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HOPE IN THE STORM

(The Fair Sex
by Jay Toups
By Supertradmum)

By 1699, in legal terms in England, the term “spinster” meant an older
unmarried woman. This term was used by the Anglican Church In marriage
certificates indicating an unmarried woman. It came to mean older women who
chose not to get married or were never asked, or who never fell in love.

Recently, because of circumstances in my life, and for the first time in my
life, I have been around quite a few single women over the age of 30. In
years past, as a teacher, most of my university and college students were
in their 20s, although now and then I would have an older student who was
female. Most of my friends are either nine years younger or more than me,
placing them in their late 50s or early 60s, or are in their thirties, but
married. Some of my friends are older than I am by nine or ten years. All
but one are or have been married.

Because of something that happened in the past few weeks, I was
recollecting that all my closest female friends are married and that most
of my closest male friends are single.

I began to wonder about friendships, ages, interests, personalities, and
began to see something about women, my own fair sex, which is not entirely
attractive. I thought of the word “spinster” in its negative connotations
of a woman who is fussy, too fussy, let us say about things in the house,
or a woman who is prissy about dress or even critical of people.

Let me explain something about the difference between married women and
single mature women, married men and single men when it comes to friendship.

The reason why my personal observations seem important is that there are
definite trends not only in my own experience, but in society, which are
alarming and can be sifted down to a common denominator.

The true friend is unselfish, loyal, able to go with the flow of life and
friendship, affirming, honest without being criticising, open, kind, and
loving. All of my closest friends are also highly intelligent and very
interesting people, people of ideas. Idea people do not talk about other
people or things, but ideas.

Let me return to my point about women of a certain age. Because of the
number of single people now in the Western world, a phenomenon which has
happened in ages past for the same societal and cultural reasons, that of
stress in the world, the angst which is now the main cause why young people
are not getting married, there are more and more single women. I have met
in the past year more single women in their 40s and 50s than I ever have in
a decade.

There is a huge problem with staying single and that is the lack of
challenge to selfishness. One sees this is both sexes—men becoming
self-centred and women becoming self-centred..but there is a huge
difference. While men who live in selfishness can maintain a level of
friendship as it pleases them to do so, especially intellectual men who
like to meet and talk about ideas over a glass of wine, or share
experiences from a rational point of view, women who live by and for
themselves fall into a particular kind of pickiness, a type of seeking
after perfection in daily trivia. The “type” of the old auntie who is
“persnickety” is found in many humous novels and plays. This type of woman
has become the picky woman because her seeking after perfection has taken
over her entire life. She may even act like someone with OCD, wanting
everything to be just right and in the same place. She must have this or
that thing to be just the way she wants it or she becomes irritated. She
has not submitted her soul and body to anyone else. She should be in a
perfect position to allow God to be her bridegroom, but this seems not to
happen.

The single man falls into the opposite fault of being too slothful, too
easy going, but then, those character flaws do not interfere with true
friendship. I do know at least one fussy, persnickety man, and he has a
strong feminine side. His lack of manliness makes him act like a spinster.
This is no accident.

Children break down one’s self-absorbed life.

The Scriptures have an interesting phrase which the feminists hate but
which is a gem of wisdom.

1 Timothy 2:15 Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (RSVCE) Yet woman
will be saved through bearing children, if she continues in faith and love
and holiness, with modesty.

This idea that women are saved by childbirth may seen contentious.

However, I can fully understand the wisdom of Timothy’s words.

Getting married, and especially having a child or more than one, forces a
woman out of this tendency to want perfection in little things and big
things. Husbands and children interrupt this seeking after perfection in
daily matters, such as cleaning, organising, having things “just so.” The
fussy woman could not endure the happy chaos of family life.

The happiness of married life with children ends that persnickety tendency
to want things the way “I want.” Dying to self comes with the baby…the list
of things which force a women to stop thinking of herself and her needs and
concentrate on the child and husband is endless.

Without those challenged of loving someone completely different from one’s
self, people fall into self-occupation. Egocentricity is an easy trap for
the single person.

Sadly, the single women in their 50s and 60s frequently do not have the
edges of their characters smoothed into docility and love. Their egos want
things “my way.”

One cannot possibly be friends with someone who insists always on their own
way and nurses hurts or even, worse, fixations and manipulations to make
things go her way.

As all of my closest female friends are married, we can have real
friendships, based not only on love but on real care for the “other.”

The selfishness of the single woman turns her into an ugly caricature of a
women, who is to being beauty and love into a home, an extended family, a
parish, but who brings ugliness instead because of gross egocentric
behaviour.

Once this tendency to selfishness is allowed to grow, the person becomes
even more intense on things being “just so” according to her way of looking
at life. Eccentricities begin to emerge in the self-centred personality,
which become more and more demanding in time. While married women in good
marriages become softer and more feminine, the opposite happens to the
single woman. If the single woman would join a convent, for example, she
would have the chance to give up her self to the community, die to self for
the good of the whole, as a wife and mother does in a good marriage.

Although a woman has a chance to become holy as a single person, not having
to please a man but able to please Christ directly more, the danger of
becoming selfish even in one’s relationship with God is a reality. I now
know too many single women who spend hours going from one prayer meeting to
another or one Church activity to another without seeing that their
interior life has shrunk into that of the narrow narcissist’s heart, bent
on having her own way. The give and take of family life stops this type of
cancer. Religious orientated women need to live in a community, as with
nuns or sisters. To be alone, or single with other singles who do not
challenge her, does not force the women to step out of her comfort zone and
learn to die to self.

Marriage and childbearing do this for a woman—allowing for the heart to
expand in love and selflessness. A vocation to the monastery or convent
also allows for the death of self and the growth of charity.

I am blessed with the friendship of married women or widows who have known
what it is to sacrifice self on the altar of daily service to others. This
is the only way to get to heaven, not the chasing after spiritual
experiences and the day of spiritual self-absorption, but the daily
challenge of giving in and giving up desires, dreams, the ego.

For the few years I was married, I faced the challenges of dying to self.
For the many years of being a single mum, I had even more chances to die to
self. Some of these graces I passed up out of selfishness, but overall, I
overcame many things and desires, many dreams based on what I wanted rather
than what God wanted. A single mum sacrifices for the sake of the child or
children. As to friendship, one cannot be a true friend if one is always
thinking of one’s own needs or if one wants to control one’s space all the
time. The spinster frequently becomes a “control freak,” wanting to be in
control of not only her surroundings, but other people’s lives as well.

Selfishness caused Eve to offer the apple to Adam. She did not want to be
alone in her crime. She demanded her way. Adam caved in to her desire
rather than let her face her God alone.

We all have to face our God alone, but it is with others that we find our
purification in this world. The call of the hermit comes only after one has
been in community.

JMJ, pray for us!

God is good,

Jay



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