For those who don’t know Spanglish or old Ricky Martin lyrics, the title is roughly translated as “living the single life.” I’ll begin with a confession: I had a hard time deciding what to write about. Despite my most valiant efforts not to categorize myself, I realize that I am writing from the perspective of an LDS young single adult. Yes, it’s a pretty harmless label and one that couldn’t be truer, but it makes me consider what it really means to be a young single adult in the Church.
Perhaps I bristle a little bit at being constantly identified by my marital status. There are many things about me that I consider to be of much more interest than the fact that I haven’t found a wife yet. I’m a playwright, for instance, and I enjoy French movies. I’m allergic to peanuts and I have green eyes. I would venture to say that those who could be classified as young married adults at least would find some pride in their title; it signals an accomplishment, not a deficiency.
I hesitate, of course, to refer to “single status” as a deficiency. But maybe that hesitancy comes from twenty-two years of worldly influences that celebrate the single life. This stands in stark contrast to a strong religious context that goes to great lengths to rescue us from our lot of loneliness. While the world tells college students to avoid the entanglements that early marriage and family will inevitably bring, the Lord has revealed through His servants that the time for such entanglements is now and the time for preparation was yesterday.
I’m grateful for a living prophet who teaches so clearly the importance of family. I, like my fellow LDS YSA’s, am grateful for the direction that those teachings give me in my life. But the fact remains that I am still the closest thing Mormon Doctrine has to “Limbo.” It’s a common problem; I’m not alone in being alone. And the world is full of reassuring voices who are much more sure than any of us are that we will someday pull ourselves out of the world of singles’ wards and into the realm where the rest of the Church members spend their time. But that day is not today.
Church leaders have addressed this too, have told us to get on with our lives, to work toward our ultimate goal but not to sit around waiting for our respective trains to come. The devil is then in the details. Where is the balance? Can we be proud of being young single adults, or should we feel like residents of a halfway house of sorts? At what point does idealism give way to reality or does faith require that we guard against that surrender? And, perhaps most importantly, how much focus on getting out of the “single trap” is healthy? What about patience? What about accountability?
Such are the questions I think we all face on a regular basis. So maybe we have more in common than I tend to think. Maybe forming a community with the throngs of our marriage-impaired brothers and sisters is not the “trap” I sometimes see it as. After all, we are the immediate solutions to one another’s problems. And if the questions remain, so be it. We have the resources to figure them out. And we have each other. And I’d do well to remember that.