7 Myths about Singleness Quotes

“If marriage shows us the shape of the gospel, singleness shows us its sufficiency.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“The issue is not whether this path or that path is better, whether singleness or marriage would bring me more good. The issue is God and whether I will plunge myself into him, trusting him every day.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“Getting married is no guarantee of companionship and care for life. Neither is having kids. Life in this tragic and fallen world is fraught for all of us. No one situation provides any ultimate security. No matter our station in life, we live with uncertainty.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“God knows me more than I know myself. God loves me more than I love myself. God is more committed to my ultimate joy than I am. So I can trust him.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“This is why the church needs single people. Not as a supposedly endless source of free babysitting, but to remind us that the joy and fulfillment of marriage in this life is partial and can only be temporal. The presence of singles who find their fullest meaning and satisfaction in Christ is a visible, physical testimony to the fact that the end of all of our longing comes in Jesus.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“It is no surprise that weddings can be a little bittersweet for single people. We’re genuinely happy for our friends as they marry. But there can also be a sense of loss. It is the start of a new era for the couple. But the end of an era for our friendship. A single friend of mine in his late forties, recently said that the marriage of one of his closest friends felt like a bereavement. It feels as though you’ve been demoted. One writer, Carrie English, describes feelings of rejection that come when attending the wedding of friends. Two people announcing publicly that they love each other more than they love you. There is not denying that weddings change friendships forever. Priorities have been declared in public. She’ll be there for him in sickness and in health, till death do they part. She’ll be there for you on your birthday or when he has to work late. Being platonically dumped wouldn’t be so bad if people would acknowledge that you have the right to be platonically heartbroken. But it’s just not part of our vocabulary. However much our society might pay lip service to friendship, the fact remains that the only love it considers important, important enough to make a huge public celebration, is romantic love.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“Then [my friend] started dating, quickly got married, then just disappeared. I never saw him. He was like Frodo from Lord of the Rings. The moment he put a ring on, he vanished. I’ve seen this happen a few times. Once a serious relationship is established and a couple gets married, friendship with others becomes a low priority.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“In much of our thinking, singleness, if not downright bad, is certainly not seen as good. One writer has noticed the difference between Christian books on marriage and those on singleness. In the books on marriage, marriage is assumed to be a great thing and all that remains is to understand it better, and perhaps be aware of one or two potential pitfalls that might arise. But books on singleness typically have a different starting point. Singleness is assumed to be pretty much awful. The point of the books is, therefore, to see if we might to eke out something just about tolerable from it. Even the way we describe singleness reflects this. It is almost always defined in the negative, as the absence of something. It is the state of not being married. It is the absence of significant other. This defining by negation reinforces the idea that there is nothing intrinsically good about singleness. It is merely the situation of lacking what is intrinsically good in marriage.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“And singleness isn't actually a bad thing. In the Bible it's good. It's even described as a blessing. In and of itself it's a wonderful gift from God that should be affirmed and celebrated.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“We need to remind ourselves, daily, that our singleness is not for us but for the Lord.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“I heard some-
one describe long-term celibates like me as being like unicorns:
you’ve heard of them, but you never think you’re going to actu-
ally meet one.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“Whatever relational cost our discipleship may incur, however much family we may lose in the course of following Christ, Jesus is saying that even in this life it will be worth it. Following him means an abundance of spiritual family. Nature may have given us only one mother and one father; the gospel gives us far more.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“I am grateful to my friend, Kathy Keller, for reminding me that God doesn’t give us hypothetical grace but only actual grace. The point is that when we imagine all the worst case scenarios, we are imagining them without factoring in the presence and grace of God that would be there if they actually happened. As Kathy wrote in an email once, “God doesn’t play that game. He doesn’t inject hypothetical grace into your hypothetical nightmare situation, so that you would know what it would actually feel like if you ever did end up in that situation.” He only gives grace for our actual situation. Replaying these scenarios over and over in our mind is therefore not at all helpful, and actually factors out what God would be doing were it to actually happen. What we’re imaging is actually life in that situation without God’s presence. Better to find something else to fill our minds with. C.S. Lewis makes a similar point when he says, “Remember one is given the strength to bear what happens, but not the 101 different things that might happen.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“I am grateful to my friend, Kathy Keller, for reminding me that God doesn’t give us hypothetical grace but only actual grace. The point is that when we imagine all the worst case scenarios, we are imagining them without factoring in the presence and grace of God that would be there if they actually happened. As Kathy wrote in an email once, “God does’t play that game. He doesn’t inject hypothetical grace into your hypothetical nightmare situation ,so that you would know what it would actually feel like if you ever did end up in that situation.” He only gives grace for our actual situation. Replaying these scenarios over and over in our mind is therefore not at all helpful, and actually factors out what God would be doing were it to actually happen. What we’re imaging is actually life in that situation without God’s presence. Better to find something else to fill our minds with. C.S. Lewis makes a similar point when he says, “Remember one is given the strength to bear what happens, but not the 101 different things that might happen.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“…the feeling that even close friendships had become provisional. There are no guarantees since people can move at any point, or marry, or have some other commitment that supersedes their friendship with me. So, I reasoned, no matter how fond of me a good friend seemed to be they would drop me when work or family warranted it.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“A friend moving away is often hard because of what it often represents. People move for all sorts of reasons…but whatever the reason, it is another way of reminding us that however close our friendship is, it’s not close enough to make someone think twice about upping sticks and moving off…The family goes. You stay. That’s the deal…People will move for family or economics, but no one moves for friends. All this underlines the fact that there is a commitment that comes with family that is lacking in the way most people think about friendship.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“When such friends move, and if you excuse the cliche, it feels like they’re taking a bit of my home with them. And when this happens a number of times over successive years, I feel like I’m Voldemort with relational horcruxes scattered all over the place.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“And having people with whom to do nothing is not necessarily a need [married people are] conscious of.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“We’ve been good friends for years. We eat to together once a week on average. We’ve gone on holidays together. We’ve known each other well enough and long enough to have developed a natural ease and familiarity with one another. They’re the kind of people I can quite happily spend time with doing nothing at all. I’m quite serious. It’s not unusual to find us sitting together, all reading books and barely talking for a couple hours or so. We have an unspoken rule that it’s entirely okay to doze off on each other’s couches.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“I can’t get by with seeing such close friends once every three months. It made me realize that while my close friends feel essential to me, I might not necessarily feel essential to them. That can really hurt. What they are to me, their families are to them. I exist much lower down on their list of needs.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“The fact is, in all likelihood, singles need their married friends more than their married friends need them. That’s not to say that married friends don’t need their single friends at all, it’s just a different kind or different level of need. As a single person, my friends are a lifeline. They’re like family. They are the ones with whom I feel most known and loved…I need them. Hugely. But the fact is they don’t need me in the same way. Many of them are the equivalent of family, but since they have families of their own, the familial sense I have towards them is not necessarily reciprocated. That might be good and right as far as it goes, but it can also be painful at times.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“Some of my friends have said something along the line of “You know where you are and you’re always welcome. Don’t wait for us to invite you.” On one level, this is very touching. But when several say it, the cumulative effect on darker days is to make me hear it as, “We’re not going to be thinking of you or pursuing you. We don’t necessarily need you, and so you’re going to have to reach out to us if you want to come over. And it will always need to be you coming to us, rather than the other way around.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“But with many of my friendships, I tend to make the first move. This is understandable as I’m the one looking for some happy company when I have a free evening or weekend. My married friends don’t have the same need for immediate company. I get that. But over time it can start to hurt. And it can make you wonder how long you might have to wait for them to initiate contact. Some of my friends have said something along the line of “You know where you are and you’re always welcome. Don’t wait for us to invite you.” On one level, this is very touching. But when several say it, the cumulative effect on darker days is to make me hear it as, “We’re not going to be thinking of you or pursuing you. We don’t necessarily need you, and so you’re going to have to reach out to us if you want to come over. And it will always need to be you coming to us, rather than the other way around.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“Being platonically dumped wouldn’t be so bad if people would acknowledge that you have the right to be platonically heartbroken. But it’s just not part of our vocabulary. However much our society might pay lip service to friendship, the fact remains that the only love it considers important, important enough to make a huge public celebration, is romantic love.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“When I feel that deep sense of longing, that feeling of sexual restlessness and frustration, I am to think of that ultimate restlessness that comes when we live apart from our Creator, a restlessness that has its answer in the one who promised deep and abiding rest for all who come to him. Sexual sin feels like the answer to that restlessness, but like all of sin’s pleasures, it is only temporary and fleeting. Celibacy isn’t a waste of our sexuality; it’s a wonderful way of fulfilling it. It’s allowing our sexual feelings to point us to the reality of the gospel. We will never ultimately make sense of what our sexuality is unless we know what it is for—to point us to God’s love for us in Christ.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“Glynn Harrison puts it this way: Whether we are married or single in this life, sexual desire is our inbuilt homing instinct for the Divine, a kind of navigation aid showing us the way home. You could think of it as a form of body language: our bodies talk to us about a greater reality of fulfillment and eternal blessing, and urge us to go there.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness

“I heard someone describe long-term celibates like me as being like unicorns:
you’ve heard of them, but you never think you’re going to actually meet one.”
― Sam Allberry, 7 Myths about Singleness