Hello tender friends!
Who are you blossoming for?
(I wrote this post with single women in mind because I’d said I would many posts ago. I’ve actually recently been applying these lessons to a very different set of circumstances, and I’ll write about those next week).
I played the comparison game in my younger years, but it’s more accurate to say it was playing me.
I fell for all the tricks for a while. I remember watching other people get married on Facebook and feeling like I was being left behind. (This included an ex-boyfriend who I pined for for over five years. When he married another woman the year before I met Anthony, I despaired hard, despite the fact that I’d had both serious and non-serious relationships since him. Overwhelmed by the pain of irrevocable rejection, I did what modern women do: I unfriended him so I wouldn’t be stabbed by images of his wedding bliss any longer).
At that same time, watching friends from high school and college get married and post pictures on Facebook, the fantasy of getting married myself swept me away for reasons besides heartbreak. Pretty much everyone I grew up with got their wedding dresses at Kleinfeld’s (because I grew up in northern New Jersey). The lace detail, the authentic satin, the glitz of a lavish wedding- I wanted it badly.
(This is Palacio de Gaudi in Astorga, Spain. I walked across Spain when I was 25 and became enchanted with the idea of getting married in this very building during that part of the hike).
But here’s the catch: I wanted the fairytale ending because I wanted to prove that I was a worthwhile woman. My idea of my own value correlated heavily to finding a boyfriend/husband who deemed me valuable.
It took a long time for me to realize that I could simply decide to value myself.
So I stopped paying attention to social media and I realized that I didn’t actually want to get married at that time. Isn’t that funny? The illusion of endless happiness and opulence on social media was so convincing that I believed I wanted something that I actually didn’t.
I also stopped dating for a while. I accepted that the rest of my life might just be me and God. Even though I didn’t want the gift of singlehood (every time I heard it referred to as a gift, my brain recoiled), I let go of the idea of trying to look pretty or prove that my boyfriend of the moment was desirable. I just trusted that whatever God had for me, even if it looked different that the dreams I had, would be God’s best.
I stopped worrying that “my turn” would never come. I stopped bothering with fixing my hair and makeup when my friends and I went to bars after work. I stopped lamenting time I had “wasted” with the wrong guys.
I started blooming for myself. And for the first time in my life, I started liking myself a little. I started enjoying time out with my friends differently once God removed the pressure to be and look perfect. I started to think, “I have fun without a boyfriend. Maybe I’m fun on my own!”
Even though a life of singlehood still wasn’t what I wanted, I trusted God to make that potential life of singlehood a wondrous thing for me.
That time was sacred, and I’m so grateful that I had that experience of just enjoying life with God prior to meeting Anthony and starting a family. I now pine for time with my girl friends in a way that I used to pine for a husband.
I wish more young, single women realized that they will also likely miss intense girl bonding because things change when you get married. No matter how close you were, everyone moves on and either marries or dates differently as they age. My friends and I still talk, but we are no longer each other’s first priority because our husbands/significant others they live with are now.
The days of running through the play by play of every moment that happened on a night you all went out together, the nights of staying up talking until 3 AM and debating together whether or not to text the guy of the night- all of that has a shelf life. I saw that period of time as a means to an end, a way of getting to the next step of the life I ultimately wanted for myself.
Now I see the missed opportunities to enjoy that time with my girl friends more. It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t have endless opportunities to stay up all night talking to them until that time was gone.
So single ladies, my prayer is that you will enjoy this time rather than wish it away. My prayer is that you will become aware of how much you enjoy being single and focusing on your friends before the time ends. I love being married and can’t imagine it any other way, but the time when it’s just you and God, and you and your gir friends before marriage, has a unique sweetness. I pray you enjoy the season before it’s gone.
Ok, that’s all for today, tender friends! I’ll be sharing a food post on Thursday and “Blooming for Myself- Part 2,” focusing on ways God has shown me to apply this idea outside of romance, next Monday.
Thank you for sharing!
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tea and tenderness 
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