Stuck at Life's Kiddie Table

After a quarter’s worth of reading, discussion and “pastoral conversations” regarding Marriage and Pre-Marriage counseling, I’ve got a thing or two to get off my chest.

First, we idealistically romantic single people have a thing or two to learn about marriage in all its messy, carnage-strewn reality. I, for one, have been quite guilty of sanitizing the whole endeavor. So, I arrive home from giving a sermon in class, for example, and the aura of a preaching hangover looms over my head and no one has dinner on the stove for me. No one is eagerly awaiting the play-by-play of the sermonizing event. No one is going to let me plant my yoga-pantsed ass on the couch next to them for an entire evening of mind-numbing network television. And its moments like this that I am reminded that singleton-ness SUCKS!

And then I realize that being married doesn’t garuntee that someone will have dinner on the stove, want to hear my sermon play-by-play or sit in potato-esque fashion in front of the television with me all evening. Being married might actually require me to share my mac & cheese, listen to someone else’s shitty day and then be forced to watch NASCAR or something.

Maybe I’m getting off-track. I’m not attempting to stage a fist-fight between married-stress and singleton-stress. There is plenty of anxiety to go around and I don’t think single people OR married people can claim the lion’s share. But I will say that, for singletons such as myself, it’s pretty easy to imagine marriage through rosy-tinted glasses.

Second, I wonder if most people get into marriage expecting it to be a sunshine-y haven from all of life’s storms. One of the best articles we read for class was called, “Marriage: A Crucible for Growth” by David Wurster. The contention of this article closely follows Harville Hendrix’s Imago Theory, which, in a grossly abridged attempt at summation, says that we marry unresolved conflict from our families of origin. In other words, we choose, in our marriage partner, someone with whom we can recreate all the positive and negative interactions of our childhood, looking (subconsciously, of course) to have all our unfulfilled needs met by this other person. So when you have that, “I feel like I’ve known this person my whole life” moment about a nearly complete stranger, WATCH OUT! That, my friend, is your Imago.

When I learned about this Imago construct, I had two immediate questions:

a) If marrying your Imago propels you back into all that unresolved conflict and produces heightened tension and great potential for re-injury, wouldn’t the wisest course of action be to stare your Imago in the face, turn tail, tuck head and run like hell? Pretty natural reaction IF you’ve already bought the myth that marriage is for the purpose of uninterrupted, happy-clappy togetherness. On the other hand, what if marriage isn’t ultimately a haven but a crucible in which all the false self you neatly project to the rest of the world is broken down and YOU, I mean the real YOU, are forced to show up, ‘fess up and grow up in and through the relationship? It’s a pretty plausible conclusion if, as a Christian, you agree that marriage is a gift from God. The syllogism would go a bit like this:

Marriage is a gift from God.
God’s gifts are not for our comfort.
God’s gifts are for our redemption.
God goes to exceedingly great lengths to accomplish our redemption.
One of God’s great lengths may be our marriages.
(Yeah, I know, easy for me to say.)

b) Assuming this theory is correct, why the monkey does anyone get married? Ever? To anyone? And, of course, I’m grossly under-qualified to answer this question but I think it might be that, despite the pain, we want to be fully known and refined in and through relationship with one another. In an earlier pastoral care class, we learned that there are several ways that we accomplish change in our lives: behavior modification (appropriate methodology for dogs, sanctioned for use on children by one James Dobson) cognitive theory (replacing negative thoughts with positive ones – a good, but lonely, alternative) and dynamic theory of change. Dynamic theory of change asserts that relationships are the crucible AND the cushion for life change. It is in relationship with other people that long-lasting change is best accomplished. Ask any married person and he/she will tell you, “I never realized how selfish/prideful/insecure/_________ I was until I got married. You really see yourself without touch-ups through the eyes of your spouse.”

And that’s the hard work of what the Bible calls “leaving and cleaving.” You learn to leave your family of origin and, by letting go of that primary relationship, you have room in your psyche/heart/life/whatever to cleave to your spouse (NOTE: the “to” is an incredibly important part of that sentence, at least if you want to avoid jail time.) Cleaving, according Wurster, is “the excitement and adventure of finding out who it really is that we married. In a sense a person then falls out of romance so they can go on with deeper loving. It is not only a process of finding out whom we have married but also a process of finding out who we are as well.” And for the incredibly difficult task of cleaving, God has seen fit to provide the tool of commitment. Commitment locks you into the process and while it IS hard work, there is always the commitment factor to fall back on. You can’t just walk away. What a scary thing! Yet, commitment is also the factor that facilitates, through its very permanence, the catalyst to do the hard work of redeeming old hurts, empathizing with the weakness of another person and sanctifying your character.

So then, third and finally, I ask this question, “What’s a single girl to do?” The question is not an invitation to a pity party (well, not mostly, anyway.) It’s an honest question.

Granting that marriage is not a walk in the park.
Granting that God uses relationship to heal (with the understanding that sometimes, in order to heal, a doctor has to re-break the bone and set it right before healing can begin.)
Granting that relationships are most likely strong enough to do the healing work when they are surrounded by padlock commitment.
Granting that the Bible has given us a mandate to “leave and cleave.

What does a single woman in her mid-twenties who has done/is doing the leaving (all the good, therapeutic work of differentiating from family of origin and re-engaging in the family dynamic as an adult child) have to cleave?

In other words, “Where’s my cleavage?”

In what relationships do I get to practice that “deeper loving” in which I engage in “a process of finding out who I am as well.”

Friends? I don’t think so. And that’s not to say I don’t have great friends. I have amazing friends. Friends that I’m learning to trust. Friends who, I believe, are in it for the long haul. But is friend-commitment cleaving-commitment? Perhaps, there are limits in this regard to the power that friendships can wield in our redemption.

Jesus? That’s the good fundagelical answer, right? Pop in the latest God-is-my-boyfriend, praisegasm music and let it roll. Well, it may have worked for Julian of Norwich. Elisabeth Elliot wants you to believe it will work for you as well. Boil it down and it goes a little something like this: singleton is to Jesus as wife is to husband. But ALL people are required by Scripture to maintain their primary allegiance to Christ the Crucified. Saying that a single person gets the same from their relationship to God as a married person does with their spouse – just weirds me out a little. That’s all I’m saying.

The church? In an ideal world, yes. Absolutely. I have quoted Life Together on this blog ad nauseam so I definitely understand that our greatest relational loyalties belong to each other as brothers and sisters in Christ. But, when it comes to drawing single people in and treating them like adults, the church, in practice, is not the place I’d go to do my cleaving. For example, review the elder and deacon boards of your church and ask, “Are there any single people serving in these positions?” Likely not. But if any of your perfectly capable single congregants gets married, any bets that they’ll be extended a nomination shortly thereafter? Sorry to break it to you but the church is a coalition of smug marrieds, making it an unsafe place for us singletons to do our cleaving.

So, “What’s a single girl to do?” Seriously. I feel like I’m stuck at life’s kiddie table and I just want to know: "Where's my cleavage?"