Yesterday I was told to pray for my future husband, and unfortunately not for the first time. Growing up in the Church, at least once a year our youth group was forced to sit through a series of sessions on dating and relationships that would end in writing a list of attributes that our perfect spouse would have, and a deep and meaningful prayer for our all elusive future 'one'.
These sessions were largely met with a mixture of glee (by those of us who hoped that the boy we fancied might actually be kicked into gear and ask us out) and downright fear (My youthworker. Definitely. She replaced "masturbate" with "marmite", so horrified was she with the word. You can't make this stuff up.)
And it's not just left to youth groups either. At the Hillsong Conference in London yesterday, Jentezen Franklin gave a passionate sermon on the importance of treasuring your family, church and relationship with God. It was spot on in so many ways, but I couldn't help being irked by the constant reference to husbands and wives, and the spoken assumption that if we didn't have one now, we would one day. While married couples may well have made up the majority of the audience, there were still probably several thousand single people in the room, wondering what their part was going to be in that.
The enemy wants to break up families, Franklin said. So we must pray ardently for our marriages – and if you're not married now, pray for the protection of your future marriage.
I have no doubt that his intentions were good, and I don't want to pin this whole issue on him. But those underlying assumptions speak of a wider problem in the Church: the idolisation of marriage and therefore the implicit demeaning of singleness.
Don't get me wrong, marriage seems to be fairly excellent, in all, and I would love to be a wife one day, but we can't assume that it's going to happen for all of us, or indeed that it should. Some Christians will never get married – that's just a fact. Others will marry, and then divorce. Many will live a life of singleness. Is it because they didn't pray hard enough aged 15?
In our hyper-sexualised, hyper-romantic culture we've been lulled into seeing coupledom as the ideal, the final product. We've bought into the lie of the rom-com. I love a Nicholas Sparks movie as much as the next person with horrible taste in films, but Hollywood is underpinned by the unrealistic notion that all will be well when the hunk with the nice arms turns up, especially if he happens to be Zac Efron.
I'm just not convinced it's as black-and-white as that. And it's not a narrative that should be perpetuated by the Church.
Prayer is powerful, absolutely, and we should be praying for our relationships and families. But to tell me to pray for my future husband is to assume that there will be one, and to stir up the possibility of deep disappointment, even resentment, should it not occur. I have friends left deeply bitter and confused by their singleness as a result of years of hearing these messages from the pulpit.
As for those attribute lists – if I'm praying for a faceless spouse, I'm guilty of reducing any future partner to the sum of their offerings. A vending machine with good shoulders – and nice hair, dry sense of humour and a passion for acoustic guitar and social justice, obviously.
What about connection – about finding a best friend, going on an adventure and seeking Jesus together? What about maybe never meeting that person – and that being, well, okay?
If we obsess about finding a husband, then we're not really looking for a person at all, but rather another check mark against an unending list of 'things that will make us happy'. It's similar to the way I so often look to Jesus as a means to get what I want rather than the subject of my desire, himself.
Marriage is excellent. Singleness is brilliant. Maybe we should stop worrying about when or if that someone will show up, and start enjoying the season we're in. That's a sermon I could get behind.
