How I Met Sam Part 2

I think one of the most difficult aspects of singleness for a Christian woman is the notion that the man must be the pursuer. I think in most cases this is the best way – a woman should not pursue a man. There may be exceptions which I need not describe here as it is not the point of my story here. I think the issue for me was that my singleness was not a problem to be solved. It was not something I could ‘do’ anything about. I could not (with the wisdom I adhered to) pursue single men. I could not manipulate relationships to find a marriageable partner. For one thing, I felt marriage was now off-limits to me. And to save any single men I knew the heartache of falling in love with me and then me deciding not to get married, I believed dating was off-limits as well. I had dated a few guys before and felt it was a disastrous way to go about finding a marriage partner. I do not condemn or criticize others who choose this route as it is the most popular of our culture, but I gained a specific conscience about the wisdom of half-hearted commitments and the sharing of souls that I felt was specially reserved for marriage. We hear much about the need for sexual purity in relationships, but I think as women we may tend to impropriety in sharing our hearts too much too soon in relationships before marriage. It feels natural, but the pain and damage that is done when a relationship does not end in marriage, seems irreparable. I chose to reserve my heart for God alone. (I believed, and still do, that it is better to be unhappy single, than unhappy married, because when married your unhappiness affects two people (or more)! But my goal was to be happy single, and I became content with a future of singleness). If God should have in mind for me to be married, then He would act on my behalf without me having to ‘date’ or enter into an unsteady relationship that had no understood future.
I told this to a friend one time and she said, ‘But then you’ll never get married. You can’t get married without dating someone first.’ But I said that with God all things are possible. I said this two weeks before the event that brought my husband into my life. Who said God doesn’t have a sense of humour?

Follow this link to Part 3:
How I Met Sam Part 3

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