Neither are all the attempts to make people feel that they are “not whole enough”.
.You have such a good attitude. I try to think like this but it is difficult.Hi Norseman,
Yes I am the one that is looking into foster care. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to get married and have children of my own. I am licensed now by the way! I haven’t heard anything from my agency as of yet. I have a family trip planned for July (cruise out of the country) so I am thinking it be best if I wait for a placement until I get home. Thanks for remembering though - that is nice.
What I meant by my comment is you need to be content with yourself. You can’t have the idea that once I am married I will be happy, or once I have kids I will be happy. I USED to think this way years ago when all my friends were getting married and having babies :crying: . Finally I realized I am single and I need to embrace it. I got involved, started volunteering more, getting together with friends, taking Catholic related classes, etc. and guess what … Being single isn’t all that bad :bigyikes: . That doesn’t take away the fact that I have a STRONG desire to be married and be a mother SOMEDAY when GOD will’s it.
I also believe that we have to help God out. What I mean by that is you need to get out there and make yourself available to meet the type of man/woman you are seeking. So I am on a Catholic dating website, I go to Catholic functions, I volunteer and maybe one day I will meet my future spouse. And until I do I am happy doing the things I am doing. I couldn’t become a foster care parent just because God put the desire in my heart. I had to take the classes, prepare my home and do all the necessary things to make myself available to it.
This thread is great because I am finding out I am not alone in my pursuit of finding a good Catholic spouse
I hate being single. It would mean so much to me to be married. I think it stems from the fact that my mother died when I was a baby and I have no brothers and sisters. Being the generation that I am I grew up in Ireland where the average family was 4 or 5 kids at least. It’s not that I am trying to replace my childhood or anything like that. I just feel such a strong call to marriage. Having said that I wouldn’t marry someone just for the sake of it. It would have to be the right person. It seems people found it alot easier years ago to meet someone. I wonder is it that our expectations have become too high?Thanks for the advice. I know you are right and it does make your life more interesting and fulfilling to be involved in things, not to mention the fact that you are more likely to meet someone the more things you are involved in and the more places you go!!! I am 34 too so I understand all about freaking out!!
God ALLOWED this, and God’s allowing something is another way of saying it happened according to God’s permissive will. This is, I believe, Church teaching. This is explained by the Jesuit Father Jean Baptiste Saint-Jure in the book, “Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence”, pages 11-26, under the titles: “The Will of God Made and Governs All Things”, “God Controls All Events, whether Good or Bad”, “How Can God Will or Allow Evil?”. No, this priest was not a heretic.
As a lot of my older mentors and wise friends always say: WAY better to be too picky than to not be picky enough. We know marriages that are borne from the latter - WHOA! Talk about a huge mess!
Well, l think there is a very serious problem if she is saying this because she is deriving her sense of self-worth from the relationship in general, and in particular from the attention that you are showing her. It is a problem because although she probably doesn’t realise it or mean to, she is actually using you as an emotional tranquiliser, and you are only making the situation worse by feeding it in the belief that both of you are in love.
First of all, I prefaced what I said with “depending on what she meant”. And it is really unfair for anyone to jump to the conclusion that his will automatically lead to addictive behavior.Well, l think there is a very serious problem if she is saying this because she is deriving her sense of self-worth from the relationship in general, and in particular from the attention that you are showing her. It is a problem because although she probably doesn’t realise it or mean to, she is actually using you as an emotional tranquiliser, and you are only making the situation worse by feeding it in the belief that both of you are in love.
The danger is when both parties lack the insight to see that they are really using each other. They go on to get married, and then eventually the attention they used to show each other out of unspoken and unrecognised necessity must be directed towards the children, and then they wonder what went wrong because each person feels deprived of attention from the other. In fact, nothing went wrong because it wasn’t right to begin with.
You see, neither person in the above example is capable of love because their relationships with other people are driven by getting rather than giving. Eventually something has to give, and in the context of this thread, that often and sadly means separation.
It’s a bit like an example l heard about piety. A person can attend daily Mass, say the Rosary daily, go to frequent Confession, and yet habitually fly off the handle at their neighbour for the smallest thing. How is such a thing possible? Probably because piety to that person is what a bottle of alcohol, a hit of heroin, a packet of cigarettes, or the attention garnered from wearing immodest clothes is to another: a temporary distraction from some form of pain, incurred either during their childhood or during their adult life, which the person never really confronts. The pain becomes buried, it simmers, and then it takes a hold of the person in other ways which leaves them painfully and, if left unresolved or untreated, permanently mystified. Often, though, people just resign their identity to their pain without ever acknowledging it. They might even say that’s how God made them when in fact it could be how they made themselves or allowed themselves to become.
In the case of a husband and wife, well, when the temporary hits of spousal affection wear off, enter alcohol addiction, enter adultery, you name it. The other person has become like a bottle of beer, but unlike a beer, a human being cannot be thrown away, cannot be consumed at leisure and to excess whenever the need arises. What happens when their partner becomes seriously ill or depressed?
This is just one example. I could give many others. My point being, and it’s a pretty simple one, is that instead of turning to God when they should, people turn to each other for fulfillment. It might work for a while, but it’s not sustainable, and by the time either person realises what’s gonig on, the damage has already been done. They turn to God at the end rather than at the beginning.
I hope my post shows a few possible consequences of that.
When people talk about being “whole”, they are simply talking about what makes them tick, what drives them. Unfortunately, secular culture encourages people to draw all of their strength from within, and to base all of their value on what they can provide and possess. The problem comes about when a person goes through hard times, as we have already seen, since everything they’ve based their life on and around is in pieces. Faith and trust in God is replaced by consumerism, careerism and exploitation that is cleverly rebadged as some kind of spirituality. But enough of that tangent.
What we need to do is to examine who we are, in a psychological or natural sense, in the context of what we are in a supernatural sense.
I don’t think l’m saying anything unreasonable or heretical here.
Just my :twocents:
I do understand what you meant by “depending on what she meant”, and apologise for causing any offense. I only intended to take one example and run with it, I wasn’t having a go at you personally. I will be more careful with my language next time
OK, I don’t dispute that in serious cases (like addictions, severe mental problems, violent behavior, etc.) these need to be worked out, because these are problems that will endanger a relationship and marriage should not be used as . However, the majority of people, I would imagine, have less serious problems that are not of the relationship-threatening type (at this time) and are worked on “en route” (which is probably true about our lives in general). I think distinguishing betwen these two is the key here, for if we wait until we are “perfect” I don’t think there will be any marriages!I do understand what you meant by “depending on what she meant”, and apologise for causing any offense. I only intended to take one example and run with it, I wasn’t having a go at you personally. I will be more careful with my language next time
Norseman, l agree with you. Just to give a personal example, l do some volunteer work which routinely brings me into contact with people who are former prison inmates, have serious mental illnesses, are living in domestic violence situations, and so forth. They often have quite a few children and cannot work for a variety of reasons. Although we are principally there to give them financial and material assistance, often the greatest thing we can do for them is to love them just for who they are, warts and all. This gives them the confidence they need to able to help themselves where they can and rebuild their shattered lives.
Some of the strongest examples of faith l have seen in my life are amongst the destitute. I’ve heard a saying that goes something like: “Faith isn’t faith until it’s all you’re holding onto”. I think there’s a lot of truth in that.
But it’s one thing to help another person to carry their cross, and it’s another to take it off them. I heard a very beautiful analogy once. It basically says that you can’t have the butterfly after the caterpillar without the intervening struggle as the butterfly fights its away out of its cocoon. If you help the butterfly out of its cocoon, it won’t survive.
So, all l wanted to say is that there are some things that a person really needs to come to terms with before they jump into a relationship. Otherwise, like the example of the butterfly, they will find it very hard to survive the rigors of marriage when they come. That’s all.
BTW, l am not PC in the least. Feel free to be as un-PC as you like
I am so happy this worked for you! God bless you and your fiance in your upcoming marriage!