When loneliness met the lioness

 

Well the initial point of this post was to talk about loneliness, but then I [the word temporarily escapes me – aha, digressed, that’s it!] digressed, to talk about the fact that thus far, I have mentally refused the concept of being a help-meet to my future husband. And then I eventually went back to talking about loneliness again.

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Recently I caught a tiny detail which concerned a certain person, (about whom I may have been tentatively allowing myself to cultivate certain hopes, shall we say!) which made me feel a little demoralised regarding my marriage.

It occurred to me in that moment, as it has done so many times previously, that emotional intimacy is the single biggest thing I am looking forward to in marriage.  That single moment was somewhat crushing because I felt the prospect of lifelong loneliness embrace me. It was honestly one of the most demoralising moments I have experienced in a long time.

So if I had not realised it before, I certainly realised it then that I have been looking forward to marriage above all as a cure for loneliness. You know, there have been other things that I have been looking forward to as well. I have been deliberately unsubtle on this blog in talking about other exciting aspects of marriage. From day to day I mentally fluctuate as to which feature of marriage I am most looking forward to. There might be some features that I can’t help thinking about more than others. And off the top of my head, I have never allowed myself to accept that any one thing is the most important aspect of marriage for me because I am aware that my needs might change over the long term.  (I say “off the top of my head” because if I were to go back and actually look through my previous blog posts, I may well find that this is not true at all!) However, that incident really brought it home to me that above all else, what my heart has been yearning for is emotional intimacy – at least just now!

However.
This is where I have to keep a really strong grasp on real life. I realise that I romanticise marriage. With the aid of my powerful imagination I imagine a state of utter bliss etc. And yet when I manage to exert some control over my imagination, I can remind myself that this is unrealistic for a few key reasons which are as follows:
On this website, I have made (surely?!) the world’s biggest song and dance about the importance of insisting on excellent character from your spouse. And I also pursue excellent character in my own behaviour. This is for the sake of having a beautiful relationship between the two of us. However, even if and hopefully when that is achieved, realistically there are still going to be a few things that will get in the way of this profound emotional intimacy of which I have always dreamed.  And these things are simply the neverending demands of modern life! Constantly working, tiredness, constant focus on or preoccupation with money, endless modern stresses. Childcare challenges – although children are often a very, very distant afterthought in my dreams of marriage. In fact, I rarely think of them at all. While I love children I don’t dream of a family, or a home which is a small microcosm of the wider community.  I dream only of my husband’s arms (still attached to the rest of his body, obviously!) – and the emotional support that he will give me. Perhaps because having children is such a selfless act, and I unapologetically want and need to get married first and foremost to fulfil my own emotional needs.  Basically, all these things boil down to time. I’m thinking that for many people who are currently married, for the reasons I have listed many of these people will still be experiencing loneliness through their marriage, even if they are blessed with beautiful relationships with their spouses. And they will likely be experiencing not only loneliness, but also the stress caused by all these challenges. These things mean that even with the most amazing spouse, with the most genuinely loving and tender relationship between us, marriage will rarely be the blissful environment that we have all dreamed of. So if I were to get married, expecting that to instantly and permanently cure my loneliness, I am just setting myself up for a huge disappointment, and likely too putting unfair pressure on my husband, and thereby my marriage itself.

Actually, I have been struck by my own statement that I have written above, that “I unapologetically want and need to get married first and foremost to fulfil my own emotional needs.”  I am wondering as I write this whether this says something very powerful and not very positive about me.  Because truth be told, this is why I am getting married, no two ways about it. I am asking myself whether this is completely wrong. Should I be getting married out of a selfless desire to serve another human being, my husband, and then subsequently our children?  That would definitely affect the way I approach marriage, and I imagine that it would encourage me to be a lot more patient, if I consciously imagined myself to be doing it for him, rather than for myself. It would also deeply affect the way I approach the question of marital criteria.

Living for others is such a Christian principle. And to be fair to myself, I have always been inclined to work for other people’s needs. It is just that I have always regarded marriage as part of my own essential self-care, which would then empower me to serve other people more.
As I write this, I am also thinking about the Biblical concept of a wife being her husband’s help-meet. If I am honest I have always mentally rejected this for myself, and thought – nup! Even though it is in the Bible. Right there at the very beginning. If I embraced this, then I imagine that that would make me adopt a mentality of serving my husband in marriage, over and above being served myself. It is definitely not that I have wanted him to be my own help-meet, but rather that I unapologetically plan to excel and achieve in my own right, so I just imagine us mutually serving one another. Which is why I have had to insist on essential characteristics for him too, to make sure that he fits in with my own life.

You know what, perhaps I need to go back to the Bible, and truly submit my heart to God. You know, perhaps it is fair to say that this is a point in which I have simply refused to submit to the Bible, and to God. You (also!) know, off the top of my head, I cannot think of any other area in which I have refused to submit to God. I have even declared, and I utterly mean it, that I will submit to my husband, as the Bible instructs. But if I am honest, the idea of being a help-meet to me suggests giving up my own dreams, which I am very reluctant to do. Furthermore, I candidly consider myself to be the most ambitious person I know. That same imagination which often leads me astray in thinking ahead to my marriage is constantly brimming with ideas for different things, ideas which I am greatly excited to work on. How can I give that up just so that I can “help-meet” for someone with far lesser dreams?! You know, perhaps I am simply an outlier, and there is space for being an outlier, if in general women will “help-meet” their husbands.

I am just going to come straight out and say this: one of the consequences of my big imagination is that I have developed myself to be a big person, with huge strength of character. I am bold and outspoken about my faith, determined, resilient – everything. (In fact, just yesterday or the day before, I was thinking about my strength of character but reflecting and chastising myself that strength of character means not just being bold and fearless, but also gracious and gentle.)  The truth is that I don’t know any marriageable guy who is genuinely bigger than me in terms of the traditional expressions of strength of character – boldness, determination, everything. If I reasonably saw someone who was genuinely bigger than me then I am sure that I would be able to envisage being a “help-meet” to him. But when I am bigger than these men in terms of strength of character, seemingly by whole orders of magnitude, then how can it reasonably make sense for me to “help-meet” myself for any of them? This is all the more true because I am a Biblist, so I genuinely invest big time into my faith, and I unapologetically strive after all the power that is promised by my faith, regardless of my gender.  Whereas many of these men are churchists, so they don’t give lots of time to their faith, either to understanding it, or to striving after power…
Let’s be brutally candid. No matter how lonely she might be a lioness is not going to marry a domestic cat, is she?!  Where are all the lions out there?! Absolutely nowhere to be seen, because no-one invests the necessary time, effort or determination to truly be strong in Christ…  The Bible has given each one of us the necessary tools to become a lion in Christ.  Someone out there has to make up his mind to reach out for it, as I have done, and strive after it with everything he has got, as I have done, so that I can finally get a husband! (If anyone out there thinks it is arrogant for me to compare myself to a lioness, while comparing these men to “domestic cats”, I am more than happy to go into details, and then you can judge for yourself whether or not I am exaggerating.)

If anyone is out there praying, I genuinely welcome your prayers.  Please pray that God would give me a submissive heart to submit to this one part of the Bible that I struggle with. I will of course be praying as well. And could you please also pray that God would bring a man who is genuinely bigger than me. I don’t want to have to pretend, to be brutally candid, as much as I want a husband, I am not going to pretend!

And let’s just put this out there! If there is someone I already know, who is marriageable by virtue of being single, and he is fed up of my outspoken candour, and he wants to show me that he is after the man and I am “only” the woman, I would genuinely be more than happy if he decided to become bigger than me.  Honestly, no-one would be happier than I am if a handsome marriageable man that I already know, perhaps one in particular, set himself the challenge of becoming bigger than me. Please take my word for this. It is going to require picking up your Bible and getting on your face in prayer, big time. But I sincerely believe that if God called men to be the leaders and women to be the help-meets, then even if a man and a woman were exerting the same effort, then due to divine empowerment, a man would naturally go further than a woman, purely because this is the way that God has ordained it.

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Anyway, to go back to loneliness, my point was going to be this.  Actually, I have a few other points:
Even if your marriage did not encounter the stresses that I have written of above, and even if you were blessed with a truly beautiful relationship with your spouse, even then that would not  fully ward off loneliness. I believe that in life we need community, that extends beyond our marriages and our nuclear families. I have written about this at length already on this blog, in other posts.
The real way to stave off loneliness, I believe is to have groups of people with whom you regularly meet up, ideally once a week, and ideally seeing the same people from week to week.  This way you build bonds with people which you can then develop in one-on-one interactions. This is how you build community. Unfortunately, this is also under attack from the very same forces which I have written of above: money or rather the constant preoccupation with money, fighting for economic survival, tiredness etc. In the same way these things stop us from investing lavish, quality time into our marriages, so they also stop us from investing time into our would-be communities.
This is why we are all collectively growing lonelier, as sad as this is. 😢

I was also thinking that one big additional aspect of my one loneliness is that I find it so hard to trust existing communities, like church communities, precisely because no-one has or makes the time to spend with God to truly develop the Christlike character that should be expected from Christians. So people’s hearts can often be unlovely, and they often seem to delight in throwing their unloveliness at me as hard as they can: pettiness, small-mindedness, barely disguised racism, completely undisguised sexism, insecurities, outright and unapologetic lies, sexual harassment, controlling behaviour, manipulation, pulling me down, lying to destroy my reputation, not merely a lack of integrity, but (from pastors) a complete failure to understand what integrity actually is. What is supposed to be attractive or compelling about any of that?! To be fair, there has also been kindness and grace and community and laughter that I have experienced in churches too. But on balance, I just find the negativity there too off-putting. No matter how people may shout about the decline in religious belief in the UK, churches on the whole, and charistmatic/Pentecostal churches in particular are not going anyway, anytime soon. But even where they do exist, long and painful experience teaches me that it is simply wisest to stay away, and to avoid any other similar collection of people because I can sadly guarantee widespread poor character.