I had a very drunken religious conversation with my boyfriend last week.  And by “drunken,” I mean he had two beers and I had one bottle of chardonnay and a bacardi/diet [which, after the BOTTLE of WINE, is like ordering a diet coke with your Big Mac].  I realized that Damon is the first non-Christian boyfriend I’ve ever had.  Out of the past five guys I’d refer to as “ex-boyfriends,” FOUR were Catholic.  I don’t think I actively sought out boyfriends with the same religious affiliation as me…and we were all fallen Catholics; none of them were devout.

My Mom has told me some interesting stories… In the early seventies, she had met and fallen in love with a man who happened to be Baptist.  She brought him home to meet my grandmother, who was very polite to him, despite her disapproval of her daughter dating a non-Catholic.  But later, she made this quite known: “If you marry him,” she told my mother, “I will not go to the wedding.” And I laughed!  Ha-ha. How old-school! I’m so glad that doesn’t happen anymore!…But the more I think about the guys I’ve dated, the more I realized that, to my relatives, Catholicism was always the icing to the cake of characteristics.  Like, “aaaaand, he’s CATHOLIC!” I think it was a few years ago that my cousin dated someone of Indian descent, and there was a very subtle energy of disapproval.  Nothing major, like my grandma’s aforementioned grand statement, but the energy is there, mainly from some older family members.

In the end, of course, their opinion doesn’t matter.  Mine, however, does, and it’s proven to be a challenge.  From eight years of Catholic schooling, I have brought very little with me into the present day. But I still feel I’ve maintained a sense of sprituality which I can only seem to define using words that I’m used to, like “God,” or “Heaven.”  My theories, as they stand now, are ridiculously vague, like, “I think there’s something ‘bigger’ than all of this, I just call it ‘God’.”  Or, “I think there’s something more for us after all of this.  I don’t have a fucking clue what it is, so I just call it ‘Heaven.’”

It’s really unsettling, then, to hear my atheist boyfriend discuss his views.  I guess the part that burns the most is his dismissal of any sort of force that drives the world — most importantly, the bringing of two people together — most, most importantly, the bringing of him and I together. And I’m not talking some big gesture of destiny here – I’ve just always believed that something kind of delegates the overall picture, including our relationships.  Everything’s cool, and we love each other and it’s ridiculous, really, but…. what if I see him as this major meaningful figure in my life, and he sees me merely as a partner to bide his time before he dies, and that’s it?  The more I think about it, the more I see how the way we look at the world is completely different.

This makes my brain heart hurt.