AFTER CANA

By Blake Sittler

Perfect spouses can’t be ordered with specified traits

Rob Reiner’s classic film, When Harry Met Sally, is the story of (spoiler alert) when Harry met Sally.

The film begins with and is interspersed with vignettes of supposedly real couples sharing how they first met their spouse. Though the vignettes were actually written by journalist-playwright Nora Ephron, these short stories hold a special place in the hearts of fans of the movie because they capture how nearly mythical our meeting stories are even though they take place in our very real world.

Some couples met overseas during the Second World War. Some met at high school dances. Some met when playing for competing teams. Many met at work or at church. Few met while piloting a gondola — even though it sounds romantic, those things are a bugger to steer and take a lot of concentration to navigate.

How did you meet your spouse?

I actually saw Brooke many times before we were introduced. Our family sat behind theirs in Handel church when we missed mass in Landis. Since we were only four and six years old at the time, it is no surprise there was no great initial spark.

We met again when Brooke drove to our school for driver training.
That’s right. They drove from Handel to Landis. For driver training. It was the country and it was the ’80s and that’s how we rolled in those days.
For young singles nowadays, all the conventional places to meet potential mates are still available, but let’s face it: fewer and fewer people are meeting at church or at dances because fewer and fewer people go to church and fewer dance.

So where is a young (or middle-aged or old) individual to go in search of lifelong love? Well, you go the same place you go to buy a pair of cougar-print rubber boots, an autographed baseball card or a new foil for your electric shaver: the Internet.

Dating websites like Catholic Match, eHarmony, Match.com, ChristianMingle, LavaLife, Zoosk and many others have introduced millions of people to a first date, which, in some cases, have led to a marriage.

In many ways, this is not much different from when single farmers, who did not have access to a wide swath of ladies to choose from locally, turned to the Home Loving Hearts section of the Western Producer.
You would think the Internet would be an almost perfect place to meet a mate. When we are looking to buy something hard to find or unique, most of us now turn to eBay or Amazon. Within minutes you can usually find exactly what you are looking for even if it has to be shipped from some other part of the world. No longer do people have to be limited to what they can buy at a local department store — we can go online and find exactly what we desire.

This is not always the case with online dating.

Many of my friends have shared their initial excitement about going to a dating website and entering their personal data (age, weight, height, income, sexual preferences, income, past diseases, pets, education . . .) and then entering the data about their “dream companion.” They mostly admit to a naiveté about the whole process — the neophyte’s hope that their Romeo or Juliet is just a click away.

(Design Pics)

Online dating is a double-edged tool. While these dating websites open you to a plethora of companions you may never have been able to meet by chance, they have the shadow temptation to turn the search for a life partner into the search for a truly elusive perfect partner.

One friend shared how many women seemed interested in him online when he first signed up. He was a single, healthy, wealthy, funny, attractive, well-built lawyer with no children or debt. Women were wooed in the beginning — until they asked how tall he was. When he replied “5 foot, 8 inches” many women ceased communication simply because he did not meet their height requirement!

His now wife of two years can only smile and say, “Their loss.”

Online dating is and will continue to be a legitimate forum whereby people seek a future spouse. Those who enter into this cyber world of choice, though, need to heed the experience of the many who married before them: the perfect spouse is not a shopping list of attributes and traits. The perfect spouse is one who loves the perfect in us, forgives the sins of us and puts up with the rest of our frailties and shortcomings.

All of our love stories are important and real vignettes in a much larger love story: a love story played out through creation, crucifixion, resurrection and the labour we give every day to our family and community.

Sittler and his wife Brooke have three children. He is the acting director of Pastoral Services for the Diocese of Saskatoon and sits on the Marriage Task Force and the Retrouvaille board of directors. He welcomes feedback at aftercana@sasktel.net