Rod taking every opportunity he can to punch right, as always.

I'm no longer in the hunt and not in communion, and it turns out I make a better boyfriend than husband so I'm not in a position to offer sage counsel. Find a man with a successful marriage and intact household and talk to him. But I can't keep my mouth shut, and I'll presume to make some observations.

In my opinion a third of marriages succeed, a third limp along, and another third are toxic and need to be ended in some gracious and dignified manner. I have no answers.

Parishes are pretty fraught places, and the structure evolved in a localized setting where people are tied to the locale and nested in an ethno-nationalist community. Christians have slaughtered each other in great numbers over sectarian and national differences so people can talk about how we are all one in Christ but this is obviously kind of important. They are also set up for families, not unattached individuals with no familial or ethnic ties to the parish; that's the setting in which they evolved for centuries. The atomized modern, mobile world is an alien landscape for the Church. Maybe the confused attempts at “young adult” or “singles” groups work somewhere but I haven't seen it.

In the traditional model men are expected to mature into adulthood with confidence, assertiveness, marketable skills and sexual prowess. Women are sexual vessels prepared from adolescence to be queens of a household under the protection of a man's kingship. Their prefrontal cortexes mature faster than men's. Solution: men in their mid to late 20s marry 17 to 20 year old women. What do men do in the meantime? Prostitutes. Maybe you marry them both around age 17 to 20 and give the husband a dowry and polish him up as another son. Otherwise expect everyone's sexual pasts to be kind of, checkered.

Count the ways in which this model is so completely at odds with the modern world. Even a staunch traditionalist father must consider telling his daughter to postpone marriage until she gets some job skills and credentials because husbands die or become different people you can't live with. Then there are the incredible ways technological society has become stacked against people without graduate or professional degrees and the lowering of sub-millionaire male status and men and women raised as socioeconomic rivals.

Again I have no answers and stories like this do not surprise me.