5 Ways for Singles to Rethink the Lenten Season

What are you doing for Lent?

Perhaps in the past, you gave up coffee and ended up non-productive at work and grumpy around friends and family. Maybe you’ve given up sweets during prior Lents, but you haven’t been eating that many sweets lately, so you think that giving them up isn’t an adequate sacrifice. Further, if you are single and called to marriage, you might be wondering how you can allow Lent to better form you for entering your vocation.

With all that in mind, here are five Lenten practices that may be particularly appropriate if you are single and called to marriage:

1. Give up online streaming services.

Or at least limit them. The average American streams eight hours of content per day, which probably isn’t the healthiest habit. Even if you only watch a few hours of Netflix per day, try giving it up, at least during the week, and offer the sacrifice up for your future spouse.

You can use the new free time to develop skills that will be helpful in marriage, i.e., learning to cook (that example works whether you’re a man or a woman). Further, the mere fact that you are practicing self-discipline now will benefit you in your future marriage.

2. Give up some of your income.

If you can afford to, set aside a small amount of your discretionary income to donate to charity. You can give to any good charity, but if you believe you are called to marriage, you may want to donate to charities that specifically focus on promoting family values. Remember, when you are married you will share your material goods with your spouse; what better way to prepare for that than sharing what you possess with others now?

3. Give up some of your “fun” time and replace it with prayer.

Even if you already pray every day, you can try adding five minutes of daily prayer for your future spouse. You can say the Divine Mercy Chaplet for them, a decade of the Rosary, or any other prayers on which you find it easy to focus, including your own words to God. Think about it: it’s just five minutes of your day, about the time it takes to preheat your air-fryer (admit it: you’re single, you have an air-fryer). You know that you can take that time to help your future spouse with your prayers!

4. Do volunteer work.

If you don’t already, you can try setting aside an hour or two on the weekend (or a day you don’t work) to volunteer in a soup kitchen or something similar. (The St. Vincent de Paul Society provides a number of services for those in need. You can check their website at SVDP USA – Providing Assistance to Those in Need for Over 175 Years (ssvpusa.org), for any volunteer opportunities they may have near you.)

You can view this not only as an act of charity towards those you are helping immediately, but also to your future spouse since you are developing a habit of self-giving that will be essential in marriage. 

5. Develop a devotion to a saint who was married while on earth.

Find a married saint or saints (like St. Therese of Lisieux's parents) and say a brief prayer to them every day, asking them to help you prepare yourself for when you eventually do enter into your vocation. It doesn’t have to be a long prayer. Even if you just add a thirty-second prayer to them at the end of every day, it could bear great fruit in the future!

If you want to spend a little more time than that with your chosen saint/s, then you can look for a biography of them and spend some time reading from it each day. (A great company that publishes Catholic books is Ignatius Press. You can look and see if they have any books on your saint/s of choice.)

Make this a transformative Lenten season.

Needless to say, you don’t need to do all of these. You don’t want to try to take on too much all at once. After all, the point is to choose practices that you will be able to keep for a full forty days! However, if you want to add one or two of them to your Lenten regimen, then please do so, and let others know if you find these practices beneficial!

Hopefully, these alternatives to cutting out ice cream will make your Lent holier and better prepare you to one day enter marriage. And I promise you, they won’t make you grumpy the way that giving up coffee does!