In light of Valentine’s day having passed this weekend, I thought I’d do the obvious thing and write about love. But I don’t want to follow the fad and celebrate love among couples but shed light on love for single people. Many of us might not be able to fathom how singleness and intimacy can appear together, but hopefully by the end of this post you might be able to.
When we hear the word intimacy, we automatically think about a sexual relationship: the intimacy between a man and his wife, often represented by sex. It represents in our minds the closeness of body and soul that a couple has as a result of the love that they share. By virtue of this understanding, single people, like me, are considered outsiders to intimacy. We are expected to wait for it in dating and marriage. But is this actually what intimacy is about? I want to challenge this view and I’ll tell you why.
To put it simply, intimacy is about knowing and being known. It involves two parties coming together and deciding to share of themselves with each other, so that they can be known and know the other. It is not something that is exclusive to people who are pursuing a sexual relationship. It is a fruit of where love is. It is love that prompts us to desire to know and be known.
This is clearest in the gospel, where the God of the universe comes to His creation and mercifully and lovingly reveals Himself and calls some of those same creatures into relationship. He knows us and then calls us to know Him, deeply, intimately! It is His love that compels Him to condescend and come to those who have turned from Him, his very enemies, and then call them into relationship. He desires to be known by us – in His holiness that should bring us low as we realize just how unlike Him we are, and in His mercy, which brings us to know that He has worked in Christ to make us holy and acceptable before Him through the forgiveness of our sins!
But more than our knowledge of Him, is His knowledge of us. As Packer says, “What matters supremely, therefore is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but that he knows me. I am graven on the palms of his hands. I am never out of his mind. All my knowledge of him depends on his sustained initiative in knowing me. I know him, because he first knew me, and continues to know me, he knows me as a friend, one who loves me; and there is no moment when his eye is off me, or his attention distracted from me, and no moment therefore when his care falters.”[1] Packer continues to describe the intimacy our relationship with God affords us as we realize that He knows us in love, even the worst parts of us, and that there is nothing that He can now know that can disillusion Him about us, as we can be about ourselves, and so quench His determination to do us good! We ought therefore to have complete security, relief and comfort in our relationship with God.
As those made in the image of God, we can reflect some of this in our relationships with each other, but more so as Christians. As we get to know the Lord and rejoice in His knowledge of us, we can begin to share this with each other regardless of our marital status. This means that single Christians can just as easily know love and intimacy, outside a sexual relationship.
And yet, one of the greatest struggles for single people is loneliness. It is loneliness that most causes single people to think that singleness is a curse, and not a gift from God. It is loneliness that most often breeds discontent and grumbling among singles. It is the failure to have meaningful relationships where we can know and be known that makes our condition in life feel especially painful. I, therefore, wanted to write in challenge to my fellow single people but also to challenge the church community in which we single people belong.
Single people need to know that the problem is not singleness but the lack of intimacy. We need to understand that part of the problem is how we understand intimacy, or shall I say misunderstand it. We need to understand that part of the problem is in our fear of making connections due to the risk of rejection and disappointment. It is only as we understand what and where the problem is that we can work out a workable solution that can result in delight, contentment and godliness for us.
This means that in order to cultivate intimacy, single people will have to be willing to deliberately seek out and cultivate intentional friendships. This involves being willing to risk rejection by extending a hand out to others in the hopes that they will also extend their hand out in friendship. It takes going beyond shallow conversation and daring to share what we really think matters. It means going beyond answering “Fine.”, when asked how we are. It means being willing to say something that might offend for the sake of honesty and openness. It means being willing to entrust ourselves to others; sharing our very souls with those who might betray us. This is how intimacy is bred and how it grows and flourishes.
I spent Valentine’s day with my good girl-friend. We had made plans to hang out the second weekend of Feb and hadn’t thought hard about the fact that we’d be hanging out together on Valentine’s day. She hosted me for a sleepover on Friday evening, where we shared in good, (mostly godly) conversation, lots of laughter and good food. We woke up to a lazy Saturday, enjoyed more conversation on our lives and how we hope to keep loving Jesus, enjoyed a hearty breakfast with a view from her balcony and later watched and discussed a talk on vulnerability. We basically shared life together, got vulnerable about ourselves and aimed to know and be known.
My friend and I didn’t just arrive at the relationship we have. We have worked on it over a few years and had some hard conversations. We’ve read the Bible together and discussed it beyond just getting it right; we have sought to challenge each other to really live out what the Bible says. There are days this was easy and days where it was very hard. We have confessed sin to each other and by the help of God shone the light of grace upon each other. We have had to be intentional. This is just one of several relationships I am intentional with. Dear single friend, be intentional in your friendships! Cultivate healthy gospel-centered intimacy with Christian friends.
To the wider church family, I want to challenge you to learn what and where the problem is. You need to know how you can better care for the single people in your midst so that we can have more single people equipped to enjoy their singleness as a gift from God. I think that responsibility does not only lie with those who are single but with all who make up the community of faith. Single people (and in fact all Christians) need all the different and diverse members of the body. They need the old and young, the married and the single, men and women. The more diverse the body of believers the greater the chance to belong and delight in intimacy. So please don’t make our lives small or shut us out of your lives.
The challenge within the wider church is that you tend to see those single people among you as transitional – as not settled in life, but waiting for marriage. Marriage is seen, within the church and wider culture, as the ultimate end for all singles and so care for singles is almost always related to how close they are to being married. The type of questions that are involved in caring for single people will almost always end up with greatest concern being on if they’ve found someone to marry. What about caring for our spiritual wellbeing? Why not prioritize asking how I am growing in my submission to the Lord and to living for him devotedly? Why not ask me about my hobbies and what I enjoy spending my time doing? Why not ask me about how I am serving my church community? There is much more to us than our marital status.
These frequent questions on or about our singleness causes us to fixate on our singleness. This means that even though I want to keep busy and stop obsessing over what culture tells me is my greatest problem, I am forced time and again to come back to it. I am not helped to cast my eyes higher, to the Lord and to his pleasure, but to keep fantasizing about the life I do not have, steadily growing in discontentedness. I am not saying you should ignore our singleness entirely, but try not to make it the main point of all our conversations!
There is also another challenge, especially with those who are newly married and have growing families. They tend to shut out single people. This, I think, is because of two things. Firstly, there is the view that married people need to have a special focus on their families and so they are in some ways encouraged to shut people out of their lives in preference of their spouse and children. While I advocate for families to spend time together sharing in the intimacy of their close relationship, I think that it is unhealthy to shut others out. While growing one kind of intimacy, it kills another kind of intimacy that is important to our functioning and growth as humans and Christians. If the only people we share ourselves with are our spouse and children, what happens when we are outside the home? or when home life is hard? What if God forbid something happens and we lose them, shall no one else really know us and stand with us?
Secondly, there is a misconception that to invite single people into the lives of married people is to make them envious of the life they do not have. While there is a chance of this, often it is a gift for single people to be brought into families. It is there that we can truly appreciate what marriage is about – not the rom-com, soap opera garbage that we’re fed on TV. It is there that we can witness what it means to love someone in a servant-hearted manner (or not). It is where we can witness that wonderful picture of Christ and his church as we see how husbands relate to their wives and vice versa (Eph. 5:31-33). It is as we’re invited into families that we can witness and understand the joys and difficulties of loving one’s spouse and rearing children while aiming to glorify Jesus.
It is as we are given a sort of front seat to what marriage and family means, that we can truly appreciate the seriousness of this institution and take seriously what we think and expect of marriage. Rather than have a fantasy about marriage barely grounded in reality, we can be live witnesses to marriages in our community and get the reality check we need.
But more than this, we get to be welcomed into the intimacy of families to share in the love that they have for each other and are willing to share with us. This begins to give us places to belong and be known and therefore get to enjoy some intimacy. Surprisingly then, rather than feel worse because of envy, we can get to feel encouraged in our singleness because we have a place where we are known and loved. More to this, it is also the married who tend to see more clearly the blessedness of singleness and even encourage us to enjoy the gift that singleness is.
I hope that this encourages us to share together in intimacy; to extend friendship to our brothers and sisters in the faith for the sake of sharing in love and intimacy and growing in godliness and grace. May God continually help and guide us in this endeavor.
[1] Packer, J.I. 2nd ed. 1993. Knowing God. Hodder and Stoughton. London, England, p45.
