Let’s Not Shackle the Single Life: Grace Goes Both Ways

A single life need not and should not be a makeshift affair.

The warm evening drifted into dusk. My aunt and I went out on the porch after the dinner dishes had been washed and put away, the kitchen floor swept, the fixtures polished. In two months I would begin college. My parents had raised me with the question, What are you going to do? always in front of me. That night even the summer stars seemed to ask it.

My aunt had a career, a translator-linguist with Wycliffe Bible Translators. And she was single. Was she happy? Or, at least, content? Why had she decided to remain single? As we sat on the porch that summer evening, I asked her these questions.

Did she regret her decision? No, she answered without hesitating. A married woman cannot work as efficiently or with as much concentration as a single woman. Her husband expects certain things of her, and if she has children, they make many more demands. Her time and her interests are greatly divided, and the work—in her case Bible translation—must suffer.

What I heard in church, what we were taught explicitly and implicitly, was quite different from that. God’s best for woman is marriage. She was created to help man and to bear children. However, since there aren’t enough men to go around, a woman should be prepared to accept God’s second best for her. In college, I sat through several lectures about how to keep bitterness out of your life if you were never “chosen,” how to turn the deepest disappointment God could give you—not marrying—into a spiritual victory. (At the same time, you were told not to go out looking for a husband, which was considered unbecoming to a woman.) Only rarely did a speaker admit that God chooses some women to be single.

Certainly God’s general pattern for living is the family—husband, wife, children. My own family, my parents, siblings, and assorted relatives, mean a great deal to me. But is God’s general pattern for the race necessarily his pattern for everyone? I wanted to see and hear a balanced view of life, not just an offhand, unconvincing tip-of-the-hat to singleness.

Given years of such training, no wonder that Christian women look upon singleness as a burden. A cross. A thorn in the flesh. God’s refining fire. Being referred to as “God’s unclaimed blessings” (“I don’t understand it; she’s so attractive, and such a good cook”) doesn’t help. A woman had to be blessed with a large amount of self-confidence to overcome—or override—the negative views of remaining single.

Can a Christian woman choose to be single? Perhaps a benefit from the secular push for equality among the sexes will be that women in the Christian community will be granted that opportunity. (Men have always had it; I’ve never heard anyone call them “unclaimed blessings.”)

Singleness offers freedom. Without the traditional ties, a woman can decide what God wants her to do and then give herself to the work wholeheartedly. The evangelical community has allowed that freedom to women missionaries serving on foreign fields but not to women at home. Now that we’ve broadened our views to see that education and business and the arts are professions in which Christian men can serve God, we should admit women in there, too.

It’s not enough, however, to say that women have this freedom, or to say that we respect their freedom to choose a single life. Our actions often belie our words—and our words may say more than we realize. As a married woman said to me a couple of years ago, “Are you just going to have a career?” (I don’t rule out the possibility of combining a career and marriage, though for myself I think it would be difficult.)

There is more than just a career involved here. A single woman is free to develop deeper friendships than she might have the physical and emotional energy for if she were married. Her scope need not be limited in any direction; in many ways, a single woman is not bound by space or time. She can and ought to have close ties with other single people, with married couples, with families, as well as with her colleagues, male and female, single and married.

Don’t overlook the need for associating with children. Become friends with a few of them. A single woman is not devoid of maternal instinct (though I think both men and women have a need to love and be loved by children). You also need friends who are much older than you. Having friends of all ages gives you a different perspective on life, helps broaden your outlook, and provides continuity.

God wants to pull all the fragments of a personality into unity; integration is the goal. An overdeveloped career and underdeveloped or nonexistent friendships misuses God’s gift of freedom.

The need to give and receive affection—a spiritual desire—is far greater than the need for physical contact with another human being. If you have the one, you can bear not having the other. It’s when affection is missing that physical hunger gnaws at you.

To be single is not to forego the traditional “womanly” pursuits. Whether you live alone or with a husband and children, a house or apartment is still a home that requires “homemaking.” And marital status has nothing to do with the desire for warm, comfortable, aesthetically pleasing surroundings. God gave each of us a desire for beauty; it is part of our desire for him, who is loveliness incarnate. Why should a single woman reject that part of her image as a creature of God?

Meals should be pleasurable no matter what your marital state. Tom Howard is quite right when he says in Splendour in the Ordinary that a meal, whether a cheese sandwich or a cheese soufflé, is an image of the eucharistic feast and ought to be treated thus. I am a better and more imaginative cook now than I was five years ago. I am free to experiment on myself and my friends. I have the time and the money to entertain people around the dinner table, something I might not want or be able to do if I cooked for a family three times a day every day.

A single woman has the freedom to use her money as she thinks best. God loves a cheerful giver, and generosity marks an open heart. But it’s not always easy to be generous when you have a family to support. Does a charity or mission seem particularly worthwhile? Give it your money and your time. Does a friend or acquaintance have a need that you or your money could help? You aren’t tied to thoughts of practicality.

A single life need not and should not be a makeshift affair. What interests you? Inner city work? Music? Children’s books? Would you have a piano if you were married? Get one. Would you entertain? You don’t need a host to be a hostess. I’ve known women who wanted furniture and fixtures of their own—in short, homes—yet kept putting if off, in case they should marry. Don’t wait. You can always sell furniture.

Yet there are dangers in being single. Most people think first of loneliness. That is not a particular danger for me. I enjoy being alone, and many of my favorite occupations are best done alone. Silence is a precious gift; don’t discount it. No single person needs to be lonely if she has cultivated friends and sought to serve them. She, of course, needs to be served as well. No one should always give and never take. That throws what Charles Williams called the doctrine of coinherence completely out of shape. God calls the community of believers to bear one another’s burdens. That is, we bear as we are borne. Sometimes it is easier to help than to allow ourselves to be helped. Grace works both ways. In seeking to serve, a single woman should not strive to become a slave.

The reverse of that is selfishness—another real danger. If you have no one but yourself to consider, the trap can be sprung before you realize it. That, too, can limit the freedom of being single. Work, for example, can become so important that, like bread rising in a bowl, it takes up all the available space. This is my particular danger. Or, you can become miserly with your money. Here again friends and family play a vital part. You need people around you who love you enough to warn you. It’s not easy on them or on you. But the ultimate goal of an integrated life reflecting the image of God should overcome any pain involved.

Jesus is the example to follow. He was single. He was born to serve. He had a God-appointed purpose to fulfill. His unique nature, God incarnate, and his unique goal, the salvation of mankind, should have given him, of all people, the right to be completely singleminded. Yet that is not how he perfectly fulfilled God’s will. He had deep friendships among all sorts of people—men, women, single, married. That was his work, an intimate part of his ultimate mission of dying on the cross for our sins. “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” That was Jesus. His relationships with Mary, Martha, Peter, and the other disciples helped prepare him for his death. No one can love in the abstract. He allowed himself to be interrupted by needy children, distraught fathers, hungry men, and sick women. Jesus’ disciples sought to protect him; he sought to make himself vulnerable.

Each of us has a work to do, and a single person is in a position to do it more fully than a married person. She can give herself to developing the gifts God has given her. Jesus’ parable of the talents urges us to do that. A woman who struggles with being single has little energy left to give to anything—not work, not friends or family, not God. The Christian community is culpable. It has contributed to an “old maid, disappointed spinster” state of mind. That shackles God’s new life with old manacles. Jesus offers joy. Shouldn’t we?

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