Not Yet Married: The Pursuit of Joy in Singleness and Dating

by Marshall Segal

We bait each other with half-truths about the best parts of ourselves, always selecting exactly what to show and how to show it, only revealing what might entice or intrigue each other.

Jesus may ask more of us, but he does so to secure something far better for us.

One of the most radical and countercultural things we can do today to declare our faith in Jesus is to marry someone and remain faithful to that spouse until we die.

If we are in Christ, we are never again defined by what we are not.

Because of that, Not Yet Married is not a book about waiting quietly in the corner of the world for God to bring a spouse, but it is about mobilizing you—a growing generation and movement of single men and women—out of shame, selfishness, and self-pity into deeper levels of love for Christ and more consistent and creative ministry to others.

I desperately want you to know that you were made for more than marriage—that marriage will never satisfy or fulfill your deepest needs and cravings. That hole in our hearts will swallow and destroy any relationship if we look to a person to make us happy or whole.

I could have written another book just about dating, but I didn’t. I wrote about singleness and dating, because the most important things I learned in singleness and dating were not about dating or marriage. They were about life and God, about finding real purpose and real satisfaction deeper than any romance.

But God did something uniquely and stunningly beautiful when he brought man and woman together. And we will never date well until we have a big, clear, and compelling idea of what marriage was really meant to be.

We want to date in a way that makes Jesus look real and reliable to others around us.

The surest love, the fullest happiness, and the highest purpose are all available to you in Jesus, just as you are.

Every joy here carries some kind of empty, unsatisfying aftertaste. Wrapped up with that desire to be happy is a desire to be known and loved.

Discontentment and disappointment rise up in the not-yet-married life when we start pursuing that love, joy, and significance in a person and not in God. We become miserable not because we’re not married, but because many of us think marriage might finally make us happy.

The Bible says that people who are fixated on experiencing as much happiness and pleasure as possible here on earth—in a career, in sex, drinking, or spending, even in marriage—are like those who dream they are eating and drinking, but wake up hungry, thirsty, and without anything to eat or drink (Isa. 29:8).

He wants us to be full, not empty; to be loved, not lonely. One of my favorite verses in the Bible says, “In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Ps. 16:11).

“No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor. 2:9). Your Father loves you, far more than a future spouse ever will or could.

The shortest answer is that we were meant to show others a bit of who God is, to share and display the love we’ve experienced with him. We’re seven billion Instagrams of God.

“God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.”2 God begins to look like everything he already is through me and my life—his perfect holiness, his flawless justice, his unstoppable love—when he and his love begin to be everything to me.

I learned that the bigger and more glorious God is in my heart, the bigger and more glorious he will be through my life, and the more I’ll be what he made me to be.

Whatever you do, do it to say something about what God has done for you and about how much he means to you. Don’t do anything just to do it, just to fit in and follow the world’s script for your life. Let all of your life—your waiting, your dating, your wanting—be brought up into the purpose God had for you when he made you, weaving you together with love in your mother’s womb (Ps. 139:13). Build your life on his love and make your purpose his glory.

Most of all, he taught me that living for his glory is not about building the biggest ministry or winning the most people but about faithfully telling people about my King, wherever he leads me. In fact, his glory often shines even more brightly in the small, quiet, unseen things we do for him. In people like Will.

We delegate the mission to people in full-time Christian ministry and look for free time to do some service project in the name of Jesus.

You need to know that there are some unique dangers in singleness—especially in unwanted singleness. He loves to deceive and discourage single people in the church and derail our devotion and ministry. He convinces us we’re not gifted or that our gifts can’t be used for ministry. He isolates us from the people around us—those who can encourage and challenge us in our walk with Christ, and those who need us in their lives. He distracts us, persuading us to pour ourselves into school, or work, or entertainment.

But if Jesus Christ died to save you and sent his Spirit to live in you, there’s nothing junior varsity about you at all. And nothing in marriage is necessary for a meaningful and fruitful Christian life. Otherwise, Paul (and Jesus) just drew short straws.

Marry if you must, but be warned that following Jesus is not easier when you join yourself to another sinner in a fallen world. While marriage may bring joy, help, and relief in certain areas, it immediately multiplies our distractions, because we’re responsible for this other person, his or her needs, dreams, and growth.

If God leads you to marry, you may never again know a time like the one you’re in right now. A season of singleness is not the minor leagues of marriage. It has the potential to be a unique period of undivided devotion to Christ and undistracted ministry to others.

With God’s help and leading, you have the freedom to invest yourself, your time, your resources, your youth, and your flexibility in relationships, ministries, and causes that can bear unbelievable fruit—to live single, satisfied, and sent.

1. Remember that true greatness will often look like weakness.

In fact, true greatness will often look like weakness, surrender, defeat, and even death.

True greatness isn’t the kind that appears in bold letters on our favorite website. No, it shows up in the details of other people’s lives, in lives like Will’s. If we aspire to be great, we need to give ourselves to the small, mundane, easily overlooked needs around us.

2. Notice the people God has already put around you.

3. Practice selflessness while you’re still single.

4. Say yes to the spontaneous. It’s just a fact—marriage murders spontaneity, not entirely but massively. One of your greatest spiritual gifts as a single person is your yes. Yes to a random phone conversation. Yes to coffee. Yes to help with the move. Yes to stepping in when someone’s sick. Yes to a late-night movie or the special event downtown. You have the unbelievable freedom to say yes when married people can’t even ask the question.

Be willing to say yes and be a blessing to others, even when you don’t always feel like it.

5. Do radical, time-consuming things for God.

We might call it resting, but too often it looks, smells, and sounds a lot like we’re wasting our singleness—

The problem with so many of us today is that we have close to no anxiety about spiritual realities and endless anxiety about the things of this world.

Marriage will not complete you (at least not in the way most people imagine); it will divide you. Paul loved marriage and what a Christian marriage says to the world (Eph. 5:22–27, 32), but he also knew what love like that costs.

The blessings—and they are many—come with burdens to bear.

All of Paul’s deepest joys came through sacrifice and suffering (Rom. 5:3–5). Like everything difficult done for Christ, marriage strengthens us to endure in faith, refines and purifies our character, reinforces the hope we have in our Redeemer, and reminds us of the flood of God’s love that’s been poured into hearts and lives.

So why does Paul encourage people to think twice before getting married? He says, “I want you to be free from anxieties. The unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord. But the married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided” (1 Cor. 7:32–34).

We have to feel a constant responsibility for one another, being attentive to each other’s needs—daily (and joyfully) being distracted with one another. The distractions are not (necessarily) burdensome, but they’re real.

We should be passionate, persistent, and anxious for them to see that he’s better than anything this world offers and that living for anything else only leads to awful, conscious, never-ending pain and punishment.

Life is short, Jesus is coming, and heaven and hell are real. Simple, weighty truths like these are our weapons in the war against distraction.

The call is not to think about Jesus and only Jesus all the time. God wants us to enjoy every gift for his glory, and he gives us lots of gifts besides his Son.

Gaining freedom from our phones requires being liberated from lies like these that bind the technology to us like links in a cold, steel chain.

And he’ll be especially and graciously attentive when it comes to protecting and providing for those who love him (Matt. 6:26–30).

We work hard to be in the know but end up knowing everything about nothing.

We were made and saved not to be loved by social media—by whatever distractions bind us to our phone—but by the almighty God of holiness and mercy.

This almighty God of holiness and mercy is not just a judge or a king, but he’s a dad. He watches over and loves you as one of his own sons or daughters. You have an all-wise and all-powerful Father in heaven, who knows everything you need and promises to deliver it precisely when you need it. Jesus says: Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. . . . Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. (Matt. 6:25, 32–33)

We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts. (Rom. 5:3–5)