Is Being Sin-gle Sin-ful?

[J 01001010]

This is a question and a thought I’ve had for a while that I’ve never heard anyone else talk about. Now I’ve come to my own conclusion. The first commandment God gave to man was to be fruitful and multiply so it would seem that is our chief mission. That seems like something humanity has never had a problem doing before. No matter what else was going on in the world or what part of the world, people were getting together and creating families. If anything, it was harder to slow people down. However that’s been changing. Now there are more and more men and women single not because they’re undesirable but because they don’t want to have to deal with another person’s issues on an every day basis, or because the standard they are holding other people to is so high that it is unrealistic, or because their casual relationships are not conducive to developing an exclusive relationship.

The first I remember hearing of this was Japan. I remember news stories about Japan’s younger generation not starting families and their birth rate dropping. The males were more interested in playing video games and having artificial relationships with stuffed animals, pocket robots and other weird things, or paying for fetish type relationships. They saw relationships with women as more trouble than they were worth. In essence they had lost the desire for complete women but there were some aspects of femininity they still desired. Meanwhile the women were checked out of relationships because these weird fetishes were their means of supporting themselves, they were desensitized, and/or they were focused on competing with men in more traditional careers. This combination of factors caused them to lose respect for their men. In public, people were reserved and dignified but at the same time there were services where people paid to cuddle, or be nagged or be treated like a baby etc. There was definitely prostitution, but a lot of it was not even sexual. It was paying for human presence and artificial connections that required no work , totally at the person’s convenience and many were checking out of intimate human contact altogether.

Then we started to see it in the west. First in Europe they began talking about how the birth rate was declining and then the United States. Now globally birthrates are on a steady decline. People are still having sex but intimacy is on the decline. There is an increase in individualism, narcissism and selfishness. Marriage rates have been on a steady decline but there is now also a decline in fertility and when pregnancies happen they are much more likely to be aborted. There is a culture of instant gratification and easy discarding.

We have gone beyond even polygamy. There are now these changing social and familial spheres that people move in and out of with complex combinations of weak and strong connections sometimes reaching back decades going back to childhood. There are people that talk to “Chat” all day as if this group of people is a singular person and there are people that watch other people’s chat and pay to interact with the person.

Throughout human history, it was difficult to keep up with people in different geographical locations. So your family and your community was generally nearby and if there was family that was distant it took considerable effort to stay in touch i.e., making a journey, writing letters, telegram, telephone calls etc. Now you can see what your elementary school crush is doing or the person you worked with 10 years ago in a different state at a whim. Keeping options opened because of this increased access that we have to others and that they have to us is another subconscious driver that keeps people single.

We are told how detrimental single parent households are for children, and at the same time we are constantly bombarded with endless reasons to end relationships and justification for “choosing yourself”. A lot of times the same “relationship expert” will be on one hand saying that you should be ready to end any relationship because of your “boundaries”, non-negotiables or any unmet expectation but also tell you how much work relationships require and how you have to be in for the long haul. More often than not the relationship “experts” have had countless failed relationships and have been “dating” 20+ years but because they have a degree or a certificate they think they are qualified to tell people how to do what they are unable to do themselves.

It seems to me if you are looking for relationship advice you should start with a person of the same sex that has been happily* married for 50 years, then you should talk to the person who has been happily* married 20 years, then 10 and then 5 and then the newly weds. The 20 year dater is the one that should be listening the most, not the one that should be teaching anything. The person who has been married much longer undoubtedly grew up in a different time and you may not totally be able to relate but as you get closer to the newly wed you should be able to pick up on some common themes for success. If you talk to people who have been intentionally single that long you will definitely pick up on some common themes and self-centeredness will almost always be one of them. I digress…

Going back to the biblical examples, we see some old testament prophets, Jesus, and Paul being single, but this is because they made a conscious decision to be single and devote their lives to ministry. They weren’t single because they were just focusing on themselves. It wasn’t because they had some long list of unmet requirements that changed with the pulse of culture. It wasn’t because they just wanted to have sex with a variety of people. It wasn’t because they had situationships and close friends that having a family was incompatible with.

To bring it back to the title, being sin-gle is not necessarily sin-ful but it can be a strong indicator of a worldview and lifestyle that is conducive to sin and leaves you more open to temptation. The attitude of “I’m single so I can do what I want’ can be very similar to “do as thou wilt” and conveys that outside of the restrictions put on you from someone else you would do anything. So perhaps for those that desire to break free of singleness, so there’s no confusion, it’s better to have an attitude of “I’m available.” Being single seems more self-centered and self-serving. While being available implies willingness and openness to the right person.

Genesis 1:28, Genesis 2:18, 1 Corinthians 7:1-9.

[Author]

Posts