It's official: There's no place safe from questions and comments about my singleness. Silly me thought that being out of the country with a group of internationals I'd never met before would make me safe from this usual topic of conversation.
But no, even in a remote Slovakian town I still can't pronounce after being there almost two weeks, surrounded by a group of international Christian journalists for a conference, I still found myself in conversations about my unmarried state.
It all started with the wonderful couple who drove me to the conference facility. This Austrian-Canadian pair has been married 32 years and you can tell they're still crazy about each other. It's there in the way they obviously amuse each other with her contagious enthusiasm about life's little details and his playful verbal sparring with a mutual friend of theirs. And it was evident in the way he watched her give the keynote talk the first night of the conference. I even saw him wipe away a few tears.
When I told the woman what a great job she'd done, I mentioned how fun it had been to watch her husband watching her. "That man's obviously crazy about you," I said with a sly smile. She thanked me for the compliment, then said something totally unexpected: "That's what I wish for you—a husband who'll be as supportive for you and the things you're called to as my husband is for me."
I felt a tad silly when I said that I wouldn't mind that either. Just hearing myself say "I'd like that, too" instead of something along the lines of "oh, don't worry about me, I've got a great, full life" startled even me. This dear new friend promised to pray for a spouse for me as she felt the Holy Spirit had put that on her heart. I thanked her, hugged her, and then walked away feeling an odd mixture of gratefulness and embarrassment.
I heard a similar sentiment a week later from a Ukrainian woman who barely speaks English. I'd shared simply one painfully awkward conversation with her during the conference, one in which I'd tried desperately to understand her fractured pronunciations and also in which my unmarried state never came up. Nonetheless, as we hugged goodbye, she whispered in my ear, "I pray for husband for you." And at the end of the conference, a woman from Malaysia brought up the husband issue for me during a private prayer time.
This was getting eerie. Or depressing. Did I look that desperate? That lonely? That in need of a spouse? I didn't know whether to feel offended or flattered … and I wasn't exactly sure about the origin of either of these emotions. Why offended? For desiring to get hitched? Why flattered? For the fact that these women who barely knew me had somehow found me marriageable?
It was during a frozen-yogurt run with a fellow single friend a few days after I returned from my trip that I began to get a peek at a possible answer. I regaled her with tales of these three international women who'd added my marital status to their prayer lists, joking that with these three spiritual pillars lifting this request heavenward, I half-expected to find my hubby waiting on my doorstep when I returned to the States. (Sadly, no such luck.)
But then the conversation turned more serious and I admitted to the part of me that bristled at these offers of prayer for my future spouse, the part of me that wanted to utter confidently, "No really, I'm just fine, thankyouverymuch."
I was somewhat relieved when this friend mentioned that she, too, felt silly when she'd recently found herself uttering aloud in a moment of loneliness, "I want to get married." When she later reflected on her sheepishness over this declaration, she traced some of her feelings back to, of all things, the feminist movement. "During the latter years of the feminist movement, when the emphasis was on hatred of and autonomy from men, it somehow became a no-no for women to want to get married. I don't think they did us any favors." We then discussed how there's probably always been somewhat of a stigma for men to express this desire.
