Valentine’s Day Special: What It Is Like To Have a Catholic Boyfriend

The term ‘boyfriend’ is a sensitive one in India. Most people avoid it, and you keep getting introduced to someone’s ‘friend’ until suddenly they’re married. Most likely it’s because of the arranged marriage culture that moves very fast from introductions to decisions to marry, with very little space in between. The only people who date and have boyfriends or girlfriends are seen as those who may be approaching relationships very casually, most likely are either very young and going about it in a clandestine way, or older and wary of the permanence or stability of marriage. It has an unsavoury tinge to it to many people.

But as a modern-day Christian, I both value marriage, as well as think it’s essential to take time to get to know someone WELL before making such a big decision. What do you call someone in the interim period? I met a wonderful young man some months ago, we started ‘talking’, went on some dates, and then entered an intentional relationship/ courtship/period of discernment (more on the stages of a relationship in a different post). Since ‘intentional relation’ seemed strange and possibly creepy, we fell back on ‘boyfriend and girlfriend’, even though we are both in our thirties and perhaps that makes us sound younger than we are.

As my regular blog readers know, I was not interested in being in a relationship or getting married unless it was to someone who shared my faith (apart from several other criteria that I won’t detail here). People thought I was crazy. “You’ll never get married if you have such high expectations.” “Don’t set conditions, maybe he will become religious after he meets you. My husband didn’t go to church before, and he changed after we got married.”

Well, then I was prepared to stay single. But I entrusted this desire of my heart to the Lord. He told me “You take care of my stuff, and I’ll take care of you.” Well, He did! I got myself a super-Catholic boyfriend. I wanted to share some of the details to inspire y’all (or make you envious), and to honour him on Valentine’s Day. So what is it like to have a Catholic boyfriend?

1. Our first conversation started with me asking him ‘What’s your story?’ (I can’t do small talk) and he proceeded to share his testimony even though he was thrown off-guard. (Not intimidated by heavy questions! Winning!)

2. Before we even went on our first date, he took time off from talking to me for a personal retreat to pray about whether this was something God was calling him to start. Talk about intentional.

3. We often land up saving and sending each other the same Catholic memes and jokes.

4. In fact when I was Facebook stalking him before we even started ‘talking’, I was surprised to find we had shared a lot of the same Catholic links and jokes over the past year (why yes, that is a part of a girl’s research on whether she would consider dating a guy. Guys, check your Facebook profiles.)

5. When we meet and he hugs me, I say things like, “Why is it that it’s always so much better when we’re in the same place than on video call? I know - it’s because we are EMBODIED SPIRITS.” And he gets it.

6. On our very first date, we were supposed to meet at a garden before going out for pizza. But he secretly was hoping and planning to stop at an Adoration chapel before we even met, but didn’t want to tell me because he thought it would sound too cheesy. But the garden closed, we had to wait somewhere before the restaurant opened, so he jumped in with “Is there an Adoration chapel close by?” And that’s how we spent the first ten minutes of our first date with Jesus in a chapel.

7. We often include a stop at an Adoration chapel on our dates.

8. On our second date, we were each waiting for the other to signal when it was time to go, so we landed up spending more than half an hour at a church. While I was getting slightly impatient and wondering why we were still there, he coolly pulls out his bible and proceeds to have his personal prayer time.

9. He carries a bible everywhere he goes.

I got one for free

10. He often asks me what the Lord said to me in my personal prayer time.

11. On the day we started our courtship, I was extremely tired, so as I shared with him that I was finally ready, I just started rambling about everything I had been thinking and feeling and experiencing that weekend (I tend to ramble when I’m tired). He interrupted me to say, “Can we stop a moment and pray?” “Oh. Yeah.” He held my hand and proceeded to consecrate our relationship to the Lord and ask Mary to cast her mantle of protection over us as well. Swoon.

12. We both took personal silent retreats a month into our courtship to pray about what the Lord was saying to each of us. We read excerpts from Pope John Paul II’s Love and Responsibility (WHICH I CANNOT RECOMMEND HIGHLY ENOUGH), watched Jackie Angel’s video about how to know if you’ve found the one, and shared what the Lord said to us after our retreats.


13. Far from being shocked when I have shared some of my sins and weaknesses with him, he has promised to help me with them, told me to tell him when I’m struggling and said even if I give in to temptation, at least he can pray for me in the midst of it.

14. He ends every nightly conversation with a prayer for us and our current needs and struggles, a Hail Mary and a ‘Saint John Paul, pray for us’. (I’m sharing my patron saint with him. I didn’t realize when I chose him in 2016 HOW MUCH John Paul II had written and taught about love, romance, marriage and relationships.)

15. He loves going to Mass and Adoration and did long before he met me, and prays the Rosary every day (which is more than I do).

There’s so much more to him and to our relationship. We also do normal stuff like watch movies and dance and go to restaurants and get anxious about things and have misunderstandings and stay up too late talking and complain about how tired we are all the time. Being Catholic doesn’t make everything perfect or easy. He’s not perfect, neither am I, and nor is our life or our relationship. But we are both aware that we need Jesus even more than we need each other, that we need to have our personal prayer time before we talk to each other, and that only Jesus can help us learn to love each other well. Having a relationship with a living God helps us remember to always return to the One who can sustain us and get us back on track.

 P.S. Here’s an interesting little fact – he’s no longer my boyfriend. But that’s a story for a different day.

 Happy Valentine’s Day, sweetheart!