“Become the woman of your dreams, and you’ll attract the man of your dreams,” Sarah Swafford advises young women.
As “dorm mom,” or resident hall director, to 142 girls who lived in Benedictine College’s St. Scholastica Hall, Swafford had a “front-row seat” into the lives of young women who came to her to talk about their dating struggles.
Her trusted advice led to a ministry of mentoring and speaking. Her message on the importance of what she calls “emotional virtue” in relationships has been reaching audiences throughout the United States; she speaks to high-school students, college students, parents and Catholics in the pews. Last December, she was featured on EWTN’s Life on the Rock.
Emotional virtue, she says, is the solution for an ordered, drama-free life, which helps one center one’s life on Christ rather than the opposite sex. Doing so, she asserts, allows one to strive for virtue within oneself and to follow the natural progression of a relationship based on friendship, patience and trust, in order to build what will last — rather than the world’s model of meeting someone, dating and moving in together.
“I think what happens in our culture a lot is that girls get so depressed and so bummed out, and guys get so impatient and tired of the waiting, and they find someone who is remotely what they want and they throw all their eggs in that basket,” Swafford explains. “And whenever that person doesn’t turn out to be what they want, they’re devastated. It all goes back to the whole idea that no one person can be your everything. It has to be Christ.”
Swafford stresses that when people follow God’s plan, relationships are built to last because they are built on real friendship, which becomes stronger with time.
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Image: Sarah Swafford