Dear Single Sister: My 29-YEAR JOURNEY OF SINGLENESS (PART 1)

by Dwania Duhaney-Millen

When I was 16 years old, I had fantasies of someday being in the most amazing relationship with someone who would make me laugh and would rub my feet. Some of my tweets from 2013/2014 reveal this…um…don’t judge me!

I never knew who he would be. I never knew his last name, but I knew one thing, I would be utterly and completely in love with someone who would accept me completely. For me, of course, this would all be a part of God’s plan for my life. Boy, did I struggle! Before I begin to post all the principles I have to teach you through these upcoming blog posts, I want to tell you about my single journey so that you can understand that when I share these principles with you, it is coming from someone who has been where you have been and who wants you to also find joy and clarity in the right relationship— one that brings you joy and peace and that pleases God. So here goes…

I grew up in a household with my mom, dad and brother in a rural area of Jamaica. I am a country girl, and I have always been proud of that. My father was a brilliant Mathematics teacher and my mom was a chef, and all my siblings are teachers! My family greatly values education, so I grew up around books. I began reading and writing from a very early age and learnt very early on how to express myself. I was also very sheltered. Unlike some children who were sent to stay over at friends’ houses and sent to parties, I never got that chance. I was sent to church! My routine was home, school and church, really. Thankfully, my older brother Ricky let me play cricket, football or “bat up and ketch” (a type of baseball) with him and the other boys who would come over to the house, and my three brothers and dad provided strong male company for me, but apart from that it was Nancy Drew books, music, and movies most of the time. Nevertheless, I was pretty well adjusted. I excelled in school and had lots of good friends.

I got saved and baptized at 14. For me, that felt like something I was born to do. Nobody forced me to do that. I literally went to my Pastor and told him I wanted him to baptize me. I have been in a relationship with God ever since then. For the first couple of years, things seemed smooth sailing. I never really understood what people were talking about when they testified in church about “trials and crosses” or worse “tribulations!”. It all sounded too spooky to me, and as a child I wondered why Christianity seemed so hard all the time. We were always going to war at my home church. We still do. Sometimes I felt like maybe I had it too easy, but then I would soon find out.

My trials and crosses…

I was on my way to becoming 18 when I entered my first situation-ship. I had been in one previous relationship before that was more like a friendship with so much talk of marriage that it made me scared, so I ran away. After a year in college with a broken relationship, the feelings of loneliness began to creep in. To be honest, I cannot tell where the deep feeling of loneliness started to creep in, but I did not want to be alone. I guess I missed having someone to talk to. As any Christian should do, I started to pray, and I prayed for a relationship. I prayed for someone who was tall, dark and handsome, and that was the point of my prayer.

Dear God, please bless me with a relationship. I want to be with someone who is tall, dark and handsome. He must have a nice smile…

A few weeks later, I met a tall, dark and handsome guy. In my mind, this was God answering prayer!  I was 2 months away from becoming 18 years old. It was on the way to choir practice, and I was in the back of a taxi when this tall, dark and handsome guy I had seen a few times around the way began to talk to me. He made me laugh, he quoted scriptures, he told me he went to church. It was nice. We exchanged numbers and that was the start of an interesting journey into a world I knew nothing about.  Would God bless me with a relationship with a guy who was not a Christian, I would ask myself. Was this the Lord’s will for me? I was heavily convicted about this, and unfortunately, I felt I had nobody to talk to about these concerns. While I was treated with respect and kindness, there were some values that we did not share that made me uncomfortable. I knew, for example, that I would never ever attend a party with this person. In fact, we never went anywhere and I felt I had to keep the relationship a secret. This brought up so many questions in my mind, understandably. Additionally, there was never any talk of marriage, and I did not know whether or not to be relieved about this either. I was confused! I was a brilliant, educated Christian girl with no sense of direction about what God wanted for me in this part of my life. So I did what I always do when I am afraid or confused. I prayed about it. I did not know the scriptures well because I wasn’t really reading my Bible, but I knew God had not thrown me into confusion, and had heard my sisters and brothers in church talk about God talking to them, so I went to God about it, and for the first time in my life, the Lord spoke to me directly out of scriptures.

Read Part 2 in the next Dear Single Sister blog post, and don’t forget to like, comment and subscribe for the latest from our blog.