Throngs of single, churchgoing New York women are desperate to find a man to connect with, and he's not the priest.
The problem: The men in their parishes are reportedly too busy praying to be doing much flirting.
"I've talked to many women who were definitely looking for love in the pews, but I don't know how successful they were," says Jennifer, a broadcast executive who, like some other Catholic women interviewed for this article, asked to have an alias used when discussing the subject ("I'm afraid they're going to excommunicate me," she says, only half-kidding).
Jennifer, an attractive blond in her late 20s, has never actually talked to any of the pew prospects who attend her Sunday-evening Mass at St. Ignatius Loyola on the upper East Side (the cardinal rule everywhere: Evening Mass is filled with twentysomethings, morning Mass with everyone else).
Actually, there was this one time, but things didn't exactly pan out.
"There's this point during Mass where you shake hands with the people around you and say, 'Peace be with you,'" explains Jennifer. "This guy in the back had his hands folded, and I turned to him and he said, 'No, I'm fighting something,' like he had a cold." In an instant, her big chance for physical contact was blown.
"I was like, fine, bless you, too! Get some Purell and shake my hand! It's not that hard."
Still, that's one more liturgical liaison than Jill, a 27-year-old East Villager, has ever had at her parish, Our Lady of Pompeii at Bleecker and Carmine in the West Village.
"I've never met anyone at Mass, ever," she says. "Maybe the church should get involved a little more. They want us to marry and start families, and continue with their values and traditions, but we're not meeting anyone!"
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