Who Will Advocate for Us?

This whole singleness situation in our society is a mess.

We all know it. We all know there’s something wrong with staying single so long, with putting off marriage and children to early middle age. It’s especially disheartening in the Christian sphere, since the church as a universal body has emphatically supported marriage up until fifteen years ago. (This change only occurred in Protestant circles. You will never hear "the gift/call of/to singleness" preached from a Catholic pulpit.)

So we know there’s something wrong, but there’s evidently nothing to be done about it.

We girls have tried everything. We’ve tried contentment, we’ve tried declaring that we’re not ready for marriage yet, we’ve tried dressing well and looking attractive to catch the guys’ attention, we’ve tried focusing on our careers and honing our ambitions both to distract ourselves and to look more attractive and successful, we’ve tried bettering ourselves and cultivating our talents and skills, we’ve tried making ourselves more interesting, we’ve tried being complete people, we’ve tried relying on Jesus to bring that special guy into our lives, we’ve tried patience and waiting, and we’ve tried asking guys out. We’ve tried regular church attendance, frequenting coffee shops and bookstores, enthusiastically sitting down in singles groups, holding dinner parties for single friends in the hopes of encouraging the sprouting of couples, praying, and ignoring the problem. We’ve tried filling the loneliness with friends, roommates, and pets.

Nothing works.

As a go-getter, I’m increasingly frustrated by my fruitless endeavors to effect some result. I’ve tried dating men who aren't Christians, since they ask, but have found that they aren’t to my taste. No matter how great or nice or gentlemanly they are, in the end there’s an insurmountable gap that comes from an unshared faith. If I were a rote Christian it might not matter, but like most other Christian girls my age, it formulates the most crucial part of my own makeup. Dating someone who doesn't have that eventually becomes a Tower of Babel experience – we don’t speak the same language.

So there are no more avenues to explore. I know eHarmony takes time, but let’s be honest, that’s a last recourse. One of desperation, of admitting defeat in drawing any of the men I actually know.

I’m not sure where the break comes. I know a lot of it has to do with our upbringing, so guys, don’t worry, I feel for you. Our parents, for whatever reason (and most of them married young), encouraged us not to date. Was it the advent of True Love Waits? Was it a terror reaction to the rise in teenage promiscuity? At some point I think it boils down to a certain (sometimes well-founded, sometimes not) lack of trust or faith in us on our parents’ part to keep good heads on our shoulders and make responsible decisions, coupled with a lack of supervision. Courtship used to be highly supervised, complete with chaperones, and even dating, up to the 60s, had some pretty severe limitations as to where a young couple could go so as to prevent private trouble-making. Which of course is a very good thing -- we've all seen Romeo and Juliet; we know what unsupervised, unrestrained adolescent passion can do. But the Jesus Movement in the 70s seemed to carry more purity of heart and responsible behavior back into the culture – the Christian culture, at least. My parents were engaged for two years and stayed sexually pure until their marriage. Their friends made it too.

But for some reason, they appeared to think we were fated by our own evil natures to screw it up. (No pun intended.) Never mind that we had been reared on Bible verses and chastity classes, and taught to make good decisions. My parents trusted my decision-making skills in regard to my academics and youth group activities, but not really my social life. And certainly I was discouraged from dating.

(A note to the parents: It's gotta suck raising teenagers in this culture, where kids are encouraged to rebel and society strips away your authority. My parents did the best they could; and in some respects the church did, too; but something didn't happen in cultivating kids for marriage and etiquette.)

And not dating in high school was fine; I didn’t see the point of dating then anyway, because who marries their high school sweethearts all that often anymore? Plus the selection wasn’t exactly winning (and I was a weirdo myself), and if I did like somebody, I had endless hours of paternal teasing to contend with.

Now, my parents had nothing against me dating in college, and put no pressure on me either to stay single or to get married. But they never liked any of the guys I did. (I mean, they were right, but all the same it wasn’t fostering a "try and see" attitude.) And I know a lot of people my age, especially guys, whose parents actively discouraged serious relationships until some undefined future perfect time when everybody was "ready" for it. And these guys’ mothers never wanted them to leave home.

And with the growing absence of wholesome coed group activities, like dances (not the grungy grindy kind, but swing and ballroom and contra) or cookouts, there wasn’t a safe haven to practice interactions with the opposite sex. Men’s mothers and fathers never taught them how to approach a girl, how to date a girl, or often even how to treat a girl, but instead they taught them to "guard their hearts," to wait until they were "stable," and to get a job first. Meanwhile the guys never received guidance or training on how to conquer the natural trepidations that guys legendarily feel about asking a girl to do anything; and were never taught that the achievement of manhood is taking on adult responsibilities – family and career. A career used to be the means by which a man provided for his family; now the career comes first, and family second, if at all. Dating and marriage became this fearsome realm of temptation and commitment that it was best to avoid altogether until a serious relationship "just happened" or until "the right person came along."

So instead of marriage acting as a milemarker of true adulthood, something for a guy to make himself worthy of and strive for, adulthood became entirely career-oriented and marriage something that blew into a person’s life like Mary Poppins when the time was magically right.

So what we have is a generation of people who are largely completely unequipped to get serious and grow up. Adult responsibilities took a strong root with the girls – in this age of women’s power we are taught to fear nothing and achieve everything, and we took it and ran with it – but in the boys there seems to be a spirit of fear that was fostered from a very young age, either by parents or the church environment where any physical contact with girls, any hugs or backrubs, were decried as leading to lust and the downfall of one’s soul – so that men from their mid-twenties onward are left with inexperience in opposite sex interaction, cluelessness as to dating etiquette, a primary focus on self, and a conviction that their own sexuality is abhorrent to God. Or, conversely, with the rise of divorce within the church (and again, aside from the occasional pulpit message about divorce being wrong, nothing much is done about it, to say, God always loves you, but if you're married, you need to stay that way), men in particular are disillusioned, feel that marriage is doomed to fail, or are terrified of ruining their marriages should they try to make a go of it.

And this spirit of fear in some guys manifests itself in snide, bitter, hardhearted attitudes toward women altogether; in others it makes them powerlessly shy and retiring; in others it makes them arrogantly convinced that no girl is good enough for them, because their mothers think so. In a lot of them it has bred a denial of the necessity of family.

We are no longer taught that "for this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be united to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh"; we are taught that "a boy or a girl shall leave his or her parents sometime after college and get a fulfilling career and make a lot of money, and then wait until marriage finds him or her, if it ever does."

The guys whose parents taught them otherwise are already married. The rest are waiting for something, and they don’t know what. The rules aren’t clear. Nobody’s taught us what to do next, and there aren’t any signs in the sky.

And nobody’s advocating for us. Because in the end, the guys always have the power. A girl can do everything she can do, up to the point of asking a guy to date her, but if he doesn’t want to, he won’t. If he doesn’t want to "wake up," he won’t. If he doesn’t want to date or get married yet, there’s nothing she can do to convince him otherwise. The scales are tipped away from the women.

This is where we need the older generation to step in. Parents need to be telling their twenty-something sons that it’s time to put aside the childish things and take on manly responsibilities. Marriage is the healthiest state for anyone. Sure, there are some crappy marriages out there, and now that we haven’t been raised to be good husbands and wives there’s a greater risk of things falling apart, since we’re most used to considering ourselves and really don’t know what we’re doing; but there are two thousand years of tradition to draw from, and our own parents’ wisdom, and God’s command to be fruitful and multiply.

The singles need the backing of the older generations. Paul’s letters to Timothy are very clear in expressing the need of young men to be mentored by older men, and young women to be mentored by older women. (This means that dads specifically need to be getting on their sons’ cases; if it’s just the moms doing it, it’s nagging.) The parental generation didn't want us to date, didn't tell us much about the practical aspects of preparing for marriage, and now expects us to take care of ourselves while knowing nothing, or to rely solely on God's Santa Claus provision of that magical mate at that magical moment (when in every other area we know that holiness is something to work toward -- we have responsibilities, things we have to do, in living the Christian life. If we aren't supposed to sit around and do nothing and wait for God to make all our actions holy, then in this area of marriage, which is a creation mandate, we should likewise seek to do something in order to get married). The church culture appears to be so materialistic and afraid of offending, or just cynical about young people’s uncontrollable impulses to sin and resentment or deafness of the church's message, that it says nothing to us about right or wrong, politeness or rudeness, action or inaction.

And the Protestant churches need to stop trying so hard to accommodate singles by legitimizing their situation. This is a unique trend in the entirety of world history, and it has truly scary implications. Putting singleness on the same plane with marriage means that it’s okay never to get married (i.e. learn to live with and for someone other than yourself) or to have children (i.e. preserve Christianity for the future generations – the Psalms describe godly daughters as "pillars gracing a hall," and pillars weren’t only beautiful but structurally vital – produce more salt for the earth, keep the church alive to minister in practical ways to a broken world rife with evil, and carry on the Great Commission). Instead of sanctifying a trend that is strangling the church body and leaving men and women alike feeling frightened, empty, powerless, and alone, the church needs to stand up and tell us to get our acts together and pursue marriage. No more "contentment." No more "education first." No more "wait and God will make it happen." Instead "hear and obey."

Debbie Maken’s book is fantastic. But young women can’t change society by themselves. We need the support of the church authority, of the fathers of the men who aren’t dating, of our mothers to keep their eyes peeled for potential mates for their daughters, or for the single young women around them who live far from their parents. In today’s attitude of fierce independence and the idea that a person’s personal life is nobody else’s business, we need the church to take back its traditional authority over the lives of its members and remind us that our private lives impact the world, and that the church does have the right to tell Christians what to do.

It’s like everybody’s waiting for the girls to do something, when we’re, sadly, on the bottom rung of the power ladder. A lot of guys our age, through their fear or pride or stubbornness, live as if they’re at the top of that ladder. Dads and churches need to remind them that they’re not.

Of course it’s going to take some heroic efforts to rectify our situation. Like I said, we haven’t been taught from childhood that marriage is necessary and that we should be preparing for it. So there’s a lot of internal adjustment to be done, and the whole body needs to come together to do it. And when we finally are married, it’s going to be up to us to teach to our children the things that weren’t taught to us, so that our sons and daughters won’t find themselves growing past youth and locked in a paralysis of ignorance and passivity.