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Deliberately Single
Over the last little while, I have had some insights into myself. I think back to when I was in high school and how terrible I have always been with women. It seemed like I was always alone; like everyone I know had a girlfriend and none of the girls I liked even knew I was there. More times than none I would say that I was the odd numbered human being; like the planet earth was populated by 6,000,000,001 people and I was that 1.
Every girl I liked seemed to be taken so I looked down on myself. Then every girl I tried to talk to brushed me off so I really started looking down on myself. Then every girl I knew was starting to have all these ridiculous issues in their relationships and for some reason, wanted to bring them all to me and I started really looking down on myself.
My thought was that I was I good guy. Church going, raised with a strong respect for women, a good listener, an honor student, creative and a hopeless romantic down in my heart. And here I am listening to all my female friends crying their eyes out because their boyfriends are absolute pigs… but they’d pick them over me every time.
I had a complete and utter lack of the “game” that it seemed like every guy around me just instinctively had and after a while I just began to think that there just must have been something wrong with me. Then I met this guy at work.
He was a friend of mine, a co-worker. We hung out and talked about stuff, but what amazed me about him was the way he could walk into a room and pick up just about any girl he wanted to. He would pick up about three or four phone numbers in a single evening while I would have been happy with just a second look. And all the girls that ran to him were gorgeous ones; the kind that I had pretty much learned not to even walk towards anymore.
I remember asking him once how he did that and he told me that he was once in the exact position that I was, which is to say girl-less. Then he told me something that disturbed me for days. He told me that he reached a point that he made a resolution within himself. He promised on one Valentine’s Day that if he didn’t have a girlfriend by the next Valentine’s Day, he’d just go off and kill himself. With that promise set in his soul, he went out there and did… basically whatever he had to do to get a girl.
For a long time, I pondered how deep that was. I was feeling kind of lonely, sure, but I wasn’t about to even joke about taking my own life. Right about then, I started looking around with a fresh set of eyes and noticed things that I hadn’t before. First, I noticed that I was a high school student. I had enough on my mind trying to balance work and school and band stuff without even dealing with girls. Second, I started noticing all the girls that were around me, especially the ones that I tried to talk to at some point in the past. Most all of them were broken up, messed up, wicked, sexually active and just generally set against my Christian upbringing. A couple of them even ended up pregnant. Looking at it that way, by them shooting me down, they saved me from fathering a child before my time.
Time passed and we have arrived at the present. Over the course of the last 5 to 7 months, I’ve discovered something more along these lines. I’ve discovered that being single isn’t, at all, a bad thing. From that time in high school to just recently, I was really intent on getting someone, but I never really asked myself why.
From the few relationships I actually have had, I’ve discovered that I’m quickly disgusted by games and that any relationship I enter will have to be serious; meaning that if I look at her and don’t see the potential for her to properly carry my last name, then there’s no point in even trying to start something up at all. I’ve also seen that there’s a lot to be fixed in me personally.
I have emotional scars from my past that I’m still healing from, I’m not yet established in life like a want to be and if I entered a relationship today or tomorrow, I’d be throwing all the issues I need worked out on the back of the woman I’m with.
As a point of order, I say again, being single is not a bad thing. And neither is being married. Biblically, both singleness and marriage are gifts from God. A married person has the benefits of a partner in life and all the help and support that comes with that. A single person on the other hand, is responsible only to themselves. As of right now, I can come and go as I please, spend my money like I want, do what I feel like, buy only the groceries I like and basically center all my resources around me alone. And I can do all of this without being selfish, because I’m the only one who I have to take account for.
There’s also another benefit. I can take this single time to be alone with God. I can pray and fast when I want, seek God at any time of day, throw myself into ministry full force and have God work out my many issues while I’m waiting for my future wife. That’s what the time is for.
The premise to this is one that I am only recently learning from sitting under the ministries of very powerful men and women of God. The way to get into a strong standing, long lasting marriage is to be whole as a single person. The entire time that I was spending looking here and there trying to find something, I was steadily dropping my standard and dropping my standard thinking less and less myself with each passing day. But, the principle is that you don’t have to chase what you can attract.
When you get to a point in your single life where you’re alright; where you can cover your own bills, stay in your own space and genuinely be happy with no more company than yourself, that’s right when that right person will come along. That’s the person, who like you, has spent years tweaking themselves, getting rid of old baggage, praying away the scars of yesterday and putting themselves in a position to where they can stand on their own two feet. The two of you will be alike in that, and the match will be so much better as opposed to you being dead in the middle of your mess, walking into a club and picking up somebody that’s just a torn to pieces as you are. The pair of you will have been whole as singles and will make a strong whole in marriage.
The reason this is the case is that whatever issue you have as a single, you will bring into the relationship. All your habits, quirks and idiosyncrasies come to bare and every personal battle you’re in the middle of fighting will soon and quickly fall onto the shoulders of that other person. Yes, it’s going to matter.
Two whole people who have spent time working themselves out are better equipped to properly handling the issues of one another and coming to healthy resolutions. An insecure relationship is going to have a lot of back and forth about who’s fault is what and hardly anything ever gets resolved. A relationship between two whole people can last a lifetime, but an insecure relationship is poised to fall apart from the word ‘go.’
This is one reason why the divorce rate is so high in America. People are jumping in and out of the bed and getting married to people that they hardly know because they feel a need to be connected. I myself once thought that if I could just be with somebody, then that would somehow make everything better for me. But the fact is that I was running for a relationship to cover up insecurities in myself and that would have translated to the severe negative in that relationship, had there been one.
With all this said, I am sending out a call for more people to try and be deliberately single. I know it’s rough, and with today’s media shoveling “love” and “dating” and “sex” and “hooking up” in our faces on a constant basis, it may seem like choosing a living death, but I promise it’s not.
Instead of hungrily seeking somebody, invest in yourself. Spend that $80 you were going to spend on dinner and a movie and buy yourself something you like. Spend some time alone with just you and God and before you know it, you’ll begin to like yourself. At that point, you’ll see more and more of what you can fix in yourself and you’ll make adjustments on your own, not for anyone but for yourself. You’ll be able to get over so much hurt from past nonsense and you’ll grow more comfortable in your own skin each and every day. And after a while, you’ll get to a point where hooking up with someone is hardly even a thought to you anymore.
Truly, that’s what any single person should do with all that free time. You’ll make whoever you end up with a whole lot happier if you can be happy with yourself, because if you can love who you are when it’s just you, then they can easily love you when it’s the two of you.
Every girl I liked seemed to be taken so I looked down on myself. Then every girl I tried to talk to brushed me off so I really started looking down on myself. Then every girl I knew was starting to have all these ridiculous issues in their relationships and for some reason, wanted to bring them all to me and I started really looking down on myself.
My thought was that I was I good guy. Church going, raised with a strong respect for women, a good listener, an honor student, creative and a hopeless romantic down in my heart. And here I am listening to all my female friends crying their eyes out because their boyfriends are absolute pigs… but they’d pick them over me every time.
I had a complete and utter lack of the “game” that it seemed like every guy around me just instinctively had and after a while I just began to think that there just must have been something wrong with me. Then I met this guy at work.
He was a friend of mine, a co-worker. We hung out and talked about stuff, but what amazed me about him was the way he could walk into a room and pick up just about any girl he wanted to. He would pick up about three or four phone numbers in a single evening while I would have been happy with just a second look. And all the girls that ran to him were gorgeous ones; the kind that I had pretty much learned not to even walk towards anymore.
I remember asking him once how he did that and he told me that he was once in the exact position that I was, which is to say girl-less. Then he told me something that disturbed me for days. He told me that he reached a point that he made a resolution within himself. He promised on one Valentine’s Day that if he didn’t have a girlfriend by the next Valentine’s Day, he’d just go off and kill himself. With that promise set in his soul, he went out there and did… basically whatever he had to do to get a girl.
For a long time, I pondered how deep that was. I was feeling kind of lonely, sure, but I wasn’t about to even joke about taking my own life. Right about then, I started looking around with a fresh set of eyes and noticed things that I hadn’t before. First, I noticed that I was a high school student. I had enough on my mind trying to balance work and school and band stuff without even dealing with girls. Second, I started noticing all the girls that were around me, especially the ones that I tried to talk to at some point in the past. Most all of them were broken up, messed up, wicked, sexually active and just generally set against my Christian upbringing. A couple of them even ended up pregnant. Looking at it that way, by them shooting me down, they saved me from fathering a child before my time.
Time passed and we have arrived at the present. Over the course of the last 5 to 7 months, I’ve discovered something more along these lines. I’ve discovered that being single isn’t, at all, a bad thing. From that time in high school to just recently, I was really intent on getting someone, but I never really asked myself why.
From the few relationships I actually have had, I’ve discovered that I’m quickly disgusted by games and that any relationship I enter will have to be serious; meaning that if I look at her and don’t see the potential for her to properly carry my last name, then there’s no point in even trying to start something up at all. I’ve also seen that there’s a lot to be fixed in me personally.
I have emotional scars from my past that I’m still healing from, I’m not yet established in life like a want to be and if I entered a relationship today or tomorrow, I’d be throwing all the issues I need worked out on the back of the woman I’m with.
As a point of order, I say again, being single is not a bad thing. And neither is being married. Biblically, both singleness and marriage are gifts from God. A married person has the benefits of a partner in life and all the help and support that comes with that. A single person on the other hand, is responsible only to themselves. As of right now, I can come and go as I please, spend my money like I want, do what I feel like, buy only the groceries I like and basically center all my resources around me alone. And I can do all of this without being selfish, because I’m the only one who I have to take account for.
There’s also another benefit. I can take this single time to be alone with God. I can pray and fast when I want, seek God at any time of day, throw myself into ministry full force and have God work out my many issues while I’m waiting for my future wife. That’s what the time is for.
The premise to this is one that I am only recently learning from sitting under the ministries of very powerful men and women of God. The way to get into a strong standing, long lasting marriage is to be whole as a single person. The entire time that I was spending looking here and there trying to find something, I was steadily dropping my standard and dropping my standard thinking less and less myself with each passing day. But, the principle is that you don’t have to chase what you can attract.
When you get to a point in your single life where you’re alright; where you can cover your own bills, stay in your own space and genuinely be happy with no more company than yourself, that’s right when that right person will come along. That’s the person, who like you, has spent years tweaking themselves, getting rid of old baggage, praying away the scars of yesterday and putting themselves in a position to where they can stand on their own two feet. The two of you will be alike in that, and the match will be so much better as opposed to you being dead in the middle of your mess, walking into a club and picking up somebody that’s just a torn to pieces as you are. The pair of you will have been whole as singles and will make a strong whole in marriage.
The reason this is the case is that whatever issue you have as a single, you will bring into the relationship. All your habits, quirks and idiosyncrasies come to bare and every personal battle you’re in the middle of fighting will soon and quickly fall onto the shoulders of that other person. Yes, it’s going to matter.
Two whole people who have spent time working themselves out are better equipped to properly handling the issues of one another and coming to healthy resolutions. An insecure relationship is going to have a lot of back and forth about who’s fault is what and hardly anything ever gets resolved. A relationship between two whole people can last a lifetime, but an insecure relationship is poised to fall apart from the word ‘go.’
This is one reason why the divorce rate is so high in America. People are jumping in and out of the bed and getting married to people that they hardly know because they feel a need to be connected. I myself once thought that if I could just be with somebody, then that would somehow make everything better for me. But the fact is that I was running for a relationship to cover up insecurities in myself and that would have translated to the severe negative in that relationship, had there been one.
With all this said, I am sending out a call for more people to try and be deliberately single. I know it’s rough, and with today’s media shoveling “love” and “dating” and “sex” and “hooking up” in our faces on a constant basis, it may seem like choosing a living death, but I promise it’s not.
Instead of hungrily seeking somebody, invest in yourself. Spend that $80 you were going to spend on dinner and a movie and buy yourself something you like. Spend some time alone with just you and God and before you know it, you’ll begin to like yourself. At that point, you’ll see more and more of what you can fix in yourself and you’ll make adjustments on your own, not for anyone but for yourself. You’ll be able to get over so much hurt from past nonsense and you’ll grow more comfortable in your own skin each and every day. And after a while, you’ll get to a point where hooking up with someone is hardly even a thought to you anymore.
Truly, that’s what any single person should do with all that free time. You’ll make whoever you end up with a whole lot happier if you can be happy with yourself, because if you can love who you are when it’s just you, then they can easily love you when it’s the two of you.
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