Dear Abigail,
My 18-year-old daughter has been intimate with her first-ever boyfriend, during her first semester of college, despite our family’s recent conversion and catechesis in Catholic doctrine regarding sex before marriage. She’s been growing in faith for over two years, knows the reasons why waiting is important, goes to daily Mass and Reconciliation as much as possible, but threw it all out the window at the first test. She also hid that she even had a boyfriend from us and lied to our face about the sex. (Her brother confirmed it for us.) She doesn’t know that we know, so now that she is away from him for a month, my wife and I are trying to persuade her to slow down her courtship. She is not on the pill. She seems to have some understanding of the peril of this situation, but I’m afraid she will go right back to making this mistake once the semester starts again. I should add that only three years ago she thought she was gay and was dating her girlfriend, didn’t want children, was filled with anxiety and fear, going so far as to cut herself among other things. It was only through the most difficult effort that my wife and I brought her through that time. She is actually excited to be a mother one day, but I’m afraid she’s making terrible mistakes and is choosing infatuation and sin over love of God, and the chance of a truly great spouse. What should I do?
—Andrew
Andrew,
Three years ago, your family wasn’t Catholic. Maybe your family wasn’t anything at all, religion-wise. Your 15-year-old-daughter was spiraling: practicing popular methods of self-harm, rejecting the idea of forming a family, trying on a sexual orientation that enraged you. You threw a Hail Mary, and the Catholic Church came down with the ball.
You and your wife converted the whole family, prodding the kids through catechesis. How you persuaded a 15-year-old to embrace such a change, I cannot imagine. In any case, mirabile dictu—it worked! Maybe your daughter’s soul yearned for this new life.
She now goes to daily Mass, stopped cutting herself, and stopped arranging her life around a desire to thumb her nose at you.
Andrew, this is an almost unreasonable amount of success.
I say this without hesitation, because I spent years studying and writing about girls very much like your daughter. Girls who battled anxiety and depression, engaged in cutting, and cycled through identities in quick succession: first announcing they were gay, then “pansexual,” and then the real doozy of self-harm—“trans.”
