Stars, Singleness, and Social Graces
The Universe, she's dancing now
They got her lit up, lit up on the moon
They got stars doing cartwheels, all the nebulas on the tuneAnd the Universe, she's whispering so softly I can hear all
The croaking insects, all the taxicabs, all the bum's spent change
All the boys playing ball in the alleyways
They're just folds in her dress— “The Universe” by Gregory Alan Isakov
When I was a single Christian twenty-something, I spent several unhappy years attending parties hosted by other single Christians. Now, as a single Christian thirty-something, I still occasionally attend these wretched affairs. But only so often as I must, and usually only if I’m actually friends with the host.
Here’s why I (and I imagine many people) hate large gatherings hosted by and for Christian singles. If you’re a woman, the ratios do not fall in your favor. More females attend church than males, and this dynamic magnifies within the single population. Any sociology or economics course will teach you about supply and demand. The more abundant a resource is, the less value it has. And the scarcer it is, the more value a resource accrues.
These market forces are at play in your average Christian singles party. Except, let’s employ a different analogy. How about the solar system? Space is far more interesting.
In this figurative solar system, a beautiful Christian marriage is the sun. Every person at the party orbits this blissful ideal. In this analogy, datable Christian men are like planets. Planets are rare and eye-catching. Scientists lose their minds when they discover planets in other galaxies. No one wants to be an unmoored rogue planet drifting through the universe for eternity.
Some planets, like Saturn and Jupiter, are brightly colored gas giants with powerful magnetic fields. These are the conventionally attractive guys. They don’t have to be all that clever or skilled at conversation. All they have to do is show up at a party, and they draw in women — our moons in this scenario — by the immense gravity of their physical attractiveness. I realize this assessment centers mostly on the influence of outward appearances on dating, and for that I apologize. There are many more dynamics in place, but I’m trying to keep this comparison simple.
Moving on, now we have the smaller, rockier planets. These are the guys who are sociable and funny enough to have female friends who like them for their personalities. They’re also usually solid men who love the Lord. But because the gas giants have captured most of the moons, they’ll only get to talk to a handful of girls, and usually, the ones who have already friend-zoned them.
Finally, there’s an asteroid belt of socially awkward guys circumambulating the edges of the room. Very few girls will talk to them. If these guys take the initiative to approach a girl, he runs the risk of her labeling him the worst word ever: Creepy.
Women will blacklist “creepy” guys to all their friends. So most men in this last category rarely attempt an approach.
In my suckier years as a human female, I avoided these guys like other girls did. I would actually feel offended if they approached me, as though their interest was vampiric and could potentially drain me of my social capital.
Instead, I was one of the girls attempting to outshine the other moons. This strategy was awful. It led to being strung along for months and never asked on an actual date. It was horrible for my confidence and my character. I thought I was undesirable. I thought I would never meet a Jesus-loving dude who was also kinda cute. It made me treat other women as potential competition instead of as people deserving of friendship.
Someone eventually chastised me for this behavior, and it was the best (albeit a very painful) gift a person could have given me.
This dressing-down made me realize I needed to radically change some things about myself. My sense of self-worth wasn’t rooted in Christ. I had placed it in being liked and desired. I didn’t want to be that sort of desperate, grasping, insecure person constantly seeking external affirmation anymore.
So I quit the Christian singles scene for a couple of years. I stopped attending parties. I went to church and bible studies and little else. That next spring, I went to Maui for a week by myself. Then, I took my first salsa lesson.
Dancing gave me an otherworldly confidence boost. I had always loved dancing and was good at it in high school. Social dancing opened up a wonderful new realm of friendship—the kind where you hang out with people based on a shared interest in a hobby. Socializing at singles parties was so toxic because no one actually wanted to make new friends. We had few, if any, common interests. We were there with individual and competing agendas: to come home with the hottest possible person’s phone number.
I don’t want to leave God out of this. Popping the Christian bubble around me meant I had to grapple with faith in new and challenging ways. I made mistakes. I met incredible people who forced me to stare into the abyss between who I said I was and who I actually was. God walked alongside me throughout it all. Is it terribly cheesy to say he followed me onto the dance floor? Yeah. It is. But I’ll say it anyway.
Let’s return to our space metaphor for a little longer.
In 1997, my family was living in East Texas. One night, my parents led me outside and pointed up at a shimmering yellow smudge in the night sky. That smudge was the comet Hale-Bopp, also known as the Great Comet of 1997. Great Comets are rare, appearing once every decade or so. Hale-Bopp was the second-brightest celestial body in the night sky after the star Sirius. Most comets are visible near sunrise or sunset, but it shone all night long.
This summer, more than two decades later, another spectacular comet appeared. C/2020 F3, also known as NEOWISE after the mission that discovered it, snuck around the edge of Mars. As it approached the sun, its icy core sublimated into a split tail of blue ionized gas and sodium. Comets with sodium tails glow gold, more vividly than other comets. NEOWISE was the brightest comet to grace Earth’s northern hemisphere since Hale-Bopp.
The awe I felt as a child gazing up at Hale-Bopp returned when NEOWISE arrived. I bought a $40 pair of binoculars and took several friends (and one date) to see the comet. NEOWISE wasn’t as bright as Hale-Bopp but was still wondrous. The last view I had was near the end of its visibility window as the comet began the journey back into deep space. I took my sister to the shores of a lake and pointed to the region in Ursa Major where it should appear. My sister patiently skimmed the velvet heavens with the binoculars. She had been too young to remember seeing Hale-Bopp when we were kids, so I wanted her to see this one.
After a few moments, she inhaled sharply. “I found it!” She exclaimed. “Oh, look! It’s a little comet!”
One of the things I love most about my sister is the childlike joy she derives from small, cute things. NEOWISE definitely classified as cute, especially at that point. It was going blue and fuzzy, demurely hidden from the naked eye. You had to work to find it. It won’t return to Earth’s skies for six thousand years.
To return to the subject of dating, if I had to assign myself a role in this strange little analogy, I wouldn’t want to be a giant planet lumbering along a predictable orbit, accumulating a gaggle of sycophantic moons.
I would want to be a comet. Comets are nimble and unforeseeable. They are once-a-lifetime rare, with off-kilter orbits that span millennia. They flash into the night sky and dazzle all who see on them. Comets have to pass close to Earth to be visible, displaying the fiery tails of their melting core. They are the poets of the universe. They expose their innermost parts with bravery and beauty before returning to the remotest parts of the galaxy.
Now, when I attend events with singles (or any sort of social gathering), I come with the goal of maintaining this mindset: people cannot make you feel valuable, or special, or worthy of admiration. Only God within you can give you that. A person who loves her life shines. She beautifies and astonishes because she reflects an inextinguishable holy light. The people she encounters leave her presence inspired and refreshed.
Trying to become this person isn’t easy, and I fail more often than I succeed. But by God’s grace, I hope I’m getting a little closer each day.
