Being Single: Lies and Wrong Ideas

Even if you’ve never seen the above image, you probably know people who have said similar things. Or maybe you’ve said them yourself. It’s tempting, as a single person, to feel this way. But as I encountered the third friend-of-a-friend who was using this image as their Facebook profile picture, I began thinking about just how wrong this message is.

As I approach my 24th birthday, I’ve been giving relationships more thought. In the eyes of the world, I’m still a relationship baby. In the Christian community, I’m middle-aged on the marriage market. It makes sense, therefore, that I vacillate often between being in absolutely no rush to find someone, and being very ready to put my heart out there.

Most single people operate like this; it’s a confusing time, with the sense of endless opportunity. But as my generation of Christian-raised singles grow up, I am feeling the backlash against the expectations of the Christian culture. Most of us have been raised in homes that support young marriage, support commitment, and “settling down.” But we are part of a culture that offers a blinding amount of choice, and the idea that there’s always something better out there. With the internet and globalization, we all have a giddy idea that anything can happen. Anything.

So what does this have to do with the above picture making the Facebook rounds? The problem is that the only people I’ve seen put it up on their profiles are Christians. And yet this idea that a relationship is about finding someone who is amazing enough to challenge your singleness is not Christian. It goes against the very spirit of the Biblical sense of marriage. (I say marriage, and not relationships, because there is very little “dating” in the Bible...mostly you are either single, or you find someone and get married, and there are no long dating relationships or mini-marriages. Another blog post.)

I’m going out on a limb here, because I’m not married. So any married friends who’d like to weigh in, I would love to hear your perspective. But from my relationships with friends, and with family, I cannot believe that dating someone is about finding someone who is perfect in every way. My friends are far from perfect. My family is far from perfect. I am far from perfect. How can I expect a husband to be perfect? But that is part of what makes relationships so beautiful--because we, as Christians, are given the privilege of modeling God’s grace toward us. God does not turn from us though we are imperfect, and we do not turn from each other. We learn to forgive, and to see our own sins.

Of course I am not saying we shouldn’t be discerning when it comes to dating. Of course there are people we are attracted to, and whose personalities complement ours, and who have similar goals. But recently, while I was in L.A., I went to a stand-up club and one of the comics was making jokes about dating, and how the problem with our culture is that we have too many choices. He likened relationships to chocolate, and how with so many choices, the chocolate we end up eating seems only so-so. He was right. We have too many choices. And because there is always something just around the corner that is better, we don’t let ourselves settle into the real work of loving someone because it is good to love, and to love consistently. Even through pain, or disappointment.

While I was at Wheaton College, there was a lot of talk of singleness (naturally, with that many single people crammed together) and whether it was better than being married. The Apostle Paul’s writing in 1 Corinthians was a huge topic of discussion. Is it more godly to be single? Paul calls it a “gift from God” (1 Cor. 7:7), and talks about how single men and women can devote more time and energy toward the church. I had friends who said we should all try to be single, rather than married, because it is clearly more godly.

I agree that singleness is a great gift. But I don’t know if I agree that it is more godly. In Hannah’s previous post, she quoted from a scholar who wrote at length about how men and women reflect God’s image together. I don’t know if you necessarily need to be married for that to happen, but being married is the natural state of humankind. Themes of marriage run throughout the Bible, and illustrations of godly marriage light up its pages. Marriage is a good thing. Being single is a gift, and if we find ourselves single for a long time, or for our whole lives, we have a great and precious (and often difficult) task given to us. But we should never hold up singleness as more holy than marriage.

I was talking recently with my brother Joshua, and he told me about a question and answer session he’d attended with his college pastor. I think his pastor said something very wise, and very helpful. While discussing singleness, and Paul’s 1 Corinthians passage, he began to talk about the gift of singleness, as Paul says it. And Joshua’s pastor said that we should not be worrying about whether or not we have the gift of singleness--whether we should stop dating or opening our heart to love. Because we all have the gift of singleness--everyone who is single has it. The gift is simply that we are single. We are charged to make the most of it, and when we marry, the gift is taken away and replaced with other gifts.

What a beautiful gift we have been given, as single people. We will never again have the time and the freedom to serve God as we can while we are single. But that does not mean we will not serve him just as effectively when we are married, nor does it mean that we have the right to stay single until we are swept off our feet by someone who is absolutely amazing. We have the counter-cultural privilege of choosing, committing, and not looking any further. Our own love is messy and knotted together, and we must expect those we love to return it in kind. But single or married, God does not abandon us to our own imperfect love. And that is a beautiful thing.

~Ruthie