I always assumed that once I was married, my loneliness would vanish. Vows exchanged with rings slipped on fingers, and poof! All the bubbles, rice, and sparklers bid forever farewell to solitude’s forlornness.
This was what “happily ever after” promised—the idea that true love placed reality on a pretty, polished pedestal and left it there to sparkle and glisten with each rising and setting sun. Truth be told, this same idea was discreetly pushed in church. As the lead pianist, I, the 21-year-old single lady, was quietly auctioned on stage each week, feeling like The Dating Game posterchild, church style.
A grandmother would drag her grandson to church to meet me. A youth pastor would convince his brother-in-law to swing by one Wednesday night. Introduction after introduction, measly date after date, I felt defeated, not wondering why the dates didn’t work out (because most of these guys had the personality of a ratty shoe), but wondering why everyone’s goal wasn’t to just accept Single Peyton, but rather, to place Peyton’s worth solely within the confines of marriage.
Thank the Lord, I found my husband, Josh, before the church decided to host a speed dating dinner in my lonely honor. Josh and I dated for six months and were only engaged six months before we married. (I guess after you’ve dated so many of the wrong guys, it doesn’t take long for you to peg the right man.)
I lived in dating and engaged bliss. Wedding prep was simple—we only had 17 people total at our wedding, including the entire bridal party—so I was able to focus my headspace on the picket-fence dream that would be my marriage. After all, no more lousy dates, no more cleaning up after a best friend’s wedding alone, no more loneliness. Right?
Wrong.
Photo Credit: © Getty Images/fizkes
It only took a few months post-marriage for me to realize that solitude is inescapable, regardless of marital status. At first, it was merely the quiet hours after I got off work, preparing dinner, loathing Atlanta traffic that barricaded him from standard 5:30 dinner plans. A year down the road, after he embarked on a new endeavor as a pilot, it would be the weeks and months that he was stationed at an airport states away.
My grandmother's antique diamond on my left ring finger couldn’t keep me from going to bed by myself, only folding down half the sheets. Nor could it keep me from cooking for one, mixing up a big casserole on Monday so I could survive on it for a full week. More so, marriage couldn’t shield the monsters, the ones I’d always kept stowed in the back of my closet, from leaping over my winter boots, shaking off their dust, and busting out of their bondage, daring me to face them.
These moments of solitude forced me to face memories, mistakes, undiagnosed mental health problems—anything else I’d spent my whole life avoiding.
One of those “anything else” realities was that marriage hadn’t fixed my life; it hadn’t filled all the cracks and crannies of life’s mundane with all the shiny things I anticipated. Instead, marriage only added a new set of realities that required more selflessness, more sacrifice, more of a calling for me to be present when life was hard.
But, while Josh was away on his first piloting gig, I wasn’t ready give of myself, and in some ways, I couldn’t give of myself. I was selfish, but unwilling to indulge in self-care. I wouldn’t get out of the house and get dinner with a friend, go to the gym, peruse the book store. I wouldn’t get therapy, wouldn’t ask for help, wouldn’t want anyone to know that I wasn’t okay—too narcissistic to let everyone see that I wasn’t balancing all the things.
Eventually, this faulty system couldn’t work. I needed help, and it took a humbling experience in a therapist’s office and one brutal, honest, life-changing prayer with God for me to understand that solitude didn’t always have to be loneliness—the two are not synonymous. Solitude, though hard, offered space to grow, to nurture my relationship with God, and when I channeled that truth, loneliness didn’t feel as dark, dank, and cold.
That’s not to say that I still don’t struggle with loneliness when Josh is gone. After all, piloting offers little opportunity for the nine-to-five lifestyle, but I can face these hard seasons understanding that marriage doesn’t fix loneliness, but instead, God fortifies solitude as a means for us to finally see the shiny things in life.
If loneliness has total control, a ghastly grip on you, know that you aren’t struggling solo. In fact, my debut memoir, Not So by Myself, dives deep into loneliness and what that looks like away from cliché churchy sayings and outside the sometimes intimidating church walls. It gets real with what’s real—not only with the hardships of being alone, but with the beautiful reality that God never leaves us fending for ourselves in these times. There are both thorns and roses in this faith, but it’s up to us to allow the blooms to grow.
Because of this freedom, this God-given opportunity to maximize bravery and a deeper understanding of hard things, you’re not so by yourself.
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