A Match Made in Heaven

I am always amazed when I'm asked for dating and relationship advice. 

Sister Mary Martha, Like you I also like terrorizing children and lucky for me I can do it 10 months out of the year! Haha! As a senior high teacher I do have the pleasure of working with young people and I absolutely love it. My only complaint is that I have many teacher friends who are all married and I wonder how I too can meet someone. I have been single for an awfully long time and I can't seem to meet anyone. I have tried classical routes and some new "on-line" routes. I am still struggling to meet someone who wants to get married and have a family. Any advice?

You get that I'm a nun, right?

Like that stops me from having advice or an opinion. I believe this question has come up before and many of our readers flew to the rescue with some good ideas. I'm sure they will once again don their angel wings and pipe in with links and lists.

Please keep in mind, when this happens, that they are not actually angels, or saints for that matter. Angels are not dead people or nice people. They are a completely different entity that God created. And  a saint is anyone who is dead and in Heaven. As saintly as someone may act, they are not actually a saint until they are not only dead, but in enjoying their Heavenly reward.

I digress.

I have two ideas for you. 

One, go out a lot. Go everywhere. No one is going come knocking on your door with a ring floating in a glass of champagne. Unless maybe....you have some plumbing that needs fixing and the plumber is a handsome Catholic man.  It would be great to marry a man who can fix things. I'll always remember Mrs. Gott chasing after her husband as he ran through the house with a hammer. In her girlish youth, she had imagined that all men were just like her father, who could not only fix a house, he could build one, from carpentry to electrical to plumbing. Alas, this is not the case and all these years later she had learned that her husband did not know how to fix anything, but it never stopped him from trying. "Hit it with a hammer" was his solution to any fix it need.  So if she saw him with a hammer, she knew she had to step in.

I digress.

Go out.  Lectures, meetings, plays, sports.  Find things to do where you meet lots of other people. 

Look your best.

Here is my other idea: a novena!  Good idea, right? Nine days or nine first Fridays, usually to ask the intercession of certain saint. Now, the patron saint for finding a husband (and the Girl Scouts of America) is St. Agnes. While I usually do recommend Agnes for the great husband safari, the truth is that Agnes herself was martyred for refusing to marry anyone. 

And then. of course, there is good old St. Valentine, whose box of chocolates day is just around the corner. He really didn't have to much to do with lovers either and we don't even know which St. Valentine is which. Maybe he delivered a love letter once or twice. He was no John Alden.

Speaking of angels, St. Raphael the Archangel is the patron of young lovers, because he stood up for a young couple. So he is a pretty good choice.

But I'm going to recommend the world's happiest bride, St. Elizabeth of Hungary. She was married off at a very young age to a princely typed, but she was happy as a clam and loved her husband to pieces. Unfortunately for her, he didn't live a very long life and she spent the rest of her days missing him, but you get the picture. They were a great match.