On Singleness, Part One

I want to write about singleness.

I know that is a cliché topic for a twenty-five-year-old lady, but I don’t think that my thoughts are necessarily as shallow as they could be, and they are long in coming because I don’t always have an outlet for clarifying them with an objective audience who will just let me talk, without feeling pity or, worse, guilt.

I guess I should start by saying that on paper I am ready for a relationship. I value the institution of marriage, but am incredibly happy at work and home so I am not (that I know of) needy or discontent without it. I’m diligent, good at domesticity, professionally successful, fiscally responsible, and personally pleasant. And yet, here I am suddenly and inexplicably teary-eyed as these things are on the screen in front of me, because if it is not any of those things that are against me, what is the problem? Boys have been in love with me before, and I have never heard anyone say, “Oh, Jane is too –” cold, or unpleasant, or unspectacular, or boring, or anything. I guess I should introduce Exhibit One in my current thoughts on singleness: please suspend reading this blog post and read “Singled Out For Good.” I read that article a few months ago, and since reading it, I have become rather superior and snobbish about any lesser treatments of the topic, but there were also several good points in a recent Boundless article, which I will concede to liking in spite of my lofty attachment to “Singled Out”. In the article, published a few weeks back and entitled, “Sexy Single Women,” the author summed up the problem perfectly several paragraphs apart:

 

How is a single woman, who is seeking to live out Christ’s call to purity and holy living, to deal with her sex drive?....Does Chastity require a denial of sexuality?...What about the Boundless reader who argued, “It is unnatural and arguably unhealthy for people with average sex drive to go without sex for a decade or more during their sexual prime”? So, if her 20s and 30s are clicking up on the odometer with no husband and no legitimate outlet for sex on the horizon, what’s a Christian girl to do?... “Wait a minute,” you might say, “Sexuality may be a great gift for people who are married, but what about me? I don’t get to have sex. My sex drive is something I have to manage, not something I get to enjoy.”

 

Anyway, this is incredibly relevant to me because lately I have been experiencing a lot of angst over this very topic. Specifically, I work with an office that is at present 100% sexually active. I observe how sex dictates their days. I can tell what is happening in their lives by watching the astonishing repercussions those private lives have upon their public ones. At the same time, the romantic attentions I get these days seem universally to be limited to coming from non-Christian boys; besides exhausting my resources of Christian guys (more on that in Part Three upcoming next week), the bad boys my age have seen the world, have spent their nights with easy girls, and are ready to settle down with a good lady whom they think they can win over if they just try a little bit harder. I cannot return one smidgen of their affection and still maintain my integrity. I must respond to every such overture with the stalwart behavior of an intractable virgin, because to return such attention is to unquestionably jeopardize my responsibility before God to be romantically involved only with believers. A few weeks ago my boss came into my area and asked, “Have you seen your company car?” Some vendor, persistent and dazzling, had sought out my car and put roses in the door handle, without any prelude of a note. They were just blooming, and they were my favorite – Double Delight, with white and pink – and he had stripped the thorns off, so that all that waited for me was sweetness and long stems. When my boss left, I threw the roses in my trash can. I felt indescribable unrest, a fit of agitation, because I adore long-stem de-thorned Double Delight roses, and because mostly I am a good, creative girl who would love nothing more than to be someone’s exciting, admiring, inventive, spontaneous girlfriend but how is forced to choose between honor to God by the suppression of my sexuality (in addition to most of my sensuality) and the indulging of my flesh, when the choice is obvious. I threw the roses away because roses are emotional forerunners to everything for which I was created and of which I dare not partake. Boundless began to address the problem simply, which may help or may not but at least did not pretend to ignore any of this:

 

Singles demonstrate that the things to which [sex points] are more important than the things themselves. Singles testify that the temporary will, in the end, give way to the eternal….The way you conduct yourself sexually is much bigger than your own personal life. It has meaning that connects to the cosmic, the unseen, the eternal. To manage your sex drive…you need to understand that….your sexuality contributes to the cosmic story. It testifies to the astonishing meaning of it all.