Catholic Girl Desperately Seeking Her Soulmate

What Happens When Life, the Universe, and Possibly God Himself Disagrees With Your Masterplan

My sensitivity reader, Hal says I have written some things here that sound contentious and harsh. He says I need to soften and layer my essay. The temptation to accept his suggestions is hard to ignore.

But I think I’m just going to trust the emotional intelligence of the people reading this. I’m not in the habit of going full-on Ex Cathedra with my opinions, don’t mind leaving room for ambiguity and nuance, and open to comments if you disagree. Or if you agree. Or in-between. Or whatever. Let me know your thoughts, I’d be delighted to hear them.

I’ve already done more for political correctness than I’d originally planned, and that was only under duress from Hal.

What Is a Woman?

Growing up in a deeply faithful Catholic household, I was only ever prepared for marriage and motherhood.

Then I spent my young adult years feeling like a failure because for many years, relationships just never happened for me. It felt like guys liked me very much as a person but not romantically. That just never seemed to even cross their minds.

It was very hard to be forced into re-evaluating my purpose from wife and mother to – I had no idea what. It only occurred to me way into my thirties that I even should.

I was not only never prepared for anything else, but the only valid purpose for us women in the Church seemed to be as wife and mother. While in the Church (meant here in the more extended sense, including Protestant denominations) the number of single women seemed to grow exponentially.

Don’t get me wrong, I really did want that life. It was in fact all I wanted.

My two sisters both got married and started having children. I didn’t.

Of course, there was a very clear requirement, which in terms of the human factor made it a whole lot more complicated. I wanted to marry a man who loved Jesus. And the market was not exactly flooded with that kind of candidate.

Purpose

Our parents, the Church, just had no answers. New teachings about “the gift of singleness” emerged, mostly written by married people. Needless to say, they had no idea!

I remember teachings that suggested that our purpose was basically to serve married couples, helping them with their babies so they could go out on “date nights”.

In the meantime, we were supposed to wait for God’s timing and provision, in my firm opinion a wildly unbiblical idea, which is one concept I have a lot of problems with anyway. (I’m sure I’ll come to that in another essay at some point.)

I heard my Dad regularly ranting about single women pursuing a career and he didn’t even hear me when I told him that I don’t know any single women who wouldn’t much rather be married and raising children. And this was true not only in religious circles but among the many non-religious friends I had. More and more single women each year, fewer and fewer of them getting married.

I’m sure there were women out there who didn’t want to, but they were still the minority at the time. This was true not just about religious folks, lots of ladies out there struggled the same, though obviously for very different reasons.

(An interesting flashback here, though: when I was around sixteen, a [female] teacher asked the class what we thought our purpose was in Life. I said Motherhood. Everyone laughed, including the teacher. Then the teacher asked me, how many children I wanted. I said at least four. They all laughed some more and made comments about the economic situation and the financial viability of a large family.)

The world has changed a great deal since then, which I will expand on a bit further down. But later in life, having met them since at school reunions, I know that they all pretty clearly made it a very significant purpose in their lives to have a family. Maybe not with four kids, but the trend remained: girls wanted to get married and raise children.

Social Engineering

What I have learned over the years is that much of the single, career-focused woman phenomenon is socially engineered. I’m not saying that it doesn’t exist, I’m saying that it’s nowhere near as much of a “phenomenon” as we are made to believe.

What we are being fed by the media is full of the products of conscious efforts to shape society, to veer it in a certain direction.

Much of the “independent, career-minded woman” image comes from these efforts. It was one of the first steps in getting to where we are now with arguments about whether physically male bodied people should be allowed into women’s spaces. No-one would have taken this seriously at the time, I wager not even trans people.

This had to start somewhere. You could never have pulled it off without serious prep work, spanning decades.

It had to start with a society where you don’t even need to have any feeling of any kind for each other to be “doing it”. Where saying “I love you” to each other after several months of sleeping together and genuinely caring about each other is a huge, traumatic event, possibly a deal breaker. This was the narrative fed to us in hugely popular shows such as Friends, where Chandler almost fainted in panic after he accidentally said “I love you” to Monica.

And of course the media trends did become wide-spread reality. But what am I talking? This all started in the 60s with the hippies and “free love” and it was well on its way by the time I was twenty.

By the time I was in my teens, wearing whatever you wanted, or close to nothing if it pleased you, had been completely accepted for decades.

These new trends were rammed down our throats every day and we happily gobbled them up and laughed along.

But don’t forget that many of us were forced into this.

I was forty-two when eventually I got married. The Church doesn’t accept IVF so babies never happened to me.

Fun fact: About a month into our relationship with my now husband, I remembered that scene in Friends. The one where Chandler blurts out the L word and panics. And I thought to myself yes, this actually is scary but if it’s a deal-breaker, I don’t want to drag this out until it becomes a heart-breaker, so I’m just going to risk it. We were at Heathrow, I was flying out to be with my family for Christmas. And I said to him: “I think I’m falling in love with you.”

The Failure and The Bitch

Although I never denied that I would have wanted otherwise, I have learned over the years that it’s sometimes much easier to be the “ice cold careerist bitch” than to admit that I might possibly be a failure. Because according to everything I learned as a child and a young person, that’s what I am.

At 55 this year, I am still rewiring my mind and heart around the whole topic of womanhood.

And then don’t even get me started on how inadequately we’ve been prepared for marriage!

Spoiler: That day thirteen years ago at Heathrow, I internally cringed and thought, this is it, now he’s going to break up with me.

What I didn’t expect was the smile of utter joy on his face.