I’ve put off writing about the topic of singleness for a long time.

It’s something I’ve felt I should write about for a while. When I saw that it was on my schedule to write about this week, I thought, “Hmm, maybe I’ll write about something else instead.”

But I decided to do what I’m often encouraging my clients to do and that is to be curious. Why am I dreading writing this post? What are the thoughts and feelings coming up for me as I write about this? Here are some of my initial thoughts:

1. I want to do this topic justice. Spend any amount of time post-college, single in the Christian evangelical church and I bet you’ve experienced to some degree the feeling of being an outsider for not having gotten married immediately at age 22. While the secular world often views getting married in your 20s to be young, this is not always the case in the evangelical church. I could tell you many a story from my own experience: the church leader asking me when I was going to get married when he knew I was not currently dating anyone; the elder who offered an unsolicited prayer for me during communion to find a husband; the church greeter who, upon my first visit to the church, encouraged me to go to a church down the road where there were more “young, single people.” Then there are the common tropes: “God will give you the desire of your heart, just hang in there!” “God’s timing is perfect, just be patient!” “You’re so great, you’ll definitely get married!” and so on and so forth. The last thing I want this blog post to be is another one of those invalidating tropes. I also don’t want to be seen as or present myself as some kind of “expert” who figured out a “solution” to singleness just because I got married. Trust me. I am no expert. If I’ve become convinced of anything in my time being married, it’s that my marriage is a gift that God graciously gave to me – not a result of any kind of merit on my part.
2. Writing this blog is forcing me to revisit hard feelings from my time of being single and wanting to be married, especially the feelings of one particular Christmas, when I made several trips to the bathroom to hide my seemingly unstoppable tears from my family. I remember feeling so alone. Despite my loving family downstairs, I felt someone profoundly missing from my life. As I remember that difficult Christmas day, I also remember feeling strangely accepting of my sadness, and in that, a peculiar comfort. I remember feeling God’s presence very strongly, and not in the “Hang in there, I’m going to bring you a husband” sort of way. But more like, “I see you. I am here with you in your sadness. You can be sad, that’s ok.”

So, I suppose that’s my hope with this blog post, dear reader. If you are single and feeling sad about that this holiday season, I don’t want to offer you any unsolicited advice on finding a partner. I don’t want to offer you any tropes that are aimed to reassure you of God’s plan that I personally don’t have any inside information on. Instead, I hope to be a voice that says, “I see you. I am here with you in your sadness. You can be sad, that’s ok.” But more than that – I hope to point you to the One who knows you intimately, and says even more emphatically, “I see you. I am here with you in your sadness. You can be sad, that’s ok.”

I think something Christians often miss is that in order to receive God’s comfort, we have to first feel our need for God’s comfort. I know I’ve wrestled with this in my own experience. I start to feel the first pings of anxiety, so I pull out trusty Philippians 4:6: “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.” Somehow over the years, I’ve come to misinterpret this verse as, “Give whatever is making me anxious or sad to God and then don’t think about it anymore,” sometimes even going so far as to judging myself for continuing to think about it, like I must be sinning for still feeling anxious or sad after I’ve prayed. But praying to God is not the same as giving myself a lobotomy. In fact, I don’t think God expects us to just forget our difficult feelings upon praying about them. I think, if anything, He invites us to feel them, to acknowledge them before Him, and then to watch Him work. Maybe this means answering our prayer for a spouse. Maybe it means making His presence profoundly felt in difficult moments. Maybe it even means no immediate response, and us crying out to God in anger and frustration (been there). Allowing ourselves to experience our pain is painful and hard. However, if we don’t acknowledge and feel our pain, it will be difficult to acknowledge and feel the comfort and presence that God alone can provide.

When I think about allowing myself to feel my pain, and when I’ve talked to clients about this, our fear is usually the same: if I allow myself to feel the depth of my pain, I may not come out of it. As a result of this fear, we employ defenses against feeling our pain. I mentioned mine above: when I continue to feel sad or anxious after praying, I will judge myself for not fully giving my difficult feelings to God, and then I have a reason to explain why my prayers are going unanswered, making me feel somewhat a sense of control. But God doesn’t work that way. The tenet of our Christian faith is that God does things for us that we absolutely don’t deserve. So when I tell myself that my prayer isn’t being answered because I don’t have enough faith or I’m not trusting Him fully, that is a lie from hell, meant for me to “work” harder and drive me further from trusting God. All I’m doing is employing a defense mechanism, lying to myself about who God is, and probably increasing the amount of shame that I’m carrying. All while, underneath, I still feel sad and anxious.

We can practice grounding ourselves in the present moment, using our coping skills, and relying on our support systems in those extremely difficult moments when our emotions seem like they might drown us. We can notice the defense mechanisms we employ to keep our true feelings at bay and practice gradually exposing ourselves to our underlying difficult feelings. And of course, we can always speak with a therapist if we need support or assistance navigating through really tough emotions or situations. The key is to be aware of our feelings and what is going on inside of us.

As I learned that Christmas, crying in the bathroom, opening myself up to my true feelings didn’t make them go away or lessen in intensity. It did not bring me a husband immediately – I didn’t meet my husband until several years after this experience. I do remember feeling more in tune with myself, as I came face to face with what I was truly feeling. While scary and disheartening, coming face to face with my true emotions felt liberating, as I soaked these feelings in without using excess energy to push them away through my various coping strategies. More than anything, I remember God’s gentle and quiet presence, reminding me that He saw the tears that I wept.

If you are struggling with being single this Christmas, I pray that God would make His presence known to you in very real and profound way. I pray that you would be reminded that while you may desire a relationship, your relationship status does not define your value as a person or how others are allowed to treat you. I pray that you would be comforted by the truth that God sees you, knows everything you’re feeling, and isn’t threatened or angered by your emotions.