Party of One: Truth, Longing, and the Subtle Art of Singleness

by Joy Beth Smith

Marriage is not inevitable. Motherhood is not inevitable. And yet, at any given family gathering, I hear this phrase at least once: “God’s got such a wonderful husband in store for you. Just wait. Keep being faithful.”

God never promises me a God-fearing husband, satisfaction guaranteed.

There is so much life God has given me to live, with or without a husband, and I can’t waste it sitting in my disappointments. In fact, I refuse to.

Tables are for community building and healing.

When people try to pair us up, two by two, and shove us in the ark of the marrieds, it feels as though we’re being pawned off, as if we’re compromising the potential of what God has for us.

You weren’t meant to fight through this life alone, to do battle by yourself—but the companion promised to you won’t necessarily wear a platinum wedding band and fold towels the wrong way.

We can’t continue to put prophecies in the Lord’s mouth and call it comfort. We can’t believe these promises and call them sound theology.

This is one of my biggest pet peeves with our current message surrounding singleness in the church: singleness is only preferable or equal to marriage when we pull a Mother Teresa and dedicate our whole lives to serving God—or, more accurately, serving God in a visible and public way that other people acknowledge.

We have to stop treating the single life like it’s a race to the altar. I’m ready for my parade. I’m ready to trade in my sneakers for a tiara and a sash as I do a princess wave from atop a float. I’m tired of racing toward an invisible finish line that keeps moving farther away the closer I get. I’m tired of staring enviously at the girls who are passing me (and all the while pushing aside my thoughts of tripping them). I’m tired of placing all my hopes and dreams on crossing a finish line that may never come.

Being single can make you selfish. It can stunt your spiritual growth—but it doesn’t have to.

I have lived a lot of life, and it’s a discredit to me and to what God is doing in and through me to refuse to acknowledge that.

At the end of the day, someone else’s failure to choose and love you properly does not make you a failure. You have to learn to love yourself, to believe you are capable of joy and spiritual growth and wisdom in your singleness, and that you are worthy of these things and that you are worthy of love.

Singleness and intimacy are not at odds, despite the messaging we’ve received.

How do we love ourselves when we feel so unlovable? And what is making us so hard to love? These questions run deep in our souls. They multiply and reverberate, picking up speed, until the only choice is to say the words aloud or allow them to tear us apart.

The tragedy of both the financial and relational prosperity gospels is that when someone is going through hard times, it is “a sign” that they don’t have enough faith. The more we believe in the prosperity gospel, the more we tend to sound like the Pharisees who said the reason the man was born blind was because of his parents’ sin. . . .

We’re not called to remove ourselves from pain.

one of my favorite verses in Hosea: “I don’t want your sacrifices—I want your love; I don’t want your offerings—I want you to know me” (6:6 TLB).

Perhaps in making a big deal about hugging, we were eroticizing something that wouldn’t naturally be sexual. Did purity culture make purity more difficult?

The One is a mirage we’ve constructed to romanticize the very real, sanctifying process of marriage, and it’s hurting us, y’all.

There is much to be gained in loving people who aren’t the easiest to love. So as hard as dating is, it’s worth it. And as much as it takes from you, it gives you something too: It gives you the opportunity to learn more about yourself and your needs.

Any man who chooses his wife based on who he believes will bend most easily to his will isn’t looking for a marriage partner but rather a parrot.

I came to realize that when I pretend to be smaller and lesser, my muscles atrophy and I’m actually both smaller and lesser than I was before. I can’t live that life. I can’t make myself less so someone else feels like enough.

We should be telling people, ‘Use this time while you’re single to become a better person. Get to know yourself—that way if you do get married, you don’t have to spend years in your marriage trying to figure out who you are. That’s one of the benefits of being older, with our eggs drying up as we speak. If we do get married in our thirties and forties, we’re more confident. We’ve already resolved issues within ourselves. We have more patience because we know who we are.”

Marriage won’t fix us, because it was never meant to complete us or heal us in the first place.

Someone once told me that you can always discern the Lord’s call on your life based on one question: What is it that, when you imagine your life without it, brings you to tears?