7 Myths about Singleness

by Sam Allberry

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.

“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

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

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.

“Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.” (Mark 3:33–35)

His real family is defined along spiritual rather than biological lines.

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. It doesn’t occur to many of them that the very passages they’d prefer to hear a married person speak from were in most cases written by an apostle who was himself single.

feeling more and more like an endangered species as the only single in a world increasingly full of couples.

But even worse than people speculating about when you might get married is when they eventually give up speculating about when you might get married. And worse than the realization that life isn’t going according to how you’d planned is when you begin to realize that it probably never will.

remaining unmarried can alter how others perceive our maturity, and we feel the pain of that perception.

We may be able to deceive other people; we will never deceive God. There is simply no thought he hasn’t seen and doesn’t know everything about.