...

I found out today as I was looking up an old classmate I used to be friends with on Facebook that they had unfriended me. I wish I didn't take these things so personally, but I really sort of do. We aren't at all close anymore, but I really liked hanging out with her in middle school and we used to send emails back and forth. We were still friends in high school - even if we rarely hung out. I even tried to visit her in college once, but it didn't quite work out. Now she's married and has a kid and I guess I'm really far off her radar. I know she's far off mine, so it shouldn't bother me, but it still does a little. Moving on - it's why saying goodbye hurts so much because you both move on, then one day you wake up and are strangers to each other. It doesn't help with my feelings of inadequacy and being left in the dust. I want so much to follow God's plans for me and to trust him and be open to what he has for me, but I see peers my age who are married and having families and wonder what is wrong with me? And I know that's the wrong way to look at it. I really do. I know that relationships shouldn't be rushed and that God's timing is perfect. I also know that marriage and family is not promised. And most days I'm ok with that logic. Other days my face gets red and splotchy and tears pool in my eyes and I feel insecure and inadequate and like I've failed at life somehow. It reminds me of some relationship books I've read that are written by 24 year olds (or some other such young age) who talk about their struggle with singleness when they were 20 and decided to wait on God and he brought their special person to them by 22 and how great a blessing it was to wait on God... and then other ones written by people who didn't get marriage right the first time, but their second marriage is working out great because they learned how to structure it God's way, and if you just do it that way to begin with you'll save yourself a lot of heartache! I understand the important things books like these are trying to get across, but I am 27, single, as far as I know not on anyone's radar and may just have to learn to be ok with being single my whole life at this point. (At this age the kid who got married at 22 would have been married for 5 years... and the person whose first marriage failed would have gotten married by now... and maybe even failed by now... and here I am, not even given a chance to fail!) Not that I want failure. When my emotions have subsided and my logic kicks in again I will be grateful that I am still single, because singleness is far better than an abusive marriage, or a loveless marriage, a controlling marriage (which also would be classified as a form of abuse, I suppose)... and there is a lot of freedom in singleness! but it still sucks. Secular culture would play me Michael Buble's "Just Haven't Met You Yet" to try to make me feel better... and maybe it's true that I just haven't met you yet... and listening to it makes me feel better, even if I doubt the truth in it.

(and that is how a post about the sadness of losing friends turns into a "woe is me for being single" post. wow. I guess it is possible.)