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Dear Father Angelo, 

I am a 26-year-old boy and I feel worried about the following matter.

Please give me your opinion, I have been greatly helped by the experiences of others that you have reported on your site, but this time I wanted to write to you personally:

The fact is that I can’t find a girl who shares the same values as me, or rather, I fell in love in the past with a Christian girl, for three years I tried hard to win her over, but I was not reciprocated.

Now I find myself alone with the desire to build a family and I would have no difficulty in finding another girl, but not with the same values as me.

I am also not such a rigid person in general, I am very understanding and patient with many dynamics as I have been fortunate enough to attend varied schools and companies seeing all kinds of things, but I don’t want to compromise my life.

In the community I’ve been in since I was born I can’t find anyone, and sometimes I feel like leaving, getting a job and going to live on my own. But what would I get out of it? A nice hot meal and money set aside to take to my grave….

I don’t think God wants me like that.

My friends don’t know what to tell me, but I can see in their eyes that if they were me they would compromise on premarital sexuality, but I already know I would not be happy about it.

I am afraid that I will be alone and that for this need of mine one day it will be too late. But I know that God is good, sees and provides.

I hope He will soon show me my place on this earth.

How do you advise me to act?

Thank you in advance, I know there are e mails similar to this one so please do not worry about answering me in a short time.

I also ask you for a prayer!

Thank you. God bless you.

Priest’s response 

My dear friend,

  1. I am glad that you don’t want to compromise when it comes to building your temporal and eternal future. Giving in on moral matters is the same as harming oneself.
  2. When Moses presented the 10 commandments to the people on behalf of God, he urged them to observe them with these words: “Be careful, therefore, to do as the LORD, your God, has commanded you, not turning aside to the right or to the left, but following exactly the way prescribed for you by the LORD, your God, that you may live and prosper, and may have long life in the land which you are to occupy.” (Dt 5:32-33). With the commandments, God does not want to take anything away from us, but intends to protect everything.
  3. When our existence is guided by the full observance of the commandments and following Jesus, it is based on solid foundations. For this reason, Moses on behalf of God promises three good things: to live long, to be happy, and to remain for a long time in the land about to be possessed.
  4. Transferring these three goods into the affective life means guaranteeing life to courtship and marriage. Deviation from God’s commandments, on the other hand, is the same as giving short life to these two precious realities.
  5. Similarly, the full observance of God’s commandments guarantees happiness. This happiness is mainly linked to the subsistence of courtship and marriage and also to the many graces that God bestows on those who remain open to Him. Deviation from the commandments is the same as laying the groundwork for many tears and mourning the loss of goods that we rightly considered precious.
  6. The third good concerns remaining for a long time in the promised land. If the promised land in the Old Testament was a strip of land facing the southeastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea, in the New Testament the promised land is paradise.
  7. Therefore, do not sacrifice in any way the supernatural good of grace to compromise with sin. God’s grace is a greater good than the entire universe as a whole. St. Thomas says just that: “But the good of grace in one is greater than the good of nature in the whole universe” (Summa Theologica, I-II, 113,9, ad 2).
  8. To find a girl with whom to build a house of mutual sanctification and a family open to the life of new children, you must turn to God so that He may make you meet her and move her heart towards you. Scripture says that “Like a stream is the king’s heart in the hand of the LORD; wherever it pleases him, he directs it.” (Pr 21:1). But also the heart of every man and every woman is like streams of water in the hands of the Lord, who can direct it towards whom He wants. In this regard, in addition to the Holy Rosary, I would like to suggest the daily recitation of the Dominican litanies, which are particularly effective.
  9. At the same time, do your part in looking for her in the most suitable environments because if the encounter with the woman whom the Lord has prepared for you is primarily His gift, it does not exclude your personal search. Jacob made a long journey to meet the one whom God had prepared for him, Rebecca. St. Thomas Aquinas recalls that grace does not replace nature but presupposes it.
  10. Returning to Jacob, I like to recall the struggle he had with an angel, which became a symbol of persevering prayer that obtains everything. Well, all night he struggled with the angel “until the break of dawn. (…). The angel then said, ‘Let me go, for it is daybreak.’ But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go until you bless me.’” (Gn 32:25-27). Do the same: do not give up on prayer until you feel heard.

I bless you, I wish you a serene continuation of the new year and I accompany you with prayer.