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redbetta
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Like I said earlier, my heart is pretty set on doing things online for the next few years.
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Thrstypirate
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I met my wife online. In fact, I only had met women through the internet. This was in 2006, so I’m out of the game for a while (we met on Craigslist personal ads before it became so creepy that they shut that section down), but this is what I found helpful.
- create an email that’s just a romance email, registered as a pseudonym. That way if a weirdo likes your ad, they can’t stalk you or Google you. I played the sneaky screen name and email insert back in the day, and it worked out.
- a friend of mine used POF, which is, or at least used to be, free. I’m sure you can narrow searches to Catholics…no promise that they’re going to be faithful of course.
- There’s a lot of hit and miss…a loooooot of hit and miss. But, there’s going to be a lot opportunity to have conversations, and if there’s going to be inappropriateness, it will come out fast…so hopefully there won’t be a con game going.
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RolandThompsonGunner
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Do you live in a major metropolitan area? Most of my friends who successfully met people online lived in major cities. There needs to be a sufficiently large pool of single people.
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redbetta
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I live in the Chicagoland area, so hopefully that helps out a bit. But, I am not sure whether to put that in my profile.
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redbetta
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Thanks. My neighbors’ eldest met his wife on Catholicmatch and their youngest found his girlfriend on their not too long ago, which had made me think this may not be such a bad idea.
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RolandThompsonGunner
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I would. You don’t want to meet a cool guy and then realize he lives in LA. Might make actually going on a date tricky.
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EmilyAlexandra
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Hello! I hope you don’t mind a comment from a newcomer. I think it seems sad if you don’t want to make friends with people from university (apologies for defaulting to UK terminology). I’m about 15 years older than you, and I would say that all of my oldest/closest friends are people I know from school and/or university. It would seem such a shame if you were deliberately missing out on that. Also, do you not worry that you may be missing out on some of the wider intellectual growth that comes from having the opportunity to be immersed in the company of your peers?
I do note that you say on your profile that you are studying pharmacology (if you use the same term in the US). If I understand correctly, that is one of those subjects that is taught as a postgraduate course in the US, but as an undergraduate course in the UK, so I am guessing that you are a postgraduate and have already spent a minimum of four years at your undergraduate university. Perhaps you feel that you already have a large enough group of close friends from your undergraduate studies that you don’t need to worry about making more friends as a postgraduate.
I mention this because I was once in a similar situation myself. I went to Oxford as an undergraduate, and when I graduated, I moved to London (about 50 miles away) to take a one-year master’s course. However, I still had a boyfriend and a large group of friends in Oxford, and my plan was to move back there at the end of the year. So, while I was friendly with people I met on my course in London, I failed to stay in touch with anybody. I’ve always regretted that, because I met some really nice and interesting people there. Then my boyfriend broke up with me and I never did move back to Oxford, which made me regret all the more that I hadn’t made any lasting friends in London. When I continued with further postgraduate study, I was sure not to repeat the same mistake, and I made a lot of friends.
I am not a Catholic. I am just here because I want to learn more about Catholicism. But, as far as I understand it, I don’t think Catholics are required only to have friends who are also Catholics. However, do tell me if I am wrong. I do know that some fundamentalist evangelical Christians do not have friends who are not Christians, but I don’t think that is the case for Catholics. I certainly have some friends who are Catholics, although they are not particularly religious.
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redbetta
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While it’s true that Catholics don’t have to only be friends with other Catholics, we prefer to associate with others who have the same values so that folks are not constantly pressuring us to do things against our conscience and we can be more honest with them. My school is very left-leaning and I don’t even want to hint that I’m a Catholic. Hell, evening mentioning that my brother is in the police would paint a huge target on my back at school since it’s gone full BLM.
Tis_Bearself
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I’m older than both of you, and following school and university (Several universities), I kept up with exactly 2 people, one of whom I since fell out of touch with about 10 years ago. So that leaves 1.
The vast majority of my friends are people who actually share my interests. Some of them went to other area colleges when I was in college, and I met them in bars where bands were playing because I was interested in bands of certain genres. None of them went to my college. Many others I met on the Internet.
I have not missed out on anything by not having friends from school. The vast majority of people at my schools had little in common with me and once we all left school there was no benefit for me in keeping up with them. We don’t all have a big St Elmo’s Fire thing going on with classmates. If you do, fine, but don’t assume everybody else needs or wants your experience.
We’re not “required to” but a lot of Catholics have a preference for practicing Catholic friends and practicing Catholic dates. As redbetta says, it helps with being on the same page with beliefs and morals; you’re (hopefully) not going to be having endless arguments over premarital sexual behavior, LGBTQ+ issues, abortion, the need to go to Mass on Sunday, and possibly even doctrinal issues which often come up if the other person is from some faith that runs around trying to convert people (LDS, JW, evangelicals, etc).
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EmilyAlexandra
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Apologies if I stepped on any toes! I completely understand what you are saying. I have also dropped out of contact with people over the years. What seemed odd to me about @redbetta’s comments was the idea of deliberately avoiding making friends. I couldn’t imagine spending several years living with people, eating with them, studying with them in the library, being tutorial partners, attending chapel with them (which I did despite not being a Christian), rowing with them, and so on, but deliberately not making any friends. It just seems rather extreme to me.
Over the years, not all friends stay the course, but I would very rarely wish that somebody had never been my friend at all. When I first went up to university, I quickly became really good friends with a girl from Northern Ireland who was from a Protestant Irish nationalist family. I learned a lot about the history and politics of Northern Ireland from our many conversations on the subject. She was also a huge fan of Douglas Coupland, and, thanks to her, I quickly read all the novels he had written until that point so that we could discuss them together. After university, she moved to Scotland and I moved to London, and we fell out of contact. A few years later, she moved to London herself and we got back in touch briefly. Then she got married and moved to the other side of the country, and we didn’t make the effort to keep in contact. These things happen, but I am still pleased that we were friends for those few years.
I am sorry to hear that the situation is so extreme. I’m pleased to say that I’ve attended three universities in the UK (and taught at two), and never have I heard of a situation in which a student (or staff member) would feel that they had to conceal their religion or political views. In my experience, people respect the fact that some people, for example, don’t drink alcohol or don’t have sex outside of marriage. In fact, the only people I have met in a university context who have been really intolerant have been some of the more fundamentalist Protestants. I would add that although it’s been a while since I was an undergraduate, I am still involved with higher education, so my experience is current with regard to the British situation. It really is sad if students in the US cannot simply be accepted for who they are. Certainly I have known several Catholics, and I don’t think they ever faced hostility because of their religion, except perhaps from some fundamentalist Protestants.
Tis_Bearself
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You’re not at University now and not in the USA.
I can totally understand how she feels.
We just had weeks of riots here.
Her brother is a cop. She leans right. I’d defiinitely be looking off-campus for friends in this environment.
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redbetta
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Yeah, I’d rather not have my house torched.
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EmilyAlexandra
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My apologies. I really had no idea just how different the situation is in the US compared with the UK. We have had riots here too, but intelligent people are still having perfectly reasonable conversations with each other. If it has reached the point that you cannot practise your religion or tell people what job a family member does, that is truly awful.
Wow, has it really reached the point that university students would burn down somebody’s house because that person is a Catholic or has a brother who is a police officer? It really sounds terrible. I am not even a Catholic, but if it is that bad at American universities now, I think I would be considering leaving the country!
Yes, I think something like that did happen, but (1) it was an isolated incident and (2) they almost immediately realised they had made a mistake and apologised for it. I think the problem with policing in the UK is that we are four nations, all with their own legal systems, and we have lots of separate police forces, mostly territorial, but some that have jurisdiction over public transport, nuclear power facilities, etc, and not all of these police forces know what the others are doing. Then you’ll get some inexperienced copper who has a “hate crime” reported to him, and he’ll go and investigate it as a hate crime, only to discover that it wasn’t a hate crime after all. We’ve had the same thing during the coronavirus lockdown. There have been accounts of police officers doing bizarre things like telling people that they can be arrested for being in their own garden. Then there’s a big fuss about it in the media, the police officer gets told off by his boss, and the force apologises.redbetta said:
But we honestly don’t have university students who would be afraid to admit to having a family member who is a police officer.
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redbetta
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Aren’t things bad in the UK as well? Didn’t cops show up at a TERF’s house a while back because she posted trans women aren’t women on Facebook or something?
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redbetta
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A black man was shot by police in a Wendy’s parking lot and, a few hours later, that Wendy’s was set on fire. Yes, it is getting bad. Thankfully, this mostly happens in the cities and I live in the surburbs. Mom is still talking about moving farther away when I graduate if this keeps happening, though.
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ioannes_pius
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There’s always sedevacantistsingles.com 
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Jbrady
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No, of course not. Not even remotely close. Nor is the OP’s claim that she is afraid to tell anyone on campus a rational reflection of reality.
There is a mass delusion going around in conservative “Christian” circles, especially those that are beholden to Trump, that they are being “persecuted” because they can longer give voice to their homophobic, racist or misogynistic views without criticism from those who disagree. It’s become a paranoid pathology in which they imagine that they are some sort of “martyrs”, and that the whole world is out to “crucify” them, especially those Christians with whom they do not agree (Not only Liberals and Progressives, but other conservatives who do not share their views). They even think the Pope is persecuting them.
It’s gotten more pronounced recently that they have lost the Culture Wars, and with it, a whole lot of privilege and prestige, but no one feels sorry for them.
There are plenty enough of them in the UK, too. Mostly, like in the US, among the Evangelical set, but also among Catholics, as well. Conservative Christianity in the UK is highly influenced by its American counterpart.
I find that this trivializes the suffering of Christians in countries where real persecution does exist. It’s rather insulting to the true victims of persecution,if you think about it.
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EmilyAlexandra
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Thanks, a very interesting post. It is certainly interesting to learn that not everybody sees it the same way. You are certainly correct about certain extreme evangelical Christians in the UK who pursue frivolous legal claims alleging some kind of religious persecution.
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Servant31
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Honestly I think this is good advice. Online is often not a good representation of reality. Everyone is imperfect. If your concerned about someone at school, could you find people you don’t have classes with? Approaching someone and starting a friendly conversation can be a really great thing. I know parishes are closed right now but they won’t be forever.
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