Choosing Celibacy

How to stop thinking of singleness as a problem.
Marcy Hintz
9/12/2008

On an ordinary Tuesday last spring, the Dean of Student Life at an evangelical Christian college in the Midwest said to me, her graduate assistant, "Marcy, the evangelical culture of our campus does a lot to prepare its students for the inevitability of marriage, but we do little to set them up for singleness. We need to do better. You should be the one to speak with them," she decided, "and the title of your talk should be, 'Single by Choice.'"

She was a provocative one, this dean, with sharp instincts. Her title's declaration posed an ultimatum: to reconsider the assumptions about singleness and marriage passed down to us by the lore of our Christian campus, and an ultimatum to me as a representative of the most recent generation of young adults, most of whom, according to U.S. census data, will not marry until we're at least 27. A full one-fifth of us will never marry at all. the rest