The site of the National Catholic Singles Conference was decorated with a mountain aesthetic. The chandelier in the lobby of the Broomfield, Colo., hotel was made of faux antlers, and behind the front desk was a large piece of fabric art depicting buffalo roaming in a field. Framed prints of aspen trees and snow-covered mountains lined the walls. Looking out the windows, you could see the freeway leading to nearby Denver.
I stood in the lobby as a diverse crowd of Catholic singles mingled, waiting for the conference to begin—men and women in their mid-30s to mid-60s in business casual, of many races and ethnicities. A few spoke only Spanish; most spoke English. Some had visible disabilities; most did not. A few were divorced or widowed, but the vast majority had never been married. Old friends hugged. First-timers introduced themselves. The nervous energy of a blind date filled the air. “Is that pizza? Is the pizza good? Maybe I’ll go buy a slice.”
I had arranged to meet Anastasia Northrop, 48, who for the past 20 years has been running this conference, which she began in 2005 to meet the spiritual and emotional needs of Catholics who are single and would like to be married. She greeted me wearing a blue shirtdress and spoke passionately about the spiritual needs of single Catholics like herself. “There’s lots of stuff in parishes for young adults, but eventually you age out of that, and anyway, ‘young adult’ is really a euphemism for single. People have an allergy to the word single. But it’s important for single people to feel seen.”
There are approximately 24 million single adult Catholics in the United States. Clergy and religious make up less than 1 percent of that cohort. Statistics also show that Americans are marrying later and less often. In 1980 the average age of first marriage for men in the United States was 25, and for women it was 22. The average age of first marriage for men is now 30, and for women it is 28. The numbers for U.S. Catholics are much the same. Some are choosing capstone marriages (getting married and having children only after a couple has completed their degrees, gotten the job, bought the house and so on) over cornerstone ones (getting married earlier and working on their relationship alongside professional goals).
God’s Loving Plan
Dating in one’s 30s, 40s and beyond can bring its own challenges, especially while juggling a full-time career. And for many, the dating apps simply are not working. According to a recent survey by Forbes magazine, 78 percent of dating app users have at times felt dissatisfaction and “burnout.” There are dating apps geared toward Catholics, like CatholicMatch.com, but for many it is not so simple to meet enough single Catholics in person. Marriage can increasingly feel like a luxury good, accessible only to the privileged few.
That is where the Singles Conference comes in. The group hosts an annual gathering and has an app that makes it possible for participants to organize in-person meetups. Ms. Northrop hopes the conference will speak to the needs of many of the single adult Catholics in the United States who feel underserved in their parishes, which tend to gear their programming toward families and young people, not single adults.
Ms. Northrop grew up the oldest of nine children in a Byzantine Catholic home. Her parents, Susan and Mark, made a living recording Catholic speakers who gave lectures on what St. John Paul II called the theology of the body. They sold these recordings to parishes—first on cassettes and VHS, and later on CDs and DVDs. Ms. Northrop was homeschooled and began traveling with her family to record theology of the body conferences in her late teens. In many ways, promoting theology of the body is her life’s work.
The theology of the body traces its origin to a series of 129 lectures given by John Paul II during his Wednesday audiences in St. Peter’s Square between Sept. 5, 1979, and Nov. 28, 1984. The lectures were on love, marriage, celibacy and human sexuality. For John Paul II, the natural world, including the body itself, revealed the mind of God. He wanted Catholics to understand the church’s teachings on love and marriage not merely as a series of “no’s” but as a living embodiment of God’s loving plan for humanity.
Drawing on natural law and the creation story in the Book of Genesis, he expounded on sexual difference and complementarity and how they demonstrate that men and women “find themselves in a sincere gift of themselves” either in married life or in consecrated life. In this worldview, some Catholics understand being single not as a vocation, but rather a liminal or in-between space, although the church also offers examples of Catholic saints—for example, St. Zita and St. Paul—who were single and never consecrated. In 1 Corinthians 7, St. Paul even suggests to the early church that it is better to remain single: “To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain unmarried as I am.”
Servant of God Dorothy Day was never married and described herself as “an unwilling celibate.” For most of her life, she loved her only child’s father, Forster Batterham, but he was unwilling to convert to Catholicism and marry her. She refused to wait around for him to change his mind, and she instead devoted her energy to founding the Catholic Worker movement.
Still, the church sees the family as the basic unit of society, and Ms. Northrop recalls longing for just that: “All I ever wanted was to get married and have a big family. Lots of people are single because they prioritized their career. That is not my story.” She says, “I did not intend to be single for 20 years. Being single doesn’t mean that you are worth less.”
Ms. Northrop attributes her singleness to a “culture war,” saying, “A lot of stuff in our world can contribute to the rise of single people. There’s the sexual revolution. There’s the culture war.”
“When women in World War II lost their husbands in the war and were widowed, that was not their fault,” she said, adding that today there are again many “devout Catholic women looking for a husband.” She believes the reasons this time are cultural: “There’s a crisis of men. Radical feminism has made people feel not as attracted to each other. Men don’t feel as needed. Or, if people grew up without a good example of what a good marriage looks like, there can be a fear of commitment.”
The Right Chemistry
Women were indeed more numerous than men at the N.C.S.C. gathering this year. Before the conference, participants organized several days of small-group activities that would allow for more one-on-one time: zip-lining, tubing, a hike, a visit to Denver pilgrimage sites, a baseball game and a concert at Red Rocks. Some came early to take part.
Participants received name tags and perused the exhibitor tables at the conference. At one, a habited nun sold art. At another, jewelry. At still another, Susan Northrop (Anastasia’s mother) sold Catholic books on the theology of the body alongside spiritual classics like Searching for and Maintaining Peace, by Jacques Phillippe.
At one table, Madigan Maere, from Dallas, was selling her services as a “Catholic matchmaker.” She said her company, CommiTmentism (the first T is shaped like a cross), was inspired by the TV show “Love Is Blind.” Singles fill out a profile, and then she sets up phone calls for them with potential matches. “If they have conversational chemistry,” she will then send them a picture of the person they enjoyed talking with. (Ms. Maere, 30, met her Catholic fiancé in a honky-tonk. “The Lord put it on my heart to buy an R.V., and my fiancé owns an R.V. repair service,” she says, smiling. Her engagement ring is shaped like a monstrance.)
Shelly Emory, 50, from Orlando, Fla., was promoting the travel agency she runs for Catholic singles called Anchored in Faith. She said the idea for her business came to her during adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. “I was a travel agent and a Catholic school teacher,” she said. “The Lord told me, ‘If you’re going to [be a travel agent], do it for me.’” She continued: “Catholic singles love to travel. One couple came to the N.C.S.C. and then came on one of my trips and got engaged.” Her advice was simple: “Be open. This person may not be your spouse, but they may be your friend; or they may be the person who introduces you to your spouse.” She said she loves the N.C.S.C. and looks forward to it every year.
One attendee in her 40s who declined to be named told me, “My mom keeps telling me it will happen when you least expect it.” But this advice has done nothing to ease her anxiety, so she came to the N.C.S.C. hoping for a match.
Many participants told me how “nice it was to be in a room full of other single Catholics.” Some said they had already exchanged numbers. Others expressed how tiring it can be being the only single person at events where it is common to have a plus-one, like weddings, bar mitzvahs and graduations.
One of the presenters, Mary Beth Bonacci, had the crowd laughing during her presentation on the first night of the conference. She said, “As Catholic [singles], we can offer up even the things we don’t like. We can offer up having no one to blame. Who ate the last cookie? It’s always me! My sister blames her husband for everything. She’s so lucky.” But there was pain in her humor, too. “We get to offer up listening to our married friends’ meet-cute stories.… We can offer up being single at church. The sign of peace? How’s that going for you? You can stand there and count to 20 while all the families hug and kiss.”
Some participants found out about the conference while searching online. Chardell Fredd, a 63-year-old Black Catholic schoolteacher from Birmingham, Ala., said: “I saw an ad for it on CatholicMatch and thought, ‘Why not? It’s something to do.’ I never married. I’m looking at retirement. I’ve been blessed with good friends. Friends have been there for me more than family. I’ve had love from so many other aspects of my life, but I’m open to finding someone.”
After a first day of mixers, a performance by a comedian and other events, I went to the restaurant bar for a late-night dinner and beer. There, I met Brian McAlpine, a 61-year-old psychiatrist from Fort Collins, Colo., who has attended the N.C.S.C. four times. He has never been married. He said: “You won’t meet a lot of people like me here. I love Pope Francis and think it’s OK to be gay. I’m not gay, but some people are born gay, and I think love is love.” He doesn’t want me to misunderstand: “You will meet beautiful, beautiful people here, people living a kind of purity…but if you meet any peace-and-justice gals, please send them my way.”
He said, “There’s a passion here for [the theologian and apologist] Scott Hahn, JPII, theology of the body. I want to learn to see the beauty of that stuff. That’s why I’m here. But I’m kind of more into the social justice stuff.” Another attendee, a woman in her late 30s from Denver who did not want me to use her name, expressed similar feelings: “I’m pro-life, but other than that I am a liberal. I’d love to meet someone who understood.”
Many participants described the conference as a “mini retreat.” They felt it was more about making friends and growing in faith than finding “the one.” Indeed, there were always people in line for adoration and confession, and Mass was full.
On day two, Dr. Alex Sami Harb, a Middle Eastern theology teacher from Alabama, spoke about the Desert Fathers and his Aunt Mary, who never married and did not have kids but “came to everything” and “was like a mother to me.” He said, “We’re not better Christians if we have a collar or seven children. At the end of our lives, God is not going to say, ‘Oh, there’s no ring, that’s a problem.’” Dr. Harb said that his Aunt Mary was at peace at the end of her life and ready to meet God because “she had loved so well.” This kind of inner peace, not checking the boxes—spouse, house, kids—was for him the goal.
Jason King, a theologian at St. Mary’s in San Antonio, Tex., agrees. He told me in an interview, “Singleness can be considered a vocation. [The theologian] Jana Bennett argued for this in Singleness and the Church: A New Theology of the Single Life. Christian discipleship is not defined by sexuality or marriage, but by one’s call to follow Christ. That means singleness, like marriage, priesthood or religious life, can be a way of living out that call.”
In another of the day’s presentations, the Rev. Thomas Loya, a Byzantine Catholic pastor from Illinois, said in his talk on the theology of the body that men were made “for accomplishment” and women were made to “receive life and love.” He drew a woman’s body on the whiteboard. It was all circles, like a pinup. He drew a man’s body next to hers. It was all triangles, like an action figure. He said that women make visible “the immense tenderness of God.” Men make visible “the strength of God.” Father Loya’s advice to women was to help their men feel “adequate for the job” of provider and protector.
Between speakers, an M.C. asked trivia questions and joked about women not being able to identify a stud finder, or men not being able to identify Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice. At one moment, the M.C. asked the crowd, “Raise your hands if you own your own home.” A smattering of hands went up. Then she said, “Look around ladies, these are the eligible bachelors in the room.” A 40-year-old woman next to me said, “Oops,” and lowered her hand.
Searching for a Social Script
Balancing modern social dating norms and Catholic values is not easy. Kerry Cronin, a professor of philosophy at Boston College, became well known for teaching a class that helped her students grapple with their understanding of a healthy relationship by requesting that they do something seemingly old-fashioned: Ask someone on a proper date. “Dating is a social script that’s no longer supported by our culture,” she said in an interview for the film “The Dating Project, which follows five single people on their dating journeys.” (The film is not associated with the conference.) She said in the interview that modern relationships are often undefined or start with the physical aspect. Going on a real date helps people to reconsider what a relationship should look like.
“It isn’t that I’m trying to go back to the 1950s and say, ‘Oh, there is some great era of dating,’ but there were good things to be retrieved from that era,” Dr. Cronin said in the film. “Look, it’s a script that works like manners work. Manners are there to make you feel like you know what you’re doing and you know what to expect.”
The line between script and stereotype can be thin. Some speakers at the N.C.S.C., like Maria Spears Mumaugh, focused on psychology and attachment styles, and helping attendees understand themselves. She said: “Research shows men need to be appreciated. Appreciation is key. We are emasculating men massively, whether we realize it or not. What men find attractive is receptivity…. Let the men in our lives do things for us.”
The theologian Jason King says healthy relationships can take many forms in today’s society, and that we need a “rich cultural discourse around what good dating relationships look like.” He noted the evolution of how our society views friendship: “It used to be a central moral and theological category,” he said. “Aquinas put friendship with God at the peak of his Summa Theologica. But it gradually disappeared from discourse as social and political life changed.”
He said that friendship and courtship “are less discussed today, even though they are crucial human relationships” and “that silence makes it harder to understand how to find and sustain healthy relationships.” He noted the usefulness of the distinction in theology of the body between love and use. “It doesn’t answer every question about dating, but it does provide a moral compass that can guide Catholics in discerning whether their relationships are truly life-giving.”
On a break during the final day of the conference, I went for a walk in a nearby open space. I watched as prairie dogs popped in and out of their tunnels and hungry hawks circled overhead. I saw fellow conference attendees walking. I admired a pair of blue-grey mourning doves perched on a barbed wire fence. After a while, I saw a man and a woman who I assumed to be married were planting trees along their property line. The woman was wearing overalls and a sunhat and was crouched over the earth planting saplings. The man was pulling a hose from the back of the house to water the newly planted trees. There were children’s toys in the yard, and from the outside looking in, it seemed pretty idyllic. And yet every marriage is its own little cloister, a mystery to the outside world. I wondered what non-negotiables had become negotiables? What sacrifices had they made to end up together?
Most of the conference attendees I met were kind people, simply looking for someone to build a life with, and as the days passed, I saw potential couples forming among the 250 attendees—going for walks around the hotel or sitting late into the evening by the firepit, telling stories.
Broomfield, Colo., is a suburb between Denver and Boulder. If being single when you want to be married can feel like living in an in-between space, it felt appropriate that the conference was being held in Broomfield, since it, too, is an in-between place: not quite urban, not quite rural. On one side of the two-lane highways of Broomfield, you see remnants of the Old West, ranches with barns and horses and fields of hay. On the other side of the same road there are newly built office parks for tech companies, rectangles in various shades of grey and beige. There’s the pollution of Denver, but none of the tall buildings or urban life. And if you squint, there are dozens of picturesque mountain peaks in the distance, but when navigating Broomfield traffic, that crisp mountain air can feel very far away. The in-betweenness of Broomfield is not limited to single people. In fact, it is where most of us find ourselves at some point in our lives: We can see what we want, but we’re not certain how to get there from here.
This article appears in January 2026.
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