The Loneliest Years of My Life

When Maggie Flynn, a native Michigander, moved to Nashville, she was surprised and dismayed that her lack of religious faith made dating difficult. "In Nashville," she wrote on Salon last week, "God is everywhere." Which is why Flynn's romantic life went nowhere until she relocated to Los Angeles.

I know the feeling -- but from the other side.

When I was in my late 20s, I moved from Washington, DC, to south Florida to take a newspaper job. I was a relatively recent Catholic convert, and more than ready to get real about marriage. My faith was absolutely central to my life, and a couple of failed attempts at dating DC women who didn't share my religious commitment taught me that I couldn't compromise on this point.

It will not surprise you to learn that its only slightly easier to find single serious Catholics in a newsroom as it is to find Jack Daniels in Mecca. This was no surprise to me. I passed many a pleasant evening in the company of my heathenous fellow Florida scribes, but never managed to meet a potential partner. I developed a crush on a non-observant Jewish writer for another section, and suspected she liked me right back, but I made no move. I knew that it could only end in tears or compromises that would come back to haunt us both.

Social science research shows that children of interfaith marriage, unsurprisingly, tend to end up with a low commitment to either faith. Raising your kids in both traditions, then offering them the opportunity to choose, is a cop-out. I believed strongly in Catholic Christianity; why would I be indifferent to the choice my children might make? And if I felt that way about my putative offspring, how could I share everything with my potential wife -- except for the faith that had become the central fact of my life?

And then there was the matter of sex. Years of bachelor derring-do had left me much to repent of, and I had seriously undertaken to change my life. In sunny, aggressively carnal south Florida, it was one thing to call oneself a Catholic, but quite another to admit that one actually believed all that stuff the Church taught about sex, and that one was actually working hard to live by it.

One night, a gang of us from the paper were relaxing at happy hour, when several rounds into the evening, a colleague brought up the issue of my freakery.

"Do you mean to tell me you really won't have sex again until you get married?" she said.

"That's the idea," I replied, slightly embarrassed.

"That's ... that's ... that's just so weird."

"Well, that's what I believe."

"You sure you're not gay?"

She was serious. Sure, it was rude, but I didn't really hold it against her. As a south Florida native, how was she to know otherwise?

Coming from the Deep South, I had never lived in a place where religion played as minor a role in the culture as it did in south Florida -- not even in Washington, which had a rich culture of faithful young Catholic adults. Sure, there were churches everywhere in Broward County, but that didn't tell you much.

I realized early on that I wasn't likely to meet serious Catholic partners at work or at the saloon. So why not at mass? I visited a number of parishes, hoping to find an active group of young adults who shared my conservative views on faith, but I had no luck. Most churches I attended -- and I was there every Sunday and holy day -- were full of retirees and families. Though I never sampled Catholic life among Latino parishes in Miami-Dade County, in Broward, the Anglo churches were enervated, and enervating.

One night, I left the end of Easter mass at my parish and drove to a nearby steakhouse to celebrate the Resurrection. I was alone. I was always alone. I had no girlfriend, or even any close Catholic friends to share the feast with (my boss was a wonderfully intelligent and engaging Catholic fellow traveler, but he was no doubt at home with his family). I realized that night that I lived my entire religious life with an online e-mail group of Catholics from around the country. If not for them, I would have been completely isolated.

Those were the loneliest years of my life. I had good friends there, but even they eventually paired off with girlfriends, whom it wasn't difficult to find if religion, or the lack thereof, wasn't an issue. I dated a couple of smart, beautiful women, but it took little time for me to realize that I had no business dating outside my faith. When the question of pre-marital chastity came up with one of the women, who counted herself a Catholic, said she knew what the Church taught, but didn't understand why I felt obliged to obey.

"We're adults," she said, mystified by me. That was the end of us, I'm afraid. I suspect all the women I briefly dated, or who thought about dating me, might have said bitterly, as Maggie Flynn did of her Nashville suitors, "It didn't matter that I was kind, considerate, and possessed a good sense of humor. All that mattered was whether I was on board with Jesus."

No, that's not all that mattered to me, nor, I daresay, is that the only thing that mattered to the Christian men Flynn was interested in dating. But because it was the essential thing about me, it had to be the essential thing about the one I would spend the rest of my life with. That made perfect sense to me, and the fact that nobody else I met felt the same way made me one lonely, Jesus-loving, Magisterium-following, John Paul-celebrating, Walker Percy-reading, chastity-embracing single American Catholic male.

The fact that I wasn't actually a Puritan made me even more of an oddball in this cheerfully godless beachside paradise. I genuinely liked my non-religious friends (and all but one of them was non-religious), and had a blast being with them. Good people, all -- some of the best I've ever known. I think they loved me as an eccentric doomed to be a failure at romance, the Catholic beach bum version of Garrison Keillor's Norwegian bachelor farmers. If Graham Greene had written a novel with Carl Hiaassen, I would have been its self-tortured protagonist.

Happily, it was too bad to last. I eventually found my true love during my south Florida years, a woman who was intelligent, literary, a smart-aleck, beautiful, and very serious about her Christian faith. She loved Jesus, margaritas, and Stevie Ray Vaughn. My girl -- for the last 13 years, my wife -- was born in Dallas and lived in Austin; I met her on a roadtrip to the great state of Texas, which, if you ask me, is God's country in more ways than one.