To Be Single In the Church

There is at Harding a stigma of young couples marrying before their impending graduation. “Three swings and a ring” and “marriage factory” are common phrases joked about amongst the inner circle of Church of Christ private school “kids.” Our campus post-office stamps have gold wedding rings on them and the university campus provides a chapel for weddings and receptions. It is a culture foreign to State Schools.

When I was a freshman, young, naive, and unsure, I was all about it. I had an anxiousness that settled into my heart when I moved into my dorm room. I knew that before I finished my four years at Harding University, I was going to be married. It didn’t matter that I had been single my entire adolescence. Never mind that I went solo to both of my high school proms. This was different. This was college. A marriage factory, I’d been told.

The fall of 2009 began and only a few months in, a girl on my third floor hall of Sears dormitory got engaged to a boy she had met a few months previous. She didn’t return to school in the spring. By the next fall, my social club had a number of “ring ceremonies.”

The next spring came and went. I had no prospects of a husband. I hadn’t even been asked to a boys function, for crying out loud. I was beginning to think I was defective, or at some disadvantage in life because I didn’t have Friday night date nights. However, much to my surprise, in the summer before my junior year I got a boyfriend. My first ever, a life event so special that my sister cried at the news.

Finally! I thought. This, oh this God ordained relationship is sure to achieve an engagement. Except it went the opposite direction and in a few short months that relationship fizzled into a big fat break-up in the parking lot of my dorm. At high noon in September. It sucked.

My semesters at Harding kept rolling by quicker than I could get a grasp on them, and before I knew it, the freshman girl with high hopes of marriage that moved into Sears in 2009 is now a 22 year old senior who is still single and has plans of traveling to four different weddings this summer.

But at some point, and I’m not even sure when, I stopped caring. Perhaps it was the experience of studying abroad. Or maybe it was more recent realization that as college is coming to an end for me, I have several open doors to walk into with no boyfriend/husband/commitment holding me back. I can choose graduate school, mission work, I can move to Utah, Alaska, Seattle, or stay in Arkansas.

And after I came to this realization, I read 1 Corinthians 7 with more intent. That it is better to remain unmarried, that those who do marry will face more worldly trials, and that those who are unmarried can focus solely on the Lord in their life.

I consider that an advantage.