I chose to attend college where I did based on a number of factors—how lovely the campus was, how easily accessible city life was. They gave me financial aid and offered so many awesome classes. I did not go with any anticipation that I would receive my “MRS.”
As I headed toward the halfway point of my college career, though, it did begin to dawn on me that I did not want to be single when I graduated. I didn’t need to marry right away, but I wanted to be in a relationship with a future.
That summer I met someone.
Our first kiss was sloppy and disastrous, such that I came home and cried to my roommates over my disappointment. They counseled me to try again. They were right.
We dated for just over two years. He continued to be so smart and so funny and kind. Generous and hardworking and sweet. He was tall and lanky and though I probably outweighed him, I felt delicate in his arms. While I was a Christian, and actually started occasionally attending worship again while we were together, he was a Hindu (though mostly nonpracticing—a Diwali/Holi Hindu, if you will). We nonetheless shared a vision of what is good and true in this life. We valued family and travel, adventure and trust, poetry and math. We wanted to make the world a better place. We were awesome together, so very much in love.
I thought I would marry him. This is how things went: you meet in college, you stay together for a long while, and eventually, when you’re old enough, you get married. We talked about it, that we would marry someday. My parents adored him. They didn’t even seem to mind too much when they figured out we were sleeping together. That’s how much they liked him.
Then I went to grad school and he stayed in Boston and we broke up. I was unmoored, lost. It wasn’t just that I mourned the relationship, which I did, but I was afraid I wouldn’t meet anyone, ever. I was afraid I’d missed my shot.
THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL, as I hope is becoming clear, can be so entirely goofy on topics of sex, love, and relationships. Sex is a critical part of identity (but only if you are straight, and fit traditional gender roles, and are married). Singleness is great and easy to bear and a virtue, and celibacy is expected; but whoa, man, does God want you to get married and enjoy the marital bed (which is both joy and obligation!) and start cranking out some Christian babies who will complete your life and give you purpose. God will bless you with all these things (unless He chooses not to, in which case you are to submit to His will, too bad, so sad).
My tone here is ever-so-slightly biting, but for those whose lives have not included healthy, lifelong, heterosexual relationships that produce healthy biological children, even the unintentional exclusion offered by the church in its valorization of certain relationship types stings. Badly.
It’s interesting that this is where Christianity has landed in the twenty-first century, given the church’s clear preference for celibacy and singleness for much of its history: religious vocations to the priesthood or convent were far more worthwhile spiritually than marriage or caring for children; Paul invited folks to get married, but only if they couldn’t be chaste like all the best people. How interesting that we’re talking so much about married sex, when Jesus—the one whom we are called to emulate and follow—was likely not married and whose sexuality remains lost to history.
The church is not the only goofy one, of course. American culture seems to tell young adults, particularly young women, that they ought not settle down until their dreams are well on their way to being fulfilled, until their careers are fully launched, until they are ready for the burden responsibility of a committed relationship. They’re supposed to experiment, but not too much; work hard and play hard; not get too attached, sow some oats, but be ready to marry by the time they hit thirty. The messages are clearly mixed, and they’re not really helping anyone.
What do we want—out of sex, out of love, for our lives? What do we want and how do we attain it? Are we to sit back and wait for God to reveal our soul mate? Are we to marry at all costs? Must we remain celibate (if we were celibate in the first place) if we don’t marry and adulthood continues its inexorable advance? Is there such a thing as a righteous, sexually active, single adult?
In this chapter we take up these questions and wonder a bit about how God is involved in our dating lives (or lack thereof). We’ll also consider Jesus as a role model for single adults—one who challenged most of the assumptions about how adult men were supposed to settle down. Singleness can be a drag or a vocation or something else entirely; regardless, God calls us to be agents in our own lives while also providing comfort when things do not go according to plan.
A WOMAN I know recently began the New Year naming her grief over a broken engagement and her hope that this would be the year that God would bring her a husband.
Another friend of mine, in recapping her year, posted to Facebook a picture of a skeleton looking out a window. “Still looking for someone to marry,” she captioned it.
One of my dearest friends just turned forty, and she has gone through several long periods of singleness: some intentional, time given for self-reflection and cultivating other relationships; others not so much. Another long-single friend has made it clear that she is open to being set up by friends; play matchmaker, she invites. Two men I know spent their twenties dating casually, actively refusing to settle down, only to get a little panicky in their thirties, on realizing that they were each actually interested in being married and becoming fathers. One joined several dating services, while the other started mining his extended social circle.
A smaller percentage of people get married today than at any other point in U.S. history,1 though that’s sort of a misleading statement. Marriage has become an economic marker in a lot of ways; people with less economic stability just move in together and don’t bother with the marriage. But it is true that remaining single is a more viable, socially acceptable option, too. Marriage and parenthood used to be seen as clear markers of the transition to adulthood; now you can stay single and still be a grown-up (though it seems to help judgy relatives come to terms with this if you manage a certain degree of success in your career).
What seems to make people happy—partnered or single—is feeling as though they have not been ill treated by God or the fates; what makes us happy is getting to choose, having a hand in our destiny.
There are those—plenty of those—whose sense of God is as the Divine Father of us all, who hears our prayers and answers them individually, in ways befitting the Divine Will, according to His time and His pleasure and His wisdom. This is a helpful way to think of God for many people, though it begins to grate on those for whom life is not going as they had hoped. Why has God not seen fit to send me a partner? What did I do wrong?
I confess, I’m not convinced that’s how God works in the world.
ERICA, A PASTOR and close friend of mine, whose theology is more steeped in the work of John Calvin, a reformation theologian deeply committed to the notion of God’s providence and sovereignty, jokes that “luck” ought to be a dirty word for Christians. It ascribes power to some force other than God. To give thanks for “good luck” is to ignore God’s graceful action in the world.
She’s probably right. Still, I’m reluctant to use words that traditionally describe the work of God to tell love stories. For reasons that have something to do with the complexity of circumstance, and the mysterious ways in which God works, we live in an unjust world, a world in which things don’t always work out, for reasons good and bad. When we come face-to-face with what Paul Tillich calls “the riddle of inequality,” what role do we suppose God takes?
A God in control of every contingency is not really a God you can praise with any ease when circumstance is often a terrible thing. I loved my college boyfriend dearly. We shared all the things that would have made for a wonderful life together. But we were young. And our graduate work led us to different cities. And our families lived around the globe from each other. And we weren’t, ultimately, ready to change cities to be together for the time being. We were willing to try our hand at a long-distance relationship, but with no definite end in sight—we’ll be apart for two years and then marry and move together, for example—things imploded pretty quickly (thanks mostly to my immaturity and inability to articulate my needs; he was lovely, always).
Things did not go according to plan, and we were heartbroken.
Sometimes the heartbreak comes earlier; in never-materializing opportunities for connection. In loneliness and isolation.
Some straight men work in industries dominated by men; they work all the time, and don’t have time to build a community in which they might meet someone. Some queer folks live in places that are hostile to LGBTQI inclusion and suffer for their isolation. Some women live in New York City, where, it has been scientifically proven, there are no eligible men.
Circumstance, bad luck, ingrained sexism in the tech industry, and pervasive homophobia in the rural Bible Belt: these are neither the work of God nor things within our control.
Circumstance can indeed be wonderful: a few years after my college boyfriend and I broke up, I met Josh, a New York native, in Chicago, where he lived with his childhood best friend, Adam, who had met my high school best friend, Erin, at the University of Pennsylvania. When I moved back to Chicago for grad school, Erin thought I should look up Adam, now a student at the same university. There are so many relationships and decisions—so many beyond our control, so many that had nothing to do with us—that led to our meeting. And, eventually, to our being single at the same time, and sharing a lengthy conversation at that summer party in the Woodlawn Avenue apartment that preceded our first date a few nights later.
Maybe my hesitancy around terminology, though, can yet be remedied. Maybe I trust in providence and prevenience, God at work, if not a singular divine Plan. The eternal God may know and see me, but I’m pretty confident that the benevolent creator wasn’t pulling the strings of a research biologist’s career in order to get me a husband, even a very good husband.
THE NOTION OF a matchmaker god, attractive though it may be, miscategorizes the work of God and misunderstands the way humans are called to respond to that work.
In a world before radar or germ theory, genetics or an understanding of female reproductive systems, a god who directly intervened in human existence did not seem so improbable. The world was full of an abundance of happenings that defied explanation and it often made sense to attribute them to God or other divine forces. Things grew significantly more complicated for Christians in our scientific age. We still believe in God, and we see no particular conflicts between science and religion, but we need to think through what it means when we say “God is at work in the world.”
Some Christians are comfortable with the idea of a god who exists and acts much like we do: whose ways are “mysterious” but who nonetheless “knows what’s best for us” and acts to bring it about, either in creating a perfect mate for each and every one of us, or in designing each of our days and the unfolding of our lives as we meet and marry that mate. That god, however powerful and sovereign, feels supernatural, and a bit ambivalent. A god who lives outside the world, watching, stepping in when our prayers get loud enough or we make a big enough mess.
That god, I’ll be honest, reminds me of Lord Business, the villain in the recent (and surprisingly fabulous) release The Lego Movie. Lord Business believes that everything belongs in a particular place; everything must be built in a particular way. Everything must be properly ordered and assembled, and if it’s not, he’ll resort to sinister ends to maintain that order. While I don’t think anyone really believes in a fascist (or Lego) god, or one who (spoiler alert) deals in Krazy Glue, it’s worth noting that a god whose plan trumps those of everyone else is not really the Christian God. The Lord invites Abraham to go to a new place, encourages Moses to return to Egypt and speak on behalf of the divine. Jesus calls people to follow him, to join him in serving.
God does not force our hands, or tap a divine foot impatiently while sulkily waiting for us to get with the program. We’re cocreators with God; we’re no longer slaves but friends. We’re invited to choose.
In The Lego Movie, the heroes are “master builders,” individuals who can pull together pieces from a host of different projects or even realms and create something wholly new and wholly useful. Theirs is an ability to envision something no one else would have imagined, and then to bring that vision to birth. I want to be a master builder when I grow up.
It may be totally ridiculous, but I think of God as something more like the inspiration that moves the master builders than the Man with the Plan. The creative energy that drives us in life, that thrives in diversity and freedom: that’s God.
I get a bit persnickety about the claims we make about who God is and what God does. When we talk, for example, about an all-knowing, all-powerful god who lives way off somewhere who makes us each a perfect mate and waits until the appointed time to show up and introduce us to him or her at church,2 it should make us wonder why that god didn’t bother to show up to stop the violence in Syria, smite the guys who poisoned all those black kids with lead-filled water in Michigan, or cure that young mother’s cancer. Or, perhaps more mundanely, why that god didn’t send my friend a partner before she aged out of fertility, when she so longed to carry a pregnancy.
That’s what theologians call “the problem of evil” and my former student Leah calls “the failure of a model of redemptive suffering.” Often pop theology suggests that God lets us suffer or struggle so that we can learn or grow. But I’m pretty sure I don’t buy that. I don’t think God would be willing to let anyone, much less make anyone, suffer or die so that someone else can learn some life lessons. That’s not what Christians mean by “costly grace.” Harkening back to chapter three, you’ll recall that we are called to treat friends and partners as “Thous,” as subjects with agency and sacred worth, not objects to deal with as we please. Surely, then, the God who loves all people equally and without bound is able to live up to the standard set for screwy little beasties like us. Surely God is not a jerk.
God doesn’t treat people badly. Neither does God hold out on us. God wants to bring the world into what process theologians3 call harmony and “intensity of feeling.”4 And yet, the “riddle of inequality” persists. Some people seem to catch more breaks than others. Some find the loves of their lives. Some don’t. That undeniable unfairness should rightly bother us. And it should make us question our understanding of the character of God. How can God be loving and just and in control of everything, while doling out blessings to some people and not others? I, for one, am not interested in a god who plays favorites.
If other Christians are also uninterested in that partisan god, there are two practices we must give up, particularly in our roles as well-intentioned/passive-aggressive friends, parents, and pastors: first, ignoring the grief, and second, fueling the shame that accompanies life in a culture that idolizes romantic love, married heterosexuality, and the nuclear family. There is a legitimate grief that accompanies the death of our expectations for our lives—the passing away of a vision for our lives that isn’t coming to be. We’re getting better as a culture at understanding certain other types of grief—grieving children never born, for example, or a hoped-for identity as a parent. But we still expect our singles to be sassy and fabulous and endlessly optimistic, even as relationships end, or doors seem to close; people need the space to grieve dreams deferred and to imagine new ways of being in the world, to carve out new identities.
The single hardest thing for long-single friends and survey respondents alike to bear—among those who were single but wished to be partnered—is the loneliness. Longing to be seen and known, longing for the grace-full experience of sexual and romantic intimacy and having that longing go unfulfilled. Singles aren’t dying for a romantic Valentine’s Day, but for a partner with whom they can comfortably ignore the made-up holiday.
Piling on the weight of loneliness is the burden of shame, often exacerbated by (sometimes well-meaning) others. What is wrong with me that no one loves me in this way? Well . . . it could be that you’re too focused on your career, or you don’t work out, or you’re too political, or . . .
What is hard is not knowing what you should be doing differently. What is infuriating is knowing that you’re doing everything “right” and you’re still alone. The Christian tradition doesn’t really resolve the problem of evil, or even of loneliness and the injustice of unintentional singleness. But it does suggest that there’s good news that’s more powerful than sin and death, so certainly more potent than despair. That gospel lies in this: The world and its possibilities for goodness are nearly infinite; far bigger than we can imagine. There is enough love to go around. And we participate in it. We are individuals, with selves, located somewhere in the space between matter and memory, and we are holy and good, even if we haven’t found a mate. We are complete, inasmuch as anything is complete. We can imagine creative ways to engage the contingencies of our universe and the vagaries of American coupling. Writer Tanzila Ahmed is wise: “I might not have a life witness, yet. But, at least, I do have a contingency plan in place. And maybe all the witness that I need in my life is simply my own.”5
IT ISN’T FAIR that some folks remain single when they’d rather be partnered. Loneliness and longing can be artistically rich—“But Not for Me” is one of Ira Gershwin’s finest; “Chasing Pavements” is one of Adele’s—but usually that transformation, from suffering to beauty, or meaning, can happen only if we attempt to live into this one wild life we’ve been given, to look for possibility, to open ourselves to God’s creative presence.
I’m pretty sure this is the call on our lives from no less than Jesus, the world’s most famous single person.
Now, I don’t mean to burden single folks with an impossible standard of forever resisting temptation and remaining pure in thought and deed. Rather, I embrace the notion that Jesus was fully human and fully divine. If he was fully human, he experienced all the joys, pains, and ambiguities of living in a body, of going through puberty and experiencing the rush of hormones, of being a sexual creature who longed to be in relationships of various sorts with other people. Human.
I get really, unreasonably, irritated by suggestions that Jesus was married and the church tried to cover it up, or that Jesus was gay and the church tried to cover it up. Basically I get irritated by conspiracy theories. I find compelling, instead, scholar Dale Martin’s argument in Sex and the Single Savior, namely that “Jesus has been a figure of ambiguous sexuality.”6
Martin examines a number of different interpretive strategies (or imaginations, as he calls them) Christians have used to reflect upon Jesus’s sexuality. He argues that we really have no way of knowing for certain what Jesus’s sex life (or lack thereof) was like. The church fathers definitely thought he was celibate, but we don’t know for sure. Some historians note that Jesus may well have been married, because just about everyone married in Nazareth in that day and age, and the fact that no spouse is ever named suggests that it was so ordinary as to not warrant mention.
Some scholars suggest Jesus might have been gay—there’s all this business about the beloved disciple; there is the erotic homo-sociality of his relationships with the disciples.
I’m compelled by the idea that Jesus was probably celibate, but that it would have been for a purpose, and that it might have been hard to bear sometimes. We get a sense of his frustration, resignation, and loneliness on occasion (“remove this cup”; “the son of man has nowhere to lay his head”), but also the full, abundant life he modeled and preached. He was fully in relationship with many; he had intimate friendships, and he was dedicated to his work. If his celibacy was hard, he was not overly anxious about it; he leaned into the other parts of his life.
Martin suggests that Jesus’s sexuality was ambiguous—we don’t know—but that regardless of what his sexual practice looked like, he was kind of “queer.” Queer because he didn’t follow societal scripts, queer because he hung with women and men, queer because he was maybe celibate but not an ascetic, queer because he didn’t marry as far as we know. Jesus was different.
Jesus was different and his path was likely puzzling to those around him, even as it puzzles us still today.
Can single Christians find hope in this, courage and sustenance here? As fully human, fully sexual, fully incarnate beings, who just happen not to be with anybody, single Christians can yet do good, saving work in the world. Singles can yet have intimate relationships. No one need be defined by relationship status or remake themselves to fit into existing social structures and roles. We can be like Jesus. Maybe celibate, maybe not. It’s really no one’s business but ours and God’s.
I’M RELATIVELY CONVINCED, in an academic sense, that Jesus was probably celibate. If that gives hope to those singles trying to remain celibate, that’s a great thing. If celibacy starts to stand in the way of abundant life for singles, they can rightly let it go.
Part of figuring out how to live into the creative life of God is figuring out how to live into being yourself, and choosing the spiritual practices and disciplines that support your own discipleship. One of the most unfair things the Christian tradition has foisted on singles is the expectation that they would remain celibate—that is, refraining from sexual relationships. American Christians sometimes conflate celibacy and chastity, too, which is a problem. Chastity is a virtue, related to temperance—it’s about moderating our indulgences and exercising restraint. We’re all called to exercise chastity in a variety of ways, though the details will vary given our individual situations.
In the official teaching of the Catholic Church, however, chastity requires restraining oneself from indulging in sexual relationships outside of the “appropriate” bounds (and bonds) of marriage. That is, chastity for singles means celibacy—no sex.
But as we’ve spent some of these first chapters considering, there might be other norms for chastity. Maybe our marital state isn’t the primary norm. I’d argue that we can be chaste—faithful—in unmarried sexual relationships if we exercise restraint: if we refrain from having sex that isn’t mutually pleasurable and affirming, that doesn’t respect the autonomy and sacred worth of ourselves and our partners.
There are those who feel that they are called to seasons of celibacy, or even years of celibacy, and if answering that call is life-giving and purposeful, then they should take it up as a spiritual discipline. But no call can be forced on an unwilling person, especially not if they find themselves single only by virtue of circumstance.
Plenty of women and men love sex, and need it—we need bodily pleasure, remember—and the abundant life for them will involve seeking out relationships of mutual pleasure. Chastity, or just sex, requires that whether we are married or unmarried, our sex lives restrain our egos in ways that destroy mutuality, restrain our desire for physical pleasure when pursuing it would bring harm to self or other.
I OFFER THE example of Jesus not because I think he was likely celibate, but rather because his life demonstrates what it might mean to be both different and beloved, chaste but never cut off. Jesus was forever referring to those who have eyes to see, and he saw people in ways that others didn’t. He saw them through the eyes of love, whoever they were. He loved them as they were, regardless of what society thought of them. We’re called to see that way, too: to see and nurture the possibilities for life and love that are constantly unfolding all around us. We’re called to see ourselves this way: beloved, no matter (or perhaps because of) our refusal to conform to society’s expectations about sex, love, and relationships.
Straight, gay, bi, trans, intersex: we are beloved, and do God and ourselves a disservice if we are conformed.
Conforming is not the same as adapting, of course. If we are lonely and not partnered, we can create other kinds of families, networks of choice and caring. But this is not changing who we are, tamping down our God-given selves; this is creating something new, beautiful, holy.
Like the master builders, who look at the pieces before them and see past the instruction manual’s designs toward something creative and unique, single and partnered Christians alike need to shut off the voices that proclaim that “everything is awesome” if our lives are just like everybody else’s, if we are following the rules.
Our call is to discern where God is calling to us, what energy is pulling us, what doors are opening in our lives, and when that pull and those doors and those voices are most holy and good. When they speak to the highest truths about ourselves. When we’re in relationships, or looking for them, that discernment has to be mutual.
ONE OF MY oldest friends and I once compared our “numbers”—the number of sexual partners we’d had. My number was substantially lower than hers. Do you think I’m a slut?
No.
She is still single. I have been with the same person for thirteen years. Even if she slept with only one person a year during that whole time—in relationships she thought had a future, in relationships in which she felt cared for—her number would be more than three times mine.
It’s not for me to judge how singles navigate their sexuality beyond marriage. I got lucky, found someone I wanted to marry who wanted to marry me, even though I wasn’t perfect, even though I wasn’t a virgin. I got lucky: I made more good choices than bad, listened as best I could to the Spirit’s leading, and was in the right place at the right time.
Another friend was single for a long time and finally decided he was ready to date with intention. But he kept blowing first dates. He had built up his expectations for each woman he actually worked up the courage to meet to such an extent that he couldn’t maintain the casual fun of getting to know someone. He probably could have used some therapy. Instead he joined Tinder. It sort of worked the same way. He met a lot of different people—not all of whom he slept with—and the realization that there are, indeed, a lot of fish in the sea relieved some of the pressure to find “the One.” And, not too long after, he found the One. Not on Tinder, though. On Match.com.
The God we know in Christ is the creative, loving force that moves in us, connecting us to one another and calling us beyond ourselves; the presence that calls us beloved—single or otherwise—and inspires us to joy-filled, abundant lives. We are both bound by destiny and free to choose our own paths. Things rarely go the way we have planned or have expected, but God is present, making all things new.
My friend Sandhya insisted that I listen to the David Gray song “This Year’s Love,” on repeat, while I wrote this chapter. It speaks of both hope and desperation, the longing for this relationship to—finally—be the one that lasts.
It’s exhausting waiting on one’s own. It’s exhausting to seek the mystery of connection over and over. To offer oneself in vulnerability to the mysteries of love.
What attracts an individual to another? Why do we feel a spark with someone and not another, and what moves that attraction to action? The thing that moves you from dinner dates to a dynamic duo is a kind of intangible mix of pheromones and shared passions and compatible work schedules and a randomly shared but undeniable hatred of Lenny Kravitz’s music. I’ve sometimes wondered if Josh and I would have fallen so hard so fast if it hadn’t been summer vacation and we hadn’t had the time to give ourselves over to the work of getting to know each other and being carried away by our enjoyment of this new romance. Would I have missed out on a life with him if I’d tried to date him while taking a full course load?
I don’t know how to differentiate between idle thinking and probing the holy mysteries of connection; I suspect there is no clear difference.
There is always possibility, and then, in most things, there is decision. Decision never ends the story: our lives are comprised of the endless unfolding of decisions and possibilities. That’s Gray’s longing. This decision, this love: may it last and last. Whether it does or not, though, we continue to navigate the challenges of destiny and freedom, of shame and grief, of hope and vulnerability.