10 Reasons Why Your Single Christian Friends Aren't Married

And what you can do about it

The First Law of Content Creation is that you have no way of predicting what pieces of your content will be ignored and what will explode. One day you can sweat and strain like Van Gogh over your little masterpiece and have everyone miss your artistry. The next day you can dash something off in five minutes and come back an hour later to find it going viral, along with the inevitable small dumpster fires in your comments.

That second kind of day was my day yesterday. It all started with a comment on some much smaller-scale threading I’d done about male loneliness and Christian vocation. A whole topic unto itself, sparked by some very sad breaking church news about a conservative Anglican minister who was burdened with being a poster boy for “gay Christian” celibacy and has now confessed a moral failing. The basic gist of my thread was that unhappy celibacy can make a ministry leadership vocation imprudent, and this is one of many reasons why it’s important not to make earnestly restless Christian men feel inferior for not applying their gifts in a “ministry”-specific context. I’ll probably develop those thoughts some more, but I prefer to wait a minute on writing a full Take when heavy news like this is barely a couple days old.

Anyway, one of my most annoying regular followers decided to do some armchair psychologizing and declare that that thread was really all about me justifying my own “desire not to marry.” He then asked me (“serious question”) whether if I were Catholic, I would be a nun. I suppose I should have been mad, but it was just too ludicrously funny. To keep the joke going, another reader consulted Grok and concluded that I do look pretty good in a habit. Sound of Music references ensued. Then again, it was noted that for Maria, being a nun actually was a viable strategy for meeting a man. Let the record show that I too would accept marrying a young Christopher Plummer as the solution to my problem.

Cliiiimb eeeeev’ry mountain/Foooord eeeev’ry streeeeeam…

Where was I? Oh yes, so, inspired by this fatuous bit of psychologizing, I decided to write a thread solely devoted to Reasons Why Your Single Friends Aren’t Married Yet. “Straight” and “Christian” were unspoken but implied modifiers. I have various thoughts about how best to serve people who aren’t romantically inclined towards the opposite sex, but that wasn’t my focus here. Meanwhile, although some of these reasons are universal, I had a Christian audience in mind and wrote them from within a Christian frame, where premarital sex and marriage outside the faith are off the table. (I would also argue that deliberately childless marriage is off the table, but that’s a little hotter for some people to handle.) I had no great expectations for these musings. I was just irritated, and as I tend to do when I’m irritated, I posted through it.

As I write, this thread has accumulated thousands of likes, hundreds of bookmarks, and the aforementioned very lively replies. I should hasten to stress that comments have been overwhelmingly thoughtful, positive and encouraging, with various fellow singles thanking me for making them feel seen. It was a nice but strange new feeling for me, because I don’t do very much writing around this topic. The last time I touched on it hereabouts is here. Frankly, it’s a little personal, and I’m a little shy about personal essay-ing in general. Plus, I dread coming across as a whiner, which if I’m being brutally honest, some Professionally Single Christians kind of do. By whining I mean, for example, complaining when churches single out mothers on Mother’s Day and give them roses or something. Or guilt-tripping married couples for not “adopting” them like some kind of third wheel. I wish I was making this up. But things in this vein dominate much of the “Christian singleness” landscape, and it’s deeply embarrassing for those of us who are just trying to go about our normal single lives.

At the same time, I also think misconceptions can spring up about exactly what’s keeping us singles single. It can be assumed that this is something we’re all deliberately prolonging because we want a career more than we want a family, or because we simply like the freedom singleness offers. I don’t deny that we do find things to like about that freedom, but I speak for many people when I say it’s ongoingly touched with melancholy. To those who wonder, “Well in that case, why not just get married?” this is my attempt to start explaining why it’s not necessarily that simple. There were originally twelve “reasons,” but for tidiness, I have decided to collapse them into ten.

1. We missed the “school dating” boat.

Maybe we went to a high school where the pickings were slim. Maybe we were homeschooled and spent most of our social time hanging out with elderly folks, families, and little kids. Maybe we were just really awkward and nerdy, had no fashion sense, and never put ourselves out there on the teen dating market.

Then in college and/or graduate school, maybe we went to public universities where, for the Christian committed to not dating outside the faith, once again the pickings were slim. Or maybe we went to single-sex schools. One way or another, we missed this boat too.

2. We missed the “career dating” boat.

“In this economy,” we must all take the work we can get, and for many Christians this will look like taking work that doesn’t put them in ongoing contact with like-minded believing colleagues. They’re not teaching at a Christian university, working for a Christian magazine or think tank, or in other lines of work where they are surrounded by potentially dateable peers. And even if they are blessed to have “Christian ideas work,” it could be remote work that doesn’t provide many tangible mingling opportunities.

3. We missed the “church dating” boat.

Some of us simply didn’t grow up in churches where we had many opportunities to hang out with people of our own age. People raised in “big-box evangelical” subculture with youth groups etc. won’t be able to relate so much to this, but it was my own experience as someone raised in a very tiny splinter denomination where my fellow congregants were almost exclusively elderly. People might also be able to relate if they grew up in more conservative churches where social ties were built more family to family—which, to be clear, I don’t think is a bad thing at all. It just made it more likely that your first dating experience was going to happen somewhere else.

As for trying to date in “church pools” now, it’s a challenge for anyone north of their 20s who looks around and sees congregations filled with mostly families, college kids, and older folks. This is particularly true in smaller towns. Once kids grow up, they tend to move away to school, move away to buy property, and if they don’t marry their high school sweethearts, they find love in another city.

4. We are regionally challenged.

But some of us never moved to the big cities, because honestly, we didn’t really want to. We preferred not to move across the country from our parents, if we could help it. We preferred to live in a town where we could own a car and drive it to all our errands and appointments in a timely fashion. We preferred rent that was under $2000 a month.

The tradeoff for all this is that we’ve never experienced what it’s like to “network” in the flesh with a critical mass of like-minded, young, upwardly mobile Christian peers in a city like New York, or Washington, D. C. We’re okay with this tradeoff. But when we occasionally touch down in one of these places to see how the other half lives, we wonder idly what could have been.

5. We don’t love the apps.

Look, it’s not that we’re totally closed. Maybe we’ll try them again, one of these days. But they’re time-consuming, and the nicer ones cost money. And they’re kind of soul-crushing.

6. We’re choosy.

This is the most complicated and delicate one to explain, and the one for which I think singles take the most heat. We’re often warned against having a “Disneyfied” view of romance in which we demand to be “swept off our feet” by our “soulmate.” We’re told that passion is overrated, that finding someone who checks all your boxes or shares your interests is overrated, that we should just be grateful if we meet a kind, decent fellow Christian who doesn’t outright turn us off.

I think this advice is reductive and misguided. And as I think anyone with some dating experience can attest, romantic attraction is a many-splendored, many-layered, and sometimes frankly mysterious thing. People can find an intellectual spark but not be drawn to each other physically. They can find each other physically attractive but realize for whatever complicated reason that their personalities aren’t meshing. They can struggle to find a commonality of tastes, of loves, of things that get them excitedly talking to whoever has the patience to listen. Or maybe they do share a number of tastes in common, but one feels an uncomfortable sense of perpetually having to catch up with the other. Of course, not all of these things will matter to everyone, but we are all wired differently. Those of us who spend our waking hours obsessively playing with ideas know that we need someone who can play with us. For intellectually inclined women, it’s particularly important to find a man who is neither intimidated by us nor full of self-importance (and experience has taught us that sometimes these are really the same thing).

Even a single variable, like physical attraction, has many facets. Maybe a man is drawn to a woman’s body but finds her voice robotic. Maybe a woman finds a man handsome but wishes he moved and spoke more confidently. Someone could say this sort of thing is being too picky, and as a relationship deepens you can see sides of a person that shift your perspective. That is certainly possible. But sometimes these things are simply not in our power to control or change, and it’s better to know ourselves, admit what we need, and admit when something isn’t working than to shame ourselves into painfully trying to make it work. Christians need to find ways of talking maturely but forthrightly about all this instead of insisting that it’s “all about the heart,” thus leaving a vacuum where pickup artists and other cynical influencers can rush in.

Finally, for those of us who take theology seriously, there are additional challenges that can present themselves in certain kinds of cross-denominational dating. As a Protestant, I am disinclined to date a Catholic, because if he’s a good Catholic he will need to require that our children be raised Catholic as well. And then even within conservative Protestantism, important conversations need to happen about whether, say, children will be baptized as infants. One happy couple I know sat down to hash out this question early in their dating process, because they came from traditions with different answers to that question. Because they were mature and thoughtful and falling quickly in love, they reached an agreement, and they’re now having adorable babies and living happily ever after.

Lord, I see what you’ve done for them, etc.

7. We have scars.

Many of us hesitate to throw ourselves into the dating pool as energetically as we could because we have painful memories of serious relationships that didn’t work. Whatever the circumstances, whichever side broke things off, our biggest fear is repeating old mistakes and reopening old wounds. We simply can’t bear the thought of being hurt again, or of causing hurt. We realize we need to get over this and try again, but it’s easier said than done.

8. Our pool is shrinking.

The older we get, the less likely it is that we’ll find viable choices at all, and increasingly our pool will be dominated by men and women who may be godly but have a sexual history (digital or physical), or a marital history. As I’ve written before, I don’t believe the past is unredeemable, nor do I believe that all remarriage after divorce is unbiblical. I’ve seen friends and acquaintances find healing in such marriages after being abandoned. Unions between the never-married and the innocently divorced can be fruitful. It’s just a very different sort of landscape to navigate.

9. Men are waiting for stability.

Even if there is an understanding that the woman will keep up some sort of partial/remote work she enjoys, a traditional Christian man ideally hopes to provide well enough that his wife can devote herself to their children. The economy is not kind to such men. They’re not being consumeristic, they’re not just overly attached to their soy lattes and Netflix subscriptions, they’re trying to reach basically solid financial ground. Unless they either strike it very lucky very early or enter a career path with the promise of a payoff on the other side of debt, this will take time. And the longer it takes for them to find their feet, the more defeated they feel.

10. Women are waiting for men.

Meanwhile, traditional Christian women are not feminists by nature, even if they have careers and higher degrees. They’re still waiting for a man to make the first move. It just feels wrong, on some fundamental level, to ask him out on a date. Now if you’re on the apps, this sort of thing can get evened out a bit more, but even so, the discomfort persists.

Thus, the single non-feminist Christian woman without a spiritual vocation to celibacy finds herself in a paradoxical position: She wants to be led by a man, but in the absence of a man, she must proceed to take control of her own future as productively as possible—launching a career, buying property by herself, eventually caring for aging parents by herself. And as she settles into the rhythms of this life she never foresaw, she admits that in many ways it’s a good life. She grows used to it. She’s content. Content, but never quite complete.

So those are the ten reasons. Now for the “what you can do about it,” where “you” are not single and earnestly wondering how to help your single brethren and sistren.

First, just see us. It sounds basic, but it means a lot to be seen.

Next, while I recognize that some of our aforementioned embarrassing single siblings might have turned you off of trying to matchmake, I can tell you not all singles resent this! However, what I will say is that we do appreciate being known and understood well enough that you have a reasonable sense of what we’re looking for. Be sensitive to the complexities and challenges I sketched in reason #6. And if you make a suggestion and it doesn’t work out, don’t feel too bad or take it too personally.

Finally, take an interest in our work, recognizing that if we never have children, our work is all that we will leave behind. And in the event that nothing ever does work out, that we seem called to carry on in that content not-quite-completeness of life as single people, continue to see us.