3 Things Catholic Men Should Know About Their Dating Years

When you believe you’ve been called to the vocation of marriage, but are still living the single life, it can be a confusing time. You’ve committed yourself to the process of finding a spouse. You want to prepare. I’m happily married today, but spent the vast majority of my adult life as single. I can look back at some things I would have done differently and others where I’m really glad I took the approach I did.

Here are three thoughts I would share for any Catholic man still in the dating process. 

1. Your vision of married life is probably wrong

We all have images in our minds about what life will look like with our future wife and, if God so wills it, our children. That vision can be a powerful motivator for self-improvement. It can lead us to work on our spiritual life and correct faults. The marital vision might be what spurs us to acquire more marketable job skills. All of this is to the good. But taken to an extreme, it can also cause unnecessary anxiety. 

A vision of married life will never be able to account for the basics of day-to-day living, and trying to prepare for something you can’t anticipate is impossible. When I was single back in the early 2000s, I thought a way to prepare for marriage would be to reduce the amount of football I watched during the fall.

As a big fan and with nothing else really going on, it was common for me to watch a couple of NFL games on Sunday. But I figured that if I had a wife and kids, this would often be impractical. So I deliberately cut it back to one game. 

The result was this—I sat around in an empty apartment on a Sunday afternoon bored out of my mind. My vision was correct in this sense—now that I’m married, my wife and I do things that we both enjoy on Sunday and I just keep up with football on my own. But it wasn’t made easier by trying to get ahead of the curve.

Whatever changes happen as you transition from single to married life in areas like these are ones you can just make organically as the time comes. 

2. This period in your life is unique

There’s a season for everything, as the Book of Ecclesiastes reminds us. It’s true of all periods in our life, and being single is no different. Instead of trying to anticipate how married life will look and then prematurely adjust to that, your time is better spent by identifying the unique opportunities that are right in front of you. 

I eventually figured out that my time being single was actually the right time to double down on my passion for sports, rather than cutting back. I had a dream of running a sports blog that would be updated every day. It took a couple of hours each day to really do it the way I hoped. My dream was that this could be a full-time job one day. I took the freedom that being single offered to go “all-in” on trying to make it happen. 

My dream didn’t pan out, but I’ve never regretted going for it. I learned that as a career, it was something I could take or leave. Just knowing that gives me peace of mind. Taking the time to try and launch a project like that is much easier when you’re single. 

3. Trust your instincts

There might be something that deep down you want to try. Maybe it’s your own project like the one I had. Maybe it’s putting time into travel. Or maybe it’s something on a professional level—getting a master’s degree or taking on additional responsibilities at work. Whatever you feel a consistent nudge to do, trust those instincts. 

It’s hard—if not impossible—to see the bigger picture and understand how whatever your instincts are prompting you to do fits into a grander plan for your life. That’s when we return to Step 1—and remember that the vision we have of our life is almost certainly quite different than how our life will actually unfold. God is the one who sees that big picture. 

Soldiers on a battlefield have to keep marching in what’s called “the fog of war”. They can’t see beyond what’s right in front of them. They simply have to trust and move forward. That’s all we can do.

The whole of spiritual life—something that includes the journey to finding a Catholic spouse—is combat in its own right. Arm yourself with a rosary, have a trusted spiritual director to bounce your instincts off of, and move forward. There is no magic formula. Only faith and perseverance.