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Spring Is Coming: Where's the Ring?

The Senior Scramble

I was recently out for coffee with my friend Lisa, who is just starting her last semester of college. She's had, overall, a great time in college — she's taking fabulous classes, double-majoring in communications and art history. She's made friends that she will cherish forever.

But as Lisa reflects on her college years, there's one big black mark. When she started school, she expected not only to enjoy her classes, and not only to make friends: She also expected to meet the man she would marry. And she hasn't. Her plan was to leave college with an engagement ring.

"Actually, my plan was a little more precise," she admits over her latte. "I planned to meet this guy sometime freshman year, but not really get to know him till sophomore year, then start dating seriously junior year, and get engaged senior year." The engagement ring, Lisa hoped, could double as her 21st birthday present.

Things haven't happened that way, and Lisa is disappointed and confused. "Maybe I should stop evaluating my time in college by this external fantasy I had, and just appreciate what a great four years I've had," she says. "But at the same time …" Lisa trails off and takes another sip of java.

"I feel like an adult because I'm graduating from college, but I still feel like a kid because I'm not married. I think everyone will just take me more seriously once I'm married. That's what happened with my sister — when she got engaged, all the sudden it was like she had joined the adult club. The bottom line is: I'm excited about the job opportunities I have for next fall; I'm excited about moving to D.C. for a while. I just … I thought I would be doing this with someone else. Maybe I've failed at the most important thing I could have done during college — find a guy."

Ah, the ring by spring pressure — which can be especially intense on a Christian college campus, but is certainly not unique to them. I recently heard a new term for the panic Lisa is feeling: the senior scramble (as in, you get to your senior year mateless, and start scrambling for a potential spouse).

The desire to get married is, of course, a good one. Even if Lisa might be romanticizing marriage just a tad (moving to a new city with someone, for example, makes some aspects of moving easier and some harder), marriage, companionship and commitment are all wonderful, transformative, rich pieces of life.

And yet: When Lisa threatens to declare her entire college experience unsatisfying, even a flop, because she will be leaving college single — something seems very off-kilter. Something seems sad and amiss.

Called to Singleness?

Here is what the pressure to get hitched by the end of college sometimes overlooks: Not all people are called to marry, especially right out of college. Some people are called to singleness, whether for a season or a lifetime. And worrying about whether you're called to "lifelong singleness" may not get you very far. If you're single at this moment, then at least for now, you are called to singleness — singleness today and maybe tomorrow. Even if you are called to marriage — even if you're reading this right now with a big rock on your left hand — marriage is not the most important thing in life. The most important thing, as we know, is your relationship with Christ.

I recently heard idolatry defined this way: idolatry happens when you take a good thing and give it more importance than it's due; when you put a good thing on a pedestal and weigh it down with a kind of reverence it was never meant to bear. When you allow marriage — a real marriage or an imagined, dreamed about, hoped for marriage — to become the most important thing in your life, you're committing a kind of idolatry.¹

There's been a lot of good discussion in the church lately about singleness — that is, there's been a real awareness that a lot of people are single, and that the church needs to make sure it's not doing things that wind up making single people feel lousy about singleness.

This increased attention to the subconscious signals we might send to single people is important. Folks like Lisa, indeed, shouldn't leave church week after week just feeling bad about themselves. Sometimes certain habits in the church leave many of us with the impression that we don't really count until we get married — that we're not really adults, or full members of the Christian community, until we get married.

That message gets broadcast in all sorts of ways — like when pastors somehow only ask married people to have important leadership roles in church. A friend of mine recently told me that her family was still seating her at the children's table at Thanksgiving even though she was 28. Her younger sister was seated with the adults, because she was married, but my friend, the older sister, was single and so stuck with the kids.

But there's something at stake even greater than how Lisa, or any other single Christian, feels about herself. What's really at stake in how we think about marriage and singleness is how we think about God, and how we think about our identity in Christ.

Yes, marriage and family are crucial parts of our society, and marriage and families offer a lot to the broader church community — among other things, marriages give the whole church a picture of radical fidelity, a glimpse at our covenantal relationship with God, and a picture of the eschatological wedding feast that awaits us.

And yet, Jesus — who Himself was never married, and who suggested to the Sadducees that "at the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage" (Matthew 22:30, NIV) — seems to tell us, over and over, that our true identity comes not from the marriage we might make, but, first and most fundamentally, from our relationship with Him.

A Theology of Singleness

When we pile on the ring-by-spring pressure, when we suggest that our most important Christian duty is to get hitched, we risk telling a false story about where our salvation comes from, and about what the primary source of grace in our lives is.

In college, I was a lot like Lisa. I dated one man for three years, and was devastated when we broke up December of my senior year. Completely devastated (but more on that in a future column!).

I was devastated because I loved that particular man, but I was also devastated because I simply wanted to get married. Marriage had actually become something of an abstraction for me, and some part of me believed that I would really and truly be OK only if I got married.

And then I did get married, and my golden calf quickly showed itself for what it was. Now, don't get me wrong, I love being married (well, most days I love being married!). Marriage is an instrument that God uses in my life to draw me closer to Him. It is a school of sanctification in which my husband and I are called to change and sacrifice, and in changing and sacrificing are made more Christ-like. But marriage does not, in and of itself, make me OK. To be made OK is, after all, just a casual way of saying "to be justified," and the only thing that justifies us, the only thing that makes us OK, is God.

What Can Make Me Whole Again?

So back to Lisa. Will Lisa get married in a year, or two years, or five, or ten? I have no way of knowing.

What I do know is this: I hope that, if Lisa genuinely desires marriage and if marriage is part of God's call and plan for her, that she does get married. But getting married will not make Lisa OK. It won't make her whole.

C O F F E E  S H O P

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Do you feel the "ring by spring" pressure?

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As part of the church, as Lisa's sister in Christ, I have a lot of responsibilities to her: to listen to her when she weeps after a break-up, to sit with her in her loneliness, even to keep my eye out for men who might make a good match for Lisa. But my most important job is to remind her that an imagined marriage is not the most important relationship in her life: Her most important relationship is with Jesus Christ and His church.