Singleness and Everything We Can’t See

To a despairing generation, the distractions of TikTok, Twitter, and Tinder seem like lifelines. But the costs of our distraction are high.

By Elle Rogers

I am radically free, which is everything I wanted. At nineteen, I traded Indiana for college in Manhattan; at twenty-three, I left the Big Apple for the nation’s capital. I am now twenty-five and studying at a well-respected law school in Chicago. I no longer want to be free. To say the thing women in their mid-twenties are not supposed to say these days, I would like to not be single.

Don’t misunderstand me: I am unendingly grateful for every moment of my education and for each part of the world I have inhabited. The practice of law is full of opportunities to advocate for issues I care about in cities I have come to love—it’s a thrilling proposition. But I would prefer to experience it alongside a husband and to confront difficult choices about work and family. Instead, the world is limitless, and I’d like limits.

How I came to want the constraints of commitment is a story for another time. The story isn’t the point; my hypothesis is that the vast majority of women in particular arrive at this realization somehow. Homer characterized female desire, and the human good life, 2,800 years ago, in Odysseus’s greeting to Princess Nausicaä in the Odyssey: 

“May the good gods give you all your heart desires: 
husband, and house, and lasting harmony, too. 
No finer, greater gift in the world than that…
When man and woman possess their home, two minds,
two hearts that work as one. Despair to their enemies,
a joy to all their friends. Their own best claim to glory.”

For as small-minded as the Lean-In crowd insists this dream is, one would expect achieving it to be simple compared with attaining the real prize in a young woman’s life, middle management. Quite the opposite. Americans are getting married later than ever and having fewer children. Larger and larger numbers of potential marriage partners are, or at least act, uninterested in prioritizing marriage and homemaking. The result, for those looking to put the horse before the corporatist cart, feels something like sailing without a destination.

* * *

This is why I envy Odysseus. It takes him ten years to return from the Trojan War, but he knows his destination—his beloved wife, Penelope, and their island home of Ithaca. Singleness is an odyssey to an unknown home. It lurks in moments of return. Unlocking the apartment door after a day at school, turning down the comforter on the bed after friends leave and the party ends—these moments are the prelude to profound loneliness, to empty spaces untouched by friends and studies and social outings.

In the era of constant stimulation, the impulse is to fill the emptiness at any cost. Enter social media, the number of the making of books and articles about which there is no end, and apps offering instant romantic connection. To extend the Homeric analogy, our platforms for showing off and hooking up are like the seductions of Circe, to whose charms a despairing Odysseus falls prey. Intending to stop only briefly on Circe’s island, Odysseus begins a dalliance with Circe and ends up performing errands on her behalf rather than continuing on to Ithaca. He forgets his mission, at the cost of an added year of travel home. So too we, weary of being alone, invite strangers into our interiority and our beds. TikTok videos, Twitter favorites, and Tindr dates mediate the return from the emptiness.

To a despairing generation, these distractions seem like lifelines. If we can’t have the ideal, we’ll take what is easy. But our distractions are vehicles for forgetting—and we are a forgetful people. They, like Circe, seduce us into a cycle of numbness that, unlike Odysseus’s journey, has no destination. We wind up ruled by our distractions, begging for just one more dopamine hit in a world (and a feed) without end. The costs of our forgetfulness are high, cashed out not only in declining rates of marriage and childbearing, but in spiking loneliness.

I wish I had better advice for the inevitable “So, what now?”, but rejecting the modern alternatives to singleness is as much like the end of The Graduate as it is the beginning of The Matrix. The empty spaces don’t suddenly become full; unmediated, the emptiness looms larger than ever. I bought into the feminist dream, I bought out, and now I’m left with longing for a home that hides behind mist and people whose faces are veiled.

* * *

Longing and emptiness are not unique to singleness. Genesis 1 begins with a depiction of an empty space, the earth itself, described in various translations as “desolate,” “barren,” and “void.” Whatever the empty earth looked like, I think it resembled Chicago in February. I had my first Chicago winter this year. On most of the days my school’s COVID policy allowed me to attend classes during our winter quarter, I walked the mile from my apartment to campus, and on most days, the sidewalks were flanked by snow up to my waist. Sometimes the snow melted, only to reveal barren earth underneath. For months I walked, greeted by trees with no leaves and homes whose doors never opened and a sky whose grey consumed all. The world was Chicago and the world was empty, and I always returned to my apartment, and that, too, was empty.

The earth was given form and spring came to Chicago sometime after my friends and I wore winter coats to a Cubs game in May—but read more than a few chapters of the Bible and it becomes clear that parts of the earth are still barren. God promises Abraham and Sarah a son born twenty-five years later. The people of Israel escape slavery in Egypt only to later find themselves in exile and their city in ruins. Move to the New Testament, and Jesus’s disciples spend their post-ascension lives awaiting a return they would never see.

To paraphrase the Apostle Paul, the earth still groans for renewal. It is, as T.S. Eliot puts it, a “twilight kingdom,” suspended somewhere between its original emptiness and the form promised. So are we. So are our longings. All of us see dimly, single or not. We long for a place we’ve never been, wish for intimacy we’ve never encountered, await wholeness for our bodies and our hearts. Often enough, we learn about what’s promised by its absence, feeling the thing most acutely in its lack. Most of us spend our lives caught between despair and distraction. Anticipating the world to come is, in many ways, the art of learning to suffer. It is a lifetime’s work, an odyssey punctuated by hints of the destination.

For those who are single, the anticipation—and the suffering—are doubled. Each day, we join with the prophets and every Jane Austen heroine to ask, “How long?” Lament is one of the better answers I’ve come up with to the problem of singleness. Lament and walking, sometimes at the same time. My winter walks to class became my time to pray, to listen to symphonies and podcasts and songs about the human experience, to cry and list everything for which I had to praise God. Sometime in March, something happened that hadn’t happened before: the sun came out, and the snow glistened like it was made of a million crystals, each bearing witness to the God who gave and is giving it form. To my weary eyes, it was a miracle. This is what we miss when we numb our longings: glimpses of the world in its true form. The twilight kingdom is the Kingdom of God, now and soon and someday and already, even if not yet.

That’s what I imagine is so grand about love: it is perhaps the greatest hint we get of the coming kingdom. Love is not blindness; it’s clarity. It’s a return home, or something that reminds us of home. Or so I’m told. I am not promised I’ll experience it, at least in romantic form, on this earth. I am promised that the God who gave the earth its form will one day make His dwelling with us. On that day, there will be no more empty spaces. Until then, in this, our exile, in a society leaving young people adrift, let’s mend each other’s sails—and let’s see if there aren’t homes to be built along the way.

* * *

I am twenty-five, and I no longer want to be free. So I choose to belong to the God who already knows and sees me fully. Commitment is everywhere, if we’re willing to look for it. The Kingdom of God is, too. Somewhere between my unmet desires and the renewed earth, the sun sets over the East River as I walk the Brooklyn Bridge from my summer job to my apartment. By God’s grace, the space between isn’t empty, even if my bed is. What once looked barren is full of longing and lament and joy and anticipation for what could be, for what already is, and for what’s coming into being. With each return to my apartment, I see it all more. Rejecting the easy for a hint of the ideal, I venture after God into the unknown, across the Brooklyn Bridge, homeward bound.

Now we see—dimly, partially, painfully, through mist and layers of unfulfilled longing. Somehow, miraculously, we see anyway.

Elle Rogers is a student at the University of Chicago Law School.