While You Wait: Making the Single Season Count

Waiting has a way of feeling like a room with no furniture in it — you are told you are somewhere, but there is nothing to sit down in, nothing to mark that time is actually passing and not simply standing still around you. If you are waiting for marriage, waiting for the right person to be found by our team, waiting for a season to end, you already know this feeling. It is one of the more ordinary forms of suffering, and one of the least talked about.

The temptation in waiting is to treat the season as a hallway rather than a room — something to get through as quickly as possible on the way to the real thing. But a hallway you live in for years is not actually a hallway. It is your life, whether you have decided to furnish it or not. The people who come out of a long single season whole, rather than simply older, are usually the ones who stopped waiting for permission to begin living.

That does not mean pretending you are not waiting, or performing contentment you do not feel. It means asking what is actually available to you right now that will not be available in the same way once you are married — depth of friendship that does not have to be split three ways with a spouse and eventually children, time to build the kind of financial and emotional stability that will make you a steadier partner later, the chance to know your own mind and your own faith without another voice in the room shaping every answer.

There is also a quieter work happening in waiting, if you let it happen rather than resent it. It is the work of becoming someone capable of a good marriage, not just someone hoping for one. Patience, it turns out, is not primarily about how long you can hold your breath. It is about what kind of person you become while you are holding it. That person is who will actually show up to the marriage, whenever it comes.

None of this makes the waiting easy, and anyone who tells you it should is not being honest with you. But a season lived well is never wasted, even when it takes longer than you would have chosen. Especially then.