Just a few days ago, I was talking with a friend over lunch and the topic turned from the general how do you do’s to the more tender and personal stuff that guys don’t often talk about. Having both recently come off of breakups we began talking about relationships, women, marriage and finding the one. Yes, men talk about this stuff too! As we were sharing I put words to a gut feeling I had been having for the past few months.
Both my friend and I are approaching ages where our families think we should be married already. If you’re like me then you have members of your extended family who seem to have nothing better to do than to speculate about your personal life! I’ll be 30 in a few months and quite honestly didn’t plan to still be single. I’m not sure how or when or where I thought I was going to get married, but as a young 20-something I just assumed it would have happened by now. It hasn’t.
If you asked me do I want to be married, I’d tell you that yes, of course I do. If you asked me if I’d like to be married right now, I’d probably waver and evade the question. I’m conflicted. You see, if I had what is called unconflicted consciousness—if both my conscious decision-making mind as well as my more unconscious mind were aligned on the same thing—in this case marriage, then I’d be there already, or at least farther along in the process. That I’m not and say that I want to be suggests that there is some internal struggle going on—a disconnect between what I say I want and what my actions convey.
So in that moment of realization, I began to ask myself:
How are my thoughts, feelings, actions and beliefs keeping me single? What has yet to click in my psyche for me to feel ready to settle down?
For some of my friends that ‘click’ has already happened. That something fell into place and the person they were currently with also turned out to be the person they wanted to marry. I’ve seen that shift occur with friends in college who were married soon after graduation. Others waited a few years and didn’t marry till their mid-twenties. Still, some of my friends seem to be in the place of waiting for that shift to occur. That’s the boat I find myself in but it doesn’t trouble me as it once did.
Where I am now reminds me a lot of being in middle school waiting for puberty to start. My 5th grade teacher Ms. O’Brien began teaching us about puberty—what changes we could expect and what our lives would look like in that transition from children to adults. Hair in new places, changes in voice, new body systems coming on-line. It was touted as an exciting time but I found it to be more anxiety producing than fun. Waiting in general makes me anxious, or rather, I’m afraid to trust that God will be walking with me through the unknown.
Even though I wasn’t a particularly late or early bloomer, I was impatient around wanting the changes to more or less happen over night. I wanted that growth spurt, changed voice and acne (well I’d rather just skip that one all together!) done in a day. I didn’t have much patience then or appreciation for the process I was going through, and all the education about how long it would take didn’t really seem to sink in or comfort me in anyway. I was just eager to grow up and to stop being seen as a kid.
The problem was, as impatient as I was, there was nothing that I could do to speed up the process.”
Nature has a way of deciding when, where and how quickly this whole process begins and thinking about it, worrying about it and praying about it doesn’t really make much of a difference. I wished there was a magic pill, or for something like in the movie Big to happen where I’d just wake up one day fully grown.
That’s about the same perspective I’ve had about marriage as well: That I’d just wake up one day to find my wife laying next to me without taking much time to think about how that was actually going to happen. While I think the process of finding the woman I’ll settle down with has a bit more subjectivity than does the process of going through puberty, it’s pretty close! Until I truly decide to make settling down a priority then single I’ll remain. Just as in puberty, once my biological clock shifts then the rest will happen almost by instinct—that natural drive that God hard-wired into us to connect and start a family will come online.
Each successive relationship that I’ve had seems to be closer to the mark…”
and yet I’m still in that in-between phase of enjoying my singlehood while looking for “the one.” During this time I see it as my job to be as ready as possible both relationally, emotionally and spiritually for when that shift occurs–almost like an athlete in training. To that end, I’m involved in my own process of personal growth both spiritually through church and emotionally and developmentally through counseling.
It is in these places that I am hard at work defining and refining the vision I have of who I am, what I want and where God wants me to be. Instead of spending my time worrying about still being single, I’m choosing to focus on becoming the best version of me I can become so when that internal shift happens, I will be as prepared as possible for the amazing ride that marriage will be!
