Editor’s Note: Bryce turns 30 in 29 weeks. He’s using the 30 weeks leading up to his milestone birthday to reflect on aging and his life so far.
What’s it like to be admired? Hot and desired? – Audrey Hobert
With her growing up surrounded by the Mormon culture in rural Utah, my grad school friend and I realized we had something of a shared history. We were both panicked in our early- to mid-twenties secretly horrified we were not married, statistically unsurprising for Zillennials pursuing their master’s degrees in the early 2020’s but nevertheless distressing for two people surrounded by conservative religious communities that inadvertently teach you marriage is easy and a game almost exclusively for young people.
Growing up as a pastor’s kid, I remember watching an 18-year-old get married to her military fiancé. I was told then that she was too young, but an exception had to be made for his upcoming deployment. What was not too young, and fairly common, was to watch people get married right out of college or, if they were a late bloomer, by their mid-twenties. This mentality carried me into my own college years, as I attended a Christian-affiliated university. If you’re unfamiliar, on all Christian colleges (at least in the US) you can find the mantra “ring before spring,” as students seek to stick to this well-established post-baccalaureate nuptial, earning an engagement ring – and the accompanying betrothed – before the spring semester ends.
Statistically, your odds of surviving a first marriage undivorced do increase the older you get. In other words, it’s theoretically better to get married later in life than earlier. However, like I always tell my students, statistics are only helpful in telling us what happens to the average person the average amount of times under the average conditions. Statistics have very little bearing on what will actually happen to you or me in the real, exceptional world we all find ourselves in. I’ve known young people who got married and divorced, and young people who got married and are thriving in those same marriages decades later. Marriage, like any human experience, can be measured and discussed, but it has to actually be embodied to have any tangible meaning.
Psychologically, though, this does something interesting to you when you find yourself walking through your twenties more often than not uncoupled. For example, I have had a very fulfilling life, earning my doctorate in developmental science shortly after my 28th birthday. I’ve made amazing friends and loved being untethered to go and visit them at the drop of a hat. My life thus far has undoubtedly been easier single than it would have been coupled. And it has certainly been easier to move over 1,000 miles each time twice in my twenties unmarried than it would have been married. I was so stressed trying to find housing each time that I can’t (or don’t want) to imagine the added stress of trying to find someone else a job and housing. And yet, even though I logically know and appreciate my life for its bachelor status, I have never been able to shake the feeling that something has been missing. When you grow up your entire life seeing people marry the second or third person they’ve ever dated and having their first child by 25, you severely underestimate how difficult dating to marry might actually end up, let alone getting a first date at all.
When I pictured my thirty-year-old life as a terrified teenager, one of three gay kids at my high school, I didn’t picture still being single, still pining after people, still wanting and waiting for someone to ask me out like they do in television shows about high school. Life at almost-thirty has been full of much more pleasant surprises than unpleasant ones. As someone who hated high school, I still can’t believe I work professionally in higher education, at a teaching focused school no less. I had no idea what a Mennonite was and now can’t imagine my life without a global community of Anabaptists around me. I can absolutely promise you I was not picturing myself to be living in the south. Yet still, my singleness has surprised me.
In high school, I leaned heavily into the messaging of the “It Gets Better” campaign. I believed that once I was out in “the real world” everything would be okay and I would be back on the correct timetable to marriage. This belief was more or less shattered my senior year when my longtime friend came out as gay and a month later had a boyfriend who happened to be an also recently outed boy that I had a longstanding crush on. I had assumed throughout the first three years of high school that the limited dating pool and overall culture of intolerance was to blame for my singleness. It turned out I just needed to be someone different to have the same kind of easy love story. If you feel like I was being a bit of an egocentric drama queen, let’s try to remember I was 18 and experiencing life for the first time.
When I went off to college and entered what I thought was the real world, I learned what many Christian leaders find out when they try to preach about dating after marrying at 18: dating outside of an insular community is an entirely different game with rules you wouldn’t believe. For example, if you’ve gone on a few dates with someone you really like, who you can see a future with, and who is compatible with you in almost every way, it’s very important you act as disinterested as possible. Text them back a day later, leave them on read from time to time, forget important things about them, and ensure they know you have lots of other suiters taking you on dates. Acting like you actually like them is demonstrably unattractive and a sure-fire way for them to lose all interest in you. On the surface, this might feel unbelievable, as it did to me when I asked a friend who was navigating these unwritten rules if she wanted to play games or if she wanted a boyfriend. You and me would both be surprised then to find out they’ve now been dating for two years and are talking about getting engaged. The games work but I still won’t play them. I simply insist on being obnoxiously chalant. More on that in another reflection.
On top of having to navigate these obviously completely sensical rules, there’s also the fun challenge of trying to date as a follower of Jesus in a generation that is increasingly atheist. You not only have to find someone who likes you and is okay with you breaking the rules and expressing romantic interests to them, you also have to find someone who accepts Christ’s lordship over their life. That alone is a challenge. If you’d like to find someone who is of a similar denomination to you, holds similar sexual ethics to you, rejects New Age Christianity, and actually attends church, well, let’s just say I wouldn’t hold my breath. And keep in mind this whole time we’ve been trying to find a suitor, we haven’t even begun to discuss being on the same page about where to live, if to have children, what issues are important to vote for, where to spend holidays, and the other myriad of lifestyle dealbreakers that need to be negotiated in any human relationship. You might begin to imagine the culture shock trying to date in this climate when the bulk of relationships you’ve seen for the majority of your life just happened between two kids in youth group one Sunday morning.
None of this is to say that the challenges of dating today undermine God’s goodness or faithfulness, or to say that I overly worry about God being late. I think it’s okay to know and to declare that God has a plan for my life while also naming that the plan is a lot more convoluted than I was initially told it would be. If trusting in God were easy, it wouldn’t be called faith.
There’s one other unique facet of my perspective that I think fits in well here. As a gay Christian who is not only out but also advocates for queer people in- and outside of the church, it’s not uncommon for me to be asked direct questions about how I feel about gay couples, both abstractly and in regards to specific examples. To be clear, I would rather be asked than not asked, but there is something that I guess makes me feel embarrassed about not getting a date in five years but still needing to discuss the nuances of queer relationships to Christians who act like we’re something alien. If I’m being vulnerable, there is also something particularly upsetting about having to experience all the bad parts of being gay – phone calls with pastors telling me I’m a terrible person, destabilizing community norms with painted nails, having to come out again and again – while not reaping the benefits of being in a relationship. If you feel like I’m still being a bit of an egocentric drama queen, let’s try to remember I’m 29 and experiencing life for the first time.
Maybe the timetable God has in mind for me to be loved is somewhere in my 30’s, maybe it’s beyond that, or maybe it’s not on this side of heaven. Whatever the case, I trust God and waiting has been a furnace my faith has been refined in. Still, though, watching myself be single almost a full decade older than my sister was when she got married, I can’t help feeling like when it’s my turn to walk down the aisle I’ll be a geriatric bride and land in Guinness Book of World Records as some horrifying (but married, dang it!!!) freak of nature. Okay, maybe I am being a little dramatic.
…more than the watchmen wait for the morning – Psalms 130:6
Bryce Van Vleet is the #1 selling author of Tired Pages and Before We All Die Let’s Have One Last Chat by the Fireside. He sells poetry art here, published a collection of poems titled Weak Eyes, and masquerades as the spoken word artist Liihey. You can support him by clicking through blog posts or donating (scroll to the bottom of the page).
Living Beyond 
Leave a comment