Handsome Wedding Guest Story

At the risk of him finding out, I have to tell you about the Handsome Wedding Guest. I may have mentioned him before--as in six years ago or so. The Wedding in question was that of my brother Nulli and Ma Belle Soeur. The Handsome Wedding Guest was a Single, Male, Catholic Uniate (whether Uki, Maronite or other, I'm not going to tell you for then all my brother's friends will guess), Doctor--tall, handsome, charming, you name it. In short, a matrimonial prize in the old-fashioned, grasping, Mrs Bennet sense of the word.

The Handsome Wedding Guest was assigned to sit at a table of Single women, which was nice for him and for us, though he soon singled out a glamorous francophone for his attentions, leaving us anglo girls in the dust. Boo. It did't even work out with the glamorous French-speaking girl, so what a waste, sigh, sigh.

The whole point to this story, however, is that he is getting married this summer, six (or is it seven?) years later, after having been Highly Eligible for Years and Years, only not having found the Right Girl until recently.

In contrast, at least two of the Single women who gazed admiringly upon him over the table are already married.

His fiancee is very pretty and very nice, belonging to his exact same ethnic group, etc., and I presume they share core values.

So all I can say is that if such a handsome and eligible man cannot find true love in a hurry, we women should not panic if we haven't found it by our 25th or thirtieth birthday. It is a total myth that we look worse at thirty than we do at twenty-five anyway. It is much easier to be thirty than twenty-five. Our confidence sky-rockets the farther we get from 21, believe you me, and this makes us easier to be around as we become less chippy and defensive. We are also often smarter, not only about other people, but about ourselves.

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Sorry I haven't transferred the Operation Valentinus sign-up sheet yet. I am most awfully busy, running around visiting people I can see only once a year, plus promoting my beautiful controversial, alarming book.

Toronto readers who want to meet up on Valentine's Day at five-thirty p.m. should send me an email for the location. There have already been eager inquiries from male fans, and thus there is need for secrecy. I am not in the matchmaking business; I am all about you feeling good about being chaste (or working on being chaste) Singles, not feeling eager to give up this holy freedom ASAP. Therefore, no boys allowed.

Personally, I am still so relieved I was Single when I was thirty-eight, which is when I met my husband B.A. And meanwhile, proving that married love is not the only kind, I must go and spend more time with the rest of my family and my Canadian friends and mentors while I can.

Broken Engagements

A broken engagement usually equals disappointment, a unique dream that has died and a cherished friendship that has either been wounded or exterminated. Sometimes it signifies a betrayal. It is serious stuff.

It is serious if the man broke off the engagement (which a gentleman was never supposed to do), and it is serious if you broke off the engagement. Either way, it hurts. And, unfortunately, it represents HIGH DRAMA to all your mutual friends and relatives. Your nearest and dearest will be sorry and perhaps embarrassed, and many of your under-twenty-five friends will talk, shriek, speculate, shake their heads... Ugh.

This is why I recommend, from the bottom of my heart, that a broken engagement is a good reason for you to get out of Dodge. Now is the time to take a quick How-to-Teach-ESL course and move to rural Poland for six months. I'd suggest Japan except that it would be harder to get to Sunday Mass. If you are away from almost everyone you know, you will escape both the possibility that your broken engagement will be of interest to those who should not be interested and the possibility that people who should care don't care.

Another long-distance plan involves mission work in some country so desperately poor, your own problems will be put into perspective. Incidentally, don't do anything dangerous or life-changing or involves a commitment of more than six months. St. Ignatius of Loyola says that you should make no important decision when you are in a state of desolation, and very often after a broken engagement a person is in a state of desolation.

A safer option involves your aunt across the country or ocean. "Scooter and I broke up. It's over. Can I stay with you for a month to get my head together?" sounds perfectly reasonable to me, aunt of three, wife of Uncle Kindhearted.

Or if you really can't move away that long, see if you can take a holiday away somewhere, as in across a large body of water. Presumably there was a wedding budget; use some money for this.

At very least, you must take a week off work or school, as soon as you possibly can. And you must not contact your ex-fiance. You must not allow your ex-fiance to contact you. It is not time for closure. Closure after a broken engagement is not something you can make happen, particularly not within a week of the break. Closure may take months. If you broke up in October, you will feel just a little better in November, and then a little better in December (with a dip around Christmas), and then a little better in January. By April, you will be much better indeed. Look forward to April.

Wherever you go, I recommend hiring a therapist to listen to you talk. The etiquette books of yore held that a gentleman cannot say anything about a broken engagement, and a lady can speak of it only to one ladylike friend who can be trusted not to say anything to anyone else. These etiquette books were published long before Bridget Jones was a book, let alone a film. I think it is almost impossible to talk about a failed engagement to only one ladylike taciturn friend, and that there are only so many times she can listen to the same story before she starts screening your calls. Therefore, I think the addition of a shrink a very good idea. If you have little money, I recommend seeing if you can talk to someone at Catholic Family Services or your university's mental health services for a nominal sum. And, for the truly poor and distressed, there is always your favourite priest.

I seriously recommend not dating for six months. The temptation to win emotional intimacy with a cool new guy by telling him all about the last cool guy (which never, ever, works in real life) will probably be too much for you. Ignore everyone who tells you that when you fall off a horse, you have to get right back on. Relationships are not horses.

Above all, allow yourself to be sad. The natural healthy reaction to disappointment and loneliness is sadness. Sadness is not a disease. It is your right to be sad until you slowly begin to discover that you are happy. (If six months go by and you are still not happy, and indeed feel worse, I recommend you see at doctor about this at once. Sadness is not a disease, but depression is.)

So to recap:

1. Get some physical distance from the community where the engagement and break-up occurred for up to six months, if you can.
2. Do not contact your fiance or allow him to contact him, no matter how lonely either of you feels. Of course you feel lonely. Find other ways or people to help you carry the burden of your loneliness. Your OWN loneliness. You are not responsible for his loneliness; you can't help him.
3. Do your best not to tell everyone in the universe what happened. Instead, hire a therapist, see a counselor or talk to a priest. If you can afford only to talk to a priest, stuff some money in the poor box.
4. Don't date for six months.
5. Don't demand instant closure. Instead, own your sadness. Imagine your sadness is a wounded bird you are going to take care of until it can fly again. Don't feel ashamed to be sad. But don't hang onto the wounded bird when it is ready to fly away. If the wounded bird doesn't show any signs of healing, go to a doctor.

I hope this is helpful.

Frank Talk on Money, Long Engagements & Religious Guys

Today I present you with a three part post because that is the mood I am in.

MONEY

It strikes me that the wrong men are worried about how much money they make and what women think of it all. Young men, the ones who wish to marry young women, should indeed plot and scheme to get a good job with opportunities for career advancement so that they will be able to support a wife and family.

Yes, most young women are also interested in getting good jobs with opportunities for career advancement, but most young women are also interested in having babies. If they are devout Catholic women, they are usually going to have babies sooner rather than later. This will take them out of the work force for months or years, and someone has to pay the bills.

But middle-aged men, the ones who wish to marry middle-aged women, should stop worrying so much about how much money they have because middle-aged women don't worry so much about that ourselves. If we are still Single, we are used to supporting ourselves anyway. And if we don't have children, we know that we are unlikely to have more than one or two at this point. And at this point, we just want someone to lean on, to leave parties with and to love. Middle-aged women have more confidence than young women, so we are less worried about "being taken advantage of". So what if we work 9-5 and he just potters around his pottery kiln, selling the odd figurine to the odd tourist? So what? Who cares? If he's kind and funny and attractive, that's enough for us. The older I get, the more looks seem to matter.

I'm not touching the subject of young men who wish to marry older women and of middle-aged men who wish to marry young women because that's two whole other blog posts.

LONG ENGAGEMENTS

I think long engagements are stupid and cruel. If you are so much in love with with somebody that you want to marry him/her, you probably want to sleep with him/her. Sexual passion is one of the strongest forces known to man, so it is really hard to keep it bottled up. It is easier to keep it bottled up if you know the exact date drinks may be served.

For the record, the "Priest must be informed one year before the wedding" instruction in parish bulletins is cruel, uncanonical and unenforceable. Ever since I was an undergrad I noticed that the most pious Catholics got married in a matter of months. They would call up a priest-uncle or priest-cousin or priest-pal and have a nice little wedding in record time. It was the more lackadaisical Catholics, or half-Catholic, half-nothing couples who dated for a very long time and then were engaged for a very long time. These couples would be mainly concerned about "the hall." Never mind the diocese and its stupid "One Year" rule (which you can challenge, btw, as it is uncanonical). Some couples were willing to wait two years for the perfect hall of their dreams.

When I was younger and as innocent as a newborn lamb, I was surprised at the pious for their unseemly haste and impressed by the couples who could patiently wait for so long. Now I am a woman of the world, and know that although the pious were dying to have sex, the not-as-pious were often already having it.

Nancy Mitford joked about the size of an engagement ring being the measure of how much a man thought your virtue was worth. This suggests that even in the 1920s, engaged couples were sleeping together. And I believe there are parts of Italy where it is so assumed an engaged couple are sleeping together, that bickering couples marry and divorce rather than just break off the engagement, for otherwise the woman's reputation would be ruined.

So I am not throwing stones at engaged couples who sleep together, the love-struck little poppets. I just think they should get married ASAP if the temptation is that bad. And obviously they'll have to go to confession first.

Meanwhile, B.A. and I tried to strong-arm my parish priest into marrying us in four months after I first talked to the priest. He looked at my annulment papers and quailed. The marriage tribunal wrote somewhere or other that I'd better know the next guy I married real well. The priest looked at me hopefully when he mentioned this. We got married six months after I talked to him. There was no stupid hall. The reception was in my parents' house. I got a priest-pal to say the Mass.

I love to say that I don't believe in single men's words--I believe only in their diamonds. I figured unless there was a ring and unless he had told his mother, an engagement wasn't real. But now I am upping the ante and saying an engagement isn't really real unless there is a wedding date.

RELIGIOUS GUYS

In general it is stupid to sleep with someone unless you're married to him or at least there is a clear,fixed and widely-known wedding date. Men in general are so terrified of marriage, they either have to be promised something really good in order to go through with it or be terrified of what their mothers will do if they don't.

A girl might think religious men exempt from this because religious men are very pro-marriage and want nothing more than to please God by getting married, so seducing a religious guy is the way forward. But no.

It is my humble opinion that if a man really is that into you, there's not much you can do to dissuade him from marrying you, short of cheating on him or killing something or someone. So merely sleeping with your devoutly Catholic fiance will probably not ruin the whole relationship, although obviously it is a mortal sin, so you ought not to do it.

However, there are certainly a lot of religious men who would be so personally devastated at having committed a mortal sin with their girlfriends that they will never see their girlfriends the same way ever again. In fact, they might even consider it virtuous to break up with those satanic temptresses so as to marry pure girls, girls who have not gotten in the way of their primary relationship with God.

It is always a good idea to seem even more chaste than your chaste Catholic boyfriend, even if inwardly you are a volcano of lust. You know you are, and your best friend knows you are, and I know you are, but he doesn't know you are, and that's fine. By appearing as pure as a bowl of vanilla ice cream, at least next to him, you are inspiring him to be good, a better man than he is, etc., etc.

I am sure there are all kinds of depressing examples that you will now write in about your boyfriends to whom you were angels of purity and light who ditched you for flashing-eyed bad girls with roses in their teeth. But in general I would say to be particularly sensitive to the hopes and beliefs of deeply religious men and don't try to tempt them into things for which they will later be very angry with you.

I have found "Don't touch the hottie" to be a particularly effective mantra.