To the Latter-day Saint Who Is Single and Feels Forgotten

You have sat through the lesson on strengthening your marriage. You have heard the talk about the eternal importance of family. You have watched another set of announcements about another engagement, and you have been genuinely glad, and also something else that you have never been able to say out loud without it coming out wrong. This is about that second thing.

What Is Actually Hard About It

It is not usually loneliness in the ordinary sense. Most single members have friends, work, a full week.

What is hard is more specific than that: you are participating fully in a community whose central organising narrative does not currently include you. The lessons assume a spouse. The milestones assume children. The metaphors for spiritual growth are drawn from parenting.

None of that is malicious. It is simply built for the majority, and the effect on the minority is a persistent low-grade sense of being adjacent to the thing rather than in it.

And you cannot mention it. Because the moment you do, someone reassures you, and the reassurance usually makes it worse.

The Things People Say

Let me name them, because being able to identify them helps.

• ”It will happen when you stop looking.” Presents your situation as a technique problem you are failing at.
• ”You are so wonderful, I cannot believe you are still single.” Implies that singleness is evidence of a defect, and that yours is mysterious.
• ”Enjoy this time — you have so much freedom.” Asks you to be grateful for the absence of something you want.
• ”Everything will be sorted out in the next life.” True, possibly. Also a way of ending the conversation.
• ”Have you tried...” Yes. You have tried it.

Most people saying these things mean well and are uncomfortable. Their discomfort is not your responsibility to manage, though you have probably been managing it for years.

The Belief Underneath

Here is where the rubber band usually is, and it is not about being single at all.

Somewhere along the way, a sentence formed. It might be: There is something wrong with me that I cannot see. Or: I did something, and this is the consequence. Or the quietest one: God has forgotten me specifically.

That last one is worth examining, because it is doing a great deal of damage in a lot of good people. It takes a circumstance and converts it into a verdict about your standing before God.

Your marital status is not a report on your worthiness. It is a circumstance, shaped substantially by the agency of other people, geography, timing, and things nobody controls.

The equation “faithful people receive blessings on schedule” is not taught anywhere in scripture. Plenty of faithful people in scripture waited, and some of them waited their whole lives.

What Comparison Does Here

Comparison is corrosive in every setting, but this is one of the cruellest applications of it, because the comparison is structural. It is announced from the pulpit. It happens at every family gathering.

When Samuel went to anoint a king he looked at Eliab and assumed. The Lord corrected him: man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.

Every metric being used to make you feel behind is an outward one. Marital status is outward. Family size is outward. None of them are what is being measured.

Romans 8:16 does not say the Spirit bears witness that you have reached the expected milestones. It says the Spirit bears witness that we are children of God. That identity does not require a spouse to be complete, and it does not arrive later.

What to Do With the Grief

First: it is grief. Name it as that rather than as ingratitude.

You are grieving something real — not a fantasy, but a legitimate hope you were encouraged to hold. Grief over a delayed or unrealised good is not a failure of faith. Treating it as one adds shame to sorrow, which is how people end up unable to talk about it at all.

Second: write it down specifically. Not “I am sad about being single.” The actual sentences. I will not have children. I have watched everyone I grew up with pass me. I am tired of being brave about this. I am angry and I do not know where to put it.

Third: surrender them one at a time. Not the desire — you do not have to surrender wanting it. Surrender the conclusions you have drawn about yourself and about God because of it. The process page has the five surrenders; The Rubber Band Ball walks through the method.

On Being Angry About It

Some of you are angry, and have not admitted it because anger at God feels like the one thing you are definitely not allowed.

Elijah sat under a juniper tree and asked God to take his life. God did not rebuke him for it. He did not confirm the despair either. He let him sleep, then fed him, then sent him back.

That is not a God who requires you to be composed before you are allowed to approach. If you are angry, say so — in prayer, plainly. Anger spoken to God is a relationship. Anger held silently becomes a rubber band.

“You are not the ball. You are the one carrying it. And you were never meant to carry it alone.”

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