Happy Valentine's Day: Embracing My Vocation to Singleness

It’s another February 14th and messages about love and significant others are all over my Facebook homepage. The administrative assistant for our department had a rose on her desk when I came in to work: a gift from her husband. People walking down the streets were wearing red and pink and things with hearts on them. My Pandora stations this morning kept playing love songs. All of this could be very depressing for this single girl, especially since I’m not a “dating girl.” That fact probably has something to do with my penchant for being incredibly serious about anything I do: I don’t believe in doing something halfway, so just casually dating someone that I couldn’t see marrying doesn’t do it for me.

Part of me wanted to be one of the bitter singles today, wearing all black and walking around with a cloud over my head, but honestly, I’m not a bitter person either. And then it hit me while I was driving to work on this beautiful warm, sunny morning: Today I ought to be celebrating my vocation to singleness.

I’m not going to lie; it can be very hard to be joyfully single, especially in a culture where it seems like everyone is in a relationship or seeing someone. It’s been several years since I’ve been in a relationship and I can’t remember the last time I went on a proper date. When the girls I graduated with, and indeed even my own brother, are getting engaged right and left, it’s easy for me feel sorry for myself and think that it will never happen to me. I want to be married. I want children. But right now, that’s not where I am. I already have a vocation, though it probably be won’t be my lifelong one, to singleness, and for me to ignore that vocation in order to focus on another that I don’t have and can’t have at the moment is wrong. This season of my life isn’t going to last forever, as far as I know, so I need to be making the most of it instead of desiring marriage right now.

I posted a blog (http://www.patheos.com/community/paganportal/2011/02/11/a-valentine-for-the-single-folks/) on my Facebook earlier this morning. It’s all good, but the part that stuck out to me particularly is this: You honor love when you don’t deceive others in order to fulfill your sexual and emotional needs. That really resonated with me, especially the part about emotional needs; I would add “and yourself” to the others, because it would be really easy to go out and find someone to date just because it felt good to be desired and cared for on another level besides friendship and familial love. It would be easy, but that doesn’t mean it would be right.

I’ve recently started subscribing to a magazine called Tobias, which is a new publication written for single Catholics. This month, Tom Bengtson’s column “faith @work” was about growing closer to God while at work; the three things he listed were to 1) Do the work no one else wants to do; 2) Be humble; and 3) Sole a problem. Reading Tom’s column made me think about what I do on a day to day basis--I may not be in an office, but I certainly am working every day. I’ve realized that I have a choice, every day, to live my vocation in love, just as those who serve the Church as clergy and religious do and as married couples, like my own wonderful parents do. I can go through the motions of doing office work, preparing for classes, being in class, interacting with others, etc., or I can do all those things joyfully because this is where I am in life.

I don’t mean joy as in a perpetual smile on my face either. I mean it in the sense of appreciating the deep peace that comes from following where God has led me right now: to be a student and a teaching assistant, living in this wonderful city and doing what I love. This is the time that I get to practice loving selflessly, treating those around me with love and respect so that when the time is right for me to marry, I won’t be thrown by the selflessness that is required of spouses and parents.

Though today wasn’t a day that, for me, was filled with romantic love, it was a day in which I sought to start deliberately living my vocation with joy. It was easy today with so many small things to find joy in: sunshine, a hug from a friend, the dinner I had thoughtfully prepared this morning, the glass of good wine I had with dinner, the candles lit on my table. I don’t think that it will this easy every day. But in the grand scheme, I know that I, with my beloved mystic Julian of Norwich, may say of my life and my vocation, “All shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.”