“Can men and women be friends?”
This is a question that I’ve seen circulate the Facebook and blog circles for a while now. I think it’s a question that becomes especially relevant at this time in our lives as young adult Catholic women when we begin to recognize just how deeply our feminine hearts crave masculine intimacy, and yet for many of us a romantic relationship doesn’t appear to be anywhere on the horizon. It especially becomes a question on the minds of many young women as they seek to live virtuous lives of purity, chastity, and modesty both internally and externally.
You see, this is a question I’ve been wrestling with a lot lately. I’ve read opinions on both sides of the argument (that women and men can’t be “just friends” vs. the opinion that it is healthy, normal and good for men and women to have authentic pure friendships) and I’ve discovered that it is not an easy question to answer. This is because such a question touches on many related and “controversial” topics: the nature of courtship, casual dating, flirtation and “emotional chastity” just to name a few, and all of these topics themselves exist with a vast spectrum of differing opinions.
But I’m tired of reading opinions on this matter; I’m looking for the TRUTH. I want to know where the line in the sand is drawn if for no other reason than the practicality of knowing what I need to confess when I go to the sacrament of Reconciliation. But where can I find the objective truth on this matter when the opinions of faithful Catholic people seem to be all over the place?
Well, it recently occurred to me that I needed to bring this question to prayer and ask the Lord what the answer was because I wasn’t receiving any clarity from the internet (go figure). And when I say “recently” I mean several months ago because I kept asking the Lord to answer this question and he kept giving me one response: silence. Until this week.
I was getting really frustrated with the Lord (to say the least) and so I cried out in prayer, “Jesus, why won’t you answer my question?” And you know what his response was?
“You’re not asking the right one.”
I felt instantly better now that I had an explanation for why my prayers on this matter had gone to God’s voicemail for so long, and then I remembered that I’d still like to have some clarity on this matter of men and women and friendship. So I said, “What question should I be asking, then?”
“Don’t ask whether or not men and women can be friends. Ask rather how you are called to love the men in your life.”
Because here’s the truth of the matter, ladies: We are called to love every man in our life. Period. If we keep getting preoccupied with the status of the relationship we have with men, then we’ve missed the boat entirely.
And yes, I know that there are different types of love that we can have for men. That’s why God said to me, “Ask rather how you are called to love the men in your life.” But it never should be a question of “whether or not” I am called to love them. I am.
But what does this look like practically? Well, that’s a whole different, difficult question. There’s very few “practicals” in something like the Catechism. If we want to see what practically lived and embodied holiness looks like, we usually have to look to the lives of the saints.
So you want to learn how to love? St. Maximilian Kolbe teaches us that “the Cross is the school of Love.” And what do we learn from the Cross about Love? That it is radically Passionate, radically Pure, and radically Painful.
Passionate Love
I’m currently taking an entire class on another great saint, St. Catherine of Siena, and this understanding of the school of Love being the Cross puts a beautiful context to her words when she addresses the Lord in prayer, “And what is my nature, Boundless Love? It is Fire, because you are nothing but the Fire of Love.”
Love, true Love, as it is revealed to us and embodied by God, is fiery. This is why St. Catherine of Siena is always using the language of fire and desire in her writings. She embodied a beautiful zeal for souls and passionately loved every person she came into contact with. And Catherine came into contact with many men, of all different sorts: priests, politicians, prisoners and popes. And Catherine loved them all passionately.
As Christian women we are called to love everyone in a truly passionate way, and yes, this includes the men in our lives as well. Christ desires to consume us in the passionate fire of his love on the Cross. There’s a reason we call Christ’s death “The Passion.” It’s literally the spousal consummation (i.e. passionate consuming) of Christ’s love for us. Likewise we should strive to “consume” the men around us with the blazing charity in our own hearts. What exactly does this look like? Well, in order for the passionate love in our hearts to consume the men in our life properly it also has to be a…
Pure Love
Here’s the other important thing to remember about fire: it’s purifying. Anything that is not the fire itself will be burned away in a blazing flame, and this is true of love too. The fire that should be blazing in our hearts is love and if God is Love then the Fire in our hearts is God. Anything that is not of God will be burned away if we allow Him to properly fan the flames of desire in our hearts. This means that the passionate love we must have for the men in our lives must be free from all traces of lust.
To love the men in our lives as brothers is no easy thing, even for women. While we may not tend to fixate on physical fantasies (though we are certainly not guiltless in this arena) we do tend to fixate on emotional fantasies. I am certainly not blameless in this area but I find that in moments where I catch my mind slipping if I can bring it back to the Cross, and refocus my desire there, Satan becomes powerless.
For true love doesn’t use another for my pleasure. Looking at the Cross reminds us of that. True love is not use, it is gift. And this gift of self is so far from self-seeking pleasure that it oftentimes results in the actual antithesis of pleasure: pain.
Painful Love
To love the men in our lives in a simultaneously passionate and pure way necessarily means that we are going to suffer. Holding our burning hearts in the purifying flames of love is going to be painful as we allow all that is not of God to be burned away. But Christ shows us on the Cross that the cost of love is pain.
This is a reality that the Lord definitely revealed to me this past summer when I asked Him to teach me how to love and He consequently broke my heart. And ladies, having my heart broken by the Lord hurt. I mean actual physical, emotional, and spiritual anguish. There were times when I would wake up in the middle of the night weeping heavy, salty tears in my pillow and repeating the phrase “Jesus, I trust in you” because I could not say anything else. In those moments I wasn’t even sure that I trusted in the Lord and that He had a plan for my suffering but I couldn’t allow myself to think that the sword that was piercing my heart was for nothing. And it wasn’t.
When the Lord allows hearts to be pierced it is always for some purpose. At the Crucifixion there were two hearts that were pierced: one was Jesus’ and one was Mary’s. Jesus’ heart was pierced so that he might share with us His abundance of mercy. Mary’s heart was pierced so that in it being broken open by the Lord she was able to receive not only the suffering Christ into her heart but all suffering people everywhere as well. This means that loving the men in our lives means that to encounter them it will pierce our own hearts, just as the heart of Mary was pierced as she encountered her son dying on the cross.
So we called to love the men in our lives in a passionate, pure, and painful way. How this is lived out practically with each of the men in your lives is going to be different based on the circumstances of their relationship with you. This is because at times that relationship is going to call for an emphasis on spousal love (Passion), an emphasis on fraternal love (Purity), or an emphasis on maternal love (Pain). Just remember that our feminine hearts were created to love the masculine in all of these ways and as long as we keep the Cross always before us as our school of Love, we are loving as the Lord desires us to love.
Keep courage and persevere always, my sisters, in the struggle to attain a clean heart.
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Alyssa is a Junior studying Humanities and Catholic Culture, Theology, and Philosophy. She is a native of Texas where she lives with her family in a blue-roofed house on top of a hill. She is passionate about the Truth of the Lord's Incarnation and loves spending time discovering and discussing ways in which others have incarnated the Gospel in film, history, literature, politics, and art. Her favorite saints are St. Teresa of Avila and St. Catherine of Siena because they both personify St. John Paul II's "feminine genius" in her mind.
