CNA staff, August 12, 2024 / 4:50 p.m.

As the U.S. marriage rate continues to decline in 2024, Catholic women discussed the difficulties of modern dating in an EWTN News In Depth feature.

“I didn’t expect to be single in my 40s. That wasn’t my plan,” says Anastasia Northrup, a Catholic and founder of the National Catholic Singles Conference.

A quarter of 40-year-olds in the United States have never been married, Pew Research found in 2021.

Meanwhile, the Catholic marriage rate fell by about 70% between 1969 and 2019, according to a recent report from Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Apostolic Research.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics, there are just over six marriages per 1,000 people in the United States, down from a record of 16.4 in 1946, after World War II.

Amid the difficult dating situation, a resurfaced comment by 2021 Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance about “childless cat ladies” sparked an outcry from single women who feel there is nothing they can do about their unmarried status.

“We are governed in this country, through the Democrats, through our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are unhappy with their own lives and the choices they’ve made and therefore want to make the rest of the country unhappy,” Vance said during an appearance on Fox News with Tucker Carlson, where he suggested that politicians without children have less of a stake in the country’s future.

“If nobody is pursuing us, there’s not much we can do,” said Sara Perla, communications manager for the Catholic Project at the Catholic University of America, in response to “the whole childless cat lady thing.”

“It’s interesting that women are being blamed for the situation in a way that I think is very unfair, because we still want to be persecuted,” Perla explained.

Hundreds of people attended a panel discussion on the challenges of modern dating hosted by the Catholic Project at the recent National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis.

“I did a survey before and after the panel and the biggest challenge that singles complained about is just meeting someone,” Perla said. “You can’t just be Catholic. I can’t just meet a Catholic man. I have to meet a Catholic man who is interesting and who is interested in me.”

Perla says one of the biggest challenges of dating Catholic people these days is finding someone who is both a well-formed Catholic and someone you can bond with—it’s not just about having the same religious beliefs.

“Some people make the mistake of trying to match people up and saying, ‘Oh, he’s Catholic,'” says Perla, a single Catholic woman in her early 40s. “And then you think, ‘That doesn’t mean much to me at all. Is he funny? Does he have interests? Does he do anything other than study theology? Because if not, then we have nothing to talk about.”

Northrup founded the National Catholic Singles Conference to promote education and fellowship among single Catholics.

“We are called to communion, we are called to community, and we do not live our faith alone or in a vacuum,” she said. “Especially as single people who do not have an integrated family community, relationships and friendships are very important.”

(The story continues below)

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Both Northrop and Perla encourage local Catholic parishes to be more inclusive of unmarried Catholics and to foster community among single people.