There is no part of your life the faith doesn't have something to say about — and your heart is the first place it wants to meet you. Dating, singleness, the longing for someone, the ache of a relationship that didn't last: none of it is too small or too messy for God. The Church doesn't hand you a rulebook to spoil your joy; it hands you a vision of love that's bigger than a feeling and sturdier than a season. Here's what that vision looks like when you're in the middle of it.
The Church's vision of love is person-shaped, not feeling-shaped. Love is a decision to will the good of the other, made over and over, long after the butterflies have settled. That sounds unromantic until you've been loved that way — until someone has chosen you on the day you were difficult, and meant it.
Sexuality isn't something the Church is embarrassed by; it's something it takes seriously enough to protect. The Church teaches that the body speaks a language, and that language has a grammar: total, faithful, fruitful, forever. When we speak that language loosely, we say things with our bodies we don't mean with our lives — and that's how people get hurt, including us.
None of this is about being perfect before you're worthy of love. It's about treating another person's heart as a place you've been entrusted, not a place you've conquered. The standard is high because the dignity of the person is high.
Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Read that not as a wedding reading but as a mirror. Where am I patient? Where am I insisting on my own way? Love is a practice, not a poem.
I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that you neither stir up nor awaken love until it pleases.
There's a time for love, and there's a rushing that wounds. The wisdom here is older than any dating app: don't force what isn't ready.
St. Elizabeth of Hungary
Married at fourteen, a mother by sixteen, widowed by twenty — and through all of it, she loved her husband Ludwig with a love that was both tender and real. She didn't flee marriage to be holy; she made her marriage holy by loving well. When he died on crusade, she wept, and then she gave the rest of her short life to the poor.
“We are made for love, and the love we are made for is Christ — but every true love we give on the way is a school for that one.”
Tear this out. Try one this week.
- ✦Be honest about what you're looking for — with yourself first. If you don't know, you'll let someone else's uncertainty set the terms.
- ✦Pray for your future spouse, even if you've never met them. It changes how you wait.
- ✦Date someone who makes you more yourself, not less. If you're shrinking, that's information.
- ✦Don't confuse attention with love. One is common; the other is rare.
