It’s Not About Dating

The virtual talent show was going about how one might expect a virtual talent show to go. It was an attempt by us leaders to keep the high schoolers in our Drama Club engaged. We were a certain number of months into the pandemic. The way time worked in those days, it could have been month three or month 10 and I’m not sure I would have known the difference. It was somewhere in that general smear of time between March 2020 and May 2021. 

There were fifteen of us on the video call–seven teenagers, four adults, and a few alumni of the program. I’d moved my workspace into my bedroom, where there were windows, but I hadn’t rearranged the furniture yet. My iPad sat perched on a pile of books on the windowsill. I wedged my light blue storage ottoman into the space between the foot of my bed, the radiator pipe, and my antique dresser. Leaning against my bed, I listened to the students sing from their makeshift workspaces in their own bedrooms around the city. The adults were invited to participate, and I read an old blog called “The Parable of the Dishes.” It was from a blog series called Parables of a Single Christian in which I told stories exploring the minutiae of my life as someone who is Christian and also romantically untethered. It was an exercise in knowing your audience. One of the adults got it, because she was also single. When I finished, she said, “I felt that on so many levels.” The teenagers shuffled in their seats, some looking at their phones, some smiling politely. 

We breezed through the acts and sat staring at our screens. Carl*, the leader, broke into the muted silence. “Hi, Jenine*! It’s been a while. What’s going on?” My eyes searched the boxes struggling to find the person to whom he was speaking. Someone had unmuted herself and was speaking. I finally saw the face that went with the voice. She was in college, just starting the second half of her freshman year when things shut down. She mentioned that she’d started doing some Instagram Live conversations with friends which made her want to talk about relationships, specifically dating. When Carl heard this he said, “Oh, well it’s your lucky day!” 

“Oh yeah?” Jenine said. 

Carl grinned. “Did you know that we have a relationship expert on this call?” 

I wondered to whom he was referring. Waiting for this mysterious person to reveal themself, I looked at all the boxes on the screen. Until, in a moment of panic, I realized Carl might be talking about me. 

Sure enough, Carl went on, “MaryB. writes about that and has a podcast, too!” 

I smiled at my computer camera as my fingers started fidgeting with the class ring on my right ring finger. “MaryB., do you have any thoughts for Jenine?”

Every thought in my head vanished as I tapped on the microphone to unmute myself. “Hey, Jenine!” My mouth went dry as I tried to find my next words. “Based on what you were saying, it sounds like you are planning to focus on romantic relationships. Is that correct?” 

Jenine nodded and said words about her premise. 

“Oh, awesome,” I mustered. “You know, I don’t actually talk much about dating in my work. When I talk about relationships, I tend to focus more on friendship, community, and that kind of thing. But I can definitely DM you some accounts that I’ve found helpful in my own thinking on dating. What’s your Instagram handle?”

She told me, and the conversation moved on. 

It wasn’t the first time someone assumed the subjects of singleness and dating are one in the same. My first essay on singleness was about dating. I’ve also found there to be a general assumption that saying one talks about “relationships” gives many people the impression that are primarily referring to romantic relationships. It is an interesting phenomenon. 

The current conversations happening around Christian dating are, of course, good and necessary. It didn’t take long for me to realize that’s not where I feel the most at home. 

In 2019, my church started what they called Relationship Forums. It was a monthly event series designed to help Christians thrive in their relationships. While the event wasn’t exclusively for singles, it covered topics like dating and physical boundaries, among others. It was my first opportunity to serve as a content consultant for a church trying to better reach its single congregants. I spoke at a couple, helped edit talks, found panelists for Q&A, and helped decide what topics to cover. 

I was facilitating a discussion on myths of singleness. Things started out rocky. We began with a poll to get everyone engaged. The last question in the poll was, “In your experience, singleness is talked about…” The options were “too much” and “not enough.” I bantered while people chose their response. When the person running admin revealed the result, about 70% of the room said: “too much.” 

“Welp,” I stated into the microphone, “this is awkward because that’s actually what we’re going to talk about today.”

At the end of the discussion time, we offered a Q&A panel. As the speaker, I was on the panel along with three men. Questions came in via text, and several were about dating. I had only, that year, started to make a concerted effort to date by joining a couple of dating apps. But I did my best. There was a question about whether or not it’s ok for women to initiate. I glanced at the panel, waiting for someone else to answer the question. To my surprise, I saw the microphone we were sharing headed my direction. My brain slowly pieced together the fact that, as the only woman on the panel, it was one I should probably answer. 

“Well,” I said, clearing my throat and trying to put my swirling thoughts into a logical order. “Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with it. I mean, you don’t want to be the only one initiating, I think it’s important that there’s mutual interest and effort. But, yeah. Speaking personally, I’m a person who tends to know what I want, so when it comes to dating, I could definitely see myself initiating. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me inviting a guy to get a cup of coffee or something. But you definitely want to be clear, so you know, I’d say something like, ‘Hey, I think you’re great, would you want to get a cup of coffee some time? I’d like to get to know you better.’” I took a breath trying to figure out how to land the plane and be clear and smooth. “‘You know, in a date-like capacity, err I mean in a romantical fashion.’” I thrust the microphone away from myself, hoping the floor would open up and consume me. I chuckled along with the rest of the room. Many of them were friends, accustomed to my socially awkward manner of speech. 

I was a year into my podcast by that point. The question of how much or even whether to talk about dating loomed large. On the one hand, it seemed like a lot of people wanted to talk about it. On the other, I thought of myself as the most awkward human on the planet. My ideas about dating best practices were largely theoretical. I saw the success of the people who did talk about dating. At the same time, I felt my interest and passion pulling me in another direction. In the three and a half years I’ve been doing this, this question has followed me. Can I be a writer and speaker in the singleness genre and not talk about dating? 

The main thing that irked me was the fact that dating consumed so little of my bandwidth as a single person. I wasn’t anti-dating. There were just a lot of other things that filled my life that I thought about more. Particularities of being single that had nothing to do with romance. I think the main point of tension I was starting to butt up against was how much our culture revolves around romantic relationships. As someone who does not date much, it feels weird to center my life and my work around something absent. On top of that, it seemed like singles have had more than their fill of advice from people with only a theoretical understanding of the realities of dating. The people I knew who were talking the best about dating were the ones in the trenches with their audience. 

It all came to a head for me during an interview for the fourth season of my podcast. I was talking to Anna Broadway, an author and one of the more brilliant thinkers on this topic. She was describing a seventeen month international trip she’d done researching singleness in the church. If you’d like to learn more, you can listen to episode 4.9 of my podcast, Unsuitable with MaryB. Safrit or check out her website, annabroadway.com. Anywho, I asked her to talk me through how she came up with her research idea. I’ll never forget that conversation, because it put into words so many things I was wrestling with at the time. 

She said, “I think the church tends to focus on those of marriageable age as it’s conventionally understood, and to talk about singleness as this premarital stage. But that not only ignores the examples of singleness that we see in the Bible, in cases of Paul and Jesus, it also ignores the reality of people who wind up single late in life and what that looks like for them.”

We do need to talk about dating. But it’s not the only thing we need to talk about. I’m not even sure whether it’s the primary thing we should talk about. At the very least, we cannot assume the topics are synonymous. Implicitly or explicitly. 

If you’re single, you might also feel resentful of being lumped into a group whose biggest need is assumed to be getting un-single as quickly as possible. Like the people listening to me talk about the myths of singleness, you might feel like singleness is talked about too much. I have found that annoyance and frustration to be an important piece of information. It indicates that something is off. Your frustration, if it’s anything like mine, might hinge on the fact that the conversation being had and the few resources being offered is extremely narrow. What if I told you that that narrowness is not good for anyone? What if I told you that your frustration can be a gift to the church?

When we say the word “single,” we have a particular person in mind. A specific person of a specific age and with specific desires. Who we picture determines what we talk about. When we as a church (us singles included) picture a white female, age 23, whose biggest problem in life is that she did not find a husband at college, it makes sense to think of singleness as a pre-marriage stage. 

But what happens when you add any sort of nuance to that person? What if she’s 53? What if he’s gay? What if she doesn’t want to get married? What if he is a person of color called to be part of a predominately white institution? What if she is a single mom? What if he’s divorced or a widower? What if she’s a gifted musician whose call and lifestyle doesn’t lend itself to a suburban picture of what marriage ought to be? What if he is homeless? When we talk about singleness, we are talking about all of these people. A holistic view of singleness doesn’t just consider how that relationship status affects our romantic relationships. It considers how that relationship status intersects with every area of our lives. 

As people who are single, we have a particular window into the many ways in which a marriage-obsessed culture is bad for everyone. When we view singleness solely though the lens of dating, we perpetuate that obsession. The fact that it annoys you to be lumped in with one small subset of singles should be a gift to the church. Because the church was never made to circle around marriage. Our faith touches every aspect of our lives, our community, and our world. We are annoyed because, in spite of what we as a church might say, the primary lens we use to engage with the topic of relationships continues to be romantic. 

As a podcaster, I leave my questions as open-ended as possible, and to hear from guests with all sorts of experiences, identities, and views. My policy is to interview only people who are single and Christian. And I don’t police the second point. If they are comfortable being called a Christian, that’s good enough for me. Part of the goal of the podcast is to expand our imagination of what it means to talk about singleness. I let my guests tell stories and share insights on any number of topics, whatever they want to talk about. I ask questions, and I do my homework. But largely, I ask a similar series of questions. Tell me about a time you felt unsuitable was a big one in the early seasons. We talk about relationships, mental health, vocation, race, sexuality, and all sorts of things. Sometimes dating comes up, but more often when we talk about relationships, we talk about friendship. 

If you are tired of people assuming romance is your biggest concern, you are not the only one. When you push back or express frustration, it is a reminder to everyone that we were not made to center our lives around a romantic and sexual partner. While the church might say that with our words, singles are an embodied reminder that our lives are not about marriage. While it is a good and important thing, it is not the only good and important thing. It is certainly not the most important thing. That is actually a message of profound hope for everyone. Everyone experiences singleness, and many believe that marriage won’t be part of the New Earth, post-resurrection. When we treat the pursuit of marriage like the end-all-be-all, we leave out those who, for whatever reason, will never get married and those who have lost their marriage. It keeps our picture of what God made us for small and wonky. 

I initially wrote this piece a few years ago as part of a book I did not end up publishing. My picture of who God is and what it means to talk about singleness and relationships has only gotten broader. Even though I have started dating more in the recent past, I still think focusing our lives on romantic and sexual relationships isn’t what we were made to do. If you’re here, odds are you feel the same. I’m grateful to have some space in your inbox to noodle on these thoughts. 

*Not their real names