Having grown up going to church, and having a lot of older relatives and friends, I've been to a fair amount of weddings. I love weddings. I've been lucky enough to have attended some truly jubilant wedding celebrations that embrace the beauty of marriage and the community that surrounds them. The joy is infectious.

Mushiness aside, I don't know if I have ever been to a wedding where the words "marriage is a reflection of how Christ loves the Church" were not uttered, in some shape or form. Don't get me wrong--I believe it to be true. It's not the validity of the statement that makes my skin crawl. It's the attention it brings to a glaring oversight in the Church (which may not be appropriately addressed at a wedding anyway, but is nevertheless poorly addressed at all).

Before I begin, I should probably insert a (now almost habitual) disclaimer: I write this with the bias of a single woman in the American, or Western, Church. My experience as a single woman, while sometimes colored with bitterness, has nevertheless been valuable in showing me that there is a disturbing lack of guidance for single people (particularly women) in the Church's teaching. I am beginning to wonder if the Church even knows what to do with single people.

As I said before, I completely agree that a marriage, in its mutual submission and respect, ought to reflect the humble love and self-sacrifice of Christ. However, I hold this sacrificial love as an example in any encounter. Friendships, interactions with strangers, conversations with family or friends. Does it look the same in all of those situations? I should hope not. Even amongst various individual friends it looks vastly different. But I want it to be my goal in any kind of relationship. While marriage is a reflection of how Christ loved the Church, I desperately hope that marriage is not the only--or the most legitimate, or the most pure--reflection of Christ's love. While I understand that marriage involves intimacy with the everyday messiness of another's soul, repeating this mantra that marriage has the potential to be a paragon of Christ's love is dangerously close to telling the unmarried that their expression of Christ's love will never reach its fullest potential without marriage.

And while the Church has ample ministries and committees and small groups for the married man, the married woman, the parent, or (sometimes, though unfortunately more rarely) the adoptive parent specifically, I rarely see anything aimed at single people that doesn't sound more like "how to not be married." The segregation of demographics within the Church often results in single people feeling like their distinguishing characteristic is their lack of marriage status. Is it hard to be single? Sometimes, yes. It sucks staying silent in a group of mothers talking about being mothers, or hearing how instrumental marriage is in sanctification. In all honesty, I often feel useless or less valuable. As a woman raised in a small, conservative church (who then went on to attend a small, conservative Christian college), I have felt again and again the isolation and purposelessness of being unmarried. If my (or any single woman's) usefulness in the church's function is limited to teaching Sunday School, and I can only use my other gifts for outside, "secular" environments, I think the Church is failing to utilize its resources. Its comfort zone in being the hands and feet of Christ often settles on families, preferably nuclear families, and a single woman is, at best, encouraged with an un-biblical promise that "God has someone for you."

I love the Church, and I want to see it flourish. But I don't want to feel like my fullest potential is that of marriage and motherhood. I don't want to be distracted by a "maybe" when I ought to be pursuing a command to "seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow's cause" (Is. 1:17). These are commands; marriage is an option.