If I thought sharing some of my hobbies, personality and humor in the Catholic Match forums might grab the attention of the woman of my dreams, it didn't take long for me to realize how sadly mistaken I was. Not only did I not get along with many of the regular contributors on the site, a great deal of my forum topics and posts caused a certain amount of acrimony among these people.
One of this blog's core beliefs is that the Church should be doing more to help its singles. I've spoken about this on Long Lost Black Sheep far too many times and have highlighted the reasons why I think this is true. My opinion was met with skepticism on the Catholic Match forums however, with some members saying it wasn't the Church's job to get people like me a date. They felt I was just making excuses for my own failures and thought it was ridiculous to place blame on the Church for my chronic singleness. I gave it right back to them and explained how the Catholic Church had far more resources than I did to bring people together. With access to facilities across the region, the Archdiocese could send out a clarion call for singles to meet up in low-cost venues. In some ways, the Church does this already with The National Catholic Singles Conference although that event isn't low-cost and often takes place in locations that are prohibitively far away. I also remarked that at the very least, our Church should be discussing the problem singles face and include us in their prayers. The regular forum users were not impressed although years later, one of my biggest critics admitted I had a point and stated the Church didn't care about single people. He did have to get a dig in against me by prefacing his opinion with the comment: ”Not to sound like someone who used to complain about this all the time....”
While lamenting the lack of Catholic Match women who were informed about world events, I remarked that everyone should have some knowledge of the conflict in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine...at least enough to hold up a conversation where you could justify one side or the other. This comment was met with disbelief by one woman who refused to broaden her horizons and thought my expectations were out in left field. Fast forward to the October 2023 attacks along the Gaza Strip, the subsequent response by Israel and the massive protests and divisions it caused in this country. I guess my forum comment wasn't so wacky after all.
A topic of discussion that was supposed to be on the lighter side of things was music. Forum users often shared favorite songs or posted tunes that pertained to certain categories. Years of listening to college and community radio had opened my world up to so many different genres and countless obscure songs so a good number of my musical selections took people off guard. I had more than one Catholic Match member warn me that my love of goth music was a slippery slope to satanism and suicide. Well, that's not what goth is about and I thought they were pretty ignorant to lump everyone together with the few bad apples that did exist in the genre. Also causing some friction was my utter disdain for hokey Christian rock which seemed to be very popular among Catholic Match members.
As discussed in a previous blog entry, I've had some wonderful opposite sex friendships over the years but for many forum users, such a thing was taboo. Naturally, this caused a fair amount of arguments and at times, it felt like I was talking to people from the 1950s. I placed such a high value on a person's individuality, it didn't matter to me what gender they were. Truth be told, I got along better with some of my female friends than I did some of my male friends because we shared more common interests and personality traits. According to the “trad Catholics” in the forums, having opposite sex friends was dangerous because sooner or later, temptation would set in. When I told one of my female friends about this, she replied, “Those people are idiots.”
In fact, by reading the Catholic Match forums I saw a strange level of discord and misunderstanding between the sexes that reminded me of some Muslim cultures. One regular in the forums who I sparred with all the time admitted that she really didn't understand men and figured things would work out between her future husband and herself once they got married. OH, YOU POOR FOOL!!!! I couldn't help but think how miserable the guy would be for having a wife that clueless.
Even though the Bible really doesn't give us a practical guide for dating and marriage, many forum users expected the men to be near-emotionless providers who were strong at all times while the women ran the households ideally as stay-at-home moms. I thought such notions were naive at best. When one forum member asked what the men of Catholic Match would do to protect their women, I joked, “Buy a rocket launcher.” My type of humor usually went over like a lead balloon.
Despite my bad reputation on the forum, people seemed to be interested in what I had to say. Some of the topics I started had huge numbers of views into the thousands as opposed to a few hundred which was the norm. A few men even sent me private messages of encouragement especially when I put annoying female forum users in their place. One gentleman who commiserated with me said, “I didn't know I was a bad Catholic until I joined Catholic Match.” I could definitely identify with that comment. I went to Mass every week, saved myself for marriage, tried to be a thoughtful person, prayed every day and yet it just wasn't good enough for some forum users.
I even had one of the regular female forum users issue what I considered to be a threat by saying I was hurting my chances at dating since many of the women on Catholic Match read what I posted and often discussed it among themselves. Well, I was only being honest and if these women found fault with my opinions, then I guess it just wasn't meant to be.
This same regular female forum user posted a topic that caused a firestorm: Chastity vs. Purity. I will discuss this controversy in the next blog entry.
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