Shiena is an East Indian anesthesiology resident in New York City. Her parents want her to marry an Indian man for cultural and religious reasons. Instead, she’s been dating an Italian Catholic bodybuilder for the last two years. But since he’s not Hindu, she hasn’t yet told her parents about the relationship, even though the pair is practically inseparable. “Every slice narrows the pie. Education, race, religion—it’s a small pool,” she said.
For SWANS (Strong Women Achievers, No Spouse) finding a partner who shares their religious tradition sometimes seems like an unnecessary burden. There are so many other qualities to match up, successful men and women…

Note to BustedHalo readers from Christine:
In February 2005 I wrote an article for BustedHalo under the title, “Overqualified for Love?” where I asked readers to share their thoughts on a pressing question for young-adults: Are smart, successful women at a disadvantage when looking for a spouse?

I wrote the article because I was concerned—both personally and professionally. I’d just finished my Ph.D., I was single, and I’d been reading about two studies that had been getting a lot of attention in the media, online and among my friends:
A University of Michigan study reported that college-educated men would prefer to marry a woman whom they considered subordinate—for…

Among the first pieces of advice for the newly engaged couple is to set up a wedding registry as soon as possible. If you don’t, you’ll get six toasters and some terrible ceramic statuettes, the guidebooks warn. There are a lot of decisions to be made—and all the gender-neutral terminology in the world can’t hide the fact that this is clearly intended to be woman’s work. Some stores (like Bloomingdale’s) are honest: They call it the Bridal Registry. It’s shopping, it’s girly, and while the man can hold the official Bridal Registry bar code zapper gun, it’s the woman who is supposed to make the big decisions.
If you think “big decisions” should…

When Madonna’s Confession’s Tour came to New York City last week, I was one of the screaming fans in a jam-packed Madison Square Garden. I’ve wanted to go to Madonna concert since 1994 when my father forbid me to attend her Bedtime Stories tour. Now I feel like it’s time for me to make some confessions.
Papa Does Preach
“My money isn’t going to support a Catholic-hater,” Dad said as he refused to give permission to attend the concert with my friends. I was 17 and thought my parents were Draconian in their rules and regulations.
I was going to pay for it with my allowance money, I argued. No dice: It was still our family money going to support a woman who the Pope had accused of…

Perhaps it was because I went to an all girls’ school, but when I got to college, most of my closest friends were guys. I’ve got great photos of me being held up by six boys from our school newspaper and of formals and parties with me as the only woman among a sea of tuxedos. Yet as we’ve gotten older, our friendships have changed. We’re less likely to hang out a deux; we’re more likely to turn events into double dates or group parties. There’s a fine line that men and women tread when they want to preserve opposite-sex friendships-and keep significant other’s from getting jealous.
According to our recent survey, 79% of BustedHalo respondents said they have gotten jealous…

Opposite-sex friendships are great, and can be completely uncomplicated. Or they can get you into a whole heap of trouble.
Sometimes a movie hits a chord in the collective conscience of a generation: The 1989 movie When Harry Met Sally did just that.
Harry: You realize of course that we could never be friends.
Sally: Why not?
Harry: What I’m saying is – and this is not a come-on in any way, shape or form – is that men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.
Sally: That’s not true. I have a number of men friends and there is no sex involved.
Harry: No you don’t.
Sally: Yes I do…
Harry: You only think you do.
As young adults attend co-ed colleges and…

John was attending a work cocktail party with his girlfriend Angie when they had a fight. Angie attends receptions for her job all the time, but this was the first time she’d been to a business function of John’s. He introduced her to his colleagues as “my date” or “my girlfriend”—but she felt like people were looking right past her. “I was a decorative accessory or an unnecessary appendage,” she said.
After a few drinks to compensate for the awkwardness, she started to introduce herself to people as “John’s handbag”—the accessory. People laughed nervously. By the third time she’d told one of John’s colleagues…

In March of last year, I met a handsome, witty man named Peter at a black-tie charity benefit in New York City and we talked until the wee hours of the morning. From the start, I knew this was a special relationship. It was simple. We communicated well. He made me laugh and treated me with love and respect. He was a talker—and a great listener. And after about six months, I was pretty sure this was it: Peter and I were in love, and I hoped someday we might get married.
Around this time I received a piece of great advice: Think about what being married means—and think about it now, while you are calm and thoughtful—because once you get engaged, the Wedding Train rolls out of the station and can become a runaway…

I gave a talk recently on sex and dating to a group of Catholic 15- and 16-year-olds in New York City. Since my normal audience is young-adults—Catholics in their 20s and 30s—I planned to write a talk that focused on the most innocent parts of dating, geared for teens: some dating advice, good communication skills and a bit about why the Church wants us to abstain from sex until marriage.
I was really surprised to learn that the majority of my teenaged audience was already sexually active. While not all of the kids were actually having intercourse, all but a few were sexually knowledgeable and believed that sex was a necessary part of a dating relationship. As one boy put it, “if we’re not ‘doing…

The wedding season is upon us and BustedHalo readers have written in with great questions about religious protocol as we celebrate our friends’ marriages. Does attending a Saturday evening wedding at church of another Christian denomination “count” as going to church for the week-or do you have to go again the next day at a Catholic church? Can you take communion at a non-Catholic wedding? And do you participate in the blessings and rituals of other faiths?
Here’s a quick guide:
What counts as “going to church?”
You attend a 5 p.m. communion wedding ceremony for two Episcopalian friends of yours. The prayers and readings are similar to the Catholic Mass, but the communion…

Since I began writing this column, scores of readers have emailed me asking for personal advice. I always offer whatever thoughts I can, and usually end letters by recommending that they speak with their priest or someone else within their church community for more detailed and ongoing advice.

Along the way, I began to wonder about this. Can a celibate clergy really give good advice to young-adults about relationships and sexuality? We recently asked the readers of BustedHalo to share their thoughts—and an enormous number of you answered.
Faith & Sex
Discussions about sexuality and relationships are alive and well within the church community: 42% of female and 58% of male respondents to our Pure…

On the Friday after Easter I attended the wedding of my friends Andrea and Simon in Oxford, England. Andrea and Simon are both studying to be vicars, so they have many friends and teachers within the Anglican Church. In fact, there were more than 150 priests in attendance on that Friday afternoon as the couple took the sacrament of holy marriage in a nuptial mass, and Andrea’s father, a reverend, officiated.
The Catholic Church has a long way to go before we’d see a similar wedding in our Church, but it was so high-church (lots of incense, formal hymns, etc.) I could envision it. It made me reconsider the importance of talking about marriage and Holy Orders as sacraments that might one day be considered…

For more than a year, I’ve been writing the Pure Sex, Pure Love column for BustedHalo. We’ve covered some big topics: When to bring up your faith in a new relationship, how to make sure you are being open to meeting the right person, and, of course, the thorny topics of sex – is premarital sex always a sin, and how far is too far when it comes to intimacy before marriage?
As a social scientist, I’ve used online polls to get a sense of what BustedHalo readers think about these topics. Through the answers I receive, I hope to take a snapshot of the opinions of the young-adult Catholic community as a whole.
Usually, the poll for the upcoming column is posted alongside the previous week’s column.…

The Bible tells us “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he” (Proverbs 26:7) and the Buddha is quoted as saying “What we think, we become.” Our minds are powerful tools, so it’s fair to ask the question: what counts as an impure thought? Why are these thoughts wrong? And isn’t just thinking it better than doing it?
Indeed, this is a hot topic. A record number of respondents filled out our recent BustedHalo survey on impure thoughts—and young-adult Catholics aren’t always in agreement with the experts.
Impure or forbidden thoughts include sexual fantasies, violence against others or ourselves, cheating, divorce, rape, and other behaviors that we think of…

At 11pm on February 9th my husband started with pain in his chest. At midnight he woke me up and said, “I don’t think I’m ok.” We drove to the emergency room. The guy at the desk took one look at Greg’s pale sweaty face and said, “Come right back to Room 1.” After that, things went the way they go when you’re a kid and you realize the sledding hill is too steep but you’ve already pushed off. Everything starts whizzing by in a blur and you’re thinking to yourself, “If I can (Unh!) just hang onto the (Ow!) sled, I might live through this.” I’m 38 years old, and the thought of becoming a widow just now is definitely NOT part of the plan.
As one…

At age 16, I told my father I was giving up going to church for Lent. At 19, I told him I was giving up my virginity for Lent. In the end, I was never that rebellious: I usually gave up chocolate, but it was a whole lot of fun to torment my ever-patient father.
It wasn’t until recently that I realized you don’t have to give up something for Lent. The Lenten period is a time where we prepare to remember Christ’s death and celebrate his resurrection to new life. We’re supposed to think about the ways we can strengthen our faith and help others as God comes to give us a second chance.
There are three parts of Lenten preparation, says Father Dave Dwyer of the Paulists: prayer, fasting and almsgiving. He gives…

So you’re single and looking for love. What’s on your list? Does she have to be beautiful, smart and funny? Does he have to be caring, tall and handsome? What about the bigger things: Does she share your dreams for the future? Does he want to have a family? And on this list of must-haves in your true love, where does religion come in?

“Every time you slice the pie again, the potential piece you are looking for gets smaller and smaller,” a 29-year-old woman recently said to me recently. “Did God really intend for it to be this difficult for me to find a man who shares my faith and who I want to kiss?”
The Un-Guide
Todd Hertz and Camerin Courtney address this and other challenges of faith-based…

A few weeks ago Pope Benedict delivered his first encyclical — a papal letter to the universal Church — entitled Deus Caritas Est (God is Love).
OK, so he probably wasn’t talking about Whitman’s-Sampler-in-a-heart-shaped-box kind of Valentine’s Day love, but bear with me: There are many languages of love.
Our faith tells us that the longing we feel for love — from our family, our spouse, and our friends — is, at core, a longing for God’s love. Why can we never be satisfied with the gifts of love that special someone gives us? Because they are human, and we’re searching for a greater love.
Body and Soul
“We speak of love of country, love of one’s…

Conventional wisdom has it that a woman, ever-obsessed with getting married, starts pairing her first name with his last name before the end of date #1—and will be the one to bring up the initial suggestion of marriage as a hope for the future. The first part is true: Rare is the woman who hasn’t (at least once) started plotting the romantic fairytale ending of a relationship in her head before the end of the first act. But my research finds that the second part is false: If the relationship is moving in that direction, it’s men, not women, who will bring up that first, tentative conversation about marriage.
More than 90% of BustedHalo respondents said they believed that women were usually the first…

Certain religions seem to be more interested in helping young adults date within their faith. Every synagogue seems to have a matchmaker. For those in the Mormon faith, every big city has a church dedicated to bringing singles together. But Catholics don’t seem to do as much of this sort of thing.
I live on the Upper West Side in New York City, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, and over the years I’ve been fascinated (and a bit jealous) about the number of ways local young-adult Jews have to meet others who share their faith. There are very active websites like jdate, frumster and sawyouatsini.com. There are dozens of married women who act as matchmakers and make introductions between eligible singles.…