Single

‘You always fall for the ‘alpha males’, but you’re just going to end up orbiting around them and they won’t even notice’. Great, so what, this is my destiny? To be ever more orbiting, invisible around attractive holy men who will fail to acknowledge my existence? And what is an ‘alpha male’ anyway. My friend’s response to my feelings towards the latest guy on my radar didn’t go down too well. Fair play, sometimes one needs to hear the truth, but it didn’t feel good.

I’ve been single all my life minus a fleeting few months in my nineteenth year and besides this anomaly, my ‘love life’ has consisted of multiple rejections, so my friends words were gutting but familiar in equal measure. Whilst I readily accept my current status as single, and need to acknowledge it and move on it when someone appears uninterested (however difficult that may be) there is definitely a place for refusing to define my future based on my past, because if my past is the lens through which I view every new situation, 1) I’m not trusting that God and 2) I’m being hopeless not hopeful.

 Where therefore, is the line between maintaining this desire and hope for a relationship in the future whilst being content in current circumstances? Being a person of extremes I’ve found the balance hard to strike; either I’m obsessed and proclaiming it to the world or if no one’s on the scene I completely squash and deny my desire for a relationship, pretending I don’t even care. Neither of these mindsets are helpful.

I’ve been advised multiple times by a variety of different people that wearing my heart on my sleeve (or facebook status, I haven’t done this but some people do . . .) is not cool. When you think/talk about something (or someone) over and over it essentially acquires more authority in your mind, and that, (it was pointed out to me) is meditation. I realized I’d been meditating on a guy for over a year. Oh dear. On the flip side, denying a desire doesn’t make it go away, it simply pushes it down and gives it space in which to brew bitterness. . . There is a middle ground, somewhere.

Whilst I do not have the ultimate answers to the turmoil of the single life, I know for a fact is that we are robbed what of what has massive potential to be an extremely fruitful time in our lives if we continually repress or obsess, focus on an absence and don’t trust. It must be frustrating for God, who has put the resources of heaven at our finger tips, to see his kids agonizing over something he has in his hands already. ‘Chill out, it will be fine, just look at what’s in front of you!’

Easier said than done, but if we want life, and life to the full, it’s about taking hold of what we have now and running with it, rather than sitting around waiting for something better to come along. As soon as we have the ‘once this is sorted, then my life will begin’ mentality, it only takes us to find the next thing we don’t have for dissatisfaction to take hold yet again. 

The question I’ve started to ask myself is ‘what has God given me NOW (and there is a very long list, he’s pretty generous you see), and how am I using it?’ This is where FAITH grows, it squashes discouragement.