My sensitivity reader, Hal says I have written some things here that sound contentious and harsh. He says I need to soften and layer my essay. The temptation to accept his suggestions is hard to ignore.

But I think I’m just going to trust the emotional intelligence of the people reading this. I’m not in the habit of going full-on Ex Cathedra with my opinions, don’t mind leaving room for ambiguity and nuance, and open to comments if you disagree. Or if you agree. Or in-between. Or whatever. Let me know your thoughts, I’d be delighted to hear them.

I’ve already done more for political correctness than I’d originally planned, and that was only under duress from Hal.

What Is a Woman?

Growing up in a deeply faithful Catholic household, I was only ever prepared for marriage and motherhood.

Then I spent my young adult years feeling like a failure because for many years, relationships just never happened for me. It felt like guys liked me very much as a person but not romantically. That just never seemed to even cross their minds.

It was very hard to be forced into re-evaluating my purpose from wife and mother to – I had no idea what. It only occurred to me way into my thirties that I even should.

I was not only never prepared for anything else, but the only valid purpose for us women in the Church seemed to be as wife and mother. While in the Church (meant here in the more extended sense, including Protestant denominations) the number of single women seemed to grow exponentially.

Don’t get me wrong, I really did want that life. It was in fact all I wanted.

My two sisters both got married and started having children. I didn’t.

Of course, there was a very clear requirement, which in terms of the human factor made it a whole lot more complicated. I wanted to marry a man who loved Jesus. And the market was not exactly flooded with that kind of candidate.

Purpose

Our parents, the Church, just had no answers. New teachings about “the gift of singleness” emerged, mostly written by married people. Needless to say, they had no idea!

I remember teachings that suggested that our purpose was basically to serve married couples, helping them with their babies so they could go out on “date nights”.

In the meantime, we were supposed to wait for God’s timing and provision, in my firm opinion a wildly unbiblical idea, which is one concept I have a lot of problems with anyway. (I’m sure I’ll come to that in another essay at some point.)

I heard my Dad regularly ranting about single women pursuing a career and he didn’t even hear me when I told him that I don’t know any single women who wouldn’t much rather be married and raising children. And this was true not only in religious circles but among the many non-religious friends I had. More and more single women each year, fewer and fewer of them getting married.

I’m sure there were women out there who didn’t want to, but they were still the minority at the time. This was true not just about religious folks, lots of ladies out there struggled the same, though obviously for very different reasons.

(An interesting flashback here, though: when I was around sixteen, a [female] teacher asked the class what we thought our purpose was in Life. I said Motherhood. Everyone laughed, including the teacher. Then the teacher asked me, how many children I wanted. I said at least four. They all laughed some more and made comments about the economic situation and the financial viability of a large family.)

The world has changed a great deal since then, which I will expand on a bit further down. But later in life, having met them since at school reunions, I know that they all pretty clearly made it a very significant purpose in their lives to have a family. Maybe not with four kids, but the trend remained: girls wanted to get married and raise children.

Social Engineering

What I have learned over the years is that much of the single, career-focused woman phenomenon is socially engineered. I’m not saying that it doesn’t exist, I’m saying that it’s nowhere near as much of a “phenomenon” as we are made to believe.

What we are being fed by the media is full of the products of conscious efforts to shape society, to veer it in a certain direction.

Much of the “independent, career-minded woman” image comes from these efforts. It was one of the first steps in getting to where we are now with arguments about whether physically male bodied people should be allowed into women’s spaces. No-one would have taken this seriously at the time, I wager not even trans people.

This had to start somewhere. You could never have pulled it off without serious prep work, spanning decades.

It had to start with a society where you don’t even need to have any feeling of any kind for each other to be “doing it”. Where saying “I love you” to each other after several months of sleeping together and genuinely caring about each other is a huge, traumatic event, possibly a deal breaker. This was the narrative fed to us in hugely popular shows such as Friends, where Chandler almost fainted in panic after he accidentally said “I love you” to Monica.

And of course the media trends did become wide-spread reality. But what am I talking? This all started in the 60s with the hippies and “free love” and it was well on its way by the time I was twenty.

By the time I was in my teens, wearing whatever you wanted, or close to nothing if it pleased you, had been completely accepted for decades.

These new trends were rammed down our throats every day and we happily gobbled them up and laughed along.

But don’t forget that many of us were forced into this.

I was forty-two when eventually I got married. The Church doesn’t accept IVF so babies never happened to me.

Fun fact: About a month into our relationship with my now husband, I remembered that scene in Friends. The one where Chandler blurts out the L word and panics. And I thought to myself yes, this actually is scary but if it’s a deal-breaker, I don’t want to drag this out until it becomes a heart-breaker, so I’m just going to risk it. We were at Heathrow, I was flying out to be with my family for Christmas. And I said to him: “I think I’m falling in love with you.”

The Failure and The Bitch

Although I never denied that I would have wanted otherwise, I have learned over the years that it’s sometimes much easier to be the “ice cold careerist bitch” than to admit that I might possibly be a failure. Because according to everything I learned as a child and a young person, that’s what I am.

At 55 this year, I am still rewiring my mind and heart around the whole topic of womanhood.

And then don’t even get me started on how inadequately we’ve been prepared for marriage!

Spoiler: That day thirteen years ago at Heathrow, I internally cringed and thought, this is it, now he’s going to break up with me.

What I didn’t expect was the smile of utter joy on his face.

It was hard being a Catholic child. Expectations and pressures I didn’t fully understand. Church felt more like endurance than encounter.

I believed in it, sure. It was a very meaningful part of my identity. It still is. I believed in God. I still do.

It just got more… layered over the years.

In my early twenties, I got swept up in a born-again wave. I wanted to be caught. And something did happen: I came out of a long depressive phase almost overnight. That experience was real. It gave me hope again.

But the struggle didn’t stay gone. The low moods, the anxiety, the fog—they came back, in waves.

Church, which was now supposed to be fun... well… it wasn’t.

I was still bored.

There, I said it.

The worship sessions that went on and on…

One time, during a visit to a church I didn’t belong to, after about half an hour, I sat down and began reading my Bible. This guy came up to me and asked what my problem was. I never went back.

Back home at my Catholic church (with the idols–yeah, don’t even ask!), you sing one song, and then you can move on to other parts of the liturgy.

Here, there was no liturgy, which was supposed to be a good thing. Except, to me, what that meant was that, after the endless worship session to start the service, there would be testimonials. Talks. Readings. More Talks. More worship.

And then there were the rules.

So many rules.

What you could wear, what music you could listen to, who you could date, and how.
The many, often conflicting, teachings about single life, relationships, marriage, and sex. Some sounded biblical, some felt suspiciously cultural. But all of them were wielded like truth.

It mattered to me—I was single for many years.

And in church, being single was often treated like a condition to be cured. A state to endure until God sent your "husband." But there were rules for waiting. Rules for dating. Rules for praying for your future spouse. And always the quiet undertow of blame if nothing happened.

Maybe you didn’t guard your heart.

Maybe you didn’t wait well enough. Didn’t pray well enough. Didn’t pray enough.

Oh yes, and the wild card! My absolute fav one! You weren’t ready! You might have thought that you were, but no, because He knew you weren’t! And anyway, were you even sure He was not intending for you to receive “the gift of singleness”? The one gift no one wanted.

And underneath it all, the quiet accusation:

Maybe your faith just wasn’t strong enough.

Once, I read an article—written by a Protestant minister, interestingly—about Mary as a model for single women.

I was furious.

Mary? She was a young girl when the arrangement was made for her and Joseph. She didn’t have to wait. She never sat in the pews aching with loneliness while people assured her, “The Lord will take care of it.” It was already taken care of. The family took care of it. Society took care of it.

Another time, someone had left a book outside my door: "God, the Matchmaker" by Derek Prince. No note. No explanation. Just an assumption left on my doorstep.

I was fuming!

I had read the book. In my twenties. We all did. If you were a Christian in those days, it was everywhere. It was huge. You couldn’t have got past it if you tried.

I need to provide some background here – bear with me.

Lydia Christensen had fully dedicated her life to God – before she ever met Derek Prince. Lydia had moved to pre-state Israel in 1942. If you think Israel is tense now, Jerusalem in the 1940s was a city on edge—war looming, streets unstable, curfews imposed, danger very real. That was when Lydia moved to Jerusalem, which was particularly volatile, to adopt orphaned and disadvantaged children. On her own. A single woman. In 1942. Her priorities weren’t in getting a husband. But they met when Derek was serving with the British Army in Jerusalem and they married in 1946.

We all wanted to be like Lydia Christensen.

But frankly… well, let’s face it.

We weren’t. Right?

We just wanted to have a regular job in a country where there was no civil unrest and all that, and then get married, and then have kids.

But anyway. Fast forward to when, over a decade later, this happened with the book on my doorstep.

I went to the minister about it. Oddly enough, he’d never heard of the book. He asked to borrow it and later told me that the whole premise—that God is a divine dating service—isn’t even clearly biblical. That surprised me, but I felt justified in my annoyance. Finally, someone much better versed in the Bible, was on my side!

I do not doubt the truthfulness of the story of Derek Prince and Lydia Christensen. No problem there.

The problem was how that story was turned into a blueprint.

A formula.

God will sort you out. You sit tight.

But life, as I found, doesn’t obey formulas.

And when it didn’t work out that way for me, I was left wondering—again—whose fault it was.

It’s strange.

Faith once saved me.

And yet over time, it also hurt me in ways I couldn’t name for years.

To this day, I haven’t let go of it entirely. Not quite.

I’m happily married now.

And still…

But these days, I carry it differently. Quieter. Gentler.

I’m learning to sit with my doubt as something human, not shameful.

And maybe—just maybe—that ’s what faith really is.