Here's Why You Need to Discern Your Vocation Before You Start Dating

A common mistake for daters.

Sometime in my college years, I started a CatholicMatch profile largely on a whim during a family summer vacation. The initial rush of excitement at seeing so many options (profiles) was followed by multiple rides on the emotional rollercoaster of finding a guy I was interested in, only to experience the visual equivalent of radio silence after Mr. Could-Be-The-One viewed my profile but didn’t take action (and my profile specified that I believed in guys initiating and girls responding).

After the first weeks riding the rollercoaster of viewing profiles and being viewed, and particularly after school started up again, I more or less settled into maintenance mode. My profile was active, sometimes I logged on, but there were no real connections to speak of between myself and any of the guys who messaged me.

During the fall of my senior year, I visited several convents, including one a few hours from my hometown and then one that required a cross-country flight to Stamford, Connecticut. Why was I maintaining an active CatholicMatch profile and visiting multiple religious orders?

Good question. 

Following God’s call.

When I was young, I wanted to be married and have kids. Then I went on multiple retreats as a teen and heard a vocation story at virtually every one that went something like, “I wanted to get married and have kids, and then God called me to be a sister.” Talk about confusing messaging! None of those giving the testimonies ever said, or at least I never processed, that at some point the vocation that sister ultimately chose began to feel attractive to her, that at some point the “call” she perceived was one that corresponded with a deep desire of her heart. 

But teenage-me heard, “You will want to do x, and then God will call you to renounce/surrender/give up x and do y instead.” Fortunately, I read several great books about religious life during those same years, so I understand that it was a beautiful vocation. But I simultaneously did not desire it and felt certain that, for that very reason, I must be called to it. And so my creation of a CatholicMatch profile was really just what I was doing to distract myself until someone came along in real life and/or I faced the facts of my presumptive impending call to religious life. 

Besides believing that I must be called to the exact opposite of what I desired, I retained a belief that religious life was a holier vocation than marriage. If I really wanted to be holy and choose the best and highest and most, religious life was it. I recall feeling lonely one particular weekend night in college and turning on some halfway-decent-but-not-great movie, and having this sense that that wasn’t holy, wasn’t good enough. Surely something holier was going on in convents across the country on a Friday night. 

Boy messages girl.

But while I retained odd ideas about what being called to a vocation meant as well as the supposed superiority of religious life, my real-life experience with the two orders I visited was different. I felt like a welcome guest in both places, but I had no desire to live with them or live like them. And they did not pressure me in any way. Both convents were life-giving places, and both vocation directresses told me to be open to dating someone if a good man should come along. So I kept my CatholicMatch profile, and my wrong-headed ideas with it. 

I graduated from nursing school and lived at my parents’ home for a year while working the night shift in a local hospital. A needed change of professional scenery led me to move out on my own two days before Halloween in 2012. I was an hour and a half away from my family and at first, I stayed in an uncle’s spare bedroom while I looked for apartments. And one night right before Thanksgiving, James messaged me. 

The best man I had ever met.

When I saw James’ profile for the first time, I realized that here was someone very different from anyone else I had heard from, and better than what I had hoped for when I was attracted to other guys’ profiles. He was funny, obviously smart, even-keeled, an outdoorsman, and a man’s man. And most importantly, his love for his Catholic faith was clearly a part of his everyday life.

I was fascinated.

I responded within hours to his “(Smiley face emotigram) from an initiating guy awaiting a possible response from girl” with an all-caps message: “WADDUP, JAMES? HAPPY SUNDAY!” 

We messaged back and forth for several months before he came to visit in early February of 2013. And while we worked out a few communication kinks, I was steadily realizing that a truly good man was interested in me, that he was everything I would have said I was looking for if I’d written it down on a piece of paper. He asked me to be his girlfriend on that visit, and I said yes.

But I still felt anxious.

Even as our relationship deepened, I experienced a growing, gnawing anxiety. I decided with a sinking heart that this anxiety must be from the inevitable realization that no matter how naturally things progressed between us, marriage and family life could not be “good enough” and that I would have to be a sister.

But I was neither honest enough to share my struggles with James nor courageous enough to look my fears in the face and assess what was reality, so I let things carry on until we actually talked about marriage in August of 2013. I flew home after that visit and broke up with him the next day. What a disaster. 

The next three months were miserable. I expected to feel peace with the decision I had made, but I felt exhausted and wretched, knowing I had mercilessly stomped on the deepest emotions of a good man. James was, naturally, completely bewildered by my decision. And I made things worse because I could not let go of him. I kept trying to contact him with the one-more-last-thing I needed to say until he kindly told me to stop and to commit to the choice I had made. 

Learning to discern.

In keeping with my determination to do the perceived holiest thing, I subsequently contacted a convent of cloistered Carmelite nuns to set up a visit. In my confusion, I decided that I must not have felt at home with the active religious orders I had visited because I needed to go for the gold in vocational surrender—cloistered life. 

Fortunately, around this time, a family friend who was a psychologist invited me to help him with some writing on, of all things, anxiety. I learned many things from the time we worked together, especially about how God works through our deepest desires rather than against them, but the most helpful thing was a tool for discernment from St. Ignatius. The friend told me to write out the gifts I’d been given, the desires in my heart, and the opportunities in front of me.

That no-nonsense, practical action really helped me calm down, as I saw that my gifts, desires, and opportunities appeared to make the most sense in the context of a vocation to marriage; a vocation which, I learned, was meant to be lived in reflection of the communal life of the Trinity and was therefore not “inferior” to religious life. 

By the time I visited the Carmelites, I felt pretty sure that religious life wasn’t for me, and indeed I spent two hours in their parlor, chatting across the grille about James, James, James. The current and prior Abbess both smiled warmly, kindly offering me their best wishes in opening my heart wide to the beauty of marriage. My heart was extraordinarily light as I headed for home the next day. 

But will he take me back?

I was finally open to what had been offered to me by a good and gracious God all along, but would James want to take a chance on me again? I had dumped him the week before his season as a football coach started, and I left him a message about my change of heart on his way to his very last game after a disappointing season. I waited to hear back from him, knowing that I couldn’t blame him if he wanted nothing more to do with me.

Providentially, after that game, he went to a weekend-long Marian conference with his family, and while there he heard for the first time about the Marian title of Our Lady, Undoer of Knots. He had a profound experience of Mary untying the knots in his heart regarding all the pain between us, and he called me after the conference to tell me that he was ready and wanted to move forward. We celebrated 6 years of marriage this past April. 

If I had it to do differently.

Two lessons emerged from that experience. 1) Men and women have a responsibility to discern their vocation well, and especially before entering into a long-distance relationship. 2) Men and women also each have a responsibility to be transparent about where they are emotionally, so that the relationship doesn’t progress unevenly with one person fully invested and the other holding back.

Certainly, God has written straight with the crooked lines of James’ and my experience, and transparently sharing those lessons learned with others has been a large part of the good that He’s brought from that situation. 

If you too find yourself halfheartedly straddling two vocational paths, I hope that our experience spurs you to make a change that brings peace.