Do You Need a Man?

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I am surrounded lately by the question of whether a woman “needs” a man. I spent the weekend on Facebook semi-complaining that I don’t have a husband to help me assemble furniture and set up my new TV. Then a woman asked me why her boyfriend helps his sister and not her, and wondered if it is because she isn’t “needy” enough.

Then a friend sent me an article about how single women have everything the feminists said they needed, but that they (we) are still not collectively a happy demographic. And then another woman asked me “how to you live with the heartbreak of not finding the right person?”

So, do we single women need a man? Or does a woman need a man “like a fish needs a bicycle” as Gloria Steinem once famously said?

I guess it depends on the definition of “need.” Do I need a man for survival? Well, apparently not, since I am still here, breathing in and out. Do I need a man to be happy? Despite not yet having found the man I want to build a life with, I seem to have built a pretty good, pretty happy life.

What does need mean?

And yet, there is a very real sense in which I can say that yes, I do very much need a man.

I looked up “need” in the online dictionary, and the first definition I saw was “require something because it is essential or very important.”

The Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes says that you, and I, and everyone, were created to find ourselves only in a sincere gift of self. The “prototype” for that gift of self is the complementary self-donation that happens in marriage. That is what we were made for. It is built into our very bodies.

Many good men and women give themselves to God in religious life, which is understood as a type of “marriage” in which they consecrate themselves to Christ as one would to a spouse. And then there are the rest of us, who may give ourselves generously in various areas of our lives, but have not made the complete self-gift we feel called to in marriage.

Given all of this, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that having a good, Godly, faithful man in my life would be “essential or very important.”

In other words, I need a man.

Improvising in the interim

What do you do when you "need" something, when it is “essential or very important” but you don’t have it?  You improvise. You work around it. Last night I was making chili, but I didn’t have the tomato soup concentrate that the recipe called for. I was too lazy to go to the store for the ingredient I needed. So I mixed tomato paste with water. And it worked—kinda. The ideal, of course, would have been to have the correct ingredient. But I made do with what I had, and the result wasn’t so bad.

So, in a similar way, I improvise my life. I “give myself” to my friends, my family and my ministries. (Of course I would do that anyway, but the extent is definitely greater as a single person.) I ask friends and brothers to help me assemble furniture. I live in a “good” neighborhood in a house with an alarm system so that I feel safe.

And, in my lonely moments, I turn to God instead of turning to a husband.

God knew from all eternity that it would be my desire to marry. And I would be single at this point in my life. And so, to my undying gratitude, He steps into the gap nicely. He meets me where I am, and He provides for me.

Don't override your deepest desire

But none of that makes me want to be like the single women I see who say, often somewhat defensively, that they don’t “need” a man. I get why they say it. Maybe they are defining "need" in the "if I don't have a man to put food on the table I will starve to death" way. Maybe they have been hurt. Maybe they don’t need the kind of man who has let them down time and time again. Nobody needs that kind of man.

But that solitary claim still rings hollow to me. It is a cry of defeat. It is an attempt to override the deepest desire of the heart, which I still maintain is to give ourselves in love to a good man who gives himself in return.

Thanks to God, family and community, it is indeed possible for a single woman to live a very happy, lovely, fulfilling life.

But nonetheless, there is no shame—nor contradiction—in admitting that I do indeed need a man.

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