Fire, water, flight

The alchemy of disappointment

Originally published February 13, 2023 on Substack.

With Valentine’s day around the corner, I’m taking the month of February to explore different aspects of romance from the bitter to the sweet.

This piece is a tender one. I finished the first draft that conveyed what I wanted in October 2022 while I was in Portugal on a sabbatical that I had planned for 2 years. The moment felt significant as the trip was the manifestation of the first time in my adult life that I chose to embrace an uncharted path, of which being single beyond when I expected has been a core part. I have a multitude of other drafts from over the last ten years, but while they hovered around the essence, none of them got to the heart. 

Words and stories have always helped me process my experiences. Even if they’re strangers, reading the words of others makes me feel less alone as I work through my own questions.  Throughout my adulthood as I’ve struggled with my single status, I’ve often sought voices that made me feel seen in the spectrum of emotions I was feeling; however, I never really found them. From my early adulthood years, many of the messages I heard from the Christian church about being single felt incomplete. They seemed unwilling to sit in the sheer pain of disappointment, but also unwilling to acknowledge the boxes the church has placed around women and our worth, often tying it to marriage and motherhood only. 

Perhaps one day I’ll write more on this topic, but for now I offer this piece particularly for those women who have wanted company in this type of pain. I also offer this piece for young girls and women to see a different path than perhaps what they have around them. Growing up and as a young adult, I didn’t realize it was a viable option to be fulfilled and single because I didn’t see women older than me who were. While I still have a desire for life partnership and hold the pain of that desire being unfulfilled, I’m happier now than I’ve ever been. I’m unwilling to compromise what matters to me most for the sake of changing my relationship status.

I hope young women can see that they can also cultivate their purpose, regardless of relationship status, and they can even decide whether or not they want to be married. Ultimately, there are so many ways for us to live as humans. On whatever path we find ourselves, may we have the courage to hold with compassion those things for which we most long that remain unfulfilled.

In my twenties, I was best friends with another twenty something named Tina*. Although I’m Ghanaian-Kenyan-American, and she is Taiwanese American, we affectionately referred to ourselves as “twins,” due to us both being petite and our many shared interests, including music and faith. We were inseparable. We had regular chats over boba and popcorn fried chicken, we took weekend hikes and we sang at the top of our lungs during church music practice. Many a late Friday night we conferenced in her maroon Toyota Prius in the church parking lot. We cried together over the latest reason our hearts were broken and the disappointment we felt at being single. Despite our closeness, one winter a crack emerged in our friendship as she began to distance herself as I worked through my recurring depression. The crack quietly grew to a chasm as our time spent together and phone calls dwindled. So when I took her call as I walked to the train after work one day, my knees buckled. She told me she had started dating someone. I felt myself leave my body, and I had to take deep breaths to make it through the walk and the train ride until I made it to my car. In the safety of my car I wailed like my body was being split open.

Tina ended up marrying that boyfriend, but by that time the chasm between us was too wide to cross, and I wasn’t invited to her wedding. I saw the pictures through mutual friends on Facebook. In the most striking one, she’s kneeling on the floor, her beaming face looking up adoringly as she’s washing the feet of her new groom. In the background, her still chosen friends stand in dazzling jewel tone blue dresses holding bright flowers while wiping tears from their eyes.

At my friend Mary’s* wedding, we gathered in the reception center hidden under majestic Redwood trees. Amidst soft candlelight, lush roses and happy people, I watched her dance with her new husband, and I felt a sudden wave rise in me. I rushed to the bathroom and cocooned myself in a stall to silently cry. Tina’s wedding was 9 years ago. Mary’s wedding was 7 years ago. Before their weddings, however, I had already been through the first waves of my peers partnering off to start married lives.

I am now 38. I cannot count the number of new relationships blossoming I’ve witnessed. I cannot count the number of times I’ve swallowed tears during someone else’s engagement or wedding. I cannot count the number of times I’ve wailed like a warrior pierced in battle. The only wound in my adult life that never seems to heal is the one of being single. While at this point I’ve tried to hide it, it’s always there. My heart split open, throbbing, bleeding. Nothing ever seems to stop the flow, but it has been the force that has untangled the myths I believed about being a woman. The wound opened my heart to my heart. To listen to what I couldn’t hear. To find what I couldn’t find. To sing open-throated. To wail open-hearted. To breathe brokenhearted and let my tears become a balm. The unmaking of these myths unmade me, but also freed me.

I read that the average life expectancy for people in the US is between 70-80. If that’s the case, it means I’m halfway through my life. I spent about 22 years of my life reaching adulthood, and the other 15 years of my life have been spent agonizing over being unpartnered. In my twenties I anxiously searched for a husband. Social situations couldn’t just be fun, and single men within a certain age range couldn’t just be friends. I was ravenous to reach the next milestone of life— marriage, yet I was woefully unsuccessful.

They say with youth things are “caught more than taught;” coming of age in the white evangelical church as a young woman meant what I “caught” were admonitions to be modest, agreeable, pray and prepare for a future husband. One summer during college I was in a mentorship group where my peers and I met with older women from our church. Much of the conversation centered on the girls in the group who had boyfriends agonizing over when they’d receive proposals. I imagine when one is at that stage in a relationship, it makes sense that you’d be wrestling with the anxiety of waiting, but as one of only two single girls in the group, I felt excluded and unsure what to take from the conversations. The only other thing I remember from that group was one of the mentors calling then Senator Hilary Clinton a “femi-nazi.”

In retrospect, it makes sense that I reached my mid-twenties in deep angst about being single. The majority of my influences taught me that being a woman had narrow bounds. Being a godly woman meant purity in singleness, submission in marriage and service and sacrifice in motherhood and ministry. By the time I was 25, however, I was a single working woman that, despite unexpectedly entering the tech field, found I was good at product management. I liked solving complex problems and kept a cool head under pressure with teams and clients. I was faithful at church, but the only thread that tied me to what I understood as the ideal image of womanhood was leading the congregation in Sunday morning worship.

When I sang, I became a songbird, and worship was the realm where my fire and water became one. I was broken open, my voice resounding through the old community center like it was a majestic cathedral, inviting the congregation to wail with me. To symbolically tear our garments as they did in the Scriptures to express sorrow, however raw it may be. I still felt I was “failing” as I was nowhere remotely near a relationship, engagement or marriage. I still watched my peers, and then those younger than me, get married. I still swallowed tears during engagements and weddings, but at least in worship my pain had a voice. I wrestled with God like Jacob; I called myself bitter like Naomi. Like Naomi, I labeled myself too old to have a sweet life, and asked “who would choose me now?”

By my late twenties, my open wound was a constant presence, and I tried innumerable ways to heal it. I had prayed all the prayers, fasted, read books, talked and prayed with elders, tried dating sites, tried meeting guys through friends. I had cared too much, tried not to care, tried to focus on my ministry and other parts of my life. Being single beyond when I expected was the thread that unraveled my faith as I knew it. The grief and confusion over a life I didn’t have crushed me. I had thought being a faithful young woman led to marriage, but I felt my gut twist with pain and bitterness as time moved forward, and I still didn’t have what I wanted.

At the end of the unraveling thread of my old faith, when I was 30 I left the church I attended at the time. The first Sunday I didn’t go to church I felt lost, guilty and confused, but undeniably, I felt relief. I began a long journey of sifting through ashes for new dreams. I confronted my perfectionism, anxiety and workaholic tendencies, slowly learning to prioritize my health through therapy. I grew in quiet confidence in my career. I wrote poetry and sang in a music duo. I continued to go on dates, and I traveled solo and with friends. I began reading and discussing politics. I moved through the discomfort I felt about money and began educating myself, learning to negotiate, save and invest. I rented my own apartment for the first time. I came home to my body. I rewrote my existence away from evangelicalism, and I found my flesh and blood. I learned the music of my heart beat, becoming imperfectly, yet fiercely devoted to her rhythm.

I’ve heard so much of the commentary on why women are single beyond a certain age (honestly I stopped reading most of it years ago as much of it feels shaming to me). They say we’re too picky. Too independent. We’re “giving away the milk for free”. They say we should change our bodies to make ourselves more attractive. We should be more open. Just let it go, and it will come to you when you least expect it. I’ve typed, swiped, texted and dated dozens of men. Lately though, I’ve taken a step back to breathe. I needed to find my footing, to feel my wings, to recover the force of my heartbeat. I needed to release the barrage of critiques about my relationship status.

Why does everyone want to clip my wings just when I’m learning to fly? They call my power shame, but they don’t know what it took to get this free. They don’t know what it took to fly this high. There’s a constant weight on my ankles as I try to release out into the wild blue skies. And sometimes it feels like out here in the wild I’ll be alone. It feels like I have to choose between who I am, my ambition, my power and being loved.

I want a lover enamored with the way I shine, but strong enough to be my soft place to land. Someone who loves to see me fly, but is kind enough to let me be earthbound. The more clarity I get on the life and love I want, the more they call my power shame.

I can be strong and tender. Sometimes I want to fight. Sometimes I want to crumble and cry. And sometimes I just want to hear the sound of my voice when the world is still. I’m not trying to push love away, but I need to know I can love myself, trust myself when so many people have failed. They were something sweet that went down sour. Something shiny that cut me raw. So I need to know I will trust my voice through all things.

I thought I needed to be chosen to be whole, but sometimes it seems for me to be chosen, “to be whole,” means I need to clip my wings and swallow my pride, when it took so long to let my light shine this bright. It took so long to let myself stand this tall. Much different from when I was young, I will walk away from a relationship if it feels more like a cage than open skies. I’m not willing to clip my wings to prove that I can be chosen.

I can’t waste the only life I have on someone who only wants me small. It’s okay to be fierce like fire. It’s okay to be soft like water. It’s okay to want a partner who wants both my power and my tenderness, but holding fire and water in the same hands is a taxing alchemy. Untangling the tales they told me about love is excruciating. I never knew just how hard it is to learn how to fly.

Having never been in a long term relationship or married at my age is clarifying. Thirty-eight is old enough to have experienced the distance between the life I wanted and the life I have, and when disappointment happens, it forces one to shine a light on the myths that have made you. It is a mysterious, brutal, demanding thing to hope for a romantic love that embraces both my brilliance and frailty.

Earlier in my adulthood, the weight of not being chosen crushed me. Now I still feel the longing, the confusion, the pain, yet I’m able to bear it. Not “grit my teeth” bear it, but “open my throat to wail” bear it. I let myself bleed easily. I let the blood and water flow from my open wound until the stream quiets down. That stream has been a river at times, uprooting everything I’ve known. That stream has been the canal to my rebirth. That stream has taught me to sing open-throated, to wail open-hearted, to breathe brokenhearted and let my tears become a balm. The unmaking of these myths unmade me, but also freed me.

I don’t know anything about long term partnership or marriage, but I know what it is to wait and long for something. There are few things more human than to feel the depth of yearning and through our days learn to bear disappointment with the full array of emotions we have.

How do you cultivate the courage to reimagine your life when it’s so different from what you hoped for? I closed the door on a long held dream of life partnership at a certain time and in a certain way. It can be so hard to release old dreams, but being single at my age has taught me to hold the most tender things in our lives with nuance, honesty and compassion. Some may call this power shame, but I’m stronger, I’m freer, I’m lighter. The takeoff is rocky, but I’m learning to fly.

*Names have been changed to protect privacy.