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.

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.

The Bedsit

Once upon a time I lived in a big room on the second floor (first floor we would say in Europe) of a very big early 20th century house that had been turned into flats. My landlady sold mutual funds; keenly interested in never having to be economically independent on anyone else ever again, I routinely bought mutual funds. I was rather susceptible to sales pitches as I had just done the unthinkable and run away from my then-husband. My landlady was a shark.

The big room came with a chest of drawers/cabinet. I soon added a futon that served as a sofa by day and as a couch by night. There must have been a table, for I remember sitting up at night before the big bay window conjugating verbs. My work ethic was admirable: I reviewed three years of high school Italian, first year university Latin, even first year Greek. I had neither a television nor a computer.

I also got up early every morning and went to the gym. Then I went to work. Then I went home to have supper before going down, three nights a week, to the boxing club. It was open only three nights a week. If it had been open five or six nights a week, I probably would have gone five or six nights a week.

On Sundays I went to Mass. I could go to Mass at only one church--the church of the priest who had said "Honey, get out when you're young"--without feeling like I wanted to kill somebody afterwards. The closest evening Mass was in a low-ceilinged church of astonishing, possibly architectural prize-winning, modernist ugliness and the entire congregation seemed grey, exhausted, and only going through the motions. This was the one period of my life when I sometimes skipped going to Sunday Mass. My justification was there was no point going to Mass if it made me that angry.

In hindsight, evening Mass--so quiet, so dull, so lacking in the great choir and the shining personality of the pastor uptown--was the one place where anger could catch up with me. It was like my very first Christian yoga class in Boston. It was not until I took that class that I realized that there was something  wrong with my foot, and that it was absolutely killing me. I hobbled away and waited for hours and hours in the college clinic (so much for snappy American private health care) to discover I had very slightly fractured it weeks before.

It amazes me that I could not have gotten rid of all that anger just through all the work I was doing. I mean, I was always working. Exercise, detailed-oriented job, exercise, verb conjugation. I ate only 1300 to 1500  low-fat calories a day: I diligently added them all up. (An apple has 90-110 calories!)  No wonder my family began to mutter words like "gaunt" when I came to visit. It amazes me that I didn't simply burn up the anger when I ran out of calories.

Boxing is a traditional Catholic cure for frustration (especially sexual) and anger. It seem like Irish-named priests in the early 20th century were always founding boxing clubs, were always sending boys to square off in the ring. Since I was in a boxing gym for up to nine hours a week, you would have thought my bruises and occasional swollen nose hid the tranquility of a nun, but no. Maybe boxing works like that for guys. (If I had a son, I would encourage him to try it.) It certainly staves off boredom. For adrenaline, there's nothing like getting into the ring and facing another violent member of homo sapiens sapiens for purposes of violence.  But it did not get rid of my anger, the anger of which I was barely conscious. Mostly I thought I was lonely.

The bedsit was heaven compared to what I had left, but some nights the walls just closed in. And this brings me back to the night I was thinking about this morning: the night I went to a dance club by myself.

There are a lot of things you might not want to do by yourself, but are perfectly doable. You can eat in a restaurant by yourself; nobody but the servers will notice. You can go to the cinema by yourself. You can even go on holiday by yourself. But I do not recommend that you leave your bedsit (bachelor apartment) late at night, walk past blocks of empty parking lots in a depressed area of town, go to a noisy dance club where you know no-one, knock back alcopop until you are drunk and then walk back past the empty parking lots at 1 AM. Although nothing bad happened to me, that was a stupid and irresponsible thing for a woman to do. At the time I thought I had been pushed out of the flat by loneliness, but it was probably not wanting to be stuck there with my anger.

I don't remember if this was before or after I finally picked up the phone and called a psychotherapist--a Catholic psychotherapist, one who advertised at the back of my comforting church. But it was in therapy that I was forced to sit still with my anger and at last begin the long task of loosening its hitherto anonymous hold on my life.

"But Marmee," says Jo in Little Women, "you are never angry."

"I am angry almost every day of my life," says Jo's saintly mother, and as a child I thought how wonderful she was to experience daily rage and yet be such a joy to be around. But what Alcott didn't mention, and what I don't want to forget, is what a blessing anger can be.

Sure, anger drove me out into the dangerous night because I couldn't stand to be alone with it. But it also propelled me into good physical health-- when I was 29 the examining nurse told me I had the heart of a 14 year old. It drove me into boxing, an experience I would not have given up for anything. It helped me to reclaim Italian and Latin and to come to grips with that bugaboo of first year uni, Greek. It thus prepared me for three years of solid academic work. Above all, it got me out of a bad marriage sooner rather than later.

So I conclude this morning that there is nothing wrong with anger in itself. (It is certainly superior to depression.) The moral questions are What should you do with it? and How do you make anger your servant, not your master?

Update: Prudence, not anger, drove me back to my computer to mention that your former boxing career is not usually something you want to mention on a first date with an NCB. Believe me on this. Few good and licit things undercut your careful projection of Devout 21st Century Catholic Femininity than your past or present ability to beat the stuffing out of somebody. Meanwhile, the Not Nice Not Catholic Not Really Anything Rats love it because they think this might mean you are kinky.  Again, believe me on this one; don't find out the hard way. Revelations of martial arts prowess should really be left for later.

Toxic Glue

I got an email the other day that I don't want to post right now as I am worried about the reader being identified. It's an unusual situation for most of my readers, and I hope even the bare outline doesn't make anyone say "Aha! It's my old friend X!"

In short, my reader is in a toxic, emotionally intense, if physically chaste, relationship with a very troubled, recently divorced man. She has tried to get out of it, but she is having a really hard time, in part because he keeps contacting her, and in part because she misses him and in part, I think, because of toxic glue.

Toxic glue is a phrase I have just invented for whatever it is that keeps you hooked to a guy even though being hooked to him makes you very unhappy. It's worse than a crush, because a crush implies unrequited love, whereas toxic glue gets its strength from mutuality. It's not that the guy doesn't reciprocate your feelings of attachment: it's that he does when he shouldn't.

Not all my readers are Catholics, so some will not agree that a divorced man might still be a married man. However, I hope I can convince these readers at least that it is a supremely bad idea to get involved with an unhappily married man, who becomes a divorcing man, who becomes a divorced man. People caught in marital breakdowns, especially if domestic abuse or children are involved, go at least a little (and sometimes a lot) crazy. And the divorce rate is so high, not because most people divorce, but because divorced people are more likely to divorce again. In a panic, many divorcing people throw themselves into rebound relationships.

The idea that marriage can be impermanent is so entrenched in English-speaking society, it's no wonder that even Catholic girls are influenced by it and think it might be okay to date a divorced man who has not had an annulment. The zeitgeist puts Catholic girls in a weird mental position: "I shouldn't be dating a married man, but he isn't really, really married, is he? I mean, like, he could have grounds for an annulment. He probably has grounds for an annulment, and it isn't really dating anyway."

And the guilt and fear of disapproval from Catholic parents and peers might keep such girls from asking for help in situations where such men have serious personal problems, either those that come along with the agonies of failed marriage or even worse ones. It's so easy, isn't it, just to curl a lip with disapproval and say, "Well, you should have known better." But what a failure of love that is. Love says, "You deserve better. How can I help you?"

I mentioned "dating," but never mind the whole artificial, shifting concept of dating, which is usually just whatever a person says it is. Emotional attachment is emotional attachment, plain and simple. My guess is that most of the time Single women can go out for a coffee with a married male friend or colleague, no problem, and then toddle off home without a pang. This coffee is a whole lot more innocent than an emotionally intimate email exchange between a single woman and an unhappily married man, even if they never go out for coffee.

Such emotional intimacy can become glue, and it is toxic glue if the woman realizes that she wants and needs to get out of the dynamic between her and the divorcing (or otherwise troubled) man but cannot get out. And in such a situation, she really needs to get help. She might need to sit down and tell her parents everything or, if for whatever reason she is afraid of her parents, a trusted older relative, a priest or a therapist.

One thing I cannot stress enough is that young, single people are vulnerable. Young single women are particularly vulnerable because, as far as I know, unhappy older men are more likely to exploit younger single women than unhappy older women are to exploit younger single men. (I am mentally listing examples of the latter, however.) Younger people are often awed and flattered by the attentions of older people, as long as the older people are not TOO old and still attractive in some way. Younger people are more likely than older people to believe whatever they are told, especially about an attractive person's "awful" husband or wife.

Oh dear, it's all so sad. Anyway, if you are in a toxic relationship with a man to whom you are not married--sexual, not-sexual, emotional, professional--and you cannot get out, please tell someone in a position of responsibility (parent, aunt, priest, therapist) who might be able to help you.

Divorce, Annulment, Remarriage

Polish sentence structure is so unlike English sentence structure that Google Translate cannot cope with it very well. Therefore, when I find out that someone has written something about Anielskie Single online, I go half-crazy trying to figure out what it is. The one solution is to get a native Polish speaker to read it to me, and they do not grow on trees.

Happily, there was one in the neighbourhood today, so I lured him in with doughnuts and got him to translate something written about beautiful, fascinating me. And we discovered that edited right out of this biography of former singledom was my divorce, annulment and remarriage.

Let's make this quite clear. I was divorced. I got an annulment. I am in my second marriage. If you have a problem in general with people who are granted annulments and remarry, then you have a problem with me. And I am sorry about that.

I am sorry about that because I think I have funny and interesting things to say and I would be sorry if someone lost out on the fun and the conversation simply because they think any divorced Catholic is not worth listening to. But I am also sorry about that because divorced Catholics are often treated like crap. I knew that when I got divorced, and you can bet the ink was barely dry on my divorce certificate when I was banging on the Marriage Tribunal door.

I didn't get my annulment to get married again. I got my annulment to end the fiction that I had been sacramentally married in the first place. I wanted freedom, not just the freedom to marry, but the freedom to be single, no longer tied to a non-husband in any way whatsoever. And of course I would not have married B.A. without an annulment, and he would not have married me. We're Catholics because we actually happen to believe the Roman Catholic faith.

It is obvious that the sanctity of marriage is in serious trouble. This is one of the reasons why I write this blog: to preserve the sanctity of marriage. People abuse marriage all the time, and in different ways. Some people mistake marriage for permanent-never-failing-romance. Other people mistake marriage for a Church-sponsored spouse trap. Still others use it as a vehicle to force others to say that their lifestyle is A-OK.

Therefore, I can understand why Catholics--especially European Catholics--are so frightened by divorced-and-remarried people. And I respect the fact that I would not be allowed anywhere near the microphone of an orthodox Catholic media outlet had I not been granted an annulment before I started to call myself single again, let alone married B.A. And I even see why the fact that I had a divorce and an annulment before I wrote my singles book was dropped from this particular bio: it was too complicated for that particular article, that particular magazine.

Life, however, is complicated. And I don't think it is helpful for the Catholic community to sweep complications under the rug and nail the rug down. We might all look wonderful and upstanding at Mass, whether beaming and clapping or bowed and silent, but we all are sinners, and we all struggle. One difference between people is that the more you have to lose, the smarter you are about keeping your mouth shut. When my pal X was Single, she would tell anyone about her latest crush object. When she was married, she told only me. (Yes, some married women--even respectable married women who love God, their husbands and their children--sometimes have crush objects. They also catch colds and the flu.)

I am no expert on ministry to divorced-and-remarried Catholics. The issues are horribly painful, pitting "being faithful" against "being welcoming." I understand that love sometimes means saying "No". I understand that receiving communion without being in a state of grace can actually harm a person. But I also understand that the divorced person so easily becomes a scapegoat. That makes me worry for divorced people, whether they are canonically single--as I was--or canonically married.

I understand why the divorce and annulment might have been dropped from my bio, but it makes me a little sad for the divorced-and-annulled all the same.

The Lady

I approach today's topic with dread because it slices very close to the bone. Also, I tried to have a light philosophical conversation on the topic the other day and it did not go well. A very old incision in my psyche began slowly to bleed.

Today's topic is "the lady."

We are all men and women, but from very early in human history we have separated men and women into categories. I suppose it is natural to do that; we put all creatures into categories. We have distinguished categories of angels. And it may even be helpful sometimes to continue to distinguish between different kinds of men and women: by nationality, for example, or by age. Other categories (class, sexual orientation) are not so helpful, for they not only distinguish but divide.

The terms "lady" and "gentleman" spring from class division. Bluntly stated, a lady was a woman whose father did not work with his hands, and a gentleman was a man who did not work with his hands. For the fine shades of who was or was not considered a lady in Britain in the early 19th century, read Jane Austen. Elizabeth Bennett was most definitely a lady because her father owned land and the family (more or less) kept up the standards expected of a landowner's daughters.

In republican America, Louisa May Alcott proudly rejected the class assumptions inherent in the word "lady": Jo March declares in Little Women that she believes in "men and women" not in "ladies and gentlemen." Her heroes and heroines are well-educated, highly moral folk who are willing to work for a living and hold their heads high among their richer relations and friends. Henry James, however, continued to use the expression "lady", although his "lady" of Portrait of a Lady was not the daughter of a landowner, but merely a woman of sterling character.

But who determines what a woman of sterling character is? No doubt this is a hotly debated smoking room topic to this very day. In the ancient world, a woman of sterling character was one whom nobody talked about by name: the mother of the Gracchi is known solely as "the mother of the Gracchi" for that very reason. In the modern world, a woman of sterling character was once one whose name appeared in the newspaper only when she was born, was married and died. In Christian circles, she was (or is) a woman who obeyed her husband or at very least never made him look like an ass in public.

I have my own ideas about what a woman of sterling character is, but they are not necessarily the same as the ideas I held when I was 21 and met a man with very pronounced ideas on the topic indeed. The man in question was absolutely sure I was "a lady" and took great pains to make sure I always was so.

Readers of this blog often write of their frustration and dread of controlling men utterly determined to get them into bed. So far I don't recall anyone writing in of her frustration and dread of a controlling man utterly determined to (A) make her conform to his ideal of The Lady and (B) make her marry him. It surprises me because most of the women who read this blog are young, traditional and/or religious, and it strikes me that a young, traditional and/or religious man is most likely to behave like that. He has it in his head what a Good Woman is (the opposite of "all those sluts out there"), and by God he's going to get her.

I have in a box somewhere a dozen letters in fine masculine script, written with an excellent pen, exhorting me to be a lady. They are very flattering, and they quite turned my twenty-something head. The mix of fulsome praise and roguish nagging would probably make me vomit today, but at the time it merely made me blush, shake my head and roll my eyes.

In the end it proved effective, and I found myself obeying a man who laid down an awful lot of rules. I was not allowed to wear blue jeans. Ladies did not wear blue jeans. I was not allowed to get fat. Ladies did not get fat. (NB Married people usually put on 10 pounds after they marry; I lost 20.) I was not allowed to walk the quiet, crime-free two blocks from the bus stop to my parents' house after dark. Ladies did not take risks. I had to wear elbow length gloves everywhere I went in broad daylight. Ladies did not get sunburnt. I had to carry a parasol for the same reason. (Yes, a parasol.) I was not allowed to use bad words, ever, even when I dropped something on my toe. Ladies did not use bad words.

He was twenty-three years old. I very much doubt he is like that now. At least, I hope not: when the worm turned, he suffered very much. And when the worm ran away, one of worm's pals gave her a pair of blue jeans. I look terrible in blue jeans now, but at the time they symbolized... What? Freedom? Self-determination.

B.A. says that a gentlemen is a man who never unintentionally gives offense. This means a man who is so aware of how his actions and demeanor affect others that he never makes a social mistake. He puts everyone at his or her ease unless, for some good reason, he needs to give someone a set-down.

I do not know what a lady is. I just know that the concept can be used as a whip to make a woman strive to turn into something she is not: a precious porcelain statue, an angel in human form, corporeal vanilla ice-cream. I am very uncomfortable with the term; I wish we could merely distinguish between good manners and bad.

And why bring all this up today? Because I know not only young women but young men read this blog and I know that some traditional young men--without first considering what John Paul II said in Dignitatem Mulieris--are working out their own anthropologies of The Lady.

At least, I think they are. Because the word cuts so close to the bone, I am not the best judge of what young men are doing when they talk about ladies or make pronouncements on female dress and behaviour. I told myself that the other day when, while walking down an ancient street with my husband and a young friend, the young friend suddenly turned to me and said, "I never imagined you would own a pair of blue jeans."

The knife of male expectation can cut both ways. Both women and men are hurt when men set up impossible standards of womanhood they glean not from Christianity or real life but from the prejudices and restrictions of a vanished age.

As I love to warn you all, some scars never heal.

***

Update: Welcome readers of The Crescat! Regular readers should know that Kat is giving away a copy of The Closet's All Mine, the American version of Anielskie Single/ Seraphic Singles. So if you are Single and can think of something you love about your Single state, toddle on over there and tell her what it is for a chance to win the prize.

Divorce is Forever

I am a merry little ray of sunshine this morning, am I not? But I have been replying to emails, and it strikes me that it cannot be stressed enough how much a bad marriage can mess you up.

Like Malta, I have a schizoid attitude towards divorce. As a Catholic, I officially decry "easy" divorce, and I worry about its effect on children. But as someone who got an "easy" divorce and then an annulment and then ten years later found the most awesome man, I love divorce.

On the other hand, I would freak if the awesome man divorced me.

It's all so confusing. Let's leave it at that I deplore divorce, but I'm so grateful I got one, and therefore I have a schizoid relationship with it.

What I hate is being defined by a failed marriage. And whether you stay in the failed marriage or fill out endless pieces of paper (especially cheques) to get out of it, the failed marriage gets inscribed on your brain forever. There's the emotional damage, which can be very long-lasting. There's the spiritual damage, which can be jaw-dropping. There's the historical damage, which makes you want to wipe perhaps a whole decade or decades of your tainted memory. You can't, though.

If you get out, there's also the stupid government forms, like your tax bill, in which you have to tick "Divorced" again and again. If you get remarried, you find yourself referring to "my first husband." If you write a book about being Single, you discover your advertising blurb begins, "Divorced and..." Yes, that will really appeal to the orthodox Catholic reader.

There is also the humiliation of being contacted by a monsignor's frightened secretary who wants to establish that your second marriage was approved by the Church before the monsignor will deign to speak to you.

When I announced in my blog that I was engaged, a seething stranger wrote in furious that my annulment allowed this happiness. It was clear he felt that my punishment for a failed marriage should continue for life. Well, no worries there, mate. Unless old age kindly robs me of my reason, I will periodically be haunted by some nasty memories.

"Argh," I will suddenly say, apropos of nothing, perhaps on a bus.

"What?" asks B.A. kindly.

"Nothing," I reply.

The one good thing about a failed marriage and its aftermath, if you ask me, is that you get an intensely personal view of who you really are, and how tough you are, and how rotten you can be.

A good marriage fosters and nourishes the nicer parts of your personality. A bad marriage rips up the flowers and encourages the weeds. When you are, say, 25 and miserable, it is hard for you to see your weeds. But when you are, say, 35 and happy, you can see the weeds and keep them in check without beating yourself up too much about them being there in the first place. And if you are happily married you do indeed keep them in check because you are afraid that if you don't, divorce might happen. And that would be bad.

Now that I have frightened you rigid about the entire institution of marriage, I will muse on what I think are the best qualities for a husband to have. The first is kindliness. I'm married to a kind and cheerful bloke, and it's heaven. We are not exactly rich, but I don't really notice. If we lived under a piece of plastic under a bridge, B.A. would contrive still to be kind and cheerful, and you have no idea what a comfort that is. I would bring him mashed up roots in a rusty soup tin, and he would quip, "Don't feed the troll!" That's the kind of man he is.

The second is respectability. The wife's lot is sometimes a harried one. So much housework--ugh. I am so bad at housework, but it generally falls to me because I work in the house and I make very little money and I'm female and men are almost incapable of it and the only thing on earth that makes B.A. cranky is dirty clothes on the bedroom floor, etc., etc. However, any minor annoyance like having eventually to do the laundry is well-compensated by the fact that I am proud of my husband.

No, really. People are constantly telling me how much they like my husband, and how famous he was at university for this, and how good he is at that. When the BBC came to interview him about David Hume... Okay, I'll stop now before you develop diabetes.

Let's leave it at this: he's sincerely kind to you, and you are intensely proud of him. That's my recipe for a happy marriage.

Yes, I'm Entitled

Update: No, Western women do NOT necessarily make terrible wives. Belated hellos to the hordes that trampled hither from Fisheaters and The Pulpit. Hi there, and buy my book! American, Canadian and Polish editions available. See margin.

****

I mentioned on Facebook that I was enjoying Eat, Pray, Love and was staggered by the negative response. Okay, Eat, Pray, Love is not a Catholic book. It even takes three or four swipes at Catholicism. The third section, which I hadn't got to yet, is pornographic. But the passion of the response shocked me. I mean, it's just Elizabeth Gilbert's memoirs. So she sold 5 million copies. I'm envious, too, but not angry about it.*

The most surprising comment came from an American man, a Chinese-American man.

"Fitting for an American princess," he wrote.

I blinked. I'd regularly heard the rather dodgy expression "JAP", "Jewish American Princess", years ago, but never "American princess."

"She was brought up on a Midwestern Protestant Christmas tree farm," I wrote back. "Hardly a princess."

"It's used wrt the attitude of entitlement, not the amount of property or status of nobility," he replied. "Surprised you haven't heard it used this way yet. It's a common complaint about Western women."

Western women.

Suddenly I was back in My Worst Theology Class Ever, listening in shock as the Asian-American Jesuit beside me declared "White women make bad wives."

"By whom?" I snarled and wrote it into the Facebook stream.

But I regretted it. The 'R' word loomed and I didn't want to mix it up with my old pal. So I told him he didn't have to answer that. But he did.

"By whom? A lot of men (including me). You'll see it on websites about marriage and dating frequented by men."

"Ooo" I wrote. "What are these websites? I've been wondering why Seraphic Singles has so few male visitors these days!"

In response, he sent me this link to a piece by Kay Hymowitz and suggested I google to find men's responses.

Well, I did and, girls, it's not pretty. You know how I keep telling you you won't always like it when you find out what men are thinking? It's definitely true.

I thought Kay Hymowitz's piece was thoughtful and even sympathetic to men, drawing upon sociological detail and historical factors to explain why 55% of Americans have not married by age 30. Yes, she observes that huge numbers of American men in their 20s aren't exactly grown-ups, but you'd have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to notice that.

However, in response to Hymowitz, male bloggers and commentators went crazy. Typically, they attacked Hymowitz's appearance. In the crudest and most inventive terms they could think up, they called contemporary American women a pack of sluts. They accused women like Hymowitz of just wanting a man to support them. It was as if she had become the lightning rod for Frustrated American Man's contempt for Contemporary American Woman.

Google at your own risk. But I'll tell you something. Reading all that abuse was not as bad as being the only white woman in an American classroom as I listened to a future priest say "White women make bad wives."

For about the millionth time that term, I made a protest. Where, I wanted to know, did this guy get the idea that white women made bad wives? There followed a lot of circumstantial evidence about one unhappy Asian male-white female marriage, plus the revelation that his mother would understand if he left the SJ but not if he married a white woman. He detailed what his mother thought of white women, e.g. lazy, money-grubbing, disobedient, disrespectful, promiscuous, etc.

"Does your mother even know any white women?" I demanded.

He thought about that and chuckled.

"Actually, I don't think she does. But she watches a lot of soap operas."

I learned more about racism through that theology class than I thought a white person could. And I learned something about sexism, too, and how much crap women from some non-Western cultures have to put up with. If women in some cultures are told that, in stark contrast to their brothers, they are entitled to absolutely nothing and that they should be grateful for anything they get then, yeah, Western women are going to look mighty entitled.

Eat, Pray, Love begins with Elizabeth Gilbert on her bathroom floor crying her heart out night after night. She has severe depression. She and her husband own a beautiful house, and she has a successful magazine writing career. She has published three books by age 35. She is the major breadwinner and--FYI--far from being a money-grubber, she hands over EVERYTHING but her royalties and future earnings to her ex-husband (who wanted the royalties, too) in their divorce.

She never explains why exactly their marriage collapsed and why divorce was so necessary to her sanity and happiness, and since she was never a Catholic and had no children, and since I was divorced once myself, I'm willing to cut her some major slack on the D-word. I have no problem saying that Elizabeth Gilbert was entitled to get up off the bathroom floor and have a decent night's sleep. As she is an American, I believe her national constitution entitles her to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Happiness.

Some women have no idea they have a right to the pursuit of happiness. And for many a woman, the greatest earthly happiness she can imagine is to marry a good man who loves her, to have his children and to raise them in comfort. In short, to be simultaneously utterly vulnerable and safely protected.

A few years ago I blogged what I wanted in a man. I wanted an educated man who had a job he enjoyed with a salary big enough to support himself and me, if I were unemployed, and our children, if we had any. I wanted a Catholic man who went to church.

A guy commented that I sure wanted a lot. But, newsflash, I wanted no more than what my mother got. My baby boomer, university-educated, property-owning, Scottish-Canadian housewife mother who--fortunately for me--ditched a fiance back in the 1960s because he bought clothing on credit. Financially irresponsible, decided my future mother. She gave him the old heave-ho and married a future university professor. Good call.

One might argue that my mother was in her early twenties, so she was worth a heck of a lot more on the marriage market than thirty-something, divorced me. However, I stuck to my guns. If I married a man, I would want him to have a job he enjoyed and that paid him a family wage because I would only ever marry a happy man who respects himself, and where I come from, a poorly paid man, or a man who hates his job, is not happy and does not respect himself.

And lo. Here I sit, in my nightie, the epitome of what some guys really, really hate. My husband is at work, working. I am at home, writing. My husband thinks I'm beautiful, but even my grandmother would only go so far as to say I'm striking, and that was before I gained 20 pounds and turned forty. No doubt there dozens of men out there who, if they dared, would tell my husband he could have done better. There'd be no point in telling them that this staying home writing while my husband supported me gig was his idea.

But they can go soak their heads. My husband is happy. And so am I.


*I didn't see the movie. I have no idea how the movie portrays Gilbert's marriage. Before anyone gets worried, I should say that I do not approve of "lifestyle divorce" if that odd phrase means "get divorced so I can go to Bali and have sex with handsome ex-pats."


Update: Now that I've been clicking around a lot, I see that Eat, Pray, Love was hugely controversial and caused a massive flare-up in the American front of the War Between the Sexes. Thus, I should probably say what I liked and didn't like about it.

First, EG is two years older than I am, and I admired her work ethic and talent. The woman can write. (I have a moral quirk in that I cut men and women who can write a lot of slack. Graham Greene was in some ways a simply awful man and a very bad Catholic. But he could write.)

Second, I know what it is like to cry my heart out on the bathroom floor wondering if I will ever stop crying, and to not know if staying or leaving would be worse.

Third, I very much enjoyed the Roman section because I, too, have an impractical love for the Italian language, only I indulged it when I was a teenager. I enjoyed her descriptions of Italy very much and would love to know where in Naples she got that pizza.

Fourth, I very much enjoyed the Indian section because I, too, have experimented with meditation--Christian meditation. Christianity has an ancient, wonderful, holy contemplative tradition. One of the most wonderful aspects of the Extraordinary Mass are the deep, contemplative silences.

Fifth, I thought her search for God very sincere. The heartfelt cry for help on the bathroom floor was completely believable, and I was astonished when I read how she wrote dialogues with herself (or with God) in a notebook because I have done that, too.

So far so good. But then she went to Bali.

The Bali section is drenched with self-indulgence rather more cloying than that of the Italian section. The Italian section was about enjoying things, God's gifts, like art, language and food. But the Bali section was about enjoying people as things. Suddenly the book seemed a trifle infantile, as if a breathless little girl was adding more and more to her big fantasy.."...and then I made my new bestest friend's, a very poor but beautiful medicine woman's, dream come true...and then I met a handsome prince and we.. and we... and we DID IT...and then... and then...he said we could try to live all over the world!"

A Roman friend claims that the operative word for Rome is "Sex" but as a matter of fact this is more like to be the word that sums up Bali, where EG's Balinese friends obsess on the subject. They encourage her to take a lover, and once she takes up her birthright in the ex-pat community, the reader knows it is only a matter of time. After one false start, and after one heartfelt refusal to have an affair with him, EG succumbs to a 52 year old Brazilian, in true romance novel fashion, i.e. he masterfully tells her to have sex with him, and she does.

Then follows more romance novel type stuff to make the average woman panic about her own sexual present or future: their bodies fit together perfectly ("Don't they always?"), she has four orgasms a day ("Is there something wrong if I don't?"), etc., etc.

Needless to say, I don't recommend Section 3 to my readers.

The story in which she emails all her friends around the world asking for money to buy a house for a Balinese single mother is EGREGIOUSLY Oprah and an artistic error that is only partially redeemed by her devastation when she realizes that her lovely friend has a crooked streak. It all reminds me of Aristotle's dictum that you can be friends only with an equal, and a very successful (if temporarily broke) American woman who thinks that a poor, divorced, Balinese single mother is her equal is fooling herself, but not the Balinese woman.

There is also an obsession with personal appearance in the Bali section, an obsession shared by EG's Balinese friends. Her medicine man pal is credited with making magic paintings that render a client more beautiful. And when I got to that bit of the book, I realized why this book was guaranteed to sell five million copies to women. It has EVERYTHING except a 17th century house outside Edinburgh.

It has endless food, which helps a scrawny EG put on only a healthy amount of weight. It has exotic, attractive, easily made friends of both sexes. It has travel. It has mystic experiences. It has magic. It has a wise medicine man who informs EG that, formerly ugly, she is now pretty. It has incandescent sex. It has philanthropy. It has sweet little girls. It has babies. It has a 50-something silverback male gorilla/Brazilian who worships EG and why not? She's 17 years his junior, and that's usually how 50-something men roll.

In short, it's a beach read that--to my surprise--is now a cultural phenomenon evoking comments of disgust from my Facebook friends.

Some Scars Never Heal

Poppets, I have such a migraine. I almost never have migraines, and this one is a doozy. It's the one I used to get on wedding anniversaries--the anniversary of my first wedding, the one that began a bad marriage that ended with a decree of nullity from the local Catholic marriage tribunal, Deo gratias.

(Long-term readers know about all this. Recent readers might find it a bit of a shock. In short, I married at 25, was miserable, ran away, got a divorce, was granted an annullment, was mad at Church--though not God, actually, was in therapy for years, went to theology school, turned into Seraphic Single, met B.A. when I was 37, became Auntie Seraphic at 38.)

One thing I absolutely resist is being a poster child for divorce. I don't hate divorce, per se, but I do hate bad marriages. And I do mean bad marriages, ones that should never, ever have happened. I hate them so much--and I love good marriages so much--that I am inspired day after day to write this blog. Having been both, I can tell you with all confidence and authority that it is better to be lonely, sad and Single than to be lonely, sad and Married.

My migraine is reminding me of a sunny day in a German city where I was sitting in a wine-bar with two classmates, one of whom was moaning about her German fiance. In the manner of German fiances, he seemed a lot more German in Germany than he did where they met, and this was driving her crazy.

My other classmate understood this as her boyfriend was German, and I didn't because I rather like Germans both home and abroad, although one must always be careful before asking for their opinions because sugaring an opinion is an absolutely foreign concept to a German.

Anyway, there we were, and the engaged girl was wondering if she should marry Axel (not his real name). The wedding had been delayed by red tape, for all her documentation had to be translated into German, and German weddings are a nightmare of red tape no matter what. Therefore, she still had an escape hatch, although they were living together and her parents had booked their flights, etc.

And the other girl said, "Well, I think you should just marry him and then if it doesn't work out, you could just get a divorce. Look at Seraphic here. She's divorced, and she's doing fine! She's in a PhD program, she's studying here in Germany..."

And my heart plummeted to my mules because, really, of all the role models I might like to be, The Proof Divorce is Okay is not one.

Getting married, no matter how briefly, is a big fat deal. I don't know if this is cultural or spiritual or what, but if you marry some guy, even if it is ludicrously unsacramental, it leaves a permanent mark on your psyche. It could be a good mark. It could be a bad mark. But it is a mark and it is permanent.

The best way to prevent divorce that I know of is to not get married to the wrong guy/girl and to not get married when you ARE the wrong guy/girl and to not get married at the wrong time or for the wrong reasons. In short, there's a lot more marriage going on than there should be. However, once a marriage is made, it's made, and once the kids are born, they're born, and there's no going back. You can get a divorce and sometimes an annulment, but you can't erase history. At least, no matter how awful the marriage is/was, something good--the children--came out of it.

That said, I'm glad I didn't have any children from my first marriage. NFP really works when you hate and fear the person. I don't hate and fear him now, by the way. I haven't the foggiest clue who he is, so much older than he was. I hope he's happy and successful--although if he's not remarried that might be for the best. I couldn't tell you for sure. He might be a very saintly person today. I am a much better person myself.

Until this morning, I thought it was all over, and that scars I thought would never heal really had healed, but then I got an email--a friendly email, actually, nothing bad-- about that time, and I got hit with The Migraine.

Because I hate to lose an opportunity to hammer home the point that it is better to stay Single than to make a bad marriage, I am laying all this heavy stuff on you. Better have a cookie now, or something.

I shall be as right as rain in a minute, but for now I am going to have a little lie-down. Maybe I will take B.A. out for dinner or do some other particularly nice thing this evening.

No comments on this one, poppet. Paradoxically, I wrote about it but idoanwannatawkabowdit.

Update: Okay, who prayed? It got me out of bed. Thank you!

The Dragon in the Woods

There has been a number of comments recently worrying about failed marriages and divorce. I get a sense that many of you in your twenties see divorce as something ubiquitous but random, striking at all but the very lucky. It is like this uncontrollable, unstoppable force out there in the woods waiting to eat you up. One minute a spouse is bliss and somehow in two or ten years he or she becomes a horrible, nasty, snapping monster. However, it's neither that dreadful nor that simple.

Nobody really understands what is going on in another person's relationship. Many of you, very sadly, had the shock of your lives when your parents broke up. Others were horrified when married friends broke up. I was next to devastated when a very old friend left her husband--which I found out about just as my brother moved into his first house, days after his wife had her first baby. I was frightened rigid.

"Don't even mention divorce in this house," said my brother.

For years my friend and her husband had been symbolic for me of the happy couple, of the marriage that worked out, of the possibility of happy married life with kids. Maybe I (then divorced-and-annulled) hadn't had it, but at least they did. But apparently they didn't. I hadn't been told the whole story; either we were not as good friends as I thought, or my pal's ability to hide unhappy feelings (she was relentlessly positive to the point of lying) had taken me in.

Divorce looks random because you don't have the backstage pass into divorcing people's marriages. Even when they're your parents, you aren't told what is going on. And you usually weren't there to see the warning signs when they first got married. And possibly nobody else saw them, and they were doing their darnedest not to see them either.

Part of the reason I write so much about Single life is because I married badly at 25 and I don't want other girls (or boys) to marry badly. I want you to live your lives intelligently and authentically without worrying about becoming "old maids." It shocks me that in 2011 girls still worry about becoming old maids, but I myself worried about it in the 1990s, and that was also long into the feminist revolution which purports to have stopped all that. It didn't.

We live in an age of anxiety, as I like to tell my Baby Boomer neighbours. And I meet many twenty year olds who worry a lot about the future. "What if I don't--"?" "What if I--?" Twenty year olds don't seem to know or trust themselves yet. And this is not a value judgement; this is an observation. I didn't completely know or trust myself until I was in my thirties. I was unusually young for my age, which is an unlucky thing. However, one of the great gifts of adulthood is that you know and trust yourself. And if you know and trust yourself, you're less frightened about the possibility of failed marriage.

Divorce is not a random accident. The seeds of divorce lurk within people before they even meet the person they divorce, and they start to spring up when the unfortunate pair get together. My seeds included gullibility, a fear of confrontation, a fear of being an old maid, a genetic tendency towards depression and--this is not all bad--the ability to chew my leg off to get out of a trap. My ex-husband had many divorce seeds, too. The only one I'll mention is his belief that he could make people do anything he wanted, which is very useful in a career but a double-edged sword when dealing with a woman who can, when the hunt seems over, chew her leg off to get out of the trap.

Bad marriages happen because too many women and men are not rooted in reality. We are led by our wishes and our fears, not by our intelligence. I do not know why this is so, other than that we live in an age of anxiety, where the media tells us "America Has Lost Her Innocence" every time there is a political assassination or a terrorist attack, and we are fed a steady drip of news about cancer, the population "bomb", global warming, climate change, "Middle East Descends into Chaos"--and a number of other things we usually can do absolutely nothing about. (Sure, you can stop polluting the air; now you stop India and China from doing it. Hmm.)

What we can change are ourselves. We can grow up. We can ask ourselves what we really like and what we really don't like. We can admit to ourselves that although X is really sweet and nice, he or she bores us now. Or that although Y is really exciting and fun, he or she treats us badly. Or that, even though Z treats us nicely, Z is really horrible to every other woman in his life: his mother, his sisters, waitresses, ex-girlfriends... We can use our brains. Scary? Yes. But do it anyway.

We can even admit that we are sinners, but we don't deserve a life punishment for our sins. For example, you don't have to marry some guy or girl just because you slept with him or her. You shouldn't have done that, and you know that, but once you apologize for having done so and have gone to confession, that could be the end of the matter. I hope it is--unless you really do love each other, and you both realize it is time to marry each other rather than to carry on like that. Truth is what is, wrote Thomas Aquinas. Truth is NOT what you merely want it to be.

If you are so unsure of yourself that you are terrified of making a bad marriage, it is a sign that you are not ready yet to get married. Again, this is not a value judgment. Just as some of us reach our adult growth at 14 and others at 21 or 22, some of us get adult brains at 16 and others at 30. That's just the way it is. Truth is what is.

One last note about marriage and divorce. After three years in an MDiv program surrounded by very good men who were mostly male religious, I learned to recognize a good man when I saw him. When I moved down to the USA, I met other good men, like my housemates and dear old Volker, and I thought a lot about what good men my father and brothers were. And when I went to Scotland and met BA, I recognized that he too was a fundamentally good man. To marry a good man, I suggest hanging out only with good men and not being guilted into giving the time of day to bad men. Judgmental? Judgment is the final step in knowledge. If you're afraid of being called judgmental, do your judgment silently in your head and find diplomatic ways to defend your decision.

Meanwhile, BA and I will never get divorced, not just because we love each other and are kind to each other, but because we fear God. We both know our marriage is sacramental. There were no possible impediments. We'd have to be really weaselly to put together any kind of annulment defence because there are simply no grounds. We're married, and we're stuck, and--so far--that's great. I don't worry about future problems. We'll cross any bridges when we come to them.

Auntie Seraphic & Pondering Second Marriages

This is an Auntie Seraphic letter right out of the combox, so this is one of the names I made up.

Dear Auntie Seraphic,

If you are thinking of marrying someone who is divorced (post-annulment), how much should you ask about their previous marriage? Not to pry into sordid past details, but to try and figure out whether anything could possibly go differently in a new union, or if one's potential husband/wife has learned anything from their first try at marriage.

Perhaps you have written about this already, but I would be grateful for any advice.

Pondering Second Marriages

Dear Pondering,

This all depends. If you are a man (and not formally engaged yet), and you want to ask a woman, "Honey, since we're thinking about marriage, do you have any thoughts on the topic?", then go for it. If you are a woman (and not formally engaged yet), and you want to ask a man that question, it might be better to say, "If you ever want to talk about what happened with [ex-spouse], I'd be happy to listen." Then wait. The idea is to spark the discussion, not to become the Inspector Rebus of the heart.

However, let me tell you: if you really want to hear the horribleness, marriage had better be something you're already discussing. In fact, these are the conversations engaged people have, should have, and indeed have to have in marriage prep class. In many dioceses, previously married people have to go to special marriage prep class. (I wonder if widows and widowers have to go or just us scabby divorced folk?)

Recently divorcing or divorced people are not good candidates for marriage. I remember that a minister's wife told her daughter to keep away from a handsome pal of hers who was divorcing because "divorcing people are crazy." And heaven knows I was pretty crazy myself. I started dating a guy with a history of dating crazy women, and when we broke up, he found another crazy woman. It was one of those things that make you go, "Hmm, am I, perhaps, crazy?"

In an ideal world, divorced-and-annulled people would be all healed by the time they met someone special, but it isn't always that way. However, I would say that the fact that a woman is not spontaneously discussing her lousy marriage is a very good sign, and I suspect the same might be true for men, too.

Incidentally, if what broke up the marriage was your intended's violence, infidelity, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, etc., etc., you need to have serious discussions about how he/she knows he/she will never do such things again. One reason why the divorce rate is so high is because divorced people sometimes (often?) divorce again.

B.A. has never asked me about my previous marriage. Of course, he read my whole entire blog, so he might have been on information overload. On the other hand, men don't usually like hearing about The Other Guy---one of the many ways in which they are unlike women, who sometimes have an unwholesome fascination with The Other Woman.

I don't know about men, but I suspect divorcees are haunted by their first weddings when planning their second. I certainly was. I bent over backwards to have the quiet, tasteful, humble wedding that my culture historically said befits second marriages. The one rule I broke was to wear a white dress, and long afterwards an impertinent person (not family) voiced her displeasure at this. Anyway, I suggest that grooms of previously married women should be prepared for their fiancees to have a bit of a meltdown about their first marriage during the horrific stress of their own wedding planning. I didn't, but after all I had been divorced for 10 years.

Finally, don't marry a man/woman unless you are head over heels with him/her and confident that your marriage could not possibly end in divorce.

I hope this is helpful.

Grace and peace,
Seraphic

You Don't Have To Marry Him

This is the anniversary of the day I ran away. I won't tell you how many years ago that was, but I can tell you it was a November 12th.

It's a terribly sad story, and it's not just my story, so I can't really go into details. Let's just say that I used to wander around my then-town wishing I could afford to put up a big billboard with the motto "You Don't HAVE To Marry Him."

My feeling, a million years ago, was that I HAD to marry the man who wanted so much to marry me or else Something Very Bad would happen. It was a long time before I realized that nothing very bad would have happened if I hadn't. Indeed, some very bad things would not have happened. And although he was very upset when I left, he did not simply roll up into a ball and die. He did not kill himself. And, in fact, I understand that today he is a successful professional with an enjoyable career. Well done, him.

I cannot stress how important it is not to marry the wrong person (or to marry before you become a right person). In a restaurant in Germany, I was horrified to find myself pointed to as "a successful divorcee": the third woman in the conversation was unsure if she wanted to marry her German fiance after all. My admirer's idea was that if it didn't work out, she could "just" divorce him.

Although any practising Catholic would find this idea distasteful, I found it awful, not just as a Catholic, but as a divorcee. Some scars take a long time to heal. Indeed, some scars might never heal in this earthly life. After all, here I am umpteen years later, happily remarried, with my blog-billboard saying "You Don't Have To Marry Him," just in case some agonized woman out there randomly types "Do I Have To Marry Him?" into a search bar. There is no such thing as "just divorcing." Marriage, no matter how short, illicit or unsacramental, is so psychologically powerful its end leaves a stain.

Being a divorced-annulled-remarried Catholic presents me with an internal paradox: I am deeply grateful for liberal divorce laws and I deplore the high divorce rate. I am deeply aware that divorced people (especially, I suspect, women) are marginalized by other Catholics, but at the same time I understand the marginalizers' concerns. Being judged forever by my own was a risk I was willing to take--and, in fact, I placed myself in the hands of professional Catholic judges: an annullment tribunal. Was going through that painful? You'd better believe it. Never, never again. But it was necessary---just as chemotherapy is necessary to a cancer patient. It's horrible, but it heals.

When I left, I knew I might not be given an annullment (though I had very strong grounds to think I would) and that I might never marry again. So be it, I thought. Anything, just so long as I could be free. I'm sorry to say I have an inkling of what it is like to be the fox that chewed its own leg off to escape the trap. And that, my dears, is why I say to you again and again "Don't settle."

Update: Cherubs, it was a long time ago, so don't feel bad for me now. Come to think of it, though, prayers go outside of history into eternity, so if you like, pray for me on that day. (Does that make sense? Maybe you helped then by praying now.) Meanwhile, I went shopping for girly things this afternoon, which I enjoyed very much.

Shackin' Up

You probably know this already, but it doesn't hurt to read it again, and it's that living together is not the same thing as marriage.

The American Centres for Disease Control have done a study of who gets to their 10th wedding anniversary, and people who lived together before marriage were at a slight disadvantage. And fewer than 30% of bidie-in relationships last 5 years. However, this is in part because 51% of bidie-ins make honest men and women of each other within three years. I suppose the rest simply break up and move on.

I was excited to see that 76% of marriages between people over 26 last ten years, although I am perturbed to see that the standard is now ten years, not, you know, twenty-five years, or "until death." And I was vastly amused to see that people who have babies "at least eight months after" their wedding stay together for ten years. Of all my Catholic friends, I know only one couple who had their first baby fewer than nine months after the wedding, and I'm not even hinting who that was. (When I was dumb enough to blurt, "What, already?", the beaming grandmother said, "We work fast in our family!")

Anyway, weddings and marriage and babies are a messy jury-rigged business, but at least they are real. What do not strike me as real are common law arrangements or living together, except among out-and-out communists. By communists I mean people who have deep-seated, tightly held, agonized ideological DOUBTS about matrimony as a legal institution. I recognize that this is not the correct use of the word communist. The biggest communist in Edinburgh has been married for at least 60 years. But you know who I mean. Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins types, only now Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins have broken up, which made me sad, actually.

My friend Fishie, who isn't married, once said, "If a man loves a woman, he marries her." I think this is sound, but I would stress the word "man" to show we are talking about a grown-up here. And I'd have to throw in "of certain traditional beliefs". If a man of certain traditional beliefs loves a woman, he marries her. (A boy might love but dither until it's too late.) At best, the man marries the beloved woman before she (or he) moves in. At least, he marries her eventually. But I feel a bit weird about that. The pressure to marry the girl you're living with must be intense, especially if your family really likes her and thinks it's time for you to have children. If you moved in with a girl just because it saved on rent and it's nice to share a bed, marriage is an entirely different ball of wax. Heaven help the woman whose boyfriend likes living with her, but harbours secret dreams of the Perfect Woman.

Fortunately, I know perfectly happy married people who lived together before they got married. Even years and years together cannot wreck the love between some bidie-ins. But for reasons obvious to devoutly religious folk, I still don't think it a good idea. And what I think a perfect destestable idea is settling for living with a man when really you are madly in love with him and want to marry him instead.

Of course, there are women who will settle for much less than this. It makes me very sad, what little women will settle for, and how much they will give to get it. I think it is much better to sleep alone and with dignity than to put up with anything from a man other than 100% fidelity and commitment. And this, of course, is what he promises in marriage.

Update: Here is a memory of bidie-ins that haunts me to this day. I was visiting an unmarried couple in England some years ago. A census-taker or someone like that came to the door and asked for my host. The woman of the house said she was his wife. And then came his voice from the sitting-room, "I'm not married to you, Paula!" It sounded again, slightly louder. "I'm not married to you, Paula!" Blah. It makes me shudder with embarrassment, imagining that ever happening to me.

Update 2: Have you considered joining the Seraphic Singles Fan Page? It was founded by two loyal Single readers. There may be discussions and things... And it will update any Seraphic Singles the Book events as they are arranged!

The Divorce Present

There's a heartfelt article up at the Daily Mail today about the crassness of divorce parties. Celebrating a divorce, says the author, is like celebrating a miscarriage.

I am of two minds about this article, having gone through a bitter divorce and skin-peeling annulment procedure although not, thank goodness, a miscarriage. On the one hand, I agree that celebrating a divorce is in very bad taste, but on the other, I think a divorcé or divorcée may feel in need of extra comfort on the day the divorce becomes legal.

I'm not sure I did. I recall my sister coming upstairs at midnight, knocking on my bedroom door, and saying "You're divorced now." My reply was, "Yay! I think I'll get married again."

"Maybe not just yet," said my sister, which was rather witty for a 15 year old, I thought.

But whatever the day itself was like, I found myself crying a lot beforehand. I cried so hard at a funeral that an elderly priest mistook me for the widow.

"Dana," he said, voice shaky with sympathy and age. "I'm so sorry for your trouble."

"I'm not Dana," I said.

"Oh," said the priest.

So I cannot say I sailed towards Divorce Day with a light-hearted tra-la, although the divorce was definitely my idea and for a few years I celebrated the day I ran away. What I really wanted was to be absolutely free, the freedom that only an annulment could bring.

I was not looking forward to being "a divorcée". Divorcées in 20th century pop culture are rather raffish, sometimes unsavoury, figures. I saw them as wearing leopard print, long red fingernails, cigarette holders. (Of course, this strawwoman had rather softened by then, 1 in 3 marriages producing divorcées of all kinds.)

So it was a great surprise when my best friend, not a Catholic, gave me a divorce present. The divorce present was wee, just a trifle, and it was, in a sad way, supremely funny. It was a tiny notebook, bound in leopard print fabric, hanging from a key chain. I suppose the unsavoury divorcée of the mid-20th century might have used it to collect gentlemen's phone numbers.

I loved that little notebook. It had everything: the element of surprise, a friend's desire to comfort, my worst fears made tiny (the leopard print), and a nod to my love of writing. Where is it now, I wonder.

So although I am down on divorce parties per se (shudder), I cannot say that giving a tiny divorce present, if intensely meaningful, given by a best friend, would always be wrong. At very least, asking your friend if she'd like to go out for dinner on the Day would be kindly.

***
Divorce is a supremely touchy subject for Catholics. Having had no children, I could have gone through life without telling anybody about mine. And indeed, I generally kept it to myself once I got beyond my mad post-divorce talking stage. If a Catholic asked after the ex, I would mention my divorce and annulment in the same breath.

This always got a friendly word from Catholics of a traditional outlook. But to my surprise, it did not endear me to Catholic divorcées less willing to beg Rome for freedom. If a Catholic woman of a certain age* confessed that she was divorced, and I volunteered the information that I, divorced-and-annulled, understood where she was coming from, the divorcée would stick her claws in about the annulment: "Oh, well THAT makes you better than me, doesn't it?" This happened twice, so I shut up.

A few years later, I discovered that even Catholics of a traditional bent were beginning to second-guess annulment decisions. John Paul II had apparently been annoyed by the number of them in North America, and this had cast doubts on the validity of our declarations of invalidity, rumoured to be rubber-stamped by "liberals". When I mentioned mine in "Seraphic Meets Bridezilla", I received some the nastiest messages my blogs have ever received. Complete strangers spat on my happiness in being free to marry B.A.

Fortunately, there is an old Latin motto to deal with such second-guessing. It is Roma locuta, causa finita: "Rome has spoken, the matter is done." And any frightened doubt I may have had about the validity of my decree of nullity has been completely dispelled by concrete experience. My first marriage had none of the fruits of the Holy Spirit--a situation that tipped me off to the fact that something was seriously awry. But this marriage, my sacramental marriage, has them all. Deo gratias.

*Annullées of the John Paul II generation can be hilarious. When I told a remarried one about mine, she said, "A virgin again!" and we giggled like loons.

Update: I've just received this blog's first negative comment: it was in response to this post. It was anonymous, from someone looking up "marriage, annulments, Catholicism" on Google, so it wouldn't have been posted anyway.

I am telling you all about it, as it helps prove my point about the supreme touchiness of the subject of Catholics and divorce. It could have been by your run-of-the-mill anti-Catholic, but it could have been by a soul in pain. There is just so much pain around divorce---a very strong reason for no-one to "settle" and for everyone who marries validly to make their marriage top priority.