How are Orthodox dating clubs
'18.01.2018'
Source: Anna Popova, batenka.ru
Journalist and screenwriter Anna Popova went to look for a couple in Orthodox dating clubs and tried to understand how true believers today are trying to find their second half in order to establish the very healthy Christian family.
I have always been considered a renegade among the church members of my family because of stubbornness and cautious attitude towards the Church. It all started with a reading of existentialists as a teenager, and ended with atheism by the age of twenty. Today, I do not wear a cross, do not celebrate Easter and Christmas, and live in a civil marriage with a French Catholic.
When familiar monks found out about this, they were horrified. One of the priests said that the Orthodox girl had two ways: either to the monastery, or to legal marriage with children. Otherwise, in his opinion, I risk to become a “barren fig tree” and live in fornication until the end of my life.
I was interested in the question: what is “Orthodox love” and where can I find it? The answer turned out to be easier: in special Orthodox dating clubs. They exist in two versions: in social networks and in reality. I studied both of them, hiding for the purity of the experiment that I was a journalist, and trying to get acquainted with an Orthodox man under the guise of a church girl.
I joined all the large groups of VKontakte and attended a meeting of the Moscow Club of Peter and Fevronia, at whose tea parties the sacrament of love was allegedly often performed at first glance.
The experiment was a success: I made Orthodox friends, received several offers to get to know each other closer, an invitation to pray together (whatever that means) and almost became a victim of a loving defender of people.
Orthodox Love: A Survival Guide
Wives, obey your husbands as the Lord, because the husband is the head of the wife, as is Christ the head of the Church. (Epistle of Paul to Ephesians 5: 22-33)
Before plunging into the world of Orthodox acquaintances, one should understand the coordinate system in which the believers live, searching for the second half. If you are far from the Church, then when you get acquainted with the basics of Orthodox society, you will get the impression that you are in Narnia. So everything is unusual for a secular person who is used to not being ashamed of his sexuality and dispose of his own body.
The world of Russian Orthodoxy does not need outside intervention. There are popular magazines (“Foma”, “Up”), Internet portals (Pravmir), YouTubechannels (Batushka otvetit with a blogger priest Alexander), fashion shows and, most importantly, a developed service industry for those wishing to get married: an Orthodox toastmaster will help to arrange a holiday in the best church traditions, church musicians will play for you and your guests, and seamstresses will sew the most modest dress for the bride.
Orthodoxy recognizes one form of love - legal marriage entered into at least in the registry office, and the maximum - supported by the wedding. The foundation of a true Orthodox family is children, they are considered a blessing from God. “Ecclesiastical marriage law states:“ The family is full when there are children in it. Children are its equal members, ”writes priest Dionysius Svechnikov in one of his sermons. According to him, marriage is “a means of continuing and multiplying the human race. Therefore, childbirth is saving, for God is established. ”
The father of the Church, St. Augustine, who lived at the dawn of Christianity, explained that children are primarily a woman’s responsibility. Even then, they were given an installation that is still relevant for Christians: a man is an independent unit, while a woman is just his “helper in childbirth”.
To emphasize the difference between the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve, a number of rules apply in Orthodox churches.
A woman, even a nun, has no right to enter the altar - only men can be there. During the service, the church is divided into male and female space. When I went to the monastery, I was very afraid of inadvertently going to the “male” part of the temple. The fact is that at the entrance sat a nun, whom everyone called grandma Salome. She seemed to be an immortal spirit of old age, moved exclusively in a wheelchair and was engaged in keeping a sharp eye on visitors to the temple. It cost the man or woman to go to the wrong part of the room, which is prepared by gender, just as the unfortunate received a sensitive blow to the back with a stick.
It is also forbidden to enter the temple during menstruation. The meaning of the ban is simple: there should be no blood in a sacred place, for in the New Testament only bloodless sacrifices are offered to God, unlike the Old.
In addition, you can not attend the temple for forty days after birth. My friend could not participate in the christening of her own daughter until the priest said a special cleansing prayer over her. And only then she was allowed to cross the threshold of the church.
It turns out an interesting paradox: the main purpose of a woman in Orthodoxy and Christianity in general is the birth of children. However, at the same time, it is punished for performing its sacred function.
This is partly why any attempt to make love for pleasure is considered debauchery. Sex in an Orthodox couple serves to conceive, and not to relax and pleasant sensations. It was in ancient India that physical love was considered a way to merge with the One, and in the Orthodox Church everything was different.
But even if you sacredly honor all prohibitions and make love for the sake of the appearance of children, you still can not touch each other during fasting. Fasting in Orthodoxy is a time of purification of the soul and body from sinful thoughts and deeds. One should attend church as often as possible, follow certain rules in food, reject fatty foods, meat and fish, and follow austerity in everyday life.
Let's count together: in total, the Orthodox have four posts per year. In 2017, Lent lasted from February 27 to 15 April, Apostolic (or Petrov Post) from June 12 to July 11, Ouspensky from August 14 to August 27, and Christmas (or Filippov Post) from November 28 to January 6 2018 th. Hence, the Orthodox couple can not have sex 132 day per year. Almost half a year.
Therefore, Orthodox dating clubs on the Internet and real life is an effective way to find a couple and fulfill the main Christian mission: to create a family.
"Not for me, my mom raised"
In your best interest to extend the period of abstinence. A year, or two, or three acquaintances ... And with passionate hugs, kisses, unchaste touches, the head cannot be cold. And all these years or two down the drain. (The sermon of Father Alexei Gomonov from 7 May 2017)
There are 203 Orthodox dating groups on the social network VKontakte; in the largest, almost 32 are thousands of people. My attempt as a journalist to communicate with their participants suffered a complete collapse. Orthodox people treated me like a dangerous animal and did not long to come into contact. As I understood later, the case was in a too “non-Orthodox page”: I cannot find reposts of the prayers and sayings of the elders, the photos scream about the love of travel — and not at all to pilgrims, and education (VGIK) gives the impression that I’m missing every day get-togethers and shamelessly mired in casual relationships.
Calling myself the name of my university teacher and posting photos of my girlfriend from Switzerland, for several days I regularly made reposts from the Orthodox groups I Believe, Orthodoxy in the Family, and Overheard. Orthodoxy. And then I decided that I was pretending to be a real user enough: I am ready again to enter the world of believers.
I posted several ads in Orthodox online dating clubs, and on the very first day I received eleven messages. One of the users, a forty-year-old Andrei, who sings in the temple on Sundays, from the very beginning called me a little mermaid and was very upset if I did not instantly react to his remarks.
He said that he worked as a controller at one of the famous confectionery factories in Moscow, and then suddenly added that he wanted to meet and give me five boxes of chocolates, which he got for free. I had to refuse: I am not at all like the photos I posted on the fake page. I was sure that if someone from the visitors of Orthodox dating clubs found out about the fake, he informed the others about it - and I would not be able to talk to anyone else.
Andrei was a calm and balanced man. So he decided that I was just checking him by refusing to meet. Apparently, therefore, Andrew decided to communicate daily with me on the themes of marriage and love. He is convinced: only believers can create a real family.
“Their marriage will be stronger and stronger. The Bible says that "God is love." At least they have a guide in life, how a husband and wife should behave in different situations. If they are believers, they can pray together, do many things together that will unite them, one world view, ”he explained to me.
However, others wrote to me, and I could not allow myself to shut up on one hero - therefore, our communication with Andrey took less and less time. He wrote to me about his loneliness, increasingly insistently offered to meet, promised to take good care of me and be a good husband, and then he realized that he could not wait for me anything serious. “The little mermaid swam into my heart and swam away,” Andrei sadly summed up and did not appear in my life anymore. I hope he found the one he was looking for.
In addition to him, I was written by a young boy with a disability living in a small village near Moscow and helping in the church, three sales managers (two from Siberia and one from Moscow) and one seminarian urgently looking for a wife (he is going to become a white father, therefore, he badly needs a spouse, otherwise he will have to go to the monks or postpone the ordination).
Men who are sitting in Orthodox dating clubs and have met me for the most part do not work or occupy low positions, are not very happy with life and are looking for great pure love to make family and loved ones the meaning of existence. They are touchy, vulnerable and really want someone to love them for their soul, and not for their appearance.
Women are looking for the same. But they are much more religious, harsher toward disobeying the precepts of the clergymen, heard during sermons, and suspect all men of wanting to live in a godless civil marriage.
My namesake Anya, a twenty-six-year-old woman working as a cashier in a Novosibirsk supermarket, cannot find an Orthodox life partner. She loves to go on pilgrimages to monasteries and dreams of "a bunch of kids and a strong family." Anya complained to me about admirers from social networks and real life: they absolutely do not understand her and cannot offer what she is looking for. She contemptuously calls them "boys."
“Why are men like that now? Why do they offend me? They annoy me that they do not know how to accept rejection. They call me old maid and make up stories about me. No, it wasn't for me that mommy raised me ”? - writes Anya.
Batyushki advise in any case not to enter into an intimate relationship immediately. It is advisable to wait a few years. Father Alexei Gomonov believes that you can not even hold hands - this can kindle "unwelcome desires." “Some even come up with the question:“ Father, how long can you keep the pen in the pen? But is it possible or not? ”. I answer: “No, this is not possible. Too much grip. Just for the tip of your finger. ”
In the search for a partner, the Orthodox are equal to the ideal of Murom princes Peter and Fevronia. This is Orthodox Romeo and Juliet, raised by the Orthodox community in the category of religious personalities. Their history contains a pattern of behavior of a true Orthodox husband and Orthodox wife.
The essence of the legend of Peter and Fevronia is as follows. A peasant woman Fevronia cured Prince Peter of poisoning with a mysterious poison. However, the prince decided to leave the savior. Away from her, he again felt bad and returned to Fevronia. They had a wedding and lived together all their lives, dying one day, as usual. Before his death, the couple took monastic tonsure with the names of David and Euphrosyne.
There are four prayers to Peter and Fevronia. Often, they are perceived as magical magical formulas that work flawlessly, like an akathist to the guardian angel, who so diligently reads my new friend Alina.
Each of the prayers corresponds to the crisis stages in the life of a young couple: a prayer for the preservation of the family, a prayer for the conception of a child, a prayer for the return of a loved one and, finally, a prayer for love and marriage.
You can also go to prayer to Peter and Fevronia, to ask God to meet with the other half. Usually they go to the Moscow Assumption Church in Putinki, where a special club of Orthodox youth named after Peter and Fevronia (abbreviated in PF) gathers. There are legends about this place: some say that it is a sin to gather in the temple, others consider that only in PF the great mystery of eternal love is performed at first sight. To some extent this is true: many members are getting married. On average, there are five to ten weddings a year.
I decided to go to the club, pretending to be a lonely church-going girl, and form my own idea of what was happening. What I observed there put me into a dead end: I didn’t find any chaste courtship and modest men who were afraid to anger the Lord by touching the hand of her beloved.
Hunting at PFA
Looking at a woman with lust, whether he is a layman or a monk, will be equally punished for adultery. (St. John Chrysostom)
In PIF, everything is managed by the active Ekaterina Gromova. She organizes the main event of Sunday evening - tea drinking after the prayer to Peter and Fevronia, which takes place right in the temple. The tables are placed under painted ceilings, and from the top Joseph and his sons look at the club members, white donkeys and the Mother of God herself in gilded robes with a pink baby Christ on full hands.
Like many Orthodox, Catherine lives in a world where there is no Netflix, Donna Tartt, "Game of Thrones" and other inherent benefits of urban youth.
She invited me to a prayer and tea party on December 24. Ironically, right on the catholic Christmas Eve. So I went to meet an Orthodox dating club straight from a traditional French Christmas dinner.
After the sermon, everyone poured out into the street to enable the PF permanent members to set up tables and prepare everything for tea drinking.
Alexey is neat, taller, smelling like a pleasant perfume. He insinuatingly informed me that such eyes as mine are not forgotten.
“I definitely saw you somewhere. Not at Matronushka? ”, - Alexey's voice was high and shrill. I decided to play along with him and said that yes, he could definitely see me in the service at the Matrona temple.
With a sly wink, Alexey announced that his memory was photographic: he would see and remember for a lifetime. Something like a professional strain. “I worked in the Ministry of Internal Affairs,” Alexey smiled and casually touched my knee with a hand, eating me with his piercing-gray eyes. Who would have thought that I was bored on the defender of the people Alexander.
Alexei, without preludes, invited together to pray the other day to St. Spyridon of Trimifuntsky, and then set off to tell how he found the Church of the Assumption of the Holy Mother of God and the PIF. It turned out that he had a prophetic dream, which brought him to the club and got along with the spiritual father - his namesake, father Alexei Gomonov.
Also, a new acquaintance informed me in confidence that he spoke with the confessor Patriarch Cyril himself, and he blessed him to return to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. “Only formalities remained, and I serve again,” said Alexey with pride.
Alex moved closer and aggressively tried to catch my eye. I understood that it was time to leave. Having seduced that I still have a lot of work, I began to get out of the table, but Alexey gently prevented me from getting up. “Give me the number,” he said bluntly. I was confused and said that I could not. “Give me!” - Aleksey declared in order and took the cell from my hands. “Unlock, I'll dial my number and thus fix yours,” insisted Alexey. I realized that there was nowhere to retreat: I allowed him to dial a number, and then I apologized and flew out of the temple.
I walked to the subway and felt a strange shame for what happened. It would seem that nothing special has happened, but I have never felt like such an object of hunting.
I remembered how, during the last trip to the monastery, one of the monks was accusing me of lightheadedness and “free view”. He said that he had to hide his eyes and not shamelessly look directly at the man, and also resented that the jacket opened his neck. “This is a provocation,” the monk chided at me, blushing with anger. Orthodox love is clearly not for such “barren fig trees” like me.
