My first date happened when I was 28 years old.
You can imagine the ways the enemy tried to rub that in my face during moments where I felt the pain of longing for marriage, the vocation that I had discerned God was calling me to, and feeling as though nothing about my state in life was changing for several years. It hurt.
I think the pain that we can feel in our single years is something that others do not know how to respond to. This is evidenced by the responses we typically hear when the topic comes up. Well-meaning people, religious or not, will say: “It’ll happen when you’re not looking for it.” “You’re such a catch! Why are you still single?” “Enjoy your life! It’ll happen when it’s supposed to.”
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These responses can leave us reeling and dissatisfied. We question whether we should keep looking for a man if we’re supposed to find him when we’re not looking. We question our value in the world and in the Church for our lack of a significant other, our lack of a capital “V” vocation. We question why we still feel the ache of being single when we can see we have a life full of blessings.
I think a lot of this stems from our cultural inability to reconcile longing and gratitude. As a single woman, there were times where I saw myself as ungrateful to God because I wanted to find someone, because I wanted to get married … as though wanting those things meant that God was not enough for me (even though I know he is). There were also times when I felt such an ache to find someone who would see me, know me, and love me deeply — so much that they would want to commit themselves to me, and I to them, for the rest of our lives.
A holy longing
When someone finally said to me that the ache and the desire I had to be a wife and a mother was a good thing, and I received that truth, I wept. It was a much-needed reminder of the Lord’s own revelation to me on a retreat in 2021. Ten months earlier, I’d been on another retreat in which I had received from the Lord the clearest sign I had ever had that he was calling me to be a wife and mother. But, it had been 10 months, and I had seen no change. There had been no dates, no change to my state in life that gave me hope of meeting someone. So the enemy started to kick me while I was down. Maybe I had misread God’s signs, I thought; after all, hadn’t I done that before? Did God really say he was calling me to marriage? Maybe that was all in my head. And as much as I didn’t want to doubt, I was afraid that maybe I had misinterpreted something. Maybe I was wrong.
Kneeling before the Lord in adoration on a Saturday night, I heard him speak to my heart: “What do you want?” What are the desires of your heart? What do you hope I’m calling you to?”
I answered: “I want to be married. I want to have a family.”
His answer came: “And why do you think I don’t want that for you, too?”
I wept. It was so clear that God saw me, and that he knew full well the desires and ache of my heart … because he put them there.
That did not take away the ache, of course, but I was able to rest in the confidence that the Father did, in fact, want to give me that gift. If we look to the Scriptures, I think a place where we can see longing in light of God’s grace is in the Song of Songs.
“Arise, my friend, my beautiful one,
and come!
My dove in the clefts of the rock,
in the secret recesses of the cliff,
Let me see your face,
let me hear your voice,
For your voice is sweet,
and your face is lovely” (2:13b-14).
Some have found it strange, even scandalous, that this romantic poetry is in Scripture. But when we recall that God intends to use this imagery to teach us how he relates to each soul as a spouse, I think it opens us up to recognize there is such a thing as holy longing — our ache, our desire for union with another is reflective of our deeper ache and desire for union with God, which is what we are ultimately made for.
In recognizing this, we begin to see that the ache we feel in our single years is an opportunity to grow in intimacy with the Lord.
Jesus trusts you
If you watch The Chosen, you may have been struck, as I have, by how profoundly the show represents the life of discipleship to Jesus. One of those moments for me occurred in Season 3, Episode 2, when Jesus is approached by James the Less (“Little James”), who asks Jesus why Jesus has not healed him of his infirmity.
Jesus says, “Do you want to be healed?” James replies, “Yes, if that’s possible.” Jesus responds, “Oh, I think you’ve seen enough to know it’s possible.” James, troubled, says, “Then why haven’t you?” Jesus gently and tenderly says, “Because I trust you.”
Jesus’ response almost perfectly matched the words a confessor had spoken to me some months before when I had confided my interior struggles with being single and trying to meet someone, and how I felt like I just wanted to skip the whole painful and awkward dating process and get to the good part already.
I had slowly and steadily come to realize that, in allowing me to experience this ache and its accompanying sorrow, Jesus was trusting me with something — and that this longing would become an opportunity for me to run to him and rely on him and draw nearer to him through this ache that so mirrored the ache of his own heart for souls. I came to recognize that Jesus, particularly on the cross, knew the longing I felt deeply and intensely because he had already been there. On the cross, Jesus longs for — thirsts for, as St. Teresa of Calcutta says — our souls. He wants so much to be united with us and for us to be restored to communion with God through the redemption he is winning. But in that moment on the cross, he is also in incredible pain. He knows the value of his suffering and anguish, but there was also the human dimension of wanting that pain to be at its end. Still, he endured. He felt the pain, the ache, the thirst, the rejection. And he felt those things for me.
I realized, when I feel those emotions, when the ache seems unbearable, I can find solace in Christ, and purpose in my longing and suffering, by trusting him all the more, and by knowing that, in uniting my sufferings with his, not one ounce of this story he is writing with me will be wasted. It will all be worth it. It does not diminish the ache, and it does not dismiss it. But it does invite me into greater intimacy with the Lord to understand his thirst for souls in my own ache, and to see that ache not only acknowledged, but elevated and redeemed in Jesus on the cross — stretched out between heaven and earth, stretched out between life and death, waiting, anticipating, longing, hoping and rejoicing, knowing what is to come is all worth it.
Sister, your ache is real. Your desire is real. And Jesus sees you in that space. He trusts you. He loves you. He aches for you and with you. Run to him whenever you feel this way. Run to him and pour out your heart to him in the most honest prayer of your life. Let him console you by receiving his grace in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist where his Sacred Heart becomes one with our own, and ours with his. And know of my prayers for you. The ache is real. But the intimacy that the ache led me to have with the Lord is more beautiful than I could have ever imagined. Hold fast to hope, sister. He trusts you.
