02 - Me

Maybe it would be helpful if I explained why I decided to re-evaluate my game plan.

Looking back, the last time a guy was truly interested in me was third grade. In fact, it wasn’t just one guy; there were two – Chris and Ryan – and they actually fought over me! Eventually I ended the drama with my bright idea to hold a race. The winner of the race would win my heart, and if the winner was me, then I would be free of both of them. (To this day, I wish I could knock some sense into young, naïve 8 year old Jill!) Now I don’t know if my superior running abilities that day were the thing that solidified me as a single person for life, or if it’s just a coincidence, but I can tell you that since that time, I have been invisible to the male eye.

At first it didn’t bother me because (as you can see from this glimpse into my third grade psyche), I was a late bloomer who wasn’t really interested in that kind of thing. By the time I got to high school, though, I was starting to worry. I can remember thinking as a freshman, “As long as I start dating by the time I’m a junior, it’ll be okay.” But in those two years, nothing changed. Both my junior and senior years came and went, and still I was a nobody.

Now, I’ve always struggled with self-esteem issues. I’ve never been the life of the party, and I’ve always had trouble fitting in. So going through 4 years of high school without ever being asked out just added to my sense of worthlessness. Still, I had hope that better things were on the horizon. After all, I was heading off to college, and maybe things would be different there.

But they weren’t. I experienced the same thing in college that I did in high school: guys didn’t even know that I existed. Unfortunately, as much as they were unaware of my existence, I was totally aware of theirs. My pattern went something like this: I would pick a guy to crush on, and I would obsess about him day and night, always trying to work up some kind of plan to get him to notice me. Then eventually, I would realize it wasn’t going to work, and, depressed, I’d move on to someone new.

You know that rhetorical question, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Well, I spent most of my life asking myself this question: “If Jill exists but no one cares enough to notice, then does she really matter?” I felt like it was essential to my future happiness and self-worth that I find the one who would notice me and affirm that I really did have significance.

Beyond feeling like a nobody, though, my inability to snag a boyfriend also made me feel like a failure. In my mind, the appropriate and normal way to live your life was to grow up, to get married, and to have kids. As I approached the end of college and I hadn’t found the husband who would make that scenario a reality, I really started to get worried about my ability to lead a successful life.

So my roommate and I made the following plan: In order to have a baby by the ancient age of 25, I needed to get married by 23. That meant I needed to get engaged at 22, which meant I needed to meet my future husband by the time I was 21. My roommate and I even went so far as to document this schedule on a poster along with all the qualities we wanted in our future husbands. We called the poster “Perfect Match,” and we hung it on the wall of our college apartment. (And I wondered why I had trouble finding a date…)

Once I had a plan, I assumed that God was on board with it, too. After all, that’s how good church people live their lives – get married, have kids – and I was a good church person. I loved God and I tried to serve him, so I thought that surely he would reward me by making my life work out the way it was supposed to.

I was wrong. Time continued to march on, and I still hadn’t found my Perfect Match. At first, I wasn’t too stressed because my roommate and I got together and adjusted our plan to “The Fast Track,” which shortened the timeline to nine-month increments instead of full years. We thought this new schedule would buy us time to find our future husbands before it was too late. The Fast Track, though, didn’t account for the fact that I had just graduated from college and begun working in an elementary school – not exactly a hotbed of single men. So I still had no Perfect Match, and really no possible way of finding him. This got me extremely depressed and anxious. I truly didn’t know how I was ever going to thrive – or even survive – in life if I didn’t get married.

As strange as it sounds, though, I also took a little bit of comfort in the lack of males in my life. After all, if there were no guys around, then I could blame my singleness on lack of opportunity rather than attributing it to some inadequacy in me. It got to the point where I would have much rather stayed home by myself than to go out around men my age, because I knew that if I was around them, it just opened me up for rejection, and I didn’t know if I could take any more of that.

It was around that time that my church did a series called “ID,” which focused on discovering your identity in God. This series totally changed my life. I began to understand that God’s opinion of me trumps what other people think (which is quite freeing for someone who is pretty much a failure at being noticed). And with this new understanding that God thinks I’m pretty special, I began to open up and interact more confidently with everyone around me.

With my newfound confidence, I was totally convinced that it was now my time to find a husband. After all, I was no longer the shy wallflower that I had always been, and I now found myself surrounded by all kinds of guy friends. Surely God had my Perfect Match waiting just around the bend! I even tried to help him along by joining every internet dating service that exists, and by attending any and every activity that promised to attract single men. I was on a mission.

But as always, no one noticed me as girlfriend potential. And that REALLY threw me for a loop. These were the thoughts that were constantly going through my head: “It’s probably because I’m not pretty enough…but there are uglier girls than me that have boyfriends! So it must be that I don’t have a good enough personality…but there are some real weirdos that have boyfriends! So it must be that I’m just a messed up person…but there are people way more messed up than I am who are in relationships. What am I doing wrong?”

In trying to work through these questions, I would ask my friends what they thought. Invariably, people would tell me that if I was single, it must be because there was something wrong with me. And I agreed! I was quite certain that there were many things wrong with me! But I also knew that there were multiple things wrong with my non-single friends, too, so it just didn’t add up.

Others offered advice on what I needed to do to improve my chances. According to these “experts”, I needed to smile more, flirt more, watch more sports, wear more revealing clothing, meet 5 new people each week, and be less serious. But I didn’t know how it would really validate me as a person if someone liked a fake version of me. Plus, what if I did these things and it STILL didn’t work? I was scared to death of what that failure would say about me.

Then there were the people who said something along the lines of, “Someday you’ll get married.” I wanted to scream at them, “Oh, really? How do YOU know? How is it that YOU somehow have insider information regarding God’s plans for MY life?”

Honestly, as scared as I was about the possibility of being single forever, I was even more scared that I might actually start a relationship – and then find out that it hadn’t solved my problems after all. What if I accomplished my goal and then fell prey to that post-partum depression that says, “Okay, I did that. Now what?” What if someone fell in love with me but I was still unconvinced of my self-worth? I mean, if that person’s validation of me was the only thing separating me from being a nobody, then I knew that I would be enslaved to that person for life. I’d have to hold onto that person at all costs or else I’d be right back to square one. But despite these worries, it seemed that being in a relationship was the only solution to my despair.

And then something happened. I started taking up salsa dancing, and my first time out at a club, I met someone I’ll call Tom. Though I knew from our first conversation that Tom wasn’t what I was looking for, I was attracted to him, and when he asked me out, I said yes. After our first date, I knew for sure that he was not husband material, but I just couldn’t bring myself to write him off. For one thing, his persistence in pursuing me made me feel good about myself – as if someone actually did think I was a worthwhile and captivating person. For another thing, my mom kept encouraging me to give him a chance, and I thought, “Well, if even my mom thinks he’s the best I can do, then I guess I should just accept the fact that this is all I can get.” I thought it would be exciting to be with a guy. I thought it would make me feel good about myself. I thought it would make me normal.

That was the worst decision of my life. It quickly became clear to me that Tom was not actually interested in me as a person at all, and that he only thought I was worthwhile as long as I was giving him what he wanted. But even though I was very much aware of this, and I had no doubt that this was going to end in disaster for me, I had to do whatever it took to keep him around because he was my only chance at being somebody. So I acted like it didn’t bother me when he refused to acknowledge me in public, or when he acted completely disinterested in anything I had to say, or when he refused to commit to me, or when he routinely hit on other girls in front of me. But inside it was killing me. From time to time, my friends would get through to me and I’d cut things off, but inevitably, I would go back. I felt like I had no choice.

I realize now that I was treating him the same way he was treating me. I hated how he was using me to fulfill his needs, but in reality, I was using him to fulfill my needs for belonging, approval, and love. I did genuinely care about him, but that wasn’t the reason I stuck around. I stuck around because before Tom, I would have rated my level of fulfillment around negative 5 on a scale of 1-10. But when I was with Tom, my level of fulfillment rose to about 0. So he seemed better than nothing.

But all the while, I hated myself for settling. I hated myself for ignoring God over and over again as he told me that he wanted something better for me. I hated myself for failing to live up to my own standards of morality. I hated myself because my worst fears were being confirmed – that I wasn’t worthy of anyone’s love.

It was during this time that I began to seek God desperately. I’d been a Christian for a long time, and I’d always enjoyed spending time with Jesus, but this was different. This was me calling out frantically for him as the waves threatened to pull me under. This was me crying, “God, if you don’t reach out and help me, I’m not going to survive!” This was me finally realizing that I couldn’t last one second without him.

I reflected on all of this one morning as I drove to work. At the end of my rope, I said hopelessly to God, “I don’t understand why all of this is happening. I’ve always tried to love and obey you, but it turns out I’m just a big disappointment. I’m not worthy of a man’s love, and I’m certainly not worthy of your love either. I won’t blame you if you decide to write me off. I want to love you, but I’m just not strong enough.”

When God responded, he said something shocking and yet hopeful. He said, “Jill, you’ve got it all wrong. You’ve been running around trying to prove yourself in your own mind and to me, and you’ve been beating yourself up because you don’t love me enough, but here’s the thing: It’s not about how much you love me. It’s about how much I love you. And you will never be able to get yourself out of this. But I can.”

When God told me on Tallahassee Drive that he loved me and wanted to rescue me, it was a pivotal moment in my life. That desperate prayer in my car began a series of conversations with God – usually emotional, weeping, and often frustrating conversations – that totally changed my outlook on who I was, who God was, and what role singleness plays in my life. It was through those conversations that God began to change my game plan, and because of that, to rescue me and give me hope. And I’d like to share those conversations with you, in the hopes that they can be of some value to someone else who wants to join the huddle.