It is not ground-breaking to observe that online dating has become increasingly popular in the past five years or so.  Given that the average age at first marriage is 28 for men and 26 for women in a 2009 survey, more and more people find themselves single late into their twenties and early thirties.  In fact, a recent study by the University of Rochester reported that online dating is now the second most likely way to meet one’s spouse (behind meeting through a friend).  Why?  After a certain point, wading through thousands of The Single Catholic Girl’s Tips on Dating and How to Stay Sane While Single in Your Twenties, putting up with yet another blind date from a well-meaning friend, and coming home to an empty apartment after work, all you can do to is throw up your hands, buy a cute puppy to dote on and lock up for business.
          
So, how are you supposed to be single and sane? Is online dating a last resort, or is there some legitimacy to developing emotional intimacy online without creating a profile out of sheer hopelessness?

For reference, I am a (naïve) twenty-something, and have been on two dates through the common dating site, Catholic Match.  One was in his late twenties, and the other mid-thirties.  Both dates were, well, uninspiring.  From what I could gather in a few hours at a basketball game or dinner, both men had solid principles yet solicited the general response of, “He was nice, but. . . .”  How could this have possibly happened, given their attractive, sparkling, intriguing online profiles?
          
The simple answer is this:  the internet warps both your identity and time.  You can spend hours crafting a well-thought out and witty email that somehow conveys your playful nature yet commitment to the life of the mind, your deep faith yet interest in the small things of daily life, and that the fact that you love Beethoven doesn’t prevent you from jamming to David Guetta in the car with the windows rolled down.  Face-to-face, you are forced to be more authentic – and rightfully so.  As a dear friend once told me, you can’t white-out the parts you don’t like about yourself, and bold-face your strengths -- almost like a potter re-shaping clay to produce a beautiful work of art.  There are the awkward pauses, unwitting food-in-your-teeth snafus, and half-hearted refusals for him to pay for dinner as a traditional formality (and judgments if he actually makes you pay).  That’s life:  it’s messy and full of savory moments.
          
To use a current buzzword, relationships should be “organic.”  They should develop bottom-up as each of you slowly but surely come to know one another, and make memories together so you can fondly say, “Remember that time when we. . . .”  Anyone can have fun on a Friday night -- it’s intriguing and thrilling -- but it’s going to Mass and brunch together on Sunday morning that make or break a relationship.  You’ll have unsure moments, of course, but it makes the ride much more exciting and fulfilling.  
          
Love is grace:  neither is offered to us freeze-dried.  The instant, microwaveable, buy-now-pay-later convenience that modernity has accustomed us to simply cannot cross over into our expectations of relationships, or faith for that matter.  Struggling with the call to assimilate daily to Christ requires perseverance, hope, and humility, difficult virtues to acquire.  Similarly, if you find yourself disappointed with your relationships, having trouble finding Mr. Darcy -- whether online, through a friend, or at Mass -- don’t be discouraged and lose faith that he will find you.  (Although, it’s always good to remind ourselves that Mr. Darcy is a fictional character!) The frustrating part is that it is not on our time but on God’s, and it behooves us to remember the Marian fiat:   “Lord, let it be done to me according to Thy word.”  These simple, humbling words strike at the very heart of human pride and impatience.  Even if we occasionally fall or succumb to temptation from time to time, it’s all part of being imperfect creatures, albeit lovingly fashioned by our Creator in His image.  So you fail:  welcome to the human race.  As Samuel Beckett once quipped, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”  

As a final note, I can’t help thinking of a striking Lenten reflection in college by Msgr. Michael Heintz that profoundly changed the way I view relationships and the intense call to be Catholic in a secular, topsy-turvy world that assaults faith at every opportunity.  The author writes, “Slow progress over time is what we should be looking for. . . . And so if you're struggling, don't lose heart and don't give up. . . . [A]s Thomas Aquinas is said to have taught, ‘it is far better to limp along the right road than to run headlong down the wrong one.’”  “Limping towards God,” limping as you love, limping as you search for Truth – these are the journeys worth sticking to with dedication and heart.  

Love is unlikely to be found deliberately or as a result of your hard work.  There are, of course, the occasional stories of Catholic Match marriages, of love affairs that bloom online, but more often than not, your experience with virtual love will stick to the rule, not the exception.  Love will come in its own time, regardless of how much you may want it. (Sorry, girls.)  To paraphrase my father, the way to accept that harsh truth without completely abandoning hope of a happy marriage is summed up in this simple equation:  Happiness = Reality - Expectations.  This is not to imply low standards or expectations, but merely urges us to recall that we are all imperfectly yet earnestly trying to live life trying to find Truth and happiness in the hope for heaven in the life to come.  

Don’t lose heart, and keep trying – with patience and faith, you’ll find him.  Whether in a chatroom discussing the Star of the Sea or at a party where you both reach for the Chex Mix, he’ll one day be there.  And if you’re really lucky, he will come to cherish, love, and better you that you may fulfill your inner potential to follow Him and become a saint.
          
Octavia Ratiu is a recent graduate from the University of Notre Dame. She is the Assistant Director of Operations at The Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, NJ. She can either be found on Catholic Match or out meeting new interesting people in the real world. Contact Octavia at [email protected].
        

So one of my beloved mentors in this world is my high school history teacher, Dr. Christopher Colvin -- Yale-educated, intellectually cynical, curmudgeonly, beret-wearing, moustached, die-hard atheist extraordinaire.  It is to Colvin that I owe my first introduction to the "life of the mind," and without his pushing me to think more, broader, deeper in high school, I most likely would have ended up majoring in Biology at UChicago.  Yuck.  Here he is, albeit sans moustache.

Anyway, he and I have remained in touch, and get coffee (now drinks) every time I am home.  Most of our tete-a-tetes involve me word-chundering about my pseudo-dramatic life, and him commenting snarkily while shaking his head or furrowing his bushy 'stache.  When I went through my I'm-trying-to-be-a-daily-Mass-mantilla-wearing-conservative-Catholic-so-I-can't-party-or-remotely-enjoy-life, he just looked at me and grumbled, "Ratiu, you're pigging out at the conservative Catholic trough."  So.  I think that will suffice for an introduction, and put his comments on my thesis below in context.

I emailed him my thesis -- "T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens:  Supreme Being or Supreme Fiction?" -- the day after I turned it in (at 3:55, 5 minutes before the deadline, of course), but he hasn't commented on it until now.  Below is the email he sent me, and I was pleasantly surprised by how detailed his remarks were and flattered that a Renaissance man with a PhD in philosophy from Yale would be so intrigued by a college student's rather slipshod and hastily composed paper.  I hope that his comments stir up some conversation on the blog, as he brings up my favorite topic to gripe about -- moderrrrrnity -- but cloaks it in a much more sophisticated light than I ever did.  Reading his thoughts has really made me re-think how I view modernity, and perhaps, perhaps, distance myself from a fully MacIntyrean criticism toward a more reserved acceptance of the world for what it is, without falling either into naive nostalgia or cynical post-post-post modernism.  Will keep you updated...I'm still starry-eyed for ol' Alasdair!

A few notes about your paper.  Read them when you are in a more settled mood.  I am sorry it took me so long to get to it, but it was a rewarding read.  Thanks for the Wallace Stevens.  I had been ardent about “Sunday Morning” when a fellow boarding school student showed it to me, but had lost touch with Stevens thereafter.  So I found the discussion of him, his ideas and his poetry, both informative and interesting. 

The paper is a point-counterpoint composition with Stevens setting the themes and Eliot providing the melody.  I think the paper gets a bit cantankerous with Eliot, caricaturing him and using him as a club against the “usual suspects” (“scorn”, “disdain”, “rabid” etc.).  I would never have let you write, “a time when hordes of intellectuals were rebelling against secular society.”  An impossible phrase in every respect.  The sort of thing you would expect my persona “Colvin” to say in a history class.  Similarly, there is the claim that Eliot is the first since Dante to innovate a poetry of devotion.  What of his beloved John Donne?  Not to mention a host of poets between the 13th and 20th centuries (or was that six century period really barren of religious poets?).  Or the reactionary if somewhat plausible (in the 1920’s) quote from the old possum sneering at would-be critics of religion, or even more the unfunny, in fact vulgar, sneer against lazy “ordinary people.”  I think Obama rather more Christian when in his Pennsylvania speech he characterized “those who cling to guns and religion” and took seriously their anxieties and principles.  I should cite you Robert E. Lee on how one, as a gentleman, never plays the status card because, as a Christian, one never has that or any status. 

I must say I was amused by the “time warp” of the paper’s intellectual setting.  The variously figured contrasts of Nietzschean “Death of God”/modernity/spiritual loss vs. crisis of modernity/spiritual nostalgia/Eliotean piety and snobbery takes me back to the world of my professors, the world of the 50’s and 60’s.  (I cannot recommend too highly for this, “The Disinherited Mind” by Erich Heller, whom I revered at Northwestern.)  Your paper seems to take its bearings from those provincial times – for I do think the several modernist “narratives” of art and intellectual life that flourished in the 20th century (and yours is one of them) were rather more provincial than other seasons of history – which are, of course, also provincial.  Succinctly put: “people think history begins with their grandparents (Nietzsche).” 

It is now also less surprising to me that you might have had a “crisis of faith”, caught up as you were in this peculiar vortex of reactionary modernism.  This is no criticism of your work or interpretation (or of your crisis).  If it is a criticism, it is of your professors who either set this framework for you (because it is deeply reassuring to conservative Catholics? -- which it is) or did not challenge you to mover either forward or backward in history to gain some perspective on the era’s excessive self-dramatization. 

The binaries I suggested above break down rather quickly.  Nietzsche is far more of a profound critic of modernism than its celebrant, despairing of its nihilism.  Eliot is modernism personified, indeed he (& new criticism, which is old 18th century Cambridge Platonism) was one of the essential straw men that post-modernism used to define itself in the 70’s.  But then, as you have it, Eliot criticizes modern individualism in the spirit of the 20’s and 30’s when this was certainly the tune of nationalism, communism, and fascism, all of whom promoted some form of “collectivism” against “individualism.”  I think your American conservative friends would be very surprised to find you advocating a collectivism of “tradition.”  It is so confusing!  Indeed, pomos ran afoul of their own “post” status when it became clear that iconic modernists (Eliot, Picasso, Hemingway, Bauhaus) were already “post-modern” before the pomos.  Dang!  Post-toasted! 

On the other hand, by sweating through the research and writing of your treatise, you have acquired a sophisticated depth to appreciate much of 20th century art, literature, and intellectual debates.  That is not to be sneezed at.  Nor is it to be taken as settled. 

My two exhortations would be to continue to explore poetry and thought to gain perspective – forward and/or backward from the “crisis of modernity;” and (b), most important, try to avoid the historicizing hysteria of this framework (crisis this and crisis that) – it’s just lamentations over ephemerality: “But is there any comfort to be found? Man is in love and loves what vanishes, What more is there to say? (Yeats.)  There is too much nostalgia (for the church!) in conservative Catholicism, but be a Roman Catholic, not an ultra-montanist. 

Quick update on my end:  I got offered a job at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton yesterday morning, and I move up there the end of January after taking a week-long road trip to DC (March for Life!), Philly (to see Fabio, of course), NYC, and Boston.  My official title is "Research Intern," and my first project is to compile the forthcoming Stem Cell report, a joint effort by The New Atlantis and the Witherspoon Council on the Integrity of Science and Ethics.  This report is targeted at students in the medical and life science professions, but I think all of you would be very interested to read it (and contribute to it through me!).  I am thrilled to be paid -- an exorbitant salary for most college grads! -- to read and write about the intersection of technology, science, and ethics.  And generally to be in Princeton.  In addition to this job, I will be attending lectures and conferences in the area (NYC, Princeton, Philly, DC), traveling to the ND medical ethics conference in March, and also working on an informal yet rigorous research program in moral philosophy and bioethics with Professor Robert George -- the emperor of the conservative Catholic mafia.  The purpose is to "get my feet wet" and focus my interest in bioethics in order to pursue it on a PhD level.  In the meantime, I am applying to MPhil programs at Oxford/Cambridge, and possibly a post-bacc in classics at Penn that might be necessary if I want to dabble in virtue ethics (I'd have to read Aristotle and Plato and Aquinas in Greek and Latin).  Annnd if I have any time leftover, I want to "shadow" my would-be husband Fabio's older brother, Tiberio, who is an internal medicine resident at St. Luke's in NYC just to keep the MD route open.  Who knows, I very well might end up going back to medical school after/if I get my PhD in order to just be a MD/PhD boss and fulfill my dreams of pretension.  In whatever free time, I'd like to do some introspection and reading/writing on my own, maybe some poetry.  I'm really into hot yoga (90 degree room, 60% humidity), and I'm re-reading the Tao te Ching and starting Sun Tzu's The Art of War.  My brother Victor quotes it all the time, and to shut me up sometimes he will calmly say, "Better a dagger in the dark, than a thousand swords at dawn."   

This is all to say that I have a few job offers still in my lap that I think some of you would be interested in.  I don't want to lay them all out here, but they are spread all over -- Phoenix, DC, New Orleans, and Wilmington, DE.  If you are job searching and would like an "in" to any of these places, I could definitely pull some strings to help a fellow PLSer out!  Call my unemployed ass anytime, and I'd be happy to talk!

Alright, better get back to watching White Christmas and getting ready for our siiiiick annual Christmas party that I invited you all to on Facebook!  I wish wish you could come, but fret not, I'll make sure to keep the wine in the fridge.  In the spirit of my official leave from school, I'll post both "Gap Yah" and Avicii's new single, "Fuck School, Let's Party."  And just to be obnoxious and a bit misogynistic, "Shit Girls Say." 

Tavs-out!  Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!  "God bless us, every one."  :)