It’s September, and the discourse on Christian Twitter has turned the corner from “Should women wear leggings?” to “Why aren’t Christians (read: Christian women) getting married at as high a rate as they should?” Christianity Today published an article by one Lyman Stone, with a title that sounds promising - “Singleness Is Not a Sin” - but ultimately disappoints. In fact, the title would have been truer to the article’s actual contents if the editor had tacked on the word, “… Technically.” Stone admits that the church has never held the position that singleness is a sin, and in fact has held celibacy for the sake of service to the church to be highly honorable. But:
Unless singleness is clearly defined as a state that has some purpose oriented toward the good of the neighbor (not just incidentally beneficial but purposively so), it is difficult to understand what possible endorsement the status can be given. It is not sinful, but it is not good. (emph mine)
In a nutshell, Stone argues that high rates of singlehood - rates such as we are seeing today - aren’t good for the church, for society, or for singles themselves. Singleness, he asserts, is “a pitiable state” and the church should be careful not to suggest otherwise.
Whenever I hear people waxing eloquent about the advantages of marriage, I wait for the other shoe to drop, and I wasn’t disappointed. While making some room for exceptional cases where singlehood can further the cause of evangelism, Stone cautions his readers: “In almost every generation of Christians for almost all of history, fertility has been a much bigger source of new believers than adult evangelism has.” He suggests that the church lend young people a hand in finding marriage partners, because this is in the church’s best interest:
The long record of history suggests that churches that find ways to help young singles find partners and have children will survive in the long run. Churches that don’t find ways to help in that process will wither away, because no Christian movement has ever been primarily sustained by adult converts long term.
As usual, “pro-marriage” is coded language for “pro-natal”. In short, the church doesn’t need single people’s undivided devotion to God as much as it needs single people to get married and have the church’s babies.
Repeatedly, Stone heads off the objection that he is arguing against singles’ interest, by saying that most Christian singles are not single by choice: they want to get married and have children. Here, I don’t really disagree with him. I know plenty of singles who would really like to get married, but circumstances haven’t allowed them to, often despite concerted effort to find somebody. But the fact that so many single people do want to get married, but haven’t yet, tells me that the problem isn’t that people aren’t convinced that marriage, in the abstract, is a desirable state. The problem is that just because you want to get married doesn’t mean you’ll automatically find someone you actually want to spend the rest of your life with - or that, if you do find that someone, they’ll want to marry you.
We keep talking as if the question is whether or not marriage is good, but the the problem with this framing is that people don’t marry marriage - they marry other people. Abstracting the institution of marriage from the concrete realities of what marriage actually is - a binding relationship between two, specific individuals who have to live with each other day in and day out - allows us to forget marriage isn’t universally experienced as “good” by the people in it. With intimate partner violence being experienced by one in three women, the choice to allow someone the kind of access that marriage involves is an especially weighty one for women. But physical harm isn’t the only possibility that women have historically faced in a world where it is assumed that everyone will get married, and singlehood is something to be avoided at all costs.
Despite being a fiction writer who lived two centuries ago, no one captures the complexities of trying to find a marriage partner in the real world, among real people, as well as Jane Austen. Austen wrote during a time of social and economic transition. Attitudes about the purpose of marriage, and what made two people suitable for each other, were changing, but the two conditions that had driven matrimonial alliances for centuries - pedigree and property - were still very much in play. Theoretically society elevated companionate marriage as an ideal, but in reality, marriages of convenience were common, and with predictable results.
In Pride and Prejudice, Jane and Elizabeth Bennet are expected to marry with an eye to fortune, not just for their own sakes, but for the sake of their family. Their father is the second son of a respectable family, but the bad luck of having no sons to inherit his one valuable asset - the Longbourn estate - have put his wife and five daughters in a bad spot. If one or more of the Bennet girls don’t “marry well” (i.e., marry someone with money), the whole family faces an uncertain future when Mr. Bennet dies. Enter, Mr. William Collins: newly-minted clergyman, grateful beneficiary of the imperious Lady Catherine De Bourgh, closest male relative of Mr. Bennet, and hence, future heir of Longbourn.
Near the beginning of the book, Mr. Collins announces his intention to pay the Bennets a two-week visit, and it becomes clear that he expects, in that time, to choose one of his five cousins as his future wife. Mr. Collin seeks a wife on “the particular advice and recommendation” of his patron, Lady Catherine. On paper, it looks like a great plan: if Mr. Collins marries one of the Bennet daughters, it will keep Longbourn in the family. And although Mr. Collins doesn’t have ten thousand pounds a year, like Mr. Darcy, he’s become the proprietor of a snug little vicarage - a perfectly acceptable home for any of the Bennet daughters (except Jane, who’s too pretty to be wasted anyone but the wealthiest man in the neighborhood). There’s only one catch: no one in her right mind would want to be married to Mr. Collins.
Austen opens her description of Mr. Collins with the words, “Mr. Collins was not a sensible man,” and for the rest of the book, that proves to be the understatement of the year. Fatuous, sycophantic, sanctimonious, and with just enough education to make himself utterly insufferable, Mr. Collins’ attempted courtship of Elizabeth is the stuff of nightmares. Mr. Collins clearly has no real regard for Elizabeth except that she’s an eligible, breathing female with convenient family connections. Despite only knowing his “fair cousin” for a few days, and receiving no encouragement whatsoever from her, when he proposes to her, Mr. Collins finds it impossible to believe that Elizabeth doesn’t want to marry him. Why would a young woman in such a precarious economic position turn down an offer of marriage with so many advantages? Especially when, as he delicately point out to Elizabeth, “it is by no means certain that another offer of marriage may ever be made to you.”
Mr. Collins defies the kind of abstraction that we so often see in pro-marriage, pronatalist messaging: he makes the matrimonial possibilities of Jane Austen’s world horrifyingly concrete with his excruciating attentions - first to Elizabeth, and later (and more successfully) to her friend Charlotte Lucas. Charlotte - plain and of only moderate fortune - is a shocking twenty-seven years old, which in Austen’s world makes her a spinster. But she seizes on her opportunity when Elizabeth rejects the overtures of Mr. Collins: she’s not one to ignore the material advantages of marriage to her friend’s spurned suitor. Charlotte works fast, and in a matter of days, she and Mr. Collins are announcing their engagement.
When Elizabeth discovers - with understandable shock - that her friend is engaged to the man she rejected only three days before, Charlotte calmly defends her choice: “I am not romantic you know. I never was. I ask only a comfortable home; and considering Mr. Collins’s character, connections, and situation in life, I am convinced that my chance of happiness with him is as fair, as most people can boast on entering the marriage state.” Charlotte’s philosophy is that opportunity knocks only once, and she fully intends to answer when it does - even if it comes in the form of Mr. Collins.
Mansfield Park is a lesser-known novel of Austen’s, but it’s a masterclass in the causes and effects of ill-conceived marriages. In it, the wealthy Bertram family adopts Fanny Price, a poor relation. The oldest daughter of the family, Mariah Bertram, is beautiful, rich, and fully intends to marry well - very well. She in fact marries Mr. Rushworth, the richest young man that she can find, but she doesn’t love him: in fact, she finds him silly and irritating. During Mr. Rushworth’s awkward courtship of her, Mariah falls in love with Henry Crawford, a dashing visitor to the neighborhood who makes a hobby of breaking hearts. But when Crawford fails to approach Mariah’s father for her hand in marriage, she accepts Mr. Rushworth’s proposal. Where her rash decision gets her - and her family - we will see.
After Mariah’s marriage, Henry Crawford becomes seriously interested in Fanny, but Fanny has already seen his flirtations with Mariah and has a very low opinion of his character. When he approaches her uncle about marrying her, Fanny refuses his offer, although she can’t tell her uncle the real reason. Her uncle, realizing that this is probably the best - and very possibly the only - offer of marriage she will ever receive, puts the pressure on her to change her mind. This is extremely mortifying to Fanny, who is only too aware that she is living on his charity. Her uncle sends her back for a visit to her family, hoping that a reminder of what (relative) poverty looks like will soften her towards this marriage prospect. Henry Crawford does his best to convince Fanny that he’s a reformed character, but whatever change his attraction to her has worked on him isn’t permanent. Disaster awaits when Crawford enters the neighborhood where the newlywed Mariah and Mr. Rushworth live. Old feelings are rekindled between Crawford and Mariah, and they end up running away together, dealing a devastating blow to the Bertrams, but vindicating Fanny.
Charlotte Lucas defends her choice to marry Mr. Collins by declaring, “I’m not romantic,” but there’s more to Austen’s marriage ethos than sentimentality. In fact, her novels are very clear-sighted about the outcomes of hasty marriages built on nothing but a fleeting attraction. In Fanny’s backstory we learn that her mother ran away from home to marry a poor naval officer, and when we see them as a married couple twenty years later, Mrs. Price’s life is anything but happy with him. Elizabeth Bennet’s father is also the pitiable victim of his own matrimonial choices: he married young, to a woman with charm and good looks, but little fortune and even less sense. This woman grows up, of course, into the querulous, nervous-tempered Mrs. Bennet, whose lack of tact is a source of constant embarrassment to her two oldest daughters. Mr. Bennet is not a lot better as a husband than Mrs. Bennet is a wife: mostly, he just baits Mrs. Bennet for his own amusement. Elizabeth’s observation of her parents is, in fact, a big part of why she is so determined to marry someone who she can be reasonably happy with.
Mr. Collins isn’t even the worst-case scenario as far as Austen marriage candidates go. He’s not violent or cruel, he doesn’t gamble, and although he’s been known to pay “those little delicate compliments which are always acceptable to ladies,” one can hardly imagine him chasing skirts. He’s technically respectable, and this ranks him higher than, say, George Wickham of the same novel, or John Willoughby of Sense of Sensibility: both outwardly charming young men who turn out to be fortune-hunting womanizers. Mr. Collins isn’t a wicked person, he’s just inane. In Pride and Prejudice, Austen asks us to judge between Elizabeth and Charlotte: is the fact that a marriage prospect is ridiculous reason enough to reject an otherwise perfectly good chance to get married? In forcing us to look at the absurdities of the Collins’ married life later in the book, Austen makes us see that Charlotte’s pragmatic decision is much worse than “unromantic”: it’s indecent.
Coming back to the present: Stone concludes by saying that single people shouldn’t be condemned, pressured or scolded into getting married, but rather exhorted and supported towards marriage. But earlier on, he writes approvingly of religious communities with high marriage rates, like ultra-orthodox Judaism, or the Punjabi community where marriage is “nearly universal” and “usually arranged.” He notes:
Marriage behaviors vary dramatically across social groups within a single economy because marriage norms and values vary. Norms matter, and by more consistently exhorting all young people in a religious community to actively pursue marriage in their 20s, marriage rates in the 20s can in fact be increased.
Clearly, Stone very much wants to see the evangelical Christian community at least get closer to the marriage rates of these groups, and he thinks the church should have a hand in helping. And although the pragmatic reasons for promoting marriage may not be the same as those that we see in Austen’s novels, pragmatism is certainly there: marriages mean babies, and babies mean that churches survive another generation. But churches aren’t the ones who will have to live in those marriages, which is why the morality of the church promoting marriage for all - or almost all - is questionable.
This has been a long post, but I included as much detail as I did from Jane Austen’s stories because I wanted us to see, in an up-close and personal way, how utterly pointless it is to make generalizations about marriage being “good” and singleness being “not good.” I also wanted to show how, even without applying direct pressure on singles to marry any particular person, an atmosphere where marriage is assumed to be good and singlehood is assumed to be bad, is an atmosphere where people themselves will make rash decisions about who to marry, with disastrous results.
Jane Austen’s novels are some of the most true-to-life fiction you’ll ever read, but in the end of the day, they are fiction, and all her heroines do conveniently find love, and matrimony. But it’s interesting that in real life, Austen never married, despite apparently having at least one opportunity. No one knows for sure why Austen ultimately rejected Harris Bigg-Wither, a well-off neighbor who made her an offer of marriage when she was twenty-seven and still an unpublished author, but speculations, of course, abound. But whatever her reasons were, one thing is clear: even though she was open to marriage in the abstract, Austen felt that being single (and single as a dependent woman in 1802) was better than her marriage options.
Some people may think that Austen’s life as a single woman is incongruous with her novels, which are all about love and marriage, but singlehood as a viable option is actually integral to Austen’s marriage ethos. If every woman must do her best to get married, there simply aren’t enough Mr. Darcys, Mr. Knightleys or Colonel Brandons to go around: someone has to marry Mr. Collins. If we want marriage to be what it ought to be, singlehood must be honored, and not just as an acceptable alternative for an elite minority of super-Christians who are unbothered by sexual appetites and want to devote their life to ministry. Rather than labeling it “not good,” singleness must be honored as infinitely better than marriage, if marriage means marrying a person against your better judgment. A friend on Twitter said it best: “I’ve never overlooked a guy because of his looks / job / income / status / or even sexual history … Every single woman I know is single because she holds marriage in high regard and doesn’t want to make a mistake.” (emph mine) A high view of marriage isn’t just compatible with a high view of singlehood: the first actually requires the second.
For the postmillennial patriarchalists who magnify earthly dominion, female singleness will tend to be seen as a waste. The single woman also puts complementarians in a conundrum, especially if they think that "femininity is the freeing disposition to affirm, receive, and nurture strength and leadership from worthy men." They are faced with the dilemma --- how can the single woman do that effectively for another woman's husband? Unfortunately, I think we have missed what male and female truly points to, what it tells us about God and his plans for his people. We have settled for a mundane view of "male and female he created them." We forget marriage comes in Genesis 2, after the woman of Genesis 1 is made for God and impressed with his image without reference to marriage.
This piece is so good I want to tattoo it on my forehead. (I'm gonna need a bigger forehead.) But seriously, THANK YOU for saying this!