Welp! It's Valentine's Day AGAIN!

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Does this just seem to get harder each year?

St.Valentine’s feast day has rolled around again with all the accompanying connotations of love and romance. Maybe you’re a bundle of conflicting emotions like I was on practically every post-pubescent Valentine’s Day where I didn’t have a date, which was pretty much all of them, until I met my now-husband.

For factual accuracy, I should add that a particularly dishonorable mention goes to the year in college when I determined mere days before the holiday that I didn’t want to date a certain guy, but my decision apparently came too late for him to cancel the flowers he’d ordered to arrive on my doorstep that day. Talk about feeling like a jerk....

On the one hand, you might be feeling, or at least telling yourself, that Valentine’s Day is just a made-up, over-commercialized holiday and not objectively worth getting upset about. Maybe you acknowledge that the holiday does mean something to some people, including yourself, but the pain of being ‘without’ that special someone leads you to outwardly declare “Bah, humbug!”

Or, you might have resigned yourself to getting through the holiday quietly and without much fuss. Perhaps you’ve made plans with good girlfriends who are also single.

If you’re particularly driven and Type-A like me, you may even be searching for some foolproof, fail-safe, guaranteed-to-attract-”the one” changes you can make to your profile to ensure this same scenario doesn’t repeat next year, even though you also simultaneously want to defiantly assert “I am who I am, and I don’t need to change a thing!”

Like I said, this time of year, you might be a bundle of emotions….

If one of those, or all of those, depending on the minute, describes you, take a deep breath.

Allow me to first affirm the beauty of the desire that you’re experiencing, though mainly as a lack today, which is the true and good desire for marriage. Consistent with His nature as the source of all that is good, God created each of us with both a capacity to receive love and a drive to make a gift of ourselves in love to others.

We read in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 221) that “God Himself is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and He has destined us to share in that exchange.” Take a deep breath in recognition that you were made good, and that your desire for marriage is good, a gift placed in your heart by your Heavenly Father whose care for you is incomparable.

And that’s my next thought. His love for you is incomparable.

The best and brightest moments of sacramental marriage, and there are many in my blessed experience, are all a reflection of and an (imperfect) sharing in His perfect love.

I encourage you without reservation to look forward to marriage, and to look out for the ways the ultimate Love of your life is pursuing you even now. Perhaps that means going to Adoration this evening, or maybe just tomorrow or this weekend, or sometime soon. Whenever you do go, pour out your actual thoughts and feelings regarding your relationship status right now. He can handle them, however messy they might be.

Feel free to ask Him the questions in your heart, yes, even the ‘why’ questions, like ‘why am I still single?’ ‘why haven’t you sent anyone yet?’ Ask Him, too, to speak into the vulnerable places of feelings of inadequacy or discouragement or rejection or past relationship wounds that this day may drudge up in your heart.

He seeks to heal those places.

I have no quick emotional or physical fixes to offer for Valentine’s Day, my friend.

But I offer you affirmation that your desire for marriage is true and good and beautiful. I offer you complete assurance that He is for you, and that He seeks to win your heart even now in this sometimes painful season, whether you are a man or a woman. Keep turning to Him in hope for the future, for “hope does not disappoint.” (Romans 5:5)

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