I don't expect anyone to believe me on this part, but I know I have seen who I am supposed to marry. I've never met him, I don't know where he is, and I don't know his name, but I know what he looks like, and the fact that I am supposed to marry him is the one single thing I am certain of. I ask that you please don't question that.
The things of which we are most confident ought to be the things which can sustain the greatest questioning. It is the things we doubt, that we are not certain of, that we want to keep from challenge.
I have waited for almost a decade now. I have never been with anyone else, I've never wanted a different person since I learned this. I am almost 30, and never had a boyfriend (the guy who called me his girlfriend in sixth grade does not count), never even had a first kiss.
It will be a sad thing, won't it, if you're totally self-deceived about this unknown man you're to marry. If you're wrong about your mystery man, how long will you wait until you acknowledge it? When you pass forty? Or fifty? The more you invest in a thing, the harder it is to give it up - including the self-deceptions you embrace.
Usually I am comfortable, content even, with waiting. I know I'm doing the right thing. I don't want to mess everything up for both him and me.
If it's God's will for you and this mystery man to be together, how do you have the power to "mess everything up"? Are you greater than God? Obviously not. It's...interesting, though, how you're making everything hang on you concerning your mystery man. If God wants the two of you together, you will be, I think, "come hell or highwater," as the saying goes.
But maybe you have a subconscious sense that your mystery man is your own romantic fabrication and, as the clock ticks nearly a decade, this is beginning to rise to the surface of your mind and heart. If you've invested in this fabrication (if this is what it is) for almost ten years now, acknowledging it for the self-deception it is will be...difficult. But imagine how much more so this acknowledgement will be if another decade of investment in it passes.
Sometimes, though, like now, the loneliness gets very crushing. You know those scenes in movies where a single person is walking through a park, surrounded by pairs of people and pets and birds? Yeah... It's like that.
I know this feeling very well. I didn't marry 'til I was thirty-nine. Never had a serious romance with any woman but my wife; never kissed any another woman romantically. So, by the time she appeared on the horizon of my life as a love-interest, I had been alone for almost twenty years. I would spend two or three days at a time without saying a word. I was alone. Who was there to speak to? Sometimes, this fact struck me sharply and the loneliness I felt was, as you say, "crushing."
It doesn't help that sometimes i feel like I'm getting too old, I feel like I'm wasting my time, I question whether what I'm doing is right or stupid, delusional. I know that anybody else wouldn't want me anyway. I fear I've wasted my entire young adult life. But... I can't help but feeling like I know he's there. I don't know how to explain it. Even when I doubt, I'm still sure. It's just...what's taking so long, y'know?
You know, when I was in my mid-thirties, I came to a point of crisis about my singleness and my life as an adult generally. I was deeply unhappy about the character of my life, in certain respects. At the top of the list was my bachelor status. My unhappiness became so profound that I developed sleep problems, and breathing issues. I felt like I could never draw a proper lungful of air. It turned out, this was just a physical manifestation of the tension within that I had about the pathetic (that was the word I had settled on) nature of my life.
Fortunately, God was not content to let me stew in my own juices. One day, He confronted me in my thinking, pushing to the forefront of my mind the question that if He could not satisfy me, who could? Was the Creator of the Universe not sufficient to make me content? What could I find in a human being that was greater than what I could find in my Maker? Over the course of a month or so, I wrestled with the idea of being content just with God. Could He be enough? Was He the God I claimed to others that He was? Eventually, I was able to say sincerely that if I spent the rest of my life as a single man, I could trust God to be more than sufficient to make up for my wife-deficit.
Once this was resolved in my heart, the breathing issues and insomnia dissolved. And a year or so later, I met the woman I would marry. Interesting, that.
Anyway, human psychology can get very convoluted and knotty. We can work ourselves into all sorts of states just by adopting certain modes of thinking, by telling ourselves certain things consistently and persistently. What better way to compensate for the thought that "no one would want me anyway" by telling yourself there is one man out there who is fated to be yours, who is on some sort of irresistible divine collision-course with you. That's a very comforting thought, isn't it? Maybe it helps relieve you of the responsibility of making yourself appealing to a man... I don't know, of course; just a thought.
The answer is probably just a simple "hang in there", "distract yourself like you have been", but it's so, so difficult. Maybe there's something else I can do? Maybe there's something I've been ignoring or missing?
We are given life by God for His purposes, to serve His will, not our own. He made each of us to know Him; and in knowing Him, to love Him; and in loving Him, to enjoy Him; and in enjoying Him, to live to His glory. As we do, God works out all things together for good, conforming us more and more to the Person of Christ. There is nothing more fulfilling than to live according to this divine purpose and so, as you do, contentment and peace result - whether you're single or married.
You'll make the very best wife by being the godliest woman you can be, devoted to Christ, wise, holy and living submitted to God's will. Such a woman God holds as precious (and rare, I think). Be such a woman and it wouldn't surprise me at all to know that the "man of your dreams" has suddenly appeared. The great thing, though, is that he will encounter a woman who is deeply anchored in her God and as such is a source of strength, faithfulness, love, patience and inner beauty, not neurotic, selfish, needy and controlling (which I'm not saying you are - just speaking generally, here).
