I recently got back in touch with the friend of mine who introduced me to the church. He lamented that, at the ripe old age of 28, he was still single. Of course, as someone who married in my early twenties, I don’t have a lot of experience on the subject, but like most interfering folks, I do have some advice.
We belong to a very family-centric church. Back when I was single, I had a friend who chose to attend the local family ward rather than the singles ward. Though she enjoyed it, she felt a lot of pressure to attend the singles ward where she could “meet a nice young man and get married.” I also had several older friends who passed thirty and were still single. I’d like to share two examples with you.
My husband had a friend who struggled with finding his mate in the singles ward. He began casually dating women outside of the church. Casual dating turned serious, and, not surprisingly, he married a nonmember and soon stopped attending church (or perhaps it was the other way around).
The second example is a close friend of mine. She attended college, served a mission, and obtained her master’s degree, all while single. Although I didn’t know her while she was single, I’ve seen enough single friends close in on their thirtieth birthday and give up. But she continued dating and eventually met and married a returned missionary; they have a wonderful family.
After nearly seven years of marriage, I can promise you that it is hard work. You’re going to fight. You’re going to disagree. You’re going to struggle. It’ll be tough at times, even when you start out on the same page. Don’t give in to imagined or even real pressure to date outside the church. Don’t let loneliness push you into lowering your standards.
When I was in the singles ward, someone taught a lesson and made the point that brought home the profound change marriage is. See, we leave the premortal existence single, and we enter the postmortal existence married (well, most of us). We already know that our mortal lives are very short – albeit significant – blips of time in the scale of eternity. As viewed from an eternal standpoint, then, it makes little difference overall if we are married when we are twenty or if we wait until we are eighty. What matters, instead, is how we conduct ourselves within the mortal range.
We know that, eventually, we will have the opportunity to experience marital, er, bliss. However, if we decide to rush matters and make rash choices, those choices will also have eternal consequences. We may find ourselves married outside of the church, which will affect our children’s spiritual walk, if not our own. We may find ourselves married to someone in the church that we aren’t well matched to. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be open to marriage. I’m only saying that we shouldn’t “settle” on decisions of eternal consequenes.
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