Honest thoughts about singleness and the Church
I’ve never talked about singleness on my blog because to me, it’s not a label that I wear. If you’ll forgive me a brief rant here (!) I really can’t stand it when people categorise the world into ‘married’ or ‘single’! No I’m not married, but I’m a whole person, comfortable being me and am not waiting for anyone else to come and (a) rescue me (be) complete me (c) start the adventure of my life for me!
Many of my wonderful single friends and I are not short of suitors. Yet each of us have found ourselves saying, in the words of Bono from U2, “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for”. People are fine with this at 20, but hit 30 and people start pressing you to try a bit harder. Someone even used the phrase ‘you’d better hurry up…the clock is ticking’ to me a few weeks ago. Yikes. Thanks for that ‘helpful’ contribution.
Maybe I’ll get married someday, maybe I won’t. I’ve never bought a Bride Magazine or dreamed about how every detail of my wedding would be (and no disrespect intended if you have!!). I guess what I’m saying is, for me the idea of marriage has never been elevated to fairytale level. I know hundreds of my female friends who see it that way. I guess I’ve seen too many of these fairytales end badly, so I know that marriage isn’t the fix-it solution for being happy.
However, I love the idea of sharing the journey of life with a soul mate and making amazing memories together. Committing for the long haul. Knowing you’ll wake up next to each other when you’re old and grey and that you’ll care for each other ’til death do us part’. That sounds great. So I’m not anti-marriage or anti-commitment at all, I’m just anti the idea that marriage is the solution to all life’s problems and the only goal everyone should be running after.
It doesn’t always feel like society promotes that though, with the steady media diet it feeds us of Rom Coms, the mass-commercialisation of Valentines Day and the women’s magazines full of wedding dresses. Culture needs to start affirming that people are just as complete when single as when married!
As a Christian, I have a real passion to see the Church do better in the way it looks after singles. It’s fine when you are a teenager or a student. There are tons of groups and activities provided. But for the increasingly large number of people aged 25+ who are choosing to not get married yet, there need to be specific opportunities to be around people in the same stage of life.
In my experience and those of my single friends, when you hit your late 20s and enter your 30s things change. Suddenly all that’s on offer for singles at Church are (a) Mums and toddlers groups (b) Wine and wives nights (c) Dating evenings where you get match-made by well meaning people!
So I write this to encourage Churches to reassess what they are providing for the generation, who like the TV Show ‘Friends’, are choosing to marry much later and still want to feel valued as part of the community. This demographic is huge in the States, especially where I used to live in California. People there are getting married later and later, which is an interesting sociological shift.
Research has shown the divorce rate halves if you wait until after you’re 25 to marry. So if you have singles in your community it might not just be that they can’t find Mr or Miss Right. Maybe they’re waiting until they’ve discovered more of who they are, before they choose the right life partner. There are hundreds of other possible reasons too – abuse in people’s past, or having experienced a painful parental divorce, or going through their own divorce, they may be widowed, single parents, gay, bisexual, celibate for religious reasons such as monastic calling or Catholic priesthood, or perhaps they’re in a long term relationship but their partner can’t commit to marrying them. These reasons are so diverse and cannot all be batched together under the insufficient umbrella of ‘not married’. So treating all singles as ‘just needing to be match-made’ is really something that the Church needs to stop doing!
Many don’t ‘get’ the idea that anyone would choose to not be married yet if they could be. People constantly say to me and my single friends ‘I’m SURE there must be someone amazing out there for each of you!’. Yes, we know plenty of amazing people and I’m sure all of us could be married 10 times over by now if we wanted. But that’s very different from waiting to find someone who’s genuinely right for you, and you for them.
Others of my friends married young, as that was normal in our Christian circles. Lots of them are now divorced. They’ve told me they walked into marriage as people who didn’t even know who they were yet, let alone who was the right partner for them. They also told me that the Church painted too fairytale a picture of marriage and didn’t suggest they waited a while until they’d grown up a bit. There are great marriage courses out there now, so hopefully this is less prevalent today.
I can’t believe how different I am now to who I was in my early twenties, when I watched many of my young friends stroll down the aisle. Looking back I know I wouldn’t have been ready for that journey of marriage to begin so young. To be honest I feel like I’m still discovering who I am now. Life has been ridiculously busy the past decade and I’ve barely had a moment to think about anything besides work. Thankfully I’ve slowed down over the past two years, to reclaim a healthy rhythm of life and deeper friendships.
Many friends I’ve chatted to in full time Church employment have also gone through the same pattern of working too hard, then finding it hard to cut back and make time for relationships. It seems a common pattern which Church leaders and staff need to guard themselves from. It’s also often true that anyone in very visible leadership can find it harder to meet ‘the right person’ as leadership brings interesting dynamics with it.
So what is it like in your Church? Are single people made to feel like whole, valued people – not just people who are waiting to meet their Prince or Princess Charming? I hope so!
I also hope that the Church in general embraces the fact that marriage isn’t for everyone. I have several friends who have already decided they want to stay single. Paul speaks so highly of this form of living in the New Testament, yet the Church rarely portrays it as a celebrated option. A friend who’s chosen to stay single told me that upon making her decision known, Christians responded that she was selfish, not following God’s ordained pattern for humanity and failing to fullfil her womanly duty to have children! Yikes! What ever happened to Paul’s idea that actually singleness IS a beautiful, valiant and godly option, just as marriage is?!
Over to you:
- Do you think my views on singleness and the Church are fair, or is your experience that Churches do validate and provide community for single people?
- Are you single and in your late twenties, thirties or older? How do you feel the Church welcomes you, or do you feel like a minority who don’t really ‘fit’?
- Do you have friends in this category? How does your Church provide community for them?
- Are you a compulsive match-maker?! Do you try and set people up because you think they need to get married, or because you’ve asked them and found out first?
