it was. Perhaps you are mourning your image of yourself as "super-pure." Well, very few human beings have ever been that "super-pure." In this case, what should comfort you is the humility of accepting that you are prone to sexual temptations like anyone else and have given in to some, and then the joy that God has forgiven you and doesn't care about that now. He just cares about you. If you feel that much disgust with yourself, I recommend you speak with a Catholic-positive counsellor or with a priest or nun who works with young people. 

The devil hates us, so he wants us to hate ourselves, too.  Then when we are tired of hating ourselves for our sexual sins, he tells us that it is the Church's fault for lying to us about sexual sin, and we should just get with the program and do whatever we think we want. This is why it is so important for you to let God's forgiveness fall on you like cooling rain on a blazing hot day.

The reason [Scooter] can forget about the past and pretend nothing happened is because he is a guy and guys are different about these things. He has probably been committing the sin of self-abuse since he was 14, so one more minor (as you did not actually have sex) sexual sin is not going to be that big a deal to his psyche. Also, society in general has never cared that much about the minor sexual sins of men. Society shrugs and says, "Well, that's men." It's women who (A) brood (B) have historically been judged harshly. Men often just do not get that women can't just do stuff and then completely forget about it, like they do.  

I don't think your feelings about [Scooter] are laughable at all. I think they are painful and they remind me of when I was 20. But I do encourage you to imagine putting all your hurt and worries in to a big bag and leaving them at the foot of the Cross for our Lord to take care of, while you get ready to go to Brazil. When you come home, it may be different, but right now the important thing is that you concentrate on the excitement of World Youth Day. It would be terrible if, when you are 30, someone asked you how World Youth Day in Brazil was and you said, "It was totally ruined for me because I spent all my time thinking about a guy and crying over him."

So don't message [Scooter] or try to contact him in any way before your trip. It could be that he himself needs time to retreat from all the drama--men often do that; have you ever heard of the "man cave"? Some men thrive on drama, but others get tired of it very swiftly. Meanwhile, what [Scooter] says about coming to see you means nothing. [Scooter] actually at your door means a lot. With men, it's most definitely their actions, not their words, that matter.

But, as I say, [Scooter] doesn't matter right now. Put him in a bag in your mind and put the bag at the foot of the Cross for our Lord to take care of, too! What matters is that you get everything you need together for World Youth Day in Brazil--your Portuguese phrasebook, your passport--and start to feel the excitement of this amazing opportunity in your life.

Grace and peace,

Seraphic

General Observations

1.  "We don't have a choice" is seducer talk, a line straight out of the movies. And there's a kind of man whose interest is sparked by the convenient fact that a woman is going away very soon.  

2.  The sentence "I owe it to him to keep things confidential" makes me uneasy. What I was talking about was preserving someone's modesty and dignity. Women are terribly hurt when the men we kiss make us the subject of locker room talk. Well, it's not nice to make men we kiss the subject of powder room talk, either. As far as I know, all my friends' babies were created through parthenogenesis. They got married or got some boyfriend; they got pregnant. There's some connection there. Hmm...

3. Making out is dangerous for women because it can make us feel more attached to a guy than is at all reasonable. Once upon a time, cavemen just picked cavewomen and dragged them off, and it strikes me that making out might have been nature's way of helping a cavewoman cope with having to have sexual congress with a complete stranger. Many a time women wail to one another, "What does she SEE in him?" Well, it might not be him. It might be the chemicals zipping and zapping around in her brain. 

4.  Guys are different. Guys are different. Guys are different. And they have really short memories regarding things they want to forget, like all those really sweet things they said last week that they honestly sort of believed at the time.   

5. A man can be great to his mother, aunts and sisters and treat all other women like trash. Although a man being nasty to his mother or sister is definitely a red flag, all his being nice to them proves is that he is nice to his mother and sister. Men in many cultures protect their own sisters while scheming to get their hands on other guys' sisters. This is why men have to have a little chat with each other before they court each other's sisters. Otherwise someone sometimes ends up dead.  

6. It's a bad sign when a man tells you he thinks your family's ethnic group is racist. It means he's racist against your family's ethnic group. It's also a convenient excuse for him not to see you. "It's not my fault I don't come to see you. It's your racist family's fault." Race and ethnicity stuff can make dating an even bigger headache, speaking as a mangia-cake maudite-anglais cracker gora dead-ghost Taig from Toronto.  Red flag.

7. Men are very much afraid of commitment to women they don't want to commit to. Occasionally men are also afraid of commitment to women they sort of do want to commit to, which is why mothers and sisters should yell at their sons and brothers about getting a move on and why girlfriends should try to make a good impression on mothers, sisters and even the nice old ladies pouring tea after Mass. However, men who are simply scared of marriage don't say "Just friends" to a girl they want as a long-term prospect.

8. There is no cure for unrequited love like international travel. And WYD must be the biggest meeting of Catholic marriage enthusiasts in the entire world.  

9. Any consensual sexual sin any of us committed privately a year ago, as a one-off, and have subsequently confessed, and has no long-term consequences, matters less now than the new scuff on our best shoes. As sexual, it is imprudent and maybe even unchaste to think about it, so don't. Almost nobody knows, and nobody cares. Every Christian knows you're a sinner. If Catholic, you say so during the Confiteor at Mass every Sunday.

10. I'm really sorry girls don't trust their mothers more. But this weird post-1919 division between mothers and daughters seems to be so widespread, all I can say is that it is so important for women in positions of authority or in the public eye to be good role models and to tell younger women the truth as it is, not as we wish it were. And younger women must train themselves to always ponder the questions "What is it?" "Is it really so?" and "Knowing that, what should I do?"  Many a time I have stopped myself from a slide into hysteria by reminding myself, "But I have no evidence. I do NOT know that."

Auntie Seraphic & Confused-Clueless I

I alluded to this post yesterday. There were two emails, so it's a two parter. Girls! It would be helpful if you put all the relevant details in your first email. For example, if you're stuck on a guy, it would be helpful to know why, beyond bonding hormone. 

Meanwhile, my unusual gentleness is because of her age.  I have some extra observations underneath for older readers. By the way, in Canada and the USA, "school" can mean "college" or "university."

Dear Auntie Seraphic, 

I hope you can offer some words of advice for me. I will summarize as best and as fast as I can.

Last year I left home and moved to a different city for school. Before heading back home I met a guy and he blew me away. He made me feel so loved, so wanted. He especially blew me away when he started to ask how I would feel if I fell in love with someone [with his career plans]...and then proceeded to discuss how I felt about marriage. 

I was very nervous about getting involved with him because I didn't want to start something and then leave to go back home. He convinced me to "just try this" because we'd never know if we didn't try and we both knew we were running out of time. Now, I am a young Catholic striving to be a saint and he is a young Protestant who struggled with controlling his desires as a young man. 

Eventually we got into a "relationship" and I compromised my values the night before I left to come back home. Thankfully the good Lord saved me, and we did not go as far as having sex, but I still felt like something was taken from me that I can now never get back again. 

He came with me to the airport and we said our teary-eyed goodbyes, thinking that in our hearts, this wouldn't be the last time we'd see each other. We continued to work on our relationship when I arrived home, but we struggled to keep it together. It fell apart one night when I had told him that I had a really deep conversation with my girl friends about what had happened the night before and he got angry and he was hurt. He felt so ashamed and he felt so guilty that my friends now looked at me different and were not happy with my choices. He started to push me away and it all fell apart. 

He ended communication very abruptly but somehow we'd get back into talking, then it would fall apart and come Christmas Day, I sent him a msg and he never responded. From then on, I was disappointed especially because he didn't have the decency to msg me Merry Christmas.

I'm sorry this is a novel, I'm just trying to grab all the important pieces.

After the many times my friends picked me up off the floor and told me he wasn't worth my time..and all the times I tried to hide when I was thinking about him out of fear of being scolded by my friends, I struggled to push him out of my mind. [But then a] month ago,  I received a msg from him. I proceeded to get text after text after text from not only him, but from [the friend who introduced us] saying "u just gotta talk to him, he won't shut up about u, tonight pushed me over the edge, he was crying because he misses u so much". 

I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to think, or say, so I didn't do anything. I let him continue to pour out his 16 apologies and [I messaged him] 2 days later. I didn't know why he was back, I was angry and confused why God has let him come back into my life and distract me. 

I thought, maybe we are supposed to be together, but I wasn't patient in the beginning, so now I am meant to learn patience,  something I struggle with every day.  Now we've been talking and trying to work on the "getting to know one another" that we had missed completely in the beginning. We have skyped numerous times and had some serious discussions.. And I feel torn now because my feelings for him are not just of that of a friends. They are more than that and its hard for me to push those aside and act as if we never had anything in the past. I am confused by what I am supposed to do because he says he just wants to be friends, and he hasn't come back to "get back together", or "be my boyfriend."

Deep down, from our discussions and our skype conversations, I truly feel he's bluffing. I feel he's scared of the feelings he has for me and isn't ready for commitment which I know he's said before.

For the past couple of days I have been seriously discerning cutting off all communication with him because I can't "just be friends" with him. I talked to my friend, the one who introduced us, and I felt I had made up my mind, and the decision was to cut him off. With that in mind, I went to the nearest chapel, and knelt before the Lord with the hopes of guidance and direction from Him, asking how I can go about cutting him off in a nice way. But instead what I received as my knees hit the floor is "you haven't been patient" and the tears just fell from my eyes. I was so overcome by emotion out of pure confusion. I felt I had made up my mind! And was thinking clearly! Yet the Lord gave me an answer of what I would have normally been ecstatic to hear!

Now, I am asking for your thoughts on the matter. I know that I care about him, truly a lot. I have thought about marriage, and I can see myself with him, but I try to push that out of my head in fear of getting hurt and being vulnerable.

Please help!

Confused and Clueless 

Dear Confused and Clueless, 

If you just left for college last year, you are probably only 19 or 20 now. You probably won't get this now, but from an adult perspective, you are very young and vulnerable and, above all, deserve forgiveness* for your sins a hundred times faster than a thirty-year-old does. It is very hard to be between the ages of 17 and 25. Your powers of reasoning, prudence and patience have not caught up yet with your desires, particularly the desire to feel loved by a man.

If you have gone to confession, what you did the night before you went home doesn't really matter. (If you haven't gone to confession, go to a good priest for it, and let that be an end to it.) All it was, from a practical point of view, was evidence that you are a human adult female who felt very sexually attracted to that human adult male. Sexual desire is one of the most powerful forces on earth, which is why human beings have created a lot of taboos and disciplines to fence it in, to help us obey God's request/command/invitation to us not to have sex outside of the one safe, just place for it: marriage.    

During this relationship, you have learned many important lessons that will stay with you for life. One is that when you have an intense experience, you want to tell all your friends about it. Another is that when you do, the other person involved may feel betrayed. (And so either you tell your friends, and don't tell the man you told your friends, or you don't tell your friends. Many married women disappoint our Single friends by suddenly clamming up when we get married. It's because our loyalty to our husbands now outweighs our need to connect with our female friends.)

The question for me is if this man is your friend. You are worried about being hurt and vulnerable, but you are hurting and vulnerable already, so leave that aside for now. A man-friend is not someone you look at and say, "Will this guy hurt me and how bad?" A man-friend is someone you look at and feel happiness because he is there. You think, "I like this man! He's a straight-up guy! I'd feel proud if I walked into a room arm in arm with him, and people thought he was my boyfriend." A boyfriend, or a husband, should also be your friend. 

What I am not getting from your email is what you LIKE about this guy. I get that you are overwhelmingly sexually attracted to him, and I get that--like most women---you want a great man to love you,  but what I don't get is whether or not you LIKE this man, so that even if you were married to someone else, you would still look forward to talking to him at parties. 

If the Lord tells you you need to be more patient, I won't contradict! And I think you need to be more patient, especially with yourself, because you are so young. He is very young, too, and he probably has many of the same worries and fears you do. He's a guy, so he's different, but that doesn't make him from an entirely different species. He's confused, clueless and vulnerable, too.

I also think you should stop talking about your business with your same-age friends. At your age, your friends will find it all an absorbing soap opera, with you as heroine and him as villain, but if you want to have a kindly, mature, Christian friendship/relationship with this man, you must develop a comparable loyalty to him. If he is not abusive in any way, you owe him the dignity of discretion and privacy. Yes, you may need advice and guidance, but I strongly suggest discussing anything that needs to be discussed about your boyfriend with him, first of all, and then perhaps with an adult mentor, like your mother or favourite aunt or priest.  

I hope this is helpful. 

Grace and peace,

Seraphic

Observations for Older Readers

1. Beware the man who pressures you into "a relationship" (and what does that mean, anyway?) or anything else because you are "running out of time." Time is the one thing you are not running out of. You have all eternity before you, and the little bit you have on this earth determines how the rest of it plays out. 

2. If you don't want the time, don't do the crime. Of course you want to do sexy stuff with sexy people. But you don't because you would feel simply terrible afterwards. You know Jiminy Cricket will sit on your shoulder yelling, "Bad Pinocchio! Bad!" If Catholic, you will have to go to a confessional and tell it all to a man behind a mesh screen who will say such kind and gentle things you may feel even worse and cry. This is better, however, than telling yourself you HAVE BEEN ROBBED. See #3.

3. You can get everything except virginity back. If you lose Grace, you can at least humbly ask for it back, and if you are really sorry and God is merciful, you will get it back. If you lose face, you can get that back, too. If you lose your dignity, you can get that back in time. Virginity, however, is a historical state, and you can't rewrite history. If you make a free act of will to have sex and you have it, hey presto, you're not a virgin anymore. (St. Augustine ruled that rape of a virgin does not entail loss of her virginity, as it does not include her free act of will. Of course it is still an atrocious thing to happen and to recover from, and rapists used to be executed.) 

Make sure you understand the difference between Grace, face, dignity and virginity. And stop using the word "virginity" for every new experience. I once broke a date with a young man because he said we were losing our rock concert virginity together. And twenty years later I was bereft of speech when another young man told me he had lost his "black pudding virginity." Stop this at once, young people!   

Incidentally, if you do something of your own free will, you were not robbed. Nothing was taken from you. You did it yourself. Let us take responsibility for the stuff we do, and call a spade a spade, and a sin a sin, and physical acts deliberately leading to sexual excitement of both parties physical acts deliberately leading to sexual excitement of both parties. Outside of marriage, these are sins.

4. Keep it classy. You did it. You feel bad. Now you don't love yourself, so you reach out to others to see if they will still love you if they too know What You Did. So you tell all your friends, and they are, like, OMG! They are all embarrassed and, like, "u gotta dump this bf, grfrd!" and when they meet up they discuss What You Did in exasperated undertones. 

Your plan to repair your self-esteem with the esteem of your posse has backfired. You are angry and hurt, and misery loves company, so who better to share in your anger and hurt than your Partner in Crime? And how better to make him angry and hurt than to tell him you told all your friends What You and He Did and how they let you down.

Sadly, this passive-aggression will backfire, too, because if there is anything men hate, it is losing face and being told to feel guilty. If you want to hang onto the delicious morsel guy whose charms you savoured succumbed to yesterday, don't yell at him about it today. Just go to confession and don't put yourself in a position where you do it again. Tell the truth, which is that it felt great at the time, but you're not doing that again because you don't want to go to hell. ("God doesn't send people to hell for stuff like that." "Yes, He does. It's in the Bible. Anyway, it's not Him sending, it's us choosing, and I need you to respect my sexual choices if this is going to work out.")  

If this is possible, do NOT tell your friends What You Did. I realize how hard this is, so if you really can't help it because you feel that bad, then pick the smartest, quietest one. If you tell two, pick two who don't know each other, so they can't discuss it. 

5. Do not tell his friend your secret plans regarding him because his friend will tell him.  Guaranteed. And then he will be angry and hurt and withdraw and say he just wants to be friends and complain about women to his friends and say we are good for only one thing, etc., etc. Bless his little heart.

6. If he says he just wants to be friends, it's over.  Keep it classy. Say "Okay, if that's what you want" and then don't text him first ever again. If you find his facebook updates seriously irritating, wait a month and then subtly defriend him. Don't discuss him. Don't skype him. Don't write to him. Don't for a minute think he was the ONE and you have lost all chance of earthly happiness and are doomed to sexual frustration and eventual insanity and death surrounded by mangy cats. Rewrite the script by saying, "Ah! He was one of the really hot ones," when your friends say his name. Wink and smile.

*I just heard Calvinist Cath have a heart attack, so I concede that it is theologically risqué to suggest anyone deserves God's forgiveness for his/her sins. What I mean is that the young are less culpable for their sexual sins than the old because they are untried soldiers in the war against sin, not battle-hardened veterans comme moi.

Aunt Seraphic Defends Discretion

Hello, dear poppets! I have returned from my week's holiday in England, where I had no internet access. It was the longest time I had gone without internet access in over ten years. Instead of going crazy, I constantly wrote in my diary while people around me looked uneasy and asked if I were going to write a book about the trip. Ah ha ha ha!

Occasionally I thought about my last post and whether it had been totally responsible and whether anyone would be as mad as a snake that I didn't open the combox to cheers and rebuttals. However, there is always my email and I came back to many emails. If I haven't answered yours already, send it again. I deleted a lot of stuff--accidental bank drafts worth half a million pounds and all that sort of thing.

Someone wrote a very intelligent email about my parting remarks about not publicizing your sexual sins. To sum up, she suggested A) that you can use them to warn fellow women and B) that telling a suitor about some murky action or episode in your past was a good way of testing whether or not he is an angry, judgmental type. If he ditches you for your all-too-human sexual peccadilloes--"Begone, Scarlet Woman, fallen spawn of Satan!"--that just goes to show you're better off without him.

Well, maybe. I think there are safer and faster ways of determining if a man is an angry, judgmental type than telling him your deepest, darkest secrets. And also there are some very good people, very good and gentle people, who just cannot handle your deepest, darkest secrets and so it is best that you not burden them with them unless or until you absolutely have to, e.g. your dearest friend come weeping to you about something terrible she or he did that you have done, too. Oh, and to foil the machinations of blackmailers.    

This is a nasty world, and even (or especially) religious enemies will try to take you down via your sex life, real or imagined. I will not dignify (or endanger) him with a link, but one of our brothers in Christ, who condemned me as a feminist heretic in trad's clothing, salivated over my blog, looking for clues that Auntie S is not as pure as the driven snow. He published his excited suspicions on his soi-disant Catholic blog. I was pretty mad, but I would have been a lot madder had I not a husband and at least one brother who now wants to go to his house and thump him.

Here is my response to your fellow reader:

Dear Reader,

Your past is your past. You own it, and you can tell people about it or not as you choose. Many women, however, think they owe the world--or men they date--complete access to their past in a spirit of "keeping it real." So first of all, I am trying to encourage young women to keep what is theirs, theirs. 

Second, people do judge us on our past sins, even sincere Christians who know they shouldn't judge. (The world judges mercilessly.) We have no control over what people choose to do with the information we give them, or how they feel about us once they have it.  [So we really do have to be careful.]

Third, men are extremely visual, and many (most?) of them have a hair-trigger sexual imagination. They simply do not like to imagine their sweethearts with other men, but they almost can't help it, if they are told about it. This is too bad, and I hope they can get over this without at the same time losing their instinctual protectiveness for women they admire. I think "getting over it" most probable in a man who has discovered himself head-over-heels in love with a woman and couldn't care less what she has done in the past, as long as she loves him back. 

Fourth, this tendency of being disturbed by the idea of women-one-knows as sexual sinner is going to be most likely among religiously conservative men, especially if they grow up fearing and resenting sexual sin. Pro-lifer activists I have met have been like that,  probably because sexual sin leads so often to ab*rti*n. I have never forgotten an otherwise very sweet pro-life teenage colleague, who adored both his mother and his sister, saying to me, "There's a difference between a slut and a Sunday School teacher." 

Fifth, I firmly believe men take their cues about a woman from other men. Men who hear Sally-Sue say "Men use me and dump me" are most likely to conclude (if only subconsciously) "Sally-Sue is the kind of woman we use and dump." But men who hear Sally-Sue say "Men treat me like a princess; they're so nice to me!" are most likely to conclude, "Sally-Sue is the kind of woman we compete for." 

For all these reasons, I think it is dangerous for a Single woman--and possibly a married woman, too--to use episodes of sexual sin from her life as a teaching method. It strikes me that it would be much safer if she were to write a novel about it. My guess is that many a truth-embracing novel has inspired women not to make the same mistakes as the heroine. Heck, I have never touched cocaine because of a character who died the first time she tried it in the Sweet Valley High stories. 

There are safer ways to test whether or not a man is a judgmental son-of-a-gun. [Just listen to how he talks about others, particularly women.] And, of course, the longer you know a man, the more likely he is to see you as you and not as his image of you-- angel, feminist, devil, or whomever--so the longer  a woman can hold off sharing the darker spots of her past the better. 

And this might indeed take discipline because for whatever reason, many women seem to want to confess to the men they love, either to test the bounds of their unconditional love (which I am not sure men have for their wives, anyway--their mothers, yes), or to feel "forgiven." However, only God can give that kind of all-healing forgiveness; we cannot find it in men. 

I hope this is a helpful explanation of my "don't tell" policy!

Grace and peace,

Seraphic 

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.

Distinguishing Loving from Fancying

People learning North American English must be so confused by our poverty of words concerning matters of the heart. When I was a school child, we expressed other-focused longings with the word "like", as in "So do you like him?" or "You like Aaron! You like Aaron!" or, cynically, "So who do YOU like?" as if every ten year old girl must by definition have a crush on someone.

This could be confusing, for of course we like many things, which means to say, we associate many things with goodness or pleasure. I like Georgian architecture, for example. I like the Scottish Poetry Library. I like the poetry of Zbigniew Herbert. I like cats. I like our nearest neighbours.

Fortunately, the British, who invented English, have a more specific word for other-focused longings and it is "fancy," as in "So do you fancy him?" 

This is a terribly useful word for it always has the connotation of want. You can also say "I fancy a cup of tea" and it means the same thing. You want something. You fancy the cup of tea because it will relax or warm you, and you fancy the new cashier in the supermarket because he is just so tasty-looking. 

Back my good theology school, which I discovered after the fact is considered rather "liberal", my ethics prof used to talk very solemnly and positively about "eros" and tell us concupiscence doesn't mean what we think it means. He was a very good man, and I can imagine him discoursing for half an hour on the holiness of our erotic feelings for the new cashier in the supermarket. However, I think the holiness of our erotic feelings for the new cashier in the supermarket has the shelf-life of a cheesecake. To be honest, if we spend too long concentrating on the thrill we get from the new cashier, we are lusting after the new cashier. 

Lust is the least of the Seven Deadly Sins, but it is still a deadly sin because, even at its mildest, it can utterly cloud your reason. It can lead you to do all kinds of stupid things, including stick with a man who is really rotten to you, or who bores you senseless, because you love kissing him so much. Physical expression of affection, even if sincere affection is largely absent, can chemically/ psychologically glue a woman to someone. Sexual desire is like a freight train, and the only person who can stop it is the driver, through a massive and heroic act of will, plus Grace.

For the sake of happiness, fancying should not be confused with loving, and love of some sort should come before fancying. Definitely there should at least be liking, as in "I like him. He is kind to people and makes me laugh." I know many people who are kind to people and make me laugh, so I like many people. I want to be around them because being around them simply makes me feel comfortable and happy, and I hope God will reward them for their kindness in this world and the next.

Hoping God will reward someone in this world and the next can be defined as "desiring the good of the other" which is the Thomist definition of love. And I think it a measure of love when your desire for the greater good of the other is greater than your desire for any of your goods less than your eternal salvation. For example, many a spouse would lay down his life for his spouse, and many a parent her life for her children. (N.B.: The good of the other is never something forbidden by God.)

Family and friends make all kinds of sacrifices on behalf of those they love. A loving parent says "No" to her  12 year old daughter going to an unsupervised boy-girl party even if the daughter will shout "I hate you! I hate you!" and mean it. A loving 24 year old teacher says "No" to his 18 year old pupil who has a crush on him, not because he could get in trouble if he didn't, but because he does not want his 18 year old pupil to suffer psychological harm.* 

This is true even if the 24 year old teacher secretly fancies his 18 year old pupil and feels pretty wretched. Because, obviously, you can fancy someone and love them at the same time. When I met B.A., I already liked him because he was funny, and then I liked him because he was so kind to everyone, and then I fancied him, but didn't do anything about it, first, because he was A REGULAR READER, and second, because life has taught me it is infinitely better to be the recipient of the First Real Move myself than to make the First Real Move and third, I had just met him and relied upon prudence to safeguard my own good and his. 

The fancying part was not as important as the liking part and the loving part, and I love my regular readers just for being regular readers. Fancying B.A. only became important when I knew B.A. fancied me, and super-important when I knew B.A. loved me in a marry-me way because, really, you shouldn't marry anyone you don't fancy. 

However, our poor hypothetical 24 year old teacher is not in a position to marry his 18 year old pupil because, first of all, she is his pupil, second, she's only 18, and third, he's married already. 

Maybe I should have said that first. At any rate, our hypothetical 24 year old teacher is a good man, and loves both his pupil and his wife, and therefore desires their good. (And if he is a Christian, he desires the good of his salvation above all else.) The good of the pupil is not to get mixed up with him, and the good of his wife is to have a loyal husband. For the teacher to act on his feelings of fancy would be contrary to love. But as he loves, he doesn't. 

To recap some distinctions to help us all sort out how we feel and what is real:

LIKING: Admiration and wanting to be around something/someone just because it/he/she makes you smile and feel happy.

FANCYING: Wanting someone, or their image, for the erotic thrill even just thinking about them gives you.

LOVING: Desiring the other's good so sincerely that you would forgo many goods, including their company, in order to protect it.  

Obviously, when fancying is divorced from love, what we have--very quickly--is lust. And many people fancy those they don't even like, which is dangerous to reason. We do that all the time when we have a crush on someone we don't even know, like a film star, and just create a fantasy around him. 

It is actually quite terrible to be fancied by someone who doesn't know you or doesn't really want to know you as you really are, and wouldn't like you as you really are, but just creates a fantasy based on your image. Knowing that, I suppose we should all strive not to do that to others ourselves. 

The worst case scenario is marrying someone who thinks you are the fantasy image of you he has in his head because, believe me, a few months of marriage will defeat his every attempt to keep that fantasy alive. And then he will blame you, you fantasy-girl murderess!  

It's lovely to be married to someone who likes you. And it is horrible to be married to someone who doesn't like you. So let there be liking before fancying! And let us put love--love as Thomas defined it--before everything else.

Explaining Annulments

Thank you for your suggestions! I will try to get to them all this week and next, although the book ones are hard, as I do not have them. I think I should have a look, though, if they are causing damage.

In writing about love 'n' marriage stuff, I have a set of pet peeves. This reminds me of my total shock when I read a recent Polish review of Anielskie Single and it said AS was so old-fashioned it might not be practical. But never mind. I have a set of pet peeves and they are divorce, long engagements, shacking up and premarital sex. They are my pet peeves because whereas on the one hand these things seem practical, they create unhappiness, especially in the not infrequent situation in which one person loves more than the other.

In addition, that feeling of "Oh My Goodness This Person Is The Most Perfect Creature God Ever Made!!!!!!" lasts three years, tops, so it is better to get married to someone sooner rather than later, after ascertaining that this person has a very good character. (After three years, character is what you're left with, and at that point it's way easier to love a good man/woman than a bad one.) And, to be frank, nothing fixes a wedding date in Catholic circles like the absolute refusal to consummate the marriage before the ceremony. This has worked for six thousand years, and it still works now.

I am seriously off topic.

Today's topic is annulments, which reminded me of my pet peeves, for one of them is divorce. Now, I had a divorce, and I am grateful for it, so it seems quixotic that one of the primary motives of this blog is to stop y'all from getting divorced. The best way not to get to divorced is not to get married in the first place, if you are settling, or he is settling, or your character needs some preparatory work, or his character needs preparatory work. Meanwhile, I hate divorce when it arises from a confusion of erotic love, which is unstable, with marriage, which is permanent and upon which the family, the building block of society, rests. Sex is for marriage, not vice versa, if you see what I mean. Not that it isn't important to marriage because it usually is.

On Sunday one of my more tenderhearted luncheon guests almost had a seizure because I said divorce was not so serious when there are no children involved. I was a tad confused until I realized he was worried I might divorce B.A. on those grounds. But there are children involved: we share two nephews and a niece. Meanwhile, I'd have to be insane to divorce B.A. Really, I cannot imagine any free action more prejudicial to my interests.

I'm still off-topic, which is how to explain annulments to non-Catholics without them sneering at you. This sort of thing is best left to a canon lawyer, but I'll give it a shot. But this is strictly amateur hour, poppets. The more you like my blog, the more you must remember that I have zero teaching authority.

1. Christian marriage is a sacrament, which means that "it is an outward sign of inward grace, ordained by Jesus Christ, by which grace is give to our souls." (The Penny Catechism)

2. Not all marriages are sacramental, although Catholics respect these non-sacramental marriages, too, as part of natural law. It is fitting and part of human flourishing for a man and a woman to make a public declaration that they are choosing each other for life, to share the same bed and to have babies.

3. Marriage, however, particularly sacramental Christian marriage, is reliant on the disposition of both parties at the time of the marriage. Both parties have to have the capacity of fulfilling their vows. They have to be completely free. They can't be getting married just because they were frightened into it, e.g. one party threatened to commit suicide or the bride's brother threatened to murder the groom if he didn't. They can't be under intolerable pressure, e.g. the girl is pregnant. (If she is they have to swear up and down they would want to be married even if she weren't.) They have also to be free of addictions and vices that make fulfilling the marriage vows impossible. They also have to have the requisite maturity to fulfill the vows. Oh, and they have to consummate the marriage, too.

4. If a marriage is not contracted under the right circumstances, it may be a marriage in law, but it is not a sacramental marriage. And the Church, who is Keeper of the Keys to the Kingdom of Heaven, has the power both to bind and loose (Matthew 16:19). Only the Church has the authority to determine who is sacramentally married and who is not, and who is free to marry again. Catholics must always ask permission of the Church to marry. Catholics who are already married and want to get married again have to ask permission of the Church to marry. The Church will give this permission if the Church decides, given the necessary evidence, that the Catholic's marriage, though once recognized by civil law, is not sacramental.

5. Although the marriage tribunal (those people in the Church asked to examine the evidence) focuses on the dispositions of both parties at the time of the wedding, I suspect they are [personal point of view ahead] looking for evidence of Grace or lack thereof during the marriage. This is how I justify having to talk about my own married life to a complete stranger, a very elderly nun, and her tape recorder, which was traumatic.

[Personal theology ahead:]

If the marriage between Christians, right from the start, is characterized by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, the ability to put up with suffering, mildness, faith, modesty, freedom from addiction, and chastity, all of which are fruits of the Holy Spirit, it is--in my opinion--most definitely a sign that the Holy Spirit was involved, and therefore it is a sacramental marriage.

If, however, right from the start, the marriage is characterized by hatred, sorrow, fighting, impatience, cruelty, evil, despair in the face of suffering, harshness, doubt, immodesty, addictions--especially sexual--and inchastity, then I personally would go on a limb and say, "Hmm, you know. I think you may have grounds for an annulment."

Suffering is, as in life in general, a normal part of marriage, although abuse is not. For example, sex can feel really weird until you get used to it. Why this is not discussed more often is a mystery to me. It makes me sad to think of all the virgins who marry and then wonder why sex does not seem to be like it is in books and if there is something seriously wrong with them. Of course there isn't, poor lambs.  Sex is a learned skill, and neither spouse is supposed to learn it until he or she gets married, so obviously it could be awkward at first. And this holds true for second marriages, too, as everyone is different, and sex is deeply personal, and thus you have to relearn it per person. Nobody Catholic tells you that, either. In the first case, I had to read Doctor-freaking-Ruth, which to a former teenage pro-lifer was the equivalent of consulting Beelzebub.

Anyway, writing all this hurt my poor arm, so I hope it is helpful.

Note: A reader once asked what could have been done to prevent me having been needlessly traumatized by my annulment procedure. Leaving aside the idea that the trauma may have helped towards my eventual hoped-for sanctification, I would say that they should have told me in advance that I would have to answer extremely personal questions in writing, that my testimony would be recorded, and that although my interviewer would be an elderly nun, I should not feel it a crime against modesty to tell her intimate stuff as she, like an elderly priest, had already heard it all.  Also, there should have been the offer of  a laywoman annulment survivor to meet me after my interview, so I would not have had to cry by myself in the toilets.

That last sentence sounds very sad and pathetic, so I will comfort my tenderhearted readers by pointing out this happened fifteen years ago. I don't think it should happen to anyone else, however.

Note 2: Children. Children are not rendered "illegitimate" by annulments. Legitimacy applies to civil law, not church law. This who is legitimate and who is illegitimate stuff is now entirely the state's purview.  Occasionally adult children furious at their parents for divorcing and at the Church for seeming to bless their divorce with an annulment seethe that the Church has rendered them, the children, bastards. She hasn't. Whereas the children may have grounds for complaint, that ain't one of them.

Icky Female Cancers

If that post title doesn't scare the boys away, nothing will. But those boys should go away anyway, because some serious TMI follows.

This is another public service announcement to all ex-virgins reminding them that they should be checked out for cervical cancer on a regular basis. In Scotland women are recommended to pop into their local medical centre and get tested every two years. And as it has been two years, your poor auntie went in and got tested today.

Actually, the test, though uncomfortable, was not so bad. What is bad is cervical cancer, and I got a ring side seat to how nasty it can be when Hilary White went toe to toe with the horror, and I held her towel and water bottle for a round or two. In the end, Hilary had to have the dreaded major invasive surgery that saved--or has prolonged--her life. And I learned the importance of getting regular checks for cervical cancer.

Here is Cancer Research UK's wonderfully frightening webpage detailing the risk factors for cervical cancer. Note particularly the role of HPV. HPV, as I believe I have mentioned before, cannot be stopped by condoms. You'll notice that, I'm sure, in the link.

The admission that condoms don't stop all STDs always slays me because when I was a teenager AIDS burst onto the scene and the misleading term "safe sex" (later rather more honestly termed "safer sex") was born. "Safe sex" was all about condoms, touted as the solution to all of life's ills, except in the very, very small print. As condoms had no side-effects, the only people I know who cast doubt on condoms as the super-heroes of the Age of Aquarius were in the pro-life, pro-chastity movement.

Now, however, the people paid to take care of public health have started to explain in a little more detail why it is that all ex-virgin women--no matter if they have been wrapped in latex all their lives--are supposed to get checked for cervical cancer. But instead of suggesting a return to the sexual taboos that made some people miserable but kept them and others safe, they have come up with Gardasil. Gardasil may be all very well (and many people have their doubts about it), but maybe a little talk--or several little talks, sitcom episodes and rock songs--about how and why sex is much better left to grown-ups would be just as helpful.

Meanwhile, smoking is also a factor in cervical cancer. Why anyone smokes horrible cigarettes today is a mystery to me. Cigars and pipe tobacco are not great for your health, but at least I can understand why smokers go in for the flavour and buzz of good tobacco. But cigarettes are the low-grade potato chips of the tobacco world, so why women are willing to risk horrible deaths for them really amazes me.

Why I Do Not Heart Chastity Talks

Everybody who writes me letters should know that I do not like chastity talks. When I was a teenager, the chastity talks at life issues conference were always packed. Dozens of bright-eyed Catholic and Evangelical teenagers filled the room to listen to a heavily made-up Evangelical lady talk about sex---I mean, chastity. And, of course, since the American Evangelical tradition involves public "When I was a sinner...." confessions, we heard some deliciously gory details. We also heard some absolute codswallop.

I once read a chastity book, written by a priest, that said God might punish boys and girls who snogged (although he probably wrote "necked") in the back of cars by giving birth defects to their future children.  I think it was this book, which I read at twenty or so, that gave me my great distaste for chastity lectures. The fact that listening to chastity lectures is in itself a mild turn-on I merely thought was funny. I thought the chastity book was sick.

Oh, I should mention that I also got a chastity newsletter.  Like the paradoxical sexual thrill of chastity talks, it was rather funny. It gave helpful hints on chaste things you could do on dates, and included back massages. Hmm. Yes. Great idea. Not.

Another problem with chastity talks, one to which readers have alerted me, is that they tend to be over-optimistic about the extent to which women suffer from celibacy. Chastity speakers concentrate on making women understand how very, very, very difficult celibacy is for men, which is why we must make things easier for them by wearing denim sacks, etc. Chastity speakers focus less on how very, very, very difficult celibacy is for women, who "just want love", which makes the poor hormonally-crazed women think that there is something seriously wrong or unwomanly about them. There isn't. They're just human beings.

I was thinking yesterday about the expression "I'm not that kind of girl." I have never come across the expression "I'm not that kind of boy." While reading an Art of Manliness chastity talk, it occured to me that when men shout at each other about chastity and fidelity, they seem to assume that they're all that kind of boy. In reality, there are probably many men who are just not that tempted and toddle along quite happily, unless they hear that they are supposed to be raging hippopotami of lust and begin to worry that there is something seriously wrong or unmanly about them.

The myth that absolutely all men are raging hippopotami of lust can cause quite a lot of misery, especially to women who throw themselves in a hippopotamus's path, expecting wild thrills, and then open their eyes to discover the hippopotamus peacefully plodding about in the river, humming to itself. The women feel like unattractive morons, and well they might. But instead of apologizing for their folly, they throw rocks at the poor hippopotamus, who feels sad and wonder if there are any nice women left in the world, etc.

But most of the time sexual attraction is one of the most powerful non-lethal forces there is. It's amazing that something inside you can be as dangerous and potent as vodka or other drugs, but it really is. It can make you do all kinds of terribly stupid and unkind things, even if you are not "that kind of girl." Actually, newsflash, most of us would be "that kind of girl" under certain circumstances, at a certain age, with certain people. The greatest protector of chastity is humility, and the sooner we stop telling lies to ourselves about how wonderfully chaste we are, the better.

The other great protector of chastity is distance. The best and most effective way not to end up on the couch under someone with whom you have "great sexual chemistry" is to stay far, far away from him.   Saint Paul's advise was a terse "Flee fornication." The second word, which sounds so nasty said out loud, will no doubt make you all flinch, so just concentrate on the word "Flee." Saint Paul didn't say, "Have a heart to heart chat" or "Sit on another couch."  He said flee. So flee.

We all hate the word fornication, particularly when it is associated with our beautiful selves, and I am using it deliberately so that nobody gets any illicit thrills from this post which, I see, has turned into a chastity talk. Usually fornication is not what we want from the incredibly cute guys we (you, anyway, since I'm hors de combat) meet at parties. No, the most we want, at this stage, is a bit of a snog.

Well, I am not an anti-snog hardliner although there was a Church ruling in the fifteenth century or something like that that deliberate snogging outside of marriage was a mortal sin. The way the chastity books used to put it was "deliberate excitation of the sexual appetites" which is actually a very sexy phrase in itself, shame on them.  But if a friend of mine got drunk and snogged some pretty girl or cute guy at a party and then called me up the next morning in floods of tears of remorse, I would say, "Ah, well. What are you gonna do?"

I also shrug at marriage-track Catholics and engaged couples snogging because sexual attraction goes to the head like vodka, and what are you gonna do? If they must snog, let them snog, but let them do it in private and not tell me about it.

However, constantly meeting up for a snog with some guy who is just not good marriage material for you, either because you don't know him that well, or he's the wrong religion, or he's used to fornication as an "ordinary, normal part of every relationship", is rather more serious in my book. It's almost as stupid as drinking-and-driving. It's one heck of a risk to take. And anyone who writes to me about how to manage such a relationship without the snogging is not going to get a satisfactory answer from little Auntie, because all I will say, with Saint Paul, is "Flee fornication." Snogging really is a gateway drug. Avoid it if you can.
 
Oh, and the last thing I will say is that the best way to stop feeling terrible about living an admirable life of chastity in continence is to stop thinking about sex stuff at all. And that includes chastity stuff. Don't read about all the things you're not doing and how delicious wicked they are. Don't read trashy romance novels. Don't watch trashy movies. Don't read trashy blogs.

By the way, nobody has told me yet: is any of the Theology of the Body stuff about sports, breathing, running, dancing, eating, singing, or any kind of movement not directly involved in the unitive-and-procreative-aspects-of-marriage? Because if it is, I may actually get around to reading it. Otherwise, zzzz.

Update: No time like the present to mention that one of my readers was pressured into much sexy talk and making out by a professional chastity speaker. Just because a boy talks about sex, I mean, chastity all the time and enjoys the applause doesn't mean he is automatically and immediately to be trusted.