What's the Point of Singleness?

Credit Skyly Photographer. Flikr.

An op-ed in the New York Times on finding meaning in life caught my eye, as an example of a problem with where we Americans think we can find happiness in life and what single people's lives often look like.

David Brooks, who fancies himself a philosopher but mostly produces fluff, observes that however many graduation speeches there are about having big ambitions, reaching for the stars, changing the world, people find as much contentment (more even!) in simply living everyday life well: being kind, tending a garden, spending time with family.

That last one was the one that caught my attention. Brooks quotes at length from several people who wrote to him, describing how they find meaning in life. One says this:

I have a terrific wife, 5 kids, friends from grade school and high school, college, army, friends locally, and sometimes, best of all, horses, dogs, and cats.

Leaving aside the horses and the dogs (and we won't even mention the cats!), I find it interesting that heading this list of what gives meaning to life is a wife and kids, the immediate family. It's interesting because it's so ubiquitous: Watch any film, read any book produced lately in the United States, and someone is bound to say that our family is what gives life meaning.

Seriously, I watched Looper last night. Even that film, of all things, locates the source of happiness (indeed, the very forces that keep us from going bad!) in a mother's love. The message that family is what makes life meaningful is everywhere.

Orson Scott Card, in one of the many additions to Ender's Game, put it this way:

Here is the meaning of life: for a man to find a woman, for a woman to find a man, the creature most unlike you, and then to make babies with her, with him, or to find them some other way, but then to raise them up, and watch them do the same thing, generation after generation, so that when you die you know you are permanently a part of the great web of life. That you are not a loose thread, snipped off. 

While there's been some politically correct huffing and puffing over the fact that Card, a Mormon, describes the family in terms of a man and a woman, most of America shares his essential idea about the meaning of life: You find someone you care about, you make a family with them, you spend time with them, and voila! Your life has meaning. 

(As an aside, even the fact that, according to Card, part of the reason that having children makes life meaningful is that it carries on our genes is common enough. No one wants to be snuffed out; everyone wants to leave a piece of themselves behind; what better way to do that than a child, who carries your genes and your values forward for the rest of the human race? This is what makes apocalyptic movies particularly distressing, the idea that no one's progeny will survive.)

But here's the problem:

We singles don't have this. 

Sure, we have family. I am very thankful for my parents. And we have friends.

But parents and friends are not at the head of that list in Brooks's essay. Wife and kids are. Cut it anyway you like, when our society says that we find meaning in life by spending time with the people we love, what our society usually means is that we find meaning in life by spending time with our significant other. Example: Almost every single Disney Princess movie ever.

At this point, I could complain about the American vision of happiness. I could say, "Let's talk about a vision of happiness that singles can have."

But maybe the point isn't that we develop a more inclusive vision of where we find meaning in life.

Maybe the point is that we adjust our vision, that we stop looking at this life and start looking at the next. 

Here's the thing: As a single woman, I'm probably lonelier than most of my married friends. My new favourite novelist Marilynne Robinson says the delights of loneliness are underrated. Indeed, the pleasures of singleness in general are underrated. I love stocking my pantry with peanut butter without worrying about a husband's allergies, deciding to watch Firefly for the third time without hearing any complaints, and (very occasionally) just having ice cream for dinner.

But the fact remains that my life is less well-stocked with important people, the people that our modern society says are essential to a meaningful life, than our married friends' lives are. My closest family member (an elderly grandmother) lives three hours' drive by car away; the rest live two or three times that. I don't see my family for months at a time.

And I'm not alone. A single friend of mine recently confided in me how much she misses her family, living five hours to the south of here. Other single friends have told me similar things, that there are fewer (or at least fewer obvious) human connections in our lives than in the lives of married people.

So yeah, sometimes we single people are lonely. Sometimes that hurts.

But honestly, what did we expect?

Here on earth you will have trials and sorrows, Jesus says. If we have hope only in this life, Paul says, we are of all men most to be pitied. 

All of Christianity comes back to this idea, that this world is broken and we have to hang on for the next. This is an idea that we single people are living testaments to. In us the world is so obviously broken; we are not part of the great web of life; we are a loose thread, snipped off; and when we die, everything that we are dies with us.

The world says this is reason for despair. All the more reason to put our hope in Jesus. We may not have a happy life in the way the world imagines it. We have something better: the One who is Life Himself.

The truth is, in the end there is nothing but Jesus for any of us. Family fades away; friends disappear. Only Jesus remains. You can simply see this a little bit more clearly in the lives of us single people, who are literally right now without the family, without the husband or wife, that modern society says we need to be happy.

So essentially, the purpose of singleness is to be a reminder. To ourselves, singleness (and its loneliness) is a reminder to go back to Jesus, to rest in Him. To the church, and the world, the reminder is the same: Go back to Jesus. Find your hope in Him.