Singleness Is Not Meant to Be Miserable

Let’s talk about being single.

Albeit a non-single lady, this topic is near and dear to my heart. It’s an area I have my own fair share of personal experience with and is something I continue to be immersed in as I work with many single people in the mental health profession.

Because let’s face it, it’s hard!

When you’re in it, it’s difficult to trust that you’ll ever fully come out of it, and in the meantime, there are a variety of traps we are prey to fall into that can make it miserable. While hard, singleness is not meant to be miserable. It’s a temporary (yes, I promise, temporary) season of life that I hope you will someday look back on with fondness and appreciation. I’m here to speak into singlehood, with nothing more than anecdotal evidence of traps I see people fall into again and again while on the quest for Mr. or Mrs. Right. 

Freedom versus stability.

Someone much wiser than me summed it up well when they named the dichotomy of freedom and stability—singleness comes with a lot of freedom, but is low in security; while your permanent vocation provides stability, but makes the ability to hop on a plane to visit a friend or volunteer for a year pretty darn difficult.

While that sense of freedom to quite literally do anything, move anywhere, become anyone, is great, it can leave a person with a sense of overwhelm and being suspended in mid-air. How do I make these big decisions that will likely have lasting consequences on my future? I don’t want to make these decisions on my own.

What if I screw up?

While these questions are so human and so understandable, they share an inherent flaw, which is not being grounded in the present. Always, always, God is to be found in the present moment. A lie that single people can tend towards is that, until in their vocation, their life hasn’t really started—that they’re not yet living. How wrong and how tragic that lie is.

Sitting around, waiting to find the one, conjuring up schemes on how to do so, and benching yourself in the meantime, are things I can confidently say we are not called to do with our singlehood. Paralyzed in fear of ‘what if’s,’ these are things I can even more confidently say will likely keep you there. 

Perhaps going hand and hand with the above, is the tendency to put off things for tomorrow that really demand our attention today. Trying to ‘figure out’ the future pulls us into big picture thinking, and can serve as a great distraction from the present. We can fall into the temptation to try to figure out the future or obsess over fantasies, at the expense of abdicating our personal responsibility in the here and now.

Make today and every moment count.

Do you have any bad habits? (If you’re human, I’m guessing probably). Break them now. Developing bad patterns with money, time-management, sleep, and health, all the way to actual addictions, are things that don’t go away because you meet the right guy or girl.

Don’t fall into the trap of pushing aside until tomorrow things that deserve your attention today. While finding the right person will be great, fun, and so incredibly special, it is not an antidote to these pre-existing bad habits. A future relationship cannot and should not be your Savior. If you can’t break these things today, you won’t be able to break them when the right person comes along. God doesn’t demand perfection, but He does demand your effort and perseverance, and He is here with you now and desires to see you flourish.

Remember that part about obsessing over fantasies?

I volunteer to make myself the sacrificial lamb in sharing the bad news… is there someone you’ve been crushing or waiting on for an extended period of time? It’s not happening. Something I see time and time again is that in an effort to satisfy that deep longing and desire to be in communion with another, we can find and create a solution for ourselves.

Perhaps it’s a good friend or a fellow volunteer, but we imagine our desire for a relationship playing out with this specific person, to the point where we become convinced it is actually what is meant to be. As humans, we have an amazing ability to deceive ourselves, but what it does is keep us in an extremely narrow scope, limiting God to our ideas vs. allowing Him to pull the blinds all the way up to reveal the fullness of His plan in His time. While painful, if you find yourself in a situation of being stuck on someone, challenge yourself to quit making excuses as to why it hasn’t yet come to fruition, and start making yourself available for when the right person does come along. 

Whenever we encounter something difficult, it has the potential to make us or break us.

One of the biggest determining factors between the two is our ability to find meaning in difficulty. The Christian life is not easy, Christ never promised that it would be. If nothing else, perhaps that is part of the meaning, to endure something difficult and allow it to refine you. Again, singlehood can be hard, but very few things that are worth having come easily. While this season may feel like a very long winter, there’s beauty within the struggle.