A letter to my unmarried sisters of the Church,
Let me begin by acknowledging that I do not know you. I
cannot be aware of the many different struggles of your heart, as vast in their
variety as they will be. But I will speak as best I can to what I know to be
true, the affection I feel for you, and what I have observed so far of your
journey.
I’m endeavoring to say to you what no one ever said to me
when I was single, but what I think you would be blessed to hear in your
present place. Quite frankly, I see too many of you unhappy and disappointed
that your particular “happily ever after” has not yet come. It is an
unhappiness you try to hide well, and you do as best you can.
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Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall
strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the Lord.
Psalms 27: 14
(Notice how it doesn't say wait on a man?) |
But I want you to know that I see you, as plainly as I see
others with all the crosses they have to bear. And I will not compare their
struggles with yours—I believe such an action to be cruel and unfair. Your
feelings, your pains are real. The loneliness and frustration you feel as you
wait, work, study, fall in love, get hurt, and grow cannot be written off as
something unimportant. Please don’t think me unwise or unknowing to any of
these things. I’ve walked my own lonely version of what you are currently
experiencing. It’s because of that experience, and my present circumstances as a
recently married woman that causes me to write to you in this fashion.
I love my husband dearly. I have nothing but the sincerest
love and admiration for him. He’s a good man, he treats me with all the respect
I have ever wanted in a husband. Our life together is sweet, and our
circumstances very blessed.
But is my happiness complete?
In all honesty, No.
Is it because of some failure on his part? Not at all.
And it’s only now we’ve been married nine months that I’m
beginning to understand this reality.
I came into my marriage with the same expectation many of
you have for yours. If you find someone loving, spiritually put together,
a priesthood holder and a returned missionary whose virtue and fidelity are
intact, your happiness will naturally follow. Because your lover and protector
is all of those things, living the gospel will naturally follow. It all stems
from the belief that because they live the gospel, total bliss and happiness
will be achieved. It will not be the end of all troubles, but surely it must be
the end of MANY of them—including the ones you dislike the most.
If only you could see now how totally wrong you are.
Marriage doesn't fix anything--it just adds more characters to the story. All the struggles you currently experience will still continue. In fact, you will receive additional pressure on top of them in ways you do not currently experience.
Marriage doesn't fix anything--it just adds more characters to the story. All the struggles you currently experience will still continue. In fact, you will receive additional pressure on top of them in ways you do not currently experience.
If you don’t work, your husband will work and you will never
see him enough to completely put you at ease. Caring for a home by yourself can
be incredibly dull and unfulfilling. It doesn’t matter how well you’ve been
taught about the divinity of housewifery and motherhood—there is nothing
rewarding or fulfilling about scraping grease out of the bottom of a casserole
dish for the third time in a week. And no, there is nothing wrong with you if
you struggle to find satisfaction in it. We’re all secretly thinking the same
thing when we first start out.
If you decide to work, you’ll see your husband even less, and handle all of the complications that come with your additional obligations. I fit that description, and sometimes it’s more than a month before I’m in the same room with my husband for more than 2 consecutive hours. You’ll wonder when the right time is to bring children into the situation, but there never really is a right moment once you’re working. There’s always one more paycheck, one more project, one more presentation, one more thing to finish. That’s if you’re lucky enough to have children once you decide you want them. It doesn’t always work out that you can have them, at least not right away.
And whether you have children or not, it can feel so much
like everything you’ve worked for up to that point is slipping away.
Bills. Debt. Saving. Responsibility. Adjustments. Massive
overhauls. Organization. Cleaning. Cooking. Working. Working. Working. That is
what marriage is, most of the time. Regardless of what type of work it is, paid
or unpaid. Most of what you do in marriage is work. People tell you that a lot,
but you really have no comprehension of what it means until you’re doing it.
And if you end up like I did and asking yourself, “What have I done?” don’t
worry. You’re just having a bad day. It will pass, and you will be all right.
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| Ladies, it's time to get off the bench! |
But the thing I mentioned before, the thing no one told me
when I was single that I’m telling you now: enjoy being single. Enjoy the
horrible dates and the long nights, the homework, and the mornings to yourself.
Enjoy each and every day where you can do exactly what you have the mind and
means to do. If you want to go to school, go to school. If you want to travel,
work hard and go as far as your dime will take you. If you want to be around
children, heaven knows you can be useful in your wards and communities to
change the lives of any sort of children you like. Take your pick.
If you are mourning the fact that you’re single, it’s because
you doing it wrong. You’re failing to recognize two things about your own life:
how much freedom you have to do what you want, and how much all of that is
going to change once you have someone else to share it with.
Your world begins long before you get married, and the quality of your life after marriage depends so much on how you spend your life when you are single.
I know you feel like your options are all closed to you
because, “I just don’t want to get too tied down, because what if I get
married?” Now that I am married, I realize now that this is the biggest mistake
I made. I held back from living, from experiencing everything I could have each
day, in the time and energy I wasted lamenting over something I didn’t have. I
denied myself opportunities and attachments that would have kept me happy
enough not to be lonely. All for the fear of having to give them up once I got
married.
In hindsight, I recognize now that my life was not
incomplete and empty because I wasn’t married. It was incomplete and empty
because I was denying myself the ability to live my life and be happy. I was
telling myself “No” when my world should have been full of “Yes,” or at least “Let’s
Try!” I was the cause of my own unhappiness, which is a habit that will rob you of marital bliss if it continues. Trust me.
Fortunately for me, I didn’t make that mistake in the ways
that mattered most to me. I went to school. I made friends who will be beside
me until the grave and beyond. I served a mission in one of the most brilliant
countries in the world. I had the time and space to learn something of
myself—my own mind, my faults, my desires, and my strengths. I was not as
consumed with marriage as I might have been. Perhaps that is why it pains me so
much to see young women making the same mistakes I did, enough to want to say
something—because I know they’re sacrificing even more than I did on the false
alters of the Hypothetical.
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| Notice how it's NOT a Stop sign... |
If you want to live your life with less heartbreak and
sorrow, stop punishing yourself and calling yourself inferior because some
lovely young man has not shown up yet. If you honestly think a man--an imperfect
being full of faults and bad days and humanity--is going to give you everything
you wanted in life all of the time, you’re setting him up for a lot of
frustration and failure. It isn’t fair to him, and it certainly isn’t fair to
you. You’ll be the one learning to let go, finger by finger, of those
expectations in moments of bitter frustration later on.
Am I saying that marriage is terrible and ought to be
avoided? Certainly not. It’s a beautiful way of life I am satisfied with enough
to work for it as hard as I do. But I'm trying not to turn my marriage into
something it was never meant to be. I need someone in addition to my husband to
make me happy in my life. He needs me to depend on someone in addition to
him to fill my search for joy in every waking hour. I can't be entirely dependent on him for every happy moment I ever have. I need passions and
pursuits, other things and people to care about in my life. I need to be able to fill my own life with meaning and purpose.
I had been denying myself these
sorts of pleasures for so long because I wanted to get married, I didn’t know
what to do with myself once I achieved it. Life felt like it was coming to an
end for me, when in actuality it was only just beginning. The feminists would
call that a failure of my husband or my church or my society, but I call it
what it truly is. The failure was me.
Rejoice in whatever place or circumstance you might be. Live with joy because you know how to meet the needs an desires of your own heart. Trust
God enough to know that wherever you are, single or married, He is leading you to the place you really intend to go. He doesn’t love you less because you are unmarried. And even
though it may seem at times that your friends and family are infinitely happier
in their situations than you are in yours—no one’s walk from birth to death is
without opposition. No one’s life is without trial. You only don’t see their
burdens because they don’t WANT you to see them. But trust me—life gets HARDER for all of us after marriage, not easier.
I know God loves all of His children. He brings us each to
the changes in our lives when we most need them, and not a moment before. When
we live with trust continually, always believing in good things to come, we
will never be disappointed in our circumstances. There will always be new
adventures and opportunities just ahead.
Please be at peace, and if I don’t see you in a wedding
dress sooner rather than later, be reassured that all is truly well.
Love and prayers,
Heather
