Being single is not too cool. Or is it? How does being single stack up with family values? What about singles' values? Must the focus be on the family"? Or can it be equally on the single person? Remember, like Adam, you were not born a couple and do not have to live, and will likely not die, as a couple.

Happily single!
At the outset let me declare that marriage can be a good thing or a bad thing. Likewise, being single can be a bad thing or a good thing.
Like marriage, single life may consist of different arrangements such as partners in intimacy, cohabitation and man-woman living together outside of marriage. Single life may involve abstinence or periodic abstinence, for a period of a year or longer. Life can be miserable for either a single or married person. There are many disfunctional single people and many troubled married people, the latter reflected in the high divorce rate.
Some of the happiest people I know are married. Some of the happiest people I know are single, included are never married. What is the secret to being happily single? The secret of being happily single is there is no secret, at least there is not a need for one. Nobody can make another person happy. A person's happiness is his or her own responsibility.
To be happily single, fall in love with yourself, accept yourself just as you are, as an autonomous person who is complete, lovely and self-sufficient. Take sex for what it is, no more or less. Sex, i.e., sexual intercourse, is not the greatest things on this side of Heaven, even when it is accompanied with an orgasm for the female or an hormonal-induced internal explosion for the screaming and relieved male who is catapulted into a depth obit where he tastes Heaven.
Yes, sex can be beautiful, but so can a million and one other things. I can say this notwithstanding the fact that the reproduction of humans depends fully upon sex.
To be happily single a person must give up the idea, and it is an idea, that he/she needs sex with a person because he loves that person or visa versa. What's wrong with that assertion? It is based on the view that "I love you because I need you," not the noble view "I need you because I love you. With this latter conceptualization a person is able to redirect his sexual energy, not in sublimation, but in non-sexual creative endavors.
Advantages of being single include: having greater freedom, more time to be alone for the purpose of engaging in spiritual enrichment activities, having less need to please another person, and freedom from making and keeping commitments of the kinds that are most responsible for giving one the "commitment jitters"" that afflicts much of the committed population. In reality, these people are "uncommitted committed," who live inauthentic lives that are characterized by pretense and faking it. The single person is in the best position to operate by his own time clock, not another person's time clock, and to dance by his own music. When sexual fulfillment is lacking in the single person's life he/she has nobody to blame but himself/herself. Apparently, the Apostle Paul was up to something that is worthy of our consideration when he said, "Now to the unmarried and the widows I say, It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion." (1 Cor. 7:8). It appears that the Apostle is saying, "Happily single,"...but married...?" For single people who may be inclined to put a guilt trip on themselves by reminding themselves, if not others, that by not having children they are not contributing to the reproduction or procreation pool, take comfort in the fact that there are enough people on Planet Earth who, as the Apostle Paul put it, "burning with passion, " who will assure the rest of us of sufficient world population growth. So if being single is your destiny, be "happily single"...enjoy life to its fullest.

Copyright 2005 by Uriah J. Fields