[Prefer viewing to reading? Scroll to bottom for a brief video supplement to this post.]
I am a single woman. It’s not an affliction and it certainly isn’t a curse. It’s a relational status, one that seems to cause a bit of discomfort among married peers who wonder whether condolences or congratulations are in order. It’s hard for anyone to know how to respond to singles when there are such broad differences among us. (See here.)
I spend a lot of time talking with young women about the lives they dream of for themselves. The conversations invariably turn to marriage and motherhood, aspirations that seem built into the identity of a majority of growing girls. Some would tell you it’s society that imposes those yearnings.
I believe they’re hardwired into our souls by the Creator who designed us for relationship and initiated the first marriage by creating Adam and Eve of and for each other.
The problem is that humanity has evolved in the millennia since Eden. Eve didn’t have to read self-help books, hone her small-talk skills or photoshop her eHarmony profile pics. When she breathed her first breath, she found one man before her—one good and God-fashioned man. He wanted no one but her and she wanted no one but him. How simple.
Things are more complex today. Society has embraced a fast-food concept of relationship that rejects long-term fidelity, and demographics, especially in the Christian world, make it mathematically impossible for every believing woman to be in a relationship with a believing man.
So how do single women respond to being unmarried? When the relational outlook dims and options dwindle, what do they do with their innate yearning for twoness?
Some thrive, some thrive-and-yearn,
some just yearn, and some despair.
It would be a mistake to generalize all singles as feeling incomplete, unhappy or bitter. Nor would it be fair to expect that their attitudes today will be the same one year, two years or ten years from now. Though I am, at this point in my life, joyful, engaged in work I love and taking full advantage of the freedoms and bonuses of living unattached, I haven’t always been.
There were years when Valentine’s Day felt like a death-knell I needed to endure again…when attending weddings heaped the added burden of words like “too old” and “never” on the single-girl baggage I dragged along behind me, despairing and morose.
I tried to quell the longings for a while. To smother the daydreams under layers of perfectly constructed reasons and rationales. I tried to convince myself that I had that frequently-misinterpreted “gift of singleness” and that my life, with all its beauty and purpose, had to be enough—that I was being petulant or ungrateful by acknowledging the yearning for something more. For a bonded commitment. For the kind of love that manifests in more-or-less spontaneous roses and candlelight.
Here is the truth:
There is a marrow-deep longing in a majority of us for a relationship
that transcends anything that is possible in the realm of singleness.
It is not wrong or weak or silly to desire a til-death-do-us-part, emotional, devoted form of love. It is a longing placed in us by the Creator who designed us for relational intimacy with him.
In my twenties and thirties, I thought there were only two ways to deal with my singleness. The first was to allow the “nevers” and “too olds” to drag me into a lifelong ditch of self-pity. The second was to measure the benefits of oneness and firmly place a lid over my human hope for twoness.
The later would have been a monumental mistake. A self-inflicted loss.
Stifling the longing in that deeply feminine part of my being would have deadened the other attributes that reside in that same place of tender womanness: nurture, intimacy, compassion, intuition, empathy…
Eliminating longing—even just ignoring it until it shrivels out of sight—would be amputating my spirit of the impulses that drive it to minister to the needy, to comfort the ailing, to see the fertile soil in lives outside my own and pour my love and energy into cultivating meaning.
Womanhood, with the strengths, desires and passions that most viscerally define it, is not something to fear. It is something to honor, to nurture, to enjoy and, yes, to manage.
Those unrequited yearnings are not the enemy if we can redirect
their flow to animate benevolent and healing impulses.
So on this Valentine’s Day, I acknowledge the twinge of longing and the pang of “why not me?” I focus on the beauty of this meaningful and delicate life I’ve been given and I choose to pour the overflow of single-hearted love into the caring, building, creating, connecting, teaching and endowing for which God has especially designed me.
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A video supplement to the article:
Rebecca Whisnant
Amen to the written version 🙂 from two single women in south Alabama!
James Wesley
These points are so good. I’m not a young woman, haha, but I, too have dreamed of a successful relationship and marriage ever since hitting adolescence. For many, it’s just a normal part of being human.
As a Christian, you’ll sometimes hear that your desire for romance comes from “the world” or “society.” This is often then followed with some platitude about how “all you need is Jesus.”
But marriage happened in the Garden of Eden. While Adam had a perfect, sinless relationship with God. Even then, God looked at Adam and said it wasn’t good for man to be alone. Isn’t that interesting? You mean even when he was totally with God, Adam still needed someone else? Whoops.
Then what happened? Well, sin screwed up the world, of course.
We live in a bad, sinful world, where bad things happen, and life doesn’t always go our way. In Matthew 19, Jesus talks about single people (well, eunuchs), and mentions a few different types. People who choose to live that way, people who are made that way by God, and people who were made that way by other men. So, apparently, some people are single due to worldly circumstances, rather than it being part of God’s Master Plan.
It makes sense. I mean, God recognized that it wasn’t good for Adam to be alone, and had a plan for that. Then, of course, sin entered the world and screwed everything up. I’m sure some people are single because of bad worldly circumstances and the presence of evil in a bad world. Not necessarily because of God’s gracious Master Plan.
I’ve often read that there’s more Christian women in the world than there are Christian men. If that’s broadly accurate, it means that not every Christian will be able to find a mate. Also, when Jesus talks about singleness (well, eunuchs) he mentions a few different types: people who were born that way, people who were made that way by God, people who choose to live that way, and people who were made that way “by other men.” In other words, some people are single even though they never chose it, and even though God didn’t make them that way , either. It makes sense.
Yes, God is good. But we live in a world that is NOT good.
And consider what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7. yes, Paul personally preferred singleness. Paul also said that it was OK to get married. Paul also said that it was just his own opinion that singleness is better. Paul also said that you’re not sinning by marrying. If Paul wrote the book of Hebrews, then he also said that marriage is a good thing.