It’s all in the teleology.
Young ladies have power that they don’t realize they have.
My older son is in college. Most people don’t “date” regularly and few people form relationships oriented toward marriage. There are some folks who are “in a relationship,” which mostly means that they have sex exclusively with each other, but not with any great long-term commitment.
Yet, it seems, some marriages do result from some of these relationships over time. Many young folks DO want to find husbands and wives, and DO want to marry, but the social conventions under which they labor frustrate their secret desires.
My son, one of a small set of Rigid, un-Frankian, Judgmental, Morally-Stern, Antequarianly-Chaste Catholics on campus, has had no lack of pretty, sweet, interesting, intelligent young women to date since arriving on campus a year and a half ago. And the dates are old-fashioned dates. An afternoon at the museum. Dinner at the club. A movie. A Catholic social event. A school dance. He’s also engaged in “group dates” from which he’s identified young ladies wishing to be dated one-on-one by him.
He also has been very firm about three rules, and very public, as well. He is interested in dating romantically to find someone to marry. She must be (or become) a Catholic. No sex before marriage.
Although I don’t think anyone openly ridiculed him (he’s in a place that is surprisingly tolerant), I know that he raised many eyebrows.
He has had no lack of young ladies interested in having a more serious, exclusive dating relationship with him. In fact, his girlfriend last semester was a young girl brought up as an atheist who was willing to consider conversion in order to further the relationship toward marriage. Once he realized that her inability to accept the concept of Original Sin doomed the relationship, he broke up with her. But, even though they had a pretty deep emotional bond, because they’d never had sex, the break-up was sad, but reasoned, without much drama. The young lady agreed with his conclusion that although they both had very strong feelings for each other, their respective worldviews were just too different to enable them to form a happy, permanent relationship.
Swiftly, he found himself sought out by another young lady to date seriously who had almost literally been “waiting in the wings.” She is a fallen-away Lutheran who is more than willing to come into communion with the Church in order to marry him. I suspect that they are much more compatible, and it would be unsurprising if they were to eventually marry. But if they don’t, my son is aware of other young ladies on campus who would love the opportunity to date him seriously.
Many, many intelligent young women are starving for good, decent men who want nothing more than to find someone to love them with all their hearts as Christ loves the Church, and to date in order to find the right person who will love them in that way. But few young men seem ready to emulate my son’s model.
His young gentlemen friends are astonished that it’s as if the young ladies line up to date him, with the goal of determining whether or not marriage to him is a realistic prospect.
My son’s a bright guy, has a sterling personality, is kind and generous (but also has a biting wit), is a good, honest, decent, loyal friend, is pretty good looking, and hard-working. But on his campus, there are plenty of smarter, handsomer, stronger, brilliant, hardworking young gentlemen of good character, too.
But they are merely taking their cue from the ladies, most of whom give no overt signals that this is what they want from their male prospects. When my son went to college, he was pretty firm about how he was going to conduct himself. But he told us that he despaired of finding anyone who wanted to date seriously, take the time to form a deep relationships, take delight in each others’ personality, who wanted to explore the possibility of marriage, who would understand the importance of sharing religious faith and belief, and who would be willing to wait for marriage. The young ladies weren’t giving any signals that they were receptive to such overtures, that they would like to date, rather than just all go out in groups, or keep it all “just friends,” or engage in casual sex. Even the girls in the Catholic Student Association didn’t seem to engage in the flirting and behaviors that encourage the gentlemen to ask them out on real dates.
However, knowing upfront my son’s intentions, absolutely not one young lady has turned him down for an initial date. A couple ladies have had previous engagements for specific events to which he’d asked them, but they made quite clear to him that they would like to be asked out again by him for a more mutually-convenient time. “I’m not interested,” hasn’t been in the lexicon of any young lady he’s asked out.
And among his gentlemen friends, many wish they would attract the ladies thusly, as many are secretly marriage-minded, too. But they’re trapped within social conventions which are sub-optimal and lead to messy, damaging relationships that hurt everyone all around. Or no relationship at all.
When one denies the purpose of things, one frustrates the means as well as their end.
Yes, the young men in my family have all been that way on campus too! They are in the minority and I think it is a combination of having less-roving genes and being raised under the moral example of men who likewise have less cad in them.
The holding out for Catholic marriage is probably less common, and most such marriage-material college men seem to end up in exclusive relationships with the very lucky minority of women on campus who manage to attract them. The majority of women are left scrambling in and too often falling prey to the modern hookup culture that especially favors men when both gay men and the exclusive-dater men are taken out of the equation.
Sigh.
The older one's dating experiences have mostly been really bad (sometimes downright strange, like the girl who invited him home to meet her parents, then treated him like a pariah from the moment she picked him up at the airport ?!?), and I think he really doesn't have much enthusiasm left for the dating process.
The other one is a freshman bball player at a small Catholic college. Sweet boy, smart, wants to be a doctor. He doesn't talk about dating much, but if there were someone very special in his life, we'd know about it.
It's sad. This generation seems to have a real problem forming real relationships -- girls just as much as boys.
Which Catholic college is your son studying at? All the Catholic colleges in California are dens of iniquity with youths romping around like dogs in heat and with leftist professors who tear down faith, God, and Jesus.