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Kindle Notes & Highlights
The single life is not meant to be free of all responsibilities. We still have friendships and family that we need to honor.
A significant temptation for many singles, especially if we live on our own, is to become self-centered.
We need to remind ourselves, daily, that our singleness is not for us but for the Lord. It’s not for our concerns, but for his.
But this is all i feel like i have
Single people are unmarried, while we would never think of married people as unsingle. It is singleness that seems to be wanting and deficient.
S. Lewis as ever hits the nail on the head: “Those who cannot conceive Friendship as substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a friend.”1 That our culture imagines that intimacy occurs only in the context of sexual attraction goes to show how little our culture actually understands and really experiences true friendship.
A brother is stuck with you. A brother is obligated to be some kind of safety net. That is what family is for. But a friend chooses you. When someone loves you at all times, good and bad, and they don’t have to but they choose to—that person is a friend.7
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Real friendship also isn’t superficial. A friend is not merely someone who knows your Facebook page. A friend is someone who knows your soul:
By its very nature friendship is a wonderful form of intimacy. The friend is the person who knows you at your sparkling best and shameful worst and yet still loves you. To be so deeply known and so deeply loved is precious.
Singleness gives me a capacity for a range of friendships I wouldn’t be able to sustain if I was married. I have close friends ranging from twenty years younger than I to twenty years older, covering a geographical and cultural range.
What did that say about me? Am I unsorted?
Comments like this, often unintentionally, tend to imply that we singles are a little like loose threads that have been left dangling and need to be tied up. It’s like we’re still awaiting processing. Once people have become established in their own family unit, they’re good to go. They’re ready for life. Or—as my friend put it—sorted.
