Dear Veronica,  

Your first few lines say it all. They are a lesson in human nature, a lesson we don't learn too readily. But then the rest of your message shows how despite ourselves God's graces has such a respectful but insistent power to make itself present in our lives, and how generous you really want to be with God.  

You started dating 'on one condition', and now 'it is too late (for it not to affect your vocation discernment)'. I would say you forgot for a while what we are made of, and now you have found out again. Except that now your knowledge of human nature is no longer theory, it is happening to you: God made man for woman, and woman for man. Everything in each complements the other: physically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually. And if you are striving to live a good Christian life and he is too, the points of attraction are going to be more, not less! So you find your attachment growing. 

St Theresa of Avila who was no cynic, only an intelligent, practical, down-to-earth saint with a piercing understanding of human nature and the sense of humor to go with it, used to say in Spanish: 'entre santa y santo, pared de cal y canto'. A rhyming phrase that means: 'if you have a holy man and a holy woman, you'd better build a stone wall between them.' That explains what has happened to you. Now, despite this experience there still is an insistent voice there that comes back. This should make you think. 

What about your conflicting feelings? Dreams of marriage, especially in the context of doing what God wants and with a person who is obviously one in a million has naturally got to bring peace because it satisfies directly your spiritual as well as emotional needs and the instinct for motherhood God has placed in you as a woman. It is perfect. You would have to be strange to feel otherwise.  

But then that voice that seems to ruin it all and says, go check out consecrated life...  

The anxiety you feel may be in part the normal struggle felt by anyone called by God to give up the goods of this life that they can see and touch, and choose him instead, whom we can neither see nor touch nor have a direct give-and-take with. 

We can only win this struggle by faith, faith which is belief and trust, faith that you nourish in the Eucharist. You are experiencing the beginning of human love.  

Ask him to touch your heart with divine love, to enter into that whole new dimension of love for him, like him. He did not grasp onto his divinity, hold onto what he had as Son of God; instead, he humbled himself, gave up what it was to be Son of God, and became one like us in everything but sin, in order to save us. He really emptied himself, for him it was such a step down. Much more than he asks of us. And when he was here as a man, he chose to love us and love his Father with his whole human heart. You need to ask him to take your heart and make it like his. 

What should you do now? Should you stop spending extra time with your boyfriend? I think you know the answer, you practically said it. If you spend time with him, most probably your attachment is going to grow. Ask yourself if that is what you want, if it is going to make it easier or more difficult to find out if God wants you all for himself, and if it is going to make it easier or not for you to follow him if he does. That is really what is in the balance.  

It won't be the easiest, but now it's your turn to show Christ you love him like the martyrs, and that you trust in him as they did. God bless. I am sure his grace will continue to strengthen and lead you