Dorothy Cummings - Seraphic Singles: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Single Life

Seraphic Singles

Seraphic Singles

How I Learned to Stop Worrying
and Love the Single Life

Dorothy Cummings

2010 Novalis Publishing Inc.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Cummings, Dorothy, 1971-

Seraphic singles : how I learned to stop worrying and

love the single life / Dorothy Cummings.

ISBN 978-2-89646-215-5

1. Single women. 2. Single women--Conduct of life.

3. Catholic women--Conduct of life. 4. Cummings,

Dorothy, 1971-. I. Title.

HQ800.2.C84 2010 306.81'53088282 C2010-900445-0

Printed in Canada.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.

5 4 3 2 1 14 13 12 11 10

This book is dedicated to

Kelly Bourke
and Seraphic Singles everywhere

Not only, then, is man capable of aesthetic liberation and artistic creativity, but his first work of art is his own living.

Bernard Lonergan

Table of Contents

Preface

F or over two years, they called me Seraphic Single.

When I sat down at my computer in November 2006 and began to write online about the Single Life, I had no idea where that life would lead me. Catholic, divorced and thirty-five years old, studying graduate theology in a city far from home, I had recently had a revelation. I wanted to share it with other Catholic women. The revelation was this: it was okay to be a single woman.

That this was a revelation might come as a surprise to the editors of both Ms. and Cosmopolitan magazines. The Single Life, to many people, means freedom, fun and sex without strings. But for sincerely Catholic women, as for women of most faiths, the state of single blessedness is something a lot more serious, a lot more real, than the sugary fantasies of Sex and the City . Unlike our more secular sisters, we are discouraged from dulling the pain of loneliness with shopping, alcohol and sexual sin.

Partnership is the norm of the secular world and, despite the sexual revolution, marriage is still presented to women as a glittering prize. And this is neither surprising nor wrong. Marriage is, as theologians have told us since ancient times, the natural end of the human person. (Consecrated celibacy, like that of monks and nuns, is a heroic sacrifice of that end.) And most women, despite the feminist revolution, still hanker for a man and a family of our very own. The 2007 self-help book The Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right sold millions of copies.

I read The Rules . My friends read it. I constantly referenced it as I wrote about the Single Life. And yet the book offered no guarantee that any of us would find Mr. Right. The future was a complete mystery, and we were afraid that husband and babies would never be ours.

And yet there was a lot to love in the Single Life. My spiritual director advised me to see where God was working in my life right then, so I had a look. I saw that I had talents, interests, friends and family. I saw that I was living in an exciting city, with plenty of opportunities for travel and study. I reread St. Pauls conviction that the Single Life was a life he would wish for everyone, and I decided to take it seriously. I reflected that if one were called by God to remain single, whether temporarily or permanently, then one should be as cheerfully accepting of Gods will as possible. I dubbed this option Seraphic and I optimistically named myself Seraphic Single.

Not every woman who wants to get married gets married , I wrote, and before I knew it, hundreds of readers across the English-speaking world were reading my blog, Seraphic Singles . Predominantly young and Catholic, readers found my essays and stories about being an unmarried, continent, church-going Catholic worth a daily visit. They wrote comments. They linked to my blog on their own blogs. They sent me emails telling their own Singles stories and asking for advice. They wrote from the University of Notre Dame, from Harvard, from Oxford, from Aberdeen. They wrote from across the USA, from Canada, from Britain, Ireland, Australia, South Africa and the Philippines. I met some of them in person. I even travelled to Scotland to meet my British readers.

And there I fell in love.

When this book goes to press, I will no longer be Seraphic Single. At the age of thirty-eight, I got married. Finding Mr. Right should not have been a shock: had I not received an annulment from the Toronto Marriage Tribunal over ten years before? The possibility of marrying again had indeed for many years lurked in my mind. But falling so completely in loveand with a devout Catholic man my age, to bootwas a shock, all the same. And it seems a very funny cosmic joke that, having accepted Gods will that I be Single, and, indeed, having written this book on the Single Life, God called me to Married Life after all.

Most Catholics do, in fact, get married. But before we do, we need reassurance that the life we live as Singleshowever frustrating, lonely and poor at timesis a life worth living. I hope that this book will help Single Catholics feel more Seraphic about the way of life in which God has currently placed them.

Introduction

What if hes not coming?

A s I said in the Preface, not every woman who wants to get married gets married. This is the cold, hard fact from which many of us run. Similarly, not everyone who gets a divorce and an annulment receives that second chance. Or we blow that second chance. Sometimes, our prince doesnt come.

There are countless reasons why this prince might not arrive. Some are historical, such as most of the men leaving town for work, or the anti-marriage trend of the sexual revolution. Some have to do with our circumstances: we work in a mostly female environment, or in a profession dominated by gay men, or in a profession dominated by celibate men, such as priests and religious, or in a community where everyone else got married at twenty-two. Some have to do with our poor choices: we dated the wrong man for a decade and have finally dumped him or been dumped; we date only unmarriageable men; we are drinking alcoholics; we are using users; we are bad-tempered harridans that no one can stand to be around. Some have to do with personal tragedies: we are physically scarred, maimed or plain as a pan of milk; we are chronically ill; we are old; we have been irreparably slandered in our communities; we are big-boned, full-figured or just heavy women, and no matter what we do, we cannot lose the weight. That is why Prince Charming has not come.

Or maybe not. Maybe some of us are just too picky. I hear this one a lot, especially from grumpy single men. But what I, and many other chronically single women, usually want is just a nice man whose looks we find attractive, who is intelligent and funny and faithful, who goes to church, who has a job that he enjoys and is proud of, and brings in enough income so that if we lose our jobs, or have a baby, we all wont be in a financial mess. I wrote this once on a website, and a poster wrote, Wow, youre picky. So maybe these men dont exist anymore or were all snapped up when they were twenty-two.