Single, Dating, Engaged, Married: Navigating Life and Love in the Modern Age

by Ben Stuart

Dating apps have made the pool of potential mates massive, which has resulted in young people slowing down their willingness to commit to a single individual. How sure am I that someone better won’t come along, when I see thousands of potential mates on my phone every day?

For others progress to marriage is impeded by seeking the fulfillment of sexual desires outside of a relationship. In the past sexual desire served as a drive to propel people into marriage because marriage was the safest and most acceptable place to have sex. Now society has largely removed any taboo associated with premarital sex.

Additionally, the meteoric rise in accessibility to pornography has offered an avenue for acting out sexually that has, for many, replaced even the search for a human partner.

When I contemplate the landscape of life and love for young people today, in many people I see fear. Fear of making a mistake. Fear of missing out. Fear of losing opportunities. I see so much fear in the hearts of young men and women. In others I hear pride. The insistence to live life on your own terms so that no one can threaten your freedom of expression. In many I also see lust. Why commit to love someone emotionally if I can just use them physically?

When I see these, it makes sense why lifelong love is being delayed. None of these drivers aim at love. Love opens up and gives of itself freely. Fear closes off and withdraws. Love risks vulnerability for the sake of the beloved. Pride will not tolerate the risk of self for the other. Love embraces all of a person, on their best days and their worst. Lust says I only want the parts of you I can use. As long as fear, lust, and pride are in the driver’s seat, the culture will be speeding away from healthy love.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a statement recently explaining that since the advent of dating apps that promote “date” selection based primarily on physical beauty, they have seen a skyrocketing increase in sexually transmitted diseases. In 2015 in Rhode Island, since the advent of Tinder and Grindr, syphilis cases have risen 79 percent.

Why mention all of this? Because for all of our connectivity through technology, we have suffered a loss of community. Fear, pride, and lust are driving us into isolation or creating shallow relationships that do not serve human flourishing.

You do not need romantic interest to discover your life’s purpose. Your journey begins with your Maker.

Do you want a reliable guide in the unknown waves of love? Admit your need. Raise your flag and declare to God that you need him to take the wheel and guide you. This is where our journey must begin.

When you have a source of life, you are a source of life. But where there is scarcity, desperation will set in. And desperation can easily become exploitation of others.

If you are disconnected from a source of life, your “oxygen tank,” then you will attempt to suck life out of someone else. You will be tempted to use people to try to get your sense of self validated. You will, in a moment, become a sucker of life rather than a giver of life. And this is how toxic relationships are born.

When we bring God-sized needs to human beings, they cannot possibly succeed. Nor can we offer them unconditional love on the days they are s...

The endgame was about me. It was an attempt to fill up my ego. I remember weeping thinking about how much selfishness had shot through every aspect of my imagination as it related to romance. I had to take a break from even thinking about a relationship with a girl. I realized I would be looking to her to make me feel as though I was somebody special. Sure, wives should make a husband feel that way, but if I bring a God-sized need for love and acceptance to any girl, no matter how impressive she is, she can’t meet a need like that.

Before you seek a guy or a girl, you need to get on board with God. Before you marry a mate, you need to meet your Maker, because it’s in the stability of walking with him that we have the resources to be a blessing to one another. We have to be connected to a source of life if we are going to be a source of life.

Why, John? Because love flows down to you from God. And when you know him, it is the most natural thing in the world to let that love flow from him, to you, and on to others.

Do you want to be a great lover of people? Do you want to be a source of life to your family, friends, anyone who you might date, and the person you will eventually marry? Then you need a source of life. This is how it was always meant to be. The beloved love. Love embraced becomes love extended. It is the natural outworking of being loved by God.

Why am I telling you about this series of events? To illustrate how oftentimes what we want in the moment is not always what is best for us in the long run. And what is best for us, we do not always value and appreciate. Some gifts are more welcomed than others.

Sometimes the most loving gift God can give us is singleness.

So singleness is a gift that the vast majority of us don’t want. Some of you may be okay with it now, but as the years go by, this is a gift you might come to resent. “Wow, you got me a present, God? How nice. Wait, singleness? What kind of gift is this? Why would you do this?”

So then what is singleness for? Paul declared that it exists “to promote what is appropriate and to secure undistracted devotion to the Lord” (NASB). Do not miss this. Verse 35 just told you the two reasons why God has ordained a season of singleness in your life.

For many of you this raises a natural question: Can’t I be devoted to the Lord while married? Why do I have to be single? Notice Paul stated that God ordains singleness in order to secure an undistracted devotion to the Lord.

Thus God, in his mercy, has given us a gift called singleness. Why? Because he wants our attention. He wants to secure an undistracted devotion to the Lord.

“We are restless until our hearts find their rest in Thee.”5 Time is short. Our relationship with God matters far more than anything else in this life. So God ordains singleness so that we might be able to focus entirely on the One we were made by and for.

The single person pines away for the intimacy of the married season of life. The married man or woman romanticizes the freedoms they enjoyed as a single person. I do not want you to do that. I don’t want you to miss out on what you have access to in your single years that you will not have when you’re married.

I want to challenge some of you who are pining away. It is okay to long to be in a relationship and long to be married. That longing is good. The ache for companionship existed in Adam before the entrance of sin in Genesis 3. But if you let that desire steal all the joy of your present single stage, you are missing out on the benefits available to you in this season of life right now.

As an unmarried man, are you anxious to find ways to please the Lord? As an unmarried woman, are you straining to consider how you might be holy to the Lord in body and spirit? Let me challenge you: if this does not define your singleness, then you are doing singleness wrong.

God has given you singleness to secure an undistracted devotion to the Lord, not to fill your time with distractions.

If these unmarried moments of your life are not spent in passionate pursuit of your Maker, then they will often be marked by a sense of aimlessness and frustration.

Then he dedicated a night every week to study the life of Jesus because he had the time and because he wanted to grow in his knowledge and love for the Lord. That’s a good use of singleness.

I remember sitting there, and I thought about all that it had cost me to be single in the suburbs. All that I didn’t have in my life. But I remember sitting in that moment, holding this kid, and I thought, God, thank you. There is no other place I would rather be than using the time and energy I have now to invest in these kids.

Devotion expresses itself in attentiveness to his Word and attending to his work. Study and service. The pursuit of intimacy with him and activity that pleases him.

Have you set aside regular time to meditate on the Word of God? Take a moment and look over your weekly schedule. Ask God to show you where that time may be.

Consider writing the verses in one color and your own thoughts and feelings in a different one. Make it an ongoing dialogue with the Lord.

Once we light the fire of unforgiveness in our heart, then decide to stoke the flames of bitterness and resentment, we do not get to be master of that flame. Fire doesn’t work that way.

As you are chasing after him, there will be all manner of people running as well, but in all manner of directions. Some will cross your path right in front of you. They may even be cute! But they are running in a totally different direction, pursuing things other than God. Maybe they’re pursuing money, happiness, fame, or acceptance. In which case you tell yourself, Hey, they’re cute, but I’m not going to try to grab hold of them. Their life is going one way and mine is going another. That’s not a good combination.

You want someone with character. Not someone who simply acquiesces to the existence of a deity, but someone who passionately pursues God and the things of God. You want to be with a man or woman who possesses a deep, God-shaped character.

Dating is not about chasing a person in whose eyes we can find a sense of meaning and fulfillment. That is far too much weight to put on another human being.

You are not half of a person waiting for another half of a person to complete you. Jesus and the apostle Paul were not incomplete as singles, and neither are you.

No human being will meet every need, solve every problem, heal every wound, or eradicate every insecurity. Those who put pressure on a friendship or a romantic relationship to provide that will always end up crushing the rel...

In 2011, a consultant to online-dating companies published the results from a survey of thirty-nine of the industry’s executives called “How Has Internet Dating Changed Society?” These insiders agreed that online dating had “made people more disposable” and may be partly responsible for a rise in divorce rates.3

We leverage our lives to build other people up for the glory of God. We do not leverage other people’s lives to further ourselves. That is no subtle difference.

Now I understand that who you think runs the universe will inform your values. Your values will shape your goals. Your goals will determine where you go in life.

While the believer is trying to follow the Lord, the nonbeliever is pursuing his or her own interests, where one of two results will inevitably occur. First, one of you will give in and eventually follow the other. Often this means the believer abandons a pursuit of God and adopts a lifestyle that reflects no allegiance to God.

“The loneliness of being single will not be assuaged by loneliness in a king-sized bed, laying next to someone who cannot communicate with you about the biggest issues in life.”

When someone believes God made this place, they also believe that the way he tells us to work within the world will work best. That’s why the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

You want a man who is making war on his lusts now for no other reason than his allegiance to Christ. If you marry a guy like that, when he goes on a work trip you won’t suffer through sleepless nights wondering what he’s up to in his hotel room. You will be able to rest in the security that comes from having a man with integrity.

Because that mate will continue to look more like Jesus and manifest his qualities throughout life—whether you deserve to be treated well or not, whether you provide incentive or not.

Ladies, if you have to beg him to go to church now, imagine how exhausted you’ll be when you have to do that week after week for the rest of your life.

Your pursuits may not be identical, but they do need to be compatible. This is an important factor in discerning whether or not God has ordained this relationship.

In the end, the happiest people are not those who are actively seeking a mate, but those who are actively seeking their Maker.