Afraid of Dying Alone? What Every Single Woman Needs to Hear

Katie had done everything right to make her single apartment a home. She painted the walls, bought grown-up furniture, and created something warm, intentional, and hers. However, she was hosting a home group the night it happened. People were walking through, marveling at how cozy it felt. And then a man she respected said something she has never forgotten.

“I love it,” he said. “But I just wonder where a guy would fit into all this. It seems like you just sort of have it all figured out. Where would a man be able to come in and decorate?”

He was not talking about himself. He was worrying on behalf of a hypothetical future man who had not yet entered Katie’s life, concerned that her fully furnished, lovingly decorated apartment might feel a little too complete. Too settled. Too hers.

Katie stood in her own living room and tried to make sense of what she was hearing. Was she supposed to have left a blank wall? A corner untouched? A room unfilled? A life deliberately half-lived, just in case a man she had never met might someday want to finish decorating it for her?

Instead of feeling bad, she dug in and bloomed where she’s planted.

The Myths We Carry In

Katie was 28 years old the first time someone made her feel like she was running out of time. A younger, married coworker looked at her with something between pity and alarm and said, “If I were 28 and still single, I would just get artificially inseminated. I don’t know how you’re managing.”

Time felt plentiful.

The years since have brought warnings about dying alone (though, she notes with dry humor, it is rare for anyone to have all their loved ones gathered at their actual deathbed), and well-meaning voices have told her to become the person God wants her to be, and a husband will follow. Assuming Christlikeness is a strategy for attracting a husband, not the entire point of a life.

But the myth that has cut the deepest is a quieter one. It is the belief that if you have not been chosen for marriage, something must be wrong with you. That singleness is a problem to diagnose and fix. It’s a waiting room you sit in until you have done enough work on yourself to finally deserve a partner.

When Kelly pressed her on this, Katie was clear-eyed about how persistent it is: “There are tons of people that were not ready for marriage, and there are other singles that are amazing and have been working on themselves. So I think that’s the biggest myth. And I have to fight it constantly, because I still hear it a lot.”

The myth is not true. But dismantling it requires daily effort.

Fighting Hard for Community

Ask Katie about the real cost of singleness, and she will point you to the airline miles.

Many of her closest friendships are with women who live in other cities. These women are in seasons of marriage and young children that make it nearly impossible for them to travel. So Katie travels. She spends the airline points, rearranges her schedule, and shows up in their lives because she has the flexibility they lack right now. At one point, she told her sister directly, “I need you to call me more. I get so encouraged, but I’m always the one who initiates.”

There were seasons where she depleted her bank account. She once told a dear friend, “I don’t have any more money. I have to stay home. So if you want to see me, you’re going to have to figure it out.” And she has had to learn, over and over again, not to keep a scorecard.

“As a single person, you’ll start to be really bitter” if you track every imbalance, she told Kelly. The antidote is choosing, again and again, to believe the friendship is worth the cost. To believe that seasons shift, and that the friend who cannot come to you now will be able to someday.

Around her, single women give up on this kind of community, and she understands why. It is exhausting to be the one who reaches out, the one who shows up, the one who makes it happen. But she believes the alternative is loneliness, and she is not willing to settle for that.

What the Church Gets Wrong (and What It Gets Right)

Katie has not left the church, but she has had plenty of reasons to leave.

A pastor once directed her to a larger church because there would be more choices for a mate. And even though she fought for nearly a decade to have the singles ministry restored, it disappeared. When it finally came back, she was one year past the age cutoff. She went anyway.

Week after week, the sermon illustrations assume a married life, and she has watched single women quietly slip away. Not usually because they lost their faith, she says, but because they could no longer answer the question of why they were there. “No one cares that I’m here” is how she describes what they felt. Not seen, not heard, not represented.

What Katie wants from the church is not necessarily a singles program. She wants something harder to manufacture and more important to get right. She wants single women to be prayed over and sent out the same way church planters are, and the ministry in her heart to be treated as valid, as weighty, as worthy of a microphone and a prayer.

“I’m not trying to take over the pulpit. I just have a call in my heart, and I want my church to support it and back it and encourage it and see it as something really beautiful rather than something to be feared.”

Katie stays because the local church matters to her, and because she cares more about being part of the solution than about being right about the problem.

The Snap at 45

For twenty years, Katie taught elementary school and loved it. But running underneath those two decades was a quieter current of dreams she had been saving.

Saving for what? For a partner to do them with. For the arrival of the life she had pictured. For a season that felt more settled, more certain, more ready.

Then she turned 45. Three days later, she was laid off.

“Something in me snapped,” she told Kelly. “I have to do what’s on my heart today. We’re not promised tomorrow, we’re not promised a spouse, we’re not promised children. It’s great to pray for and hope for whatever life we want, but today my gift is what I’ve got right now: my brain, my talents.”

Unfortunately, there’s a voice that tells her that if she had begun at 30, she would be further along by now. She does not pretend that voice is easy to silence. It was a conversation with Kelly that gave her a phrase to hold onto. If you are supposed to be doing something, God will provide manna for the day. Not the month, not the year. The day.

“Let’s get used to eating some manna,” Katie said, laughing.

When 8 A.M. Doesn’t Look Like 8 P.M.

Sometimes Katie wakes up at 8 in the morning, absolutely loving her life, and by 8 in the evening, she is crying over her charcuterie board with a glass of wine, grieving the same life she loved twelve hours earlier.

However, this is not a contradiction. It is the truth about holding both joy and sorrow at once and bringing both to God. He can hold the 8 a.m. version, who is rocking it, and the 8 p.m. version, who is sobbing and asking why. He is not asking her to clean it up before she comes.

“Whenever I’m telling God how frustrated I am, asking what are You doing, Lord? Why her, why not me? He can handle that. He can hold that just gross human-ness that I’m bringing Him. And He’s not annoyed, He’s not telling me to clean it up before I come.”

Perhaps more than anything else, Katie is learning not to judge who she is at 8 p.m. by who she is at 8 a.m. Not to treat grief as evidence of weak faith. Not to measure her closeness to God only in her best moments.

Go Ahead and Decorate the Apartment

At the end of the conversation, Kelly asked Katie what she would want to say to single women who are out there right now. Katie did not hesitate long.

You are not alone, and what you feel is valid. People are going to say things, but you do not have to receive every word they offer as gospel. It is okay to push back and say you are not being too picky. You are allowed to wait for the man the Lord has for you, and you will know him when you find him.

Do not wait until you have given up on finding someone to start the thing that has been on your heart since you were twenty years old.

“Today you’re single, you’ll probably be single tomorrow, unless something crazy happens overnight. You’ll probably be single this week. Cool. Ask, ‘What can I do today, tomorrow, this week that will glorify God on this earth?’ Use the talent, mind, and heart He’s given you. And let that be what glorifies God — not your fertility or your future desires to be a wife.” —Katie Brown

Decorate your apartment. Buy the house. Start the ministry. Write the thing. Go see your friends. Eat the charcuterie, cry when you need to, and wake up in the morning and love your life again. and love your life again.

You do not have to leave half of it empty for a man who does not live there yet.

This article was adapted from an interview with Katie Brown. To hear the full conversation, watch the complete episode on the Mission Single Podcast, hosted by Kelly Werner.