One of my mentors is a celibate monk, and he says we can live without sex but we can’t live without love. And there are a lot of people who have a lot of sex and never experience love, and people who never have sex [but] have deep experiences of intimacy and love.
–Shane Claiborne

Love without fear. Unselfish.

In my 20′s, I was a die-hard advocate of the benefits of being a single Christian and very much appreciating the freedom and rewards it allowed for me. I even wrote a hefty start to a book on how much I loved being single and was ready to refute all the usual responses from married people (it makes you selfish, you become more like Christ because of the work involved in the marriage relationship, the Bible uses marriage as a metaphor for the church for a reason, singles are just a bunch of people that never grow up, blah blah…).

I was doing fine, though it was based in an untested arrogance. I was busy with my education, traveling, and experiencing life. I was not at all unhappy with having emerged through that part of my life without a bunch of relational baggage. God was good.

I then slipped into my 30′s and found myself sinking into anger and despair and a lack of purpose based on the fact that the assumed “normal” life included being married and having a family. There was a very specific thing that set this off in me, right at the start of my 30′s, and it caused a very quick downhill slide. I felt that I wasn’t normal, that I had missed the expected benchmarks in life.

Oh, if we only realized how destructive our focus on “normal” life is, our pressure to force the mold on. We force people to the sideline or to sin, almost, by insisting they be “normal.”

I realized that all of my college friends began pairing up and marrying off, and I found myself as seconds, the understandable place of being when a friend has a spouse and you can’t be first in his or her life anymore. Gone were conversations and confidence of my place in life I had had in my 20′s, replaced by listening to the talk of mortgages and kids and only, in a near-miss attempt to include me, remember-whens.

I couldn’t relate, I felt despondent, I was lonely, and I was tired of going through life without feeling like another person had my back.

Why do we look to people for what we need?

I had fits of anger and sadness and blame, and tried to go about changing who and how I was, thinking that that was the problem for why I was alone. I wasted time on superficial improvements that didn’t last, didn’t take, or just exhausted me with my own imperfections.

I read articles and books by single people saying all kinds of things, and blogged it with fire-breathing keystrokes over the years. I read the work of writers who said to not give up, that it would happen, or to stop having such wrong focus. I read books by married people blaming single people, and books by married people telling single people how blessed they were. I watched as the shelves of the Christian bookstore filled up with marriage-related material, and with books that described men and women as being so in need of certain things in their life that they simply all must get married.

I sat through discussions, conversations, and lectures by married friends who, though usually well-meaning, end up adding to the noise and unnecessary guilt. I ranted and raved and expressed how hard it was to be alone. I listened these friends tell me they couldn’t understand why I wasn’t married, that there was nothing “wrong” with me.

It only made me feel, more keenly, that there were the married people who had nothing wrong, and the singles who had something wrong. I hated feeling like it was us vs. them, but I felt alien in a world full of marrieds.

Just lay it down, Julie, I felt inside my heart. Let this go. Let this go, so you can live the life I wrote for you.

It was all cause-and-effect, or blessed-vs.-responsible, or some other kind of simplistic arrangement that denied the fact that real people have real pain and in the end we just want to be loved. The core of it, this whole marriage/single debacle is what Claiborne says: what we all really want is love.

“Love is equated with sex,” I had written in a journal. “Or, it is thrown away by saying ‘I love pizza’.” I then went on with how, because everything around us is sexualized, we get a skewed focus on that and, through guilt by association, our concept of love. “People need to be touched, but touch has been made sexual.”

The world is starved for love and feasts on sex. We need life-fortifying food and we bloat up on simple carbs instead.

When I read this article about singleness now, as I slowly push myself up off the ground here in my mid-30′s, regaining something I barely understood from my 20′s after God used a situation of great difficulty in my life to get me here, a sort of tested version of my 20′s, I take heart in it again. It’s not as easy as it was then. It’s a permanent bruise. But the article, and those like it, are just another little way God speaks to me and says “you’re not alone, you’re not a mistake, you have a place, and when you asked to be like Jesus, did you know what you were asking?”

Sometimes we pick things up we need to lay back down, to either never get them back, or someday maybe.

The things I wrote in the journals I felt led to let a few friends read are things I doubt I will ever really put online; I’m not prepared for the response, even the well-meant response (which is usually the most cutting), of those who have not walked this path.

“So you’re single and in your 30′s,” my friend Travis told me once when we were having a conversation. “Big deal. Lots of people are. That’s not unusual.”

I was attempting to say something else, but I stopped. I closed up and said nothing further to him. There is something more to what I was saying, and what Claiborne is saying, than can be understood by someone who is merely technically not married but going through serial relationships.

Being single isn’t about the lack of a piece of paper and a ring…

Being single isn’t about the lack of a piece of paper and a ring, but is an entire frame of mind. The truly single person looks to no one else to provide for needs, but God. The truly single person makes no other person an idol or even a well-loved distraction. The truly single person accepts the blessings and freedoms with the achingly painful loneliness and doesn’t try to hide from it. The truly single person enjoys the now, and accepts that this may or may not be the future until death. The truly single person doesn’t hold out in a mindset of abstinence, but in a mindset of celibacy, two very different things. The truly single person finds purpose in the church as the body of Christ despite the best family-focused efforts to allow them to do otherwise.

The truly single person finds purpose in life that doesn’t come with saying “I do” and having children. The truly single person understands that well-meaning matchmakers and even seemingly ideal situations may have to be rejected no matter how much sense they make to others, simply because the direction is “No, not now”, even if the temptation to take the usual path is very strong.

The truly single person is, as Paul and Jesus said, better in focus because they have no one else to look to in their aloneness, but God. Their whole purpose in life is the Gospel. They have but One provider for all things. The freedom is painful, with limitlessness almost overwhelming.

Few of us are truly single. We still look elsewhere.

Do you really know what it is like to come to the place where you say, yes. I am single. Single. No “someday, maybe” or any other platitude, but completely accepting of being single?

Why would God ask us to be single, and, seemingly, in increasing numbers these days?

Perhaps the church needed some adjustment from their idolatry of the family.

If you’re a last-days believer, you might think God wants more people focused on his work than raising families. I won’t berate that theory at all, frankly. Perhaps the church needed some adjustment from their idolatry of the family — and yes, it has a problem with that. If you have a family, you will not see the problem. Perhaps people are finally breaking free from culturalized Christianity of the past that caused people to marry who really shouldn’t have. What would the face of Christianity look like if a large number of its followers weren’t fettered down with children, responsibilities, and jobs? We don’t really know, but I think we will.

It might not be good for man to be alone, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a true calling.

God is asking people to come to a place of truly accepting being single. Not for pity, not for something they lack, not because of how they were or weren’t made, not because of who they aren’t, but because of who they are. If we could shrug off this push for marriage, there are some people struggling in life that could be set free to have a purpose in the body of Christ instead of feeling second class.

Claiborne puts it well:

So how can we as a Church create a place that’s safe for people to experience intimacy and love and that doesn’t say that the only path God could have for you is to have a husband and wife and two-and-a-half kids? There are plenty of ways to experience community and God’s call. It’s so distorted that we have lost an appreciation of singleness within evangelicalism. I had a pastor honestly pray in a children’s sermon that every kid would find the one that God had for them. It’s sick. [...] So many of the heroes of our faith have been people who have followed Jesus in single-mindedness in love and romance, and we need that within the Church. There’s something that people who are sexual minorities can really fuel into that, a tremendous love and energy that we fall short if we’re just a Church full of people that are married.

God has been good to me, even when it seemed extremely cruel at the time.

You know, I’ve never really wanted kids. I’ve been ambivalent about it my whole life. My nieces and nephews have always been my “children” — I’ve taken care of many of them from infancy on and have really enjoyed them — and I’ve never found myself with my heart ripped to pieces any time someone with a baby walked by. I don’t gush and goo at baby showers, nor do I want to hold other people’s babies. I don’t feel unfulfilled, and have never looked at having kids as the path for  my fulfillment. My art and writing and relationships and family and experiences and faithfulness to God — that is fulfilling to me. That is how I will change the world, and I’ve always been quite settled about that. God was good to me in this.

That love without fear? Romantic love is not perfect love; there is an element of fear in it. It is not an unselfish love, for it does want something back. Perfect love gives but not to get. It says “as you are, I love you.” It doesn’t claim ownership. It is patient, it waits, it pours out and never takes in. It allows someone to walk away. It holds out a hope in Christ and nothing else that is attainable on this earth.

Perfect love is hard. And it’s a shame that we’ve decided to entangle it with sex and marriage when it can exist without both. By doing that, we deny that perfect love of Christ to those who don’t imbibe in either.

Just as I can’t understand the marriage relationship, neither can someone who is married understand what it is to be single. Yet, it is mostly from married people that I have been receiving teaching and instruction in church, often with accompanying sermon illustrations of family or marriage life.

I want to now say something bold, then, and ask that the married person hear it from a single person: the truly single person understands love much better than the married person.

It’s an incredible bruise, a constant state of comparison and “am I a whole person”, but going forward boldly with a love without return.

God has been good and it still hurts and I’m sure I’ll be upset about it all over again tomorrow.