I turned 31 about a month ago. Which is so great and exciting and I am excited about it. And I am single. Never been married, maybe never have fallen in love. I live in a highly religious community and am myself highly religious and spiritual and have had a hard time making sense of my single status. It’s probably been one of my most sensitive personal topics and it’s been hard. 

For those of you who know me, you know that I lost my dad over a year ago. Losing my dad was excruciatingly painful and was a shock to my life in every way. But it also felt clear: this is what is right, it hurts, feel it completely and it will heal with time and you will be a new and better person because of it. There was a point to it, a purpose for it, and I am different in many good ways because of it. I found purpose in my grief and live my own kind of epic life in memory of my Dad. 

Being or feeling single or alone is also a kind of grief. For any of you who know what this is like, it hurts more than anyone can see because it’s an unseen, confusing, prolonged pain; we’re not sure if we are grieving a life we may not have or on the cusp of a happily ever after.  I’ve had to keep the hope alive that I could meet someone any day now but then there are days where it’s all I can do to keep going because of the pain and discouragement around it all. It is a different kind of pain and straining on the soul than losing a parent was for me. 

If you’re a woman like myself, there’s an added intensity of wanting to have children in this life. I struggled with the answer that I would receive everything I’ve been promised whether in this life or the next. My whole being would respond with “It has to be in this life or I’m going to the next!”

To anyone who relates to this single or not, there are things I have learned to turn to for comfort, strength and peace. And I believe these things can console our loneliness, curb the pain, and have the potential to fully heal a broken heart and what can feel like a broken life plan. 

1. God has always used a Wilderness to strengthen and purify His people. 

Being a single member of a Church focused on Families leaves us to grapple with our own sense of being alone in a personal wilderness. God led His people through wildernesses, to strengthen and purify them and help them find who they really are. 

My wilderness journey has been harder and longer than I would have ever expected. And I still believe I will get married and have children. I just didn’t think it would be in my 30’s. And it’s possible it won’t happen then of course either. But I do know I am being led. And on the days when all I can see is my feet in front of me, that is all I have. 

My fear doesn’t like the wilderness at all and is constantly trying to make sense of how I got there or why. It wants to talk about and analyze exactly what went wrong so I can fix it. When I’m in this mental state, I believe that I’m the one that can and should fix it, and for heavens sake quickly! Then everyone can relax about me and we all can move forward together. When my fear tries to take over and figure it out, I introduce the thought that maybe this is where I am supposed to be. Maybe I was led here. For a purpose I know not.

 When we start to trust that we are led into the wilderness we can let go of our “shoulding”. I should have done this better, I should have gone to more FHE’s, I should have prayed harder when I was in college and had more opportunities to date etc etc. All of that looking back starts go away when we open to the idea that this period of personal wilderness IS our plan.

Another interesting thing happens if and when we choose to trust that we have been led into the wilderness; we realize how completely dependent on God we are to be led through it. We let go of control over figuring it out. We stop analyzing and spinning our own wheels and start listening. We start trusting. And we realize as AA members do, that “I can’t” I am powerless over this plan for my life, “He Can” God is the only power that can make this happen or make me okay at all, and “I will let Him”, I will turn my life and where I thought I was going over to this power completely. I’m not in control. I relinquish my control. I trust. I am led. I surrender and I let the person I thought I was becoming die. I become Gods alone. Single to His will and His glory. I am His.

I chose to trust that God has led me into the wilderness and that He is leading me out of it. Trust that God is leading you, trust the wilderness you’re in, embrace it fully and see what happens. 

2. Opposition and pain are part of the plan

My singles ward Bishop once gave a lesson about the Tree of Life and my impression rested on the role of the mists of darkness in that vision. While he was speaking, I recognized so clearly that I was being attacked by this darkness, intensely and often! I felt that, of course, the darkness would want to keep me from holding on to what I know and believe in and the promise of an eternal family for me. Of course there would be immense opposition to me seeing my value, to believing in a good man for me, to believe that I could be healed of anything keeping me from that path.

Once I could see the doubts, fears, and insecurities I’d been being influenced to feel or believe in as the adversary, it was much easier to hold to the light. There have been times of such darkness that it’s all I can do to visualize the light in my mind and putting all my thoughts on the light until it’s stronger than the black hole Satan tries to get me sucked into. I have had many a night praying to cast out negative energies that want me to be cynical and in pain with them. 

It also helped me to relate those moments of heaviness, pain, and negativity to being like a pregnant woman having a contraction. If she doesn’t know she’s going into birth and that this is how that birth comes about, she might panic and fear the pain of the contraction. When a woman is coached to know that this is part of it, she no longer fears the way her body is helping the baby be born.

This thought helped me immensely in times when the doubts and fears were so strong I wanted to die. I remember that I am giving birth! People sometimes want to die when they are giving birth. The dying and the birthing are interconnected parts. I am birthing a new life for myself that is different from the one I imagined for me but no less amazing than anyone else’s journey.

Recognizing that there is darkness and seeing that it has a purpose has been essential for me to turn again towards the light of hope and to feel again that I am known and loved personally by God. And also knowing that moments of intense opposition, doubt, pain, or darkness are going to come and they are going to pass and that this process is part of how we are made new. 

3. Finding the Prince of Peace within

I was raised in the disney princesses era and as silly as that may sound, I think I had a 4-5 year old impression on love for, like, a long time. I just really believed that some day my prince would come and we would live happily ever after. I waited to be rescued from my single life of struggle and trials and loneliness and be taken to the fairy tale land of a blissful marriage. 

There were many good men, none that I was super interested in. I served a mission, I developed anxiety, depression, and an eating disorder after my mission, figured all that out with God, started a career and extremely fulfilling personal business in a few years, took great opportunities to travel, met and helped and loved some truly amazing people, and discovered much more of who I really am. All this while part of me still waited to be happier and for things to get easier.

John 4:14 “But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life”.  This is one of my favorite ideas! That our journey of allowing Christ within will create IN US a well of water to quench all thirst for happiness or peace or well being. Not a physical thirst but an emotional and spiritual thirst for God, Oneness, eternal connection and life. 

Part of the struggle of “being single” is a belief that having a partner will give us what we are looking for most be it comfort, security, financial ease, companionship, acceptance, affection. The struggle comes again in realizing we are waiting for an OUT THERE person to fill a gap that we feel in here. We get stuck trying to control the things we can’t control (like people) to meet our needs. Christ was teaching us that we can let go of our outer thirsting and try His spring inside us with Him and His constant presence instead. 

I stopped waiting recently. I asked God to take that habit from my mind and to help me be fully present to Him and to my Purpose here and now. I asked to let my desire for God and His work for me to be my greatest desire. I asked to be freed from thinking that a person OUT THERE would save me in here. I prayed to have my eye and my life be single to the glory of God and to have the faith that His plan for me is better than any I have for myself. 

Remaining single longer than expected in a family-oriented belief system can be so hard, especially when you have felt that you are doing everything you can to receive a righteous desire of the heart. It is a righteous desire to find the right partnership and to be in an eternal marriage. That is still the ultimate plan. That is still the promise. That is still the path of exaltation. And it is coming. I believe that if your heart is in the right place, you can’t mess it up. We get to find strength in His plan for us and let go and let God make us into more than we could have made ourselves into any other way. 

I hope and pray that we all are able to turn our lives over fully to the Creator of Heaven and Earth and live Single to His Glory. Whatever path that looks like for each one of us. May we have peace in where we are and hope in where we are going.