Singleness and the Mormon Life

A girl I know recently wrote this post about Marriage As Status. I blog-stalked my way over to her blog, and I kind of think I might like to be best friends with her. She always seems to have a good perspective on life, but combines that with a lot of sass. She's really great. I'm tempted to post the entire thing from her blog, but I'll constrain myself to just these two paragraphs:

I try not to look at my singlehood as a curse. More like an opportunity to learn and grow and experience things I wouldn't be able to under the "married with children" filing status. That's not to say that I don't feel a deep longing inside not to be alone and to have a family. But, I am not going to tie my life to another person just to get those things. If that were the case, I would have done it long long ago. No. I want more. I want love. I want to know deeper and more inspiring love than what I've known before. And I don't think that waiting for that kind of love is wrong or makes me unloveable or even picky...

So, this oratorio leaves me here: there is no one status that is better than another. We need to be sensitive to others and less judgemental (myself included). I firmly believe I will find the love I seek. But I don't want to be made to think I'm less than without it.

Some recent events in my own life left me lamenting the single-status, and when you're in the thick of it, it's hard to maintain a similar healthy outlook as this girl seems to have. I was talking to a friend of mine about it the other night, telling her that I was just so tired of dealing with the trial of being single, and that I was ready at least for the new trials of dealing with an ornery wife, crying babies, or struggling to pay the mortgage. Especially in the midst of my affliction, I just wanted to deal with a different kind of heartache from what I was then experiencing. Sometimes in this Mormon culture it's hard to be over the age of 25, actively participating in church, be single, and not feel like a screw-up.

After talking with my friend, and even though we didn't come up with any solutions, I felt so much more at peace. The grass is always greener, regardless of what it is that you're going through, even when it comes to gladly taking on another person's worst problems. Somehow whatever I'm dealing with at the current moment can't possibly be as bad as whatever that person over there is dealing with, so could we please make an arrangement and just trade concerns for at least a day or two?

Why can't I ever seem to escape the trap of thinking that I know what's better for my life than what Heavenly Father does? I'm sure that once I get some perspective on everything and I'm not feeling so myopic, I'll be able to look back and thank my lucky stars that things have turned out exactly the way that they did.

This girl that I've fancied for the entire school year took me out to lunch for my birthday yesterday. We got into the topic of dating and being an older single member in the church. On the surface when you talk to her you would never think that she struggles with feelings of inadequacy or disappointment when it comes to the dating and marriage issue, but she feels it just as much as anybody else does. She also added that she gets all sorts of comments about why she's not married - too picky, not picky enough, don't devote enough time, don't devote enough attention, too intimidating, etc.

Otherwise very sensitive people somehow become very insensitive a lot of times when talking about this subject with their single compatriots, and so often they'll leave out what perhaps should be the most obvious reason - marriage hasn't happened simply because it isn't time yet. In the post I refer to above, the girl makes a comparison to how it is a similar situation to when people can't have kids who have been trying for years, and for some other people they can't seem to do anything to stop the flow of extra mouths to feed.

Maybe we won't know all the reasons why things turn out (or don't) they way they did until after this life, but there is purpose behind it all. Somehow the trials that each of us experience are a perfectly customized program that helps each of us evolve into the person that God wants us to be. Whether it's dealing with the tragedy of death, betrayal of a friend, or the disappointment of failed expectations, they all do their part in fashioning us into the person that Heavenly Father ultimately wants us to become.

I guess, in a sense then, that when I want to shove off the difficulties in own life, I am denying His plan for me and assert that I know better than He does, that my finite vision sees something that His infinite vision does not.

And when I put it in those terms, I can't help but laugh at how dumb I can be sometimes.