7 Myths about Singleness

by Sam Allberry

Jesus was not calling others to a standard he was not willing to embrace himself.

He is the humanity all of us are called to be but which none of us are. He is the most complete and fully human person who ever lived. So his not being married is not incidental. It shows us that none of these things—marriage, romantic fulfillment, sexual experience—is intrinsic to being a full human being. The moment we say otherwise, the moment we claim a life of celibacy to be dehumanizing, we are implying that Jesus himself is only subhuman.

The temptation for many who are single is to compare the downs of singleness with the ups of marriage. And the temptation for some married people is to compare the downs of marriage with the ups of singleness, which is equally dangerous. The grass will often seem greener on the other side. Whichever gift we have—marriage or singleness—the other can easily seem far more attractive. Paul’s point is to show singles that there are some downs unique to marriage—some “worldly troubles”—that we are spared by virtue of our singleness.

I think being unhappily married must be so much harder than being unhappily single.

Paul is not saying that singleness is spiritual and marriage unspiritual. Nor is he saying that singleness is easy but marriage is hard. No, the contrast is between complexity and simplicity. Married life is more complicated; singleness is more straightforward.

I can easily become anxious about “the things of me.” It is easy to do what I want, how I want, when I want. I don’t have a “significant other” to have to flex around. If I want to go out, I can. If I want to have some space for myself, I can. For us singles it is much easier to eat when we want and sleep when we want. 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.

If we balk at the idea of singleness being a gift, it is not because God has not understood us but because we have not understood him.

Given what we’ve already seen about the negative ways in which singleness has been viewed, many Christians have taken “the gift of singleness” to mean some special capacity to cope with it. It’s an unusual endowment that enables certain chosen people to survive as single. It’s like a superpower.

To think any situation necessitates sin denies the perfect unity and integrity of God. It makes him like us, inconsistent and contradictory. It also denies his goodness, suggesting he is in the habit of stitching us up: calling us to do something and then withholding all ability to do it.

“none of us is missing out.”6 All of us get something of the goodness of God.

It is hard to imagine a guy saying this on bended knee while proffering a ring to his girlfriend: “I’ve been struggling to exercise self-control as a single person, so I think I should marry rather than be aflame with passion.”

Not everyone struggling to exercise self-control in this area will necessarily be able to find someone appropriate to marry. The presence of significant sexual desires does not justify disobeying other biblical commands about, say, not marrying someone of the same sex or someone who does not share our faith in Christ. We can’t just take 1 Corinthians 7:9 on its own and deduce from it that God now somehow owes us some form of sexual intimacy.

We mustn’t blame selfishly deferring marriage on singleness any more than we should blame selfishness in marriage on marriage itself.

Singleness, like marriage, is a good thing. It needs to be received appropriately and held in a biblical perspective, as does marriage. When we honor it, as God intends us to, as a good gift, then we won’t presume it needs some spiritual superpower to make it bearable.

But the choice between marriage and celibacy is not the choice between intimacy and loneliness, or at least it shouldn’t be. We can manage without sex. We know this—Jesus himself lived as a celibate man. So did Paul. Many others have done so as well. But we are not designed to live without intimacy. Marriage is not the sole answer to the observation, “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Gen. 2:18).

C. 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.

Within all of us is a deep yearning to know and be known. It can sometimes feel as though sex will deliver this. It seems to be a means of exposing who we are to someone else. After all, older generations used to use the language of “knowing” as a way to speak of having sex. But divorced from real relationship, sex may be a form of physical intimacy, but only that. It will not provide the deeper intimacy we need in life. It is possible to have lots of sex and no real intimacy.

But the reverse is also true. It is possible to have a lot of intimacy in life and for none of it to be sexual.

The writer of the proverb seems to assume we can have “many” such folk around. That is certainly more true today than it’s ever been. Technology has made it easier than ever to have an abundance of companions. Social media keeps us in touch with dramatically more people than we could otherwise keep up with—all of those school friends and old work colleagues, the former neighbors, even people we’ve dated. Now we’re still nominally in touch and kind of in the loop with all of them. I don’t feel like I’ve lost touch when it takes all of three seconds to beam up their homepage and pretty much know exactly what they’re up to.

But the danger is that this creates the illusion of true friendship without the actual reality of it.

Having mates we can share time and have a laugh with is no bad thing, but in and of itself is not what Proverbs says we need in order to live well.

A friend is someone who has chosen you. The obligation is entirely self-imposed, which can make it all the sweeter. As C. S. Lewis once put it, friendship is “the least natural of loves; the least instinctive, organic, biological, gregarious and necessary. . . . The species, biologically considered, has no need of it.”

Marriage is not just a close friendship with sex added. Nor is close friendship marriage without sex. Marriage, by definition and necessity, must be exclusive. It is covenantal. Friendship is not. My friendship with even a closest friend is not threatened by the growth of a similar friendship with someone else. It is not a zero-sum game. In fact, the opposite is often the case.

In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. . . . Hence true friendship is the least jealous of loves.8

Oil and perfume make the heart glad, and the sweetness of a friend comes from his earnest counsel. (Prov. 27:9)

I think of it as one of the enduring highlights of our friendship, because it is a gift to have someone who knows your soul, knows the best and worst about you, yet through it all is deeply committed to you.

A friend is someone you tell your secrets to, someone you let in on the real things that are going on in your life. They’re the ones who really know what’s going on with you. They know your temptations, and they know what most delights your heart. They know how to pray for you instinctively.

As a single person, there is a depth of intimacy my married friends enjoy that I am not able to experience—to share pretty much all of life with one other person. But it is not as simple to say that I have less intimacy in my life as a result.

Singleness lends itself to this kind of intimacy; it provides the opportunity and freedom for it. So while I might not know the unique depth of intimacy a married friend enjoys, there is a unique breadth of intimacy available to singles that married friends would not be as able to experience.

Jesus responds to all this. He doesn’t tell them to just grit their teeth and wait for the age to come when it will finally be worth it. No. Jesus shows them it will be worth it even in this life. Whatever someone might have to leave behind to follow him, he will replace, in godly kind and far greater measure. Even those who leave whole family networks behind for the sake of Jesus will receive back from him vastly more—a hundredfold.

Instead, we see that our spiritual family needs our biological family, and our biological family needs our spiritual family. If church is our family, then the boundary of our physical family life should be porous and flexible rather than fixed and inviolable. It is easy to see how this can help those of us who are single. It can be a great blessing to be involved in the physical family life of others.

For them it is a daily chore. But for me it is a novelty to do this for a few days. I never get to do a school run. What parents often find part of the mundane grind of daily life, some of us singles might actually enjoy. Plus it’s a great way to chat with their kids and find out what their school life is like. I find out who their friends are and what classes they most love and hate (and get to pick up the latest colloquialisms). I know how to pray for them a whole ton better after even a short journey in a car.

I love it when I go round to married friends’ homes and see not only (or even) their wedding photos, pictures of their children and whole-family holiday snaps, but also photos of other families and friends (sometimes including me!). This reminds me that “family” doesn’t just mean the nuclear family, that I am not on my own, and that as a Christian I am part of a wonderful wider family.3

In other words, we have all been saved by divine hospitality. We were far away from God but have now been brought into his presence, into his very household. God has taken us in and seated us at his table. And he has done all this through the blood of Christ. He was forsaken and left out so that we could be folded in. The sign that we have received this kind of hospitality is that we offer it to others.

I think too of the opportunities I have as a single man to encourage my friends who are married (which is the vast majority of them). One way I can use my singleness is to commit to praying for them as husbands. I don’t have personal experience of marriage to offer them, but I know enough of what Scripture says to know what they should be aiming for as husbands and to know how much they’ll need support and accountability to get there.

A sudden, unexpected moment of bereavement. So a verse like this one in Titus is an amazing encouragement. There is a kind of parenthood available to us even as unmarried singles. Titus is Paul’s begotten.

But what brought Mary greatest blessing is something that any of us can share with her. Jesus says there’s a blessing greater than that of a parent, even than that of being a parent to the Son of God. And that is to be an obedient Christian. If you hear the Word of God and keep it, you are more blessed than any parent of any child. But there is more.

If the blessing of physical sons and daughters is not itself the greatest blessing, then it’s also the case that physical children are not the only—or even the greatest—kind of children we can have. Men and women produce physical children. But the gospel itself also produces offspring. We see this in how Isaiah foretells the death of Jesus: It was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring. (Isa. 53:10)

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” I’d evidently been neglecting The Team.

Being married and having children makes it easier to identify with and minister to those with families in a local congregation. Little wonder that many churches look for new pastors to be people with families.

If someone thinks it’s laughable that I find myself preaching on passages directed to husbands and wives or to parents, they’re assuming that human experience matters more than divine wisdom.

Sometimes we singles can be not only more flexible but also more responsive than our married friends. There is a danger here, of course. This kind of freedom, when it comes with enthusiasm for ministry and lots of energy, means we can neglect giving time we need to building up friendships and investing in community.

Just as marriage by itself isn’t a qualification for gospel ministry, so also singleness by itself isn’t a hindrance.

He has come as a savior, and this shows us what kind of savior. He is not a savior who is happy only to lift us from the water, plop us back onto dry land, and be done with us, nor one merely willing to extend the act of saving into an ongoing kind of nodding acquaintance. As savior, he intends to be a husband to the people he’s rescued.

marriage “is the wraparound concept for the entire Bible.”6 It illustrates the big thing God is doing in the universe: making a people for his Son. Ortlund continues: The eternal love story is why God created the universe and why God gave us marriage in Eden and why couples fall in love and get married in the world today. Every time a bride and groom stand there and take their vows, they are reenacting the biblical love story, whether they realize it or not.7 And this story provides the key to understanding our sexuality.

First, we won’t demean or trivialize it. It points to Christ and his people. We’ll therefore take it seriously. In the old language of the Book of Common Prayer, it “therefore is not by any to be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly, to satisfy men’s carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God.”9 It matters and, married or not, all of us need to uphold it: “Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled” (Heb. 13:4).

Marriage is not ultimate, but it points to the thing that is. Marriage itself is not meant to fulfill us but to point to that which does. The real marriage is the one we find in Christ. Our marriages on earth are just the visual aid of this.

“If at some point you find your marriage is a disappointment to you, please bear in mind that’s because it’s supposed to be. It’s not meant to fulfill you, but to point to the thing that does.” Seeing this ultimate significance of marriage as pointing to our union with Christ is vital. Nothing gives marriage more dignity, but nothing better protects us from investing ultimate significance in it.

If God made us sexual beings, how can it be good that we don’t in any way fulfill that aspect of who we are? Our married friends can feel satisfied that they’re honoring their sexual feelings, giving expression to them in a godly way and in the proper context of marriage, and thereby honoring their sexuality as it points beyond itself to its ultimate referent in Christ.

The meaning of marriage in no way exhausts the way in which our sexual desires, met or unmet, can play a constructive role in our lives and be a means of honoring the gospel.