After a talk I once gave, a young woman approached me with a problem. She was a Youth Mission Team missionary, traveling to Australia in a van with two other girls and three guys. They would run retreats at high schools, sharing their testimonies of faith in Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church.
She described the three guys she had spent the year with as very virtuous, prayerful, and passionate about their Catholic faith. And the problem was – she was attracted to all of them! Her concern was that because she was attracted to all of them, she was being impure. She was worried that this was a bad thing and needed to knock it off.
Was she being impure by being attracted to all three of these men? Actually, no.
I want to make a crucial distinction to help me answer this question. There is a significant difference between a healthy attraction to a virtuous person and a romantic interest in a person. Although there is some obvious overlap between the two, they are not necessarily the same thing.
If I’m romantically interested in someone, I also find them attractive. However, it is possible, even when healthy and normal, to find people attractive that I am not romantically interested in. What am I saying?
Being attracted to a person should not necessarily indicate you want to date or marry a person. Attraction to something or someone simply means recognizing the goodness and beauty of that thing or person. The world and every person in it would lose their color, if I believed that, because I was married, I could not recognize, rejoice in, or delight in virtuous and holy people.
I will never forget a youth retreat I spoke at, where a young woman proudly said, “I think Mother Teresa is the most beautiful woman in the world, not because she was the most physically attractive, but because she had the most beautiful heart.”
Very few would disagree.
This young woman was rightly “attracted” to Mother Teresa. By attracted, I mean that she was inspired by and drawn to the goodness and beauty of the person of Mother Teresa. Was she romantically interested? Of course not. A healthy attraction to a virtuous person doesn’t need to be romantic and can even occur between two people of the same sex.
In my own life, I can attest to being attracted to, inspired by, and drawn to several male friends who serve as role models for me, because they demonstrate certain virtues or character traits.
How does this answer the young woman’s problem? Well, there is no problem. There is no problem with a young Catholic woman being attracted to, inspired by, and delighting in three virtuous, prayerful men who honor, respect and cherish her as a sister in Christ.
I joked with her that I would be worried if she were not attracted to them! For a young Catholic woman, these men likely possess all the qualities she would love her future husband to possess. Her attraction to them is a good sign that she is drawn to the good in these men. Attraction is the right response to virtue.
Clarification.
Although it is perfectly natural and healthy for her to be attracted to men like this, even multiple at a time, it would be wrong for her to be pursuing all of them in a romantic sense at the same time. A romantic interest is different, and a person should not be entertaining multiple potential relationships at once. This is dishonest and confusing.
To keep these friendships respectful, unless or until a romantic relationship with one of them begins to develop, I advised her to do a few things.
- Ensure that she is not being emotionally impure by fantasizing about being in a relationship with all of them. It can be tempting to imagine being in a relationship with one person one day, and another person the next. This creates a false reality in the woman’s mind, as she struggles to be “just friends” in person, because they may have hugged, held hands and kissed in her imagination.
- I encouraged her to refrain from flirtatious gestures, conversations and behavior. It can be tempting for a girl or a guy to grasp the attention of multiple people of the other sex at the same time. Avoid this too. This is just ego. All of us have a desire to be loved and valued, but desiring romantic interest from multiple people at once is a disorder of this inherently governing desire.
- Lastly, I encouraged her to be at peace with being attracted to, drawn to, and delighting in the good of these three men, while being aware of whether she desires something romantic with any one of them. She should not fall into the trap of dating all of them just because they might ask. She must discern for herself whether she really does want something romantic with the guy who might ask. I always say, if you can date all of them, date none of them. It is good to be attracted to good and virtuous people. Still, a romantic interest should be entered into to discern marriage. And there are very few people you will ever meet who will honestly fall into this category.
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