I'm a gay guy. Should I marry a woman?

[theCardinalbird]

So, if a parent had a child, just like God is our parent and we are His children, and this child wanted to go and put his hand on a hot stove, he should be allowed to do this because every child should have free will, something that is given to him out of the parent’s love for him. And if this child burns his hand, that was his choice, not the parent’s choice even though the parent could have prevented the child from burning his hand. And if a child burns his hand, something good will come out of his suffering. And if a child wants to run out into the street and gets run over, the parent should “respect and indulge” the child’s choice to run into the street because allowing him to exercise his free will is a gift.

The parent should instruct the child, which the parent (God) has done. The church was sent by God to warn the child not to do those things. People have free will to do things yes, but they are warned by the parent of the consequences. What I posted before explains that suffering occurs because:

Satan has a certain amount of control over this universe, which is why there is sin, sickness, suffering, and death

 

[Gab123]

And it seems kind of cruel of God to make someone gay who is Catholic so that they are unable to have a legitimate Catholic marriage.

The only thing God wants of us is to become sanctified so we can have a share in His eternal Life in His kingdom. He wants to get us out of this world and all of it’s slavery to sin. The good news is that God wants you and everyone to be part of His family. But sin has to go. Much like a parent telling a heroin addict that the drugs have to go, simply because they end up destroying what could have been.

 

[Imdaman]

I’m pretty sure I mentioned more than once that I’d be having sex and open to children.

But if I wasn’t clear, I hope I am now!

Even more basic, neither would I marry a woman whom I had NO attraction to. I assume there would be some attraction. It wouldn’t be random, after all.

Thanks for the reply. I figured this out before hand and now I’m sure everyone else knows. Hopefully this will clear up any misconceptions anyone has.

 

[EnglishTeacher]

Maybe part of the problem with this thread is that it has gotten so long that people are just jumping in without having read the whole conversation, because it seems like many of us are just talking past each other.

Ultimately, really there is no way for the OP to be able to answer his own question (“Should I marry a woman?”) without having spent much time discerning, which process necessarily includes dating. And actually, that’s the same for any of us–there is no practical answer to the question, “Should I get married?” if you are a single person not currently seeing someone. The answer depends equally on the other person in the equation, so the only practical question is “Should I marry [insert name]?”

With the question being purely hypothetical at this point, everyone is jumping in and (unfairly) assuming and filling in the blanks (e.g., that the OP will deceive his wife about his attractions to men, that the OP will marry someone he is not attracted to, that the OP will not have relations with his wife, etc. etc. etc.).

All that to say, the only way to have any idea whether marriage is a good idea for you is to begin going on dates with women (keeping it casual for now unless there is a real possibility of a future that includes complete honesty and attraction, and all that). I would think you would discover sooner rather than later if there is any point in continuing–and definitely keep in close contact with your spiritual director about it.

 

[Thorolfr]

And the evidence that someone is gay, or bisexual, or fluid, or transgender, or questioning, or a transexual, or queer, is…what? Self reports.

Self reports based on the current state of their attractions.

We know that atttractions strenghten, diminish, tune, refine in every other area of human behavior.

We know from about 75 years of Behavioral Psychology with perhaps 200K scientific experiments that “reinforcement” happens, all manner of types of behavior can be shifted and nudged.

This is not arguable.

We also know that the sexual sense is HIGHLY pleasing and reinforcing.

So I think reasonable people can reject the idea that self reports of “attractions” should be the primary evidence of one’s natural orientation.

Most things that have to do with the mind are a matter of self report and there is not a test for most of them. Even when someone says that they’re depressed, or are having psychotic hallucinations, there’s no test to see if this is truly the case or what the extent of it is.

And people who study emotions have a very difficult time doing this. As Lisa Feldman Barrett, University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, says in her book, How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2017) (p. 2):

I directed a lab that asked hundreds of test subjects to keep track of their emotional experiences for weeks or months as they went about their lives. My students and I enquired about a wide variety of emotional experiences.

These new experiments revealed something that had never been documented before: everyone we tested used the same emotion words like “angry,” “sad,” and “afraid” to communicate their feelings but not necessarily to mean the same thing. Some test subjects made fine distinctions with their word use: for example, they experienced sadness and fear as qualitatively different. Other subject, however, lumped together words like “sad” and “afraid” and “anxious” and “depressed” to men “I feel crappy” (or, more scientifically, “I feel unpleasant”). The effect was the same for pleasant emotions like happiness, calmness, and pride. After testing over seven hundred American subjects, we discovered that people vary tremendously in how they differentiate their emotional experiences.

As she goes on to explain, this makes it very difficult to do a scientific study of emotions since the researcher can’t tell if two people who use the exact same words to describe their emotions are experiencing the same thing.

And I’m sure that the same kind of difficulty happens when someone tries to study sexuality.

 

[catholic1seeks]

Without “Attractions, desires, proclivities, inclinations, preferences,” we’d never even search for the truth.

The whole human endeavor is a search for God, who is our ultimate Good and Truth.

The search for truth is a desire placed in everyone.

We all want happiness. We are all built with this goal in mind.

Sometimes it’s not so easy to be black-and-white. If God wanted everything to be straightforward, then I suppose he wouldn’t have given us bodies and multiple desires, in the first place.

 

[Thorolfr]

The only thing God wants of us is to become sanctified so we can have a share in His eternal Life in His kingdom. He wants to get us out of this world and all of it’s slavery to sin. The good news is that God wants you and everyone to be part of His family. But sin has to go. Much like a parent telling a heroin addict that the drugs have to go, simply because they end up destroying what could have been.

But there is no evidence that most gay people could ever have been straight. And having same-sex attraction is not an addiction any more than having opposite sex attraction is an addiction. And yet I haven’t seen you comparing straight people to heroin addicts.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

This thread is a dumpster fire right now.

We need virtues! We need the virtue of chastity, yes, but we also need the virtues of charity, prudence, kindness, and self-control. Failures in those virtues during this very conversation are causing us to hurt each other, or else – worse yet – to play into one another’s prejudices.

Let’s listen to each other. How about it?

 

[Kei]

Hm, I imagine many women would not like to be married to a man who didn’t find them attractive.
Then again, I think it should be clear if you ask married couples who have lasted for many decades, at least from what I can tell, that attraction is overrated. Looks fade, what matters is if you can get along with the person for years on end. In this sense, I don’t see why not, but I would be very open with any woman you date about this and know that many may not support this decision.

In this, romance would bloom from closeness and care over attraction. But of course, this should be discerned with much prayer and guidance, to see what God wants.

 

[catholic1seeks]

Yeah I think I need to take a break for a bit and focus on prayer.

It’s easy for everyone to lose focus when you’re trying to prove a point.

 

[Thorolfr]

We could probably do without the comparisons of gay people to thieves, pedophiles and heroin addicts…

 

[Edward_H]

It’s a preposterous assertion to say that for “most” things our knowledge of the nature and purpose of things comes from self reports.

Perhaps in the stark absence of any other data external us we’d be left with only sense data.

Psychologists have shown how easy it is to bias self reports. The biases are so easy to hold away.

You ignore all sorts of objective data.

The design of the external organs.
Their complementary design on many levels.
Cellular data.
Generic data
Brain functioning
Immune system operations.

All of these sources of data point to complementary purpose and nature.

But you want to hang your grasping argument on self reports, so labole and easily moved.

 

[Gab123]

Any time there is a discussion about anything that has to do with homosexuality here in CAF, eventually, gay people always get compared to thieves and pedophiles and we’re told that we are more likely than others to be promiscuous and be unable to form long-lasting and monogamous relationships. We’re told that we are more likely to be mentally ill, get STDs like HIV, and that the feelings we have for those of the same sex are not real love but only lust.

And the people who say these things will probably claim that they are doing this out of love for us.

There are many different sins that destroy the life of grace in a soul. Heterosexual sin outside of marriage is just as bad being that it is also a mortal sin and leads down the wide path Christ warned about. All mortal sins are rooted in one of the Seven Capital Sins. (Pride, Envy, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth).

Love is not a feeling, it is a choice. And it would be a terrible thing to Choose not tell somebody about the pit that Jesus warned about. It was Jesus who said ithat if something causes us to sin, cut it out of our life…
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[RandomAlias]

Display? Is this another auto-complete or voice-recognition fail?

I think it is supposed to be “I renounce Satan, his works, and his ways,” or words to that effect.

Edit: Or maybe it is display as in 2 Thessalonians 2:9 (tells of one who comes in the manner of Satan with displays of power, signs, and wonder).

 

[Edward_H]

Where did you come up with that first idea? Not from the Church.

What that assertion says is that we have a ego centric basis for truth. We are the source of truth!

That’s incentive.

Leads to sadness and anarchy, especially interior anarchy.

 

[Thorolfr]

It’s a preposterous assertion to say that for “most” things our knowledge of the nature and purpose of things comes from self reports.

Perhaps in the stark absence of any other data external us we’d be left with only sense data.

Psychologists have shown how easy it is to bias self reports. The biases are so easy to hold away.

You ignore all sorts of objective data.

The design of the external organs.
Their complementary design on many levels.
Cellular data.
Generic data
Brain functioning
Immune system operations.

All of these sources of data point to complementary purpose and nature.

But you want to hang your grasping argument on self reports, so labole and easily moved.

Where did I say, that “for ‘most’ things our knowledge of the nature and purpose of things comes from self reports.” I said, “Most things that have to do with the mind are a matter of self report and there is not a test for most of them.” When people describe what’s going on in their heads (their emotions, their feelings, their attractions, their desires, their psychological disorders, etc.), there aren’t very many ways to test what they say and we don’t even completely understand the biological underpinnings of these things because our understanding of brain functioning is still in its infancy. That’s why the biological causes of most psychiatric conditions described in the DSM are unknown. Diagnosis is based mostly upon a clinical interview with the patient and with those who know them.

 

[Anicette]

This is a serious question…

It is not wise to marry a woman if you have zero attraction to woman on general and in this woman in particular. This marriage can even declare null by the Church if it fail…

But if in your life you met a woman that you feel at least some attraction, love, and are not rebuke with the idea to have intercourse with her, why not?

It will be more honest if you tell her the true, because she possibly may not take the risk.

You don’t know for sure what can happen for you in your life, and perhaps you will marry, even if the chances are slim. Some men how had SSA can in their life feel attracted by one woman.

I recommand to look in the book of Dan Mattson, Why I don’t call myself gay, and read his blog and twitter. He speak to this issues. He has SSA, but had had a relationship with a woman one time. Now he lives as a single.

 

[Edward_H]

We are not our mind.

We are a soul that has a body.

Relying on self reports to establish one’s identity is one of the most irrational acts known to man, so prone to error and bias and manipulation (even moods) are self reports.

An act of a fool, an irrational man.

No wonder suicide and mental health issues are so prevalent in the alphabet community.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

Relying on self reports to establish one’s identity is one of the most irrational acts known to man

Thorolfr has done no such thing. You are the one saying that “gay” is an “identity”.

I disagree with Thorolfr about a ton, but you’re putting up a straw man, instead of responding to his claim.

 

[OsculeturMeOsculo]

The responses to this thread seem to be unhelpful. What do you think?