This St Valentine’s Day there’s an epidemic of singleness – time to bring back the Parish Dance
Peter Day-Milne• February 14, 2025
Have you ever noticed how much rarer couples are nowadays than they once were, especially outside the Church?
Statistics show that fewer and fewer young people are forming lasting romantic relationships, or even non-lasting ones. Over the last few years, newspapers have chronicled this marked societal change with a series of salacious headlines (“Young People having less sex than ever before”), and most of us Catholics have, I believe, read them with comparative indifference.
“At least the youth are avoiding fornication,” we have thought, “and besides, celibacy is no bad thing.”
But on this St Valentine’s Day, I want to argue that the decline in coupling is in fact an extremely unhealthy and worrying trend. I will draw readers’ attention to a conceptual distinction, implicit in the teaching of St Augustine, that helps us to see why this is the case, and finally I will ask how we as a Church can do more to counter today’s epidemic of singleness.
“Marriage is good, but celibacy is better”: every Catholic is aware of this notion, which is clear in the letters of St Paul, and also implicit in the Gospels (e.g. Luke 14:20). But if we are to make a good assessment of today’s growth in singleness, we need to understand the Pauline preference better than we typically do. Here we can look to the teaching of St Augustine. For though Augustine – a man who cohabited for years before his conversion, and whose philosophical imagination was always coloured by Platonism – had a somewhat lower opinion of couple-formation than that of the settled Magisterium, nevertheless his firm, biblical orthodoxy led him to some important insights about both marriage and virginity, which he set out in his treatises De Bono Coniugali and De Sancta Virginitate (the latter of which is specifically about virginity in women, though his teaching in it is also relevant to men’s celibacy).
Virginity, Augustine teaches, is not good in itself. Rather, it becomes good when it is dedicated to God: for then it allows one to think how to please Him alone. Yet because this is the reason for its goodness, virginity must not only be dedicated to God, but also lived out faithfully, if it is to surpass marriage: a virtuous married woman is better than a garrulous, prurient or proud religious (BC 23). Moreover marriage, though less good in itself than faithful consecrated life, is still a genuine good, not only because it usually produces new life, but because of the mutual society of husband and wife, and also because, amongst Christians, it is a sacrament (BC 11). Marriage, Augustine says, is to dedicated virginity as Martha’s table-service is to Mary’s waiting at Jesus’s feet: both are good, even though Mary’s action was the higher.
This teaching has two implications. First, we must draw a distinction between dedicated celibacy, which is good in itself, and undedicated celibacy, which is not. For dedicated celibacy is not merely a sacrifice or a burden offered up to God, like fasting; on the contrary it is positively good, and experienced as such by those who faithfully observe it. A dedicated celibate does not merely renounce the warm hearth of the family home, but he or she has the benefit of an especial closeness to God – of sitting at the Lord’s feet like Mary. In fact, dedicated celibacy has the unique dignity of being both intrinsically good and good as a sacrifice.
Celibacy not dedicated to God, on the other hand, is not intrinsically good; if it is good at all it is only good as a Cross faithfully born. Indeed St Augustine declares boldly that a woman who is single unwillingly is spiritually worse off than a married woman: “I would not say this lightly, but a woman who is already married is in a more blessed state than one who intends to marry, for the former already has what the other still desires…The former seeks to please the one man to whom she is given; the latter, many men, not knowing to whom she is to be given.”
Once we realise the full value and dignity of dedicated celibacy, we can see that it is this celibacy that St Paul recommends over marriage in his letters, as being a positive good, a supernatural gift and a source of special graces; not celibacy or singleness in itself, which is but a privation of the lower, but positive good of marriage.
Hence today’s epidemic of singleness is not a good thing at all, for very few of today’s young single people are single because they have chosen to dedicate themselves fully to God. Rather, they are remaining single for other reasons, and so they are missing the natural (and for Christians, sacramental) good of marriage without gaining the supernatural good of dedicated celibacy.
What are those “other reasons” for singleness today? Judging by anecdotal evidence, I would suggest that there are three principle ones. The first is a lack of suitable spouses: one frequently hears young women complain that today’s men are whiny, immature, irresponsible and self-absorbed; whereas young men complain that women are hard, fierce and un-nurturing.
The second reason is sex-saturation. Louise Perry in her book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution recounts telling anecdotes of men and (less often) women who have been so steeped in pornographic images and the sexualised culture that they have simply grown bored of romantic relationships and couple-formation.
Third, and linked, is our culture’s embrace of sterility as a liberating good. As the normalisation of contraceptive sex has made sexual acts self-absorbed, with each person treating the other as an instrument of gratification, so the sexes have increasingly grown frustrated with and resentful of each other. Again, Perry’s work documents this: she reminds us of the disturbing prevalence of choking, slapping and spitting in today’s sexual relationships, and the way in which men talk openly online of hating their sexual partners. Sex that deliberately excludes the potential for creating babies ends up creating a nameless sense of frustration that breeds hatred, and precludes couple-formation. This hatred represents the end-point of the Sexual Revolution’s selfish, anti-life, alienating logic.
If I am right that these are the reasons for today’s epidemic of singleness, then the epidemic is a sign of terrible disorder and rejection of God. Far from rejoicing that the decline in coupling at least means a decline in fornication, we Catholics should recognise that if young people today are too cold, self-absorbed and sex-saturated to form romantic relationships, their singleness represents an even wickeder state of our culture, and one perhaps even deadlier to souls, than the more promiscuous state that preceded it.
This may seem like a bleak picture for Valentine’s Day, but it does invite us to consider whether we can do more as a Church to fight the decline of romance. As to the wider problems of the Sexual Revolution, we can but continue to reject it and all its empty promises, and to insist on the goodness of family life, of which we must make our own lives a witness. We must also be unashamed in our acceptance and defence of the full Catholic moral teaching on marriage, which alone can protect the family in the long run.
Yet some of the obstacles to romance today are more straightforward. The lack of marriageable people makes it hard for young people to find a spouse. Are we as a Church doing enough to help them? In pre-Vatican-II days – before the tight-knit social rituals of British Catholic culture came to be seen as insular and unevangelical, as well as the outward expression of a timorous Church still mentally living in priest-holes and hidden chapels, and far too suspicious of converts – the Parish Dance was a normal institution.
Thousands of Catholics met their spouses at them (and this, notably, in an age when vocations were still common). Now, though, one hardly hears of parish dances except at a few big, thriving, markedly traditional city parishes. That the pre-Vatican-II Church really was somewhat insular is probably true; but surely the time has come to consider the losses as well as the gains of post-conciliar cultural change? Ought we not to be helping Catholics to find other Catholics to marry? Isn’t it time for a revival of the parish dance?
Fighting the decline of couple-formation is a task for all of us. Though some priests have a gift, even a charism, for matchmaking, it is not their job. So perhaps on this Valentine’s Day each of us might consider introducing two fellow parishioners to each other.
If St Valentine the priest could risk death to marry Christians in secret, then surely this is the least we can do? If those that we introduce to each other already have supernatural vocations, then we won’t do any harm. And if not, then we might just find ourselves godparents.
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Photo: A lone winter rose (Credit: Mike Plante.)