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Famous Sam Allberry Quotes

“The fact is, in all likelihood, singles need their married friends more than their married friends need them. That’s not to say that married friends don’t need their single friends at all, it’s just a different kind or different level of need. As a single person, my friends are a lifeline. They’re like family. They are the ones with whom I feel most known and loved…I need them. Hugely. But the fact is they don’t need me in the same way. Many of them are the equivalent of family, but since they have families of their own, the familial sense I have towards them is not necessarily reciprocated. That might be good and right as far as it goes, but it can also be painful at times.”

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Book:7 Myths about Singleness
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“We’ve been good friends for years. We eat to together once a week on average. We’ve gone on holidays together. We’ve known each other well enough and long enough to have developed a natural ease and familiarity with one another. They’re the kind of people I can quite happily spend time with doing nothing at all. I’m quite serious. It’s not unusual to find us sitting together, all reading books and barely talking for a couple hours or so. We have an unspoken rule that it’s entirely okay to doze off on each other’s couches.”

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Book:7 Myths about Singleness
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“It is no surprise that weddings can be a little bittersweet for single people. We’re genuinely happy for our friends as they marry. But there can also be a sense of loss. It is the start of a new era for the couple. But the end of an era for our friendship. A single friend of mine in his late forties, recently said that the marriage of one of his closest friends felt like a bereavement. It feels as though you’ve been demoted. One writer, Carrie English, describes feelings of rejection that come when attending the wedding of friends. Two people announcing publicly that they love each other more than they love you. There is not denying that weddings change friendships forever. Priorities have been declared in public. She’ll be there for him in sickness and in health, till death do they part. She’ll be there for you on your birthday or when he has to work late. Being platonically dumped wouldn’t be so bad if people would acknowledge that you have the right to be platonically heartbroken. But it’s just not part of our vocabulary. However much our society might pay lip service to friendship, the fact remains that the only love it considers important, important enough to make a huge public celebration, is romantic love.”

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Book:7 Myths about Singleness
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“In much of our thinking, singleness, if not downright bad, is certainly not seen as good. One writer has noticed the difference between Christian books on marriage and those on singleness. In the books on marriage, marriage is assumed to be a great thing and all that remains is to understand it better, and perhaps be aware of one or two potential pitfalls that might arise. But books on singleness typically have a different starting point. Singleness is assumed to be pretty much awful. The point of the books is, therefore, to see if we might to eke out something just about tolerable from it. Even the way we describe singleness reflects this. It is almost always defined in the negative, as the absence of something. It is the state of not being married. It is the absence of significant other. This defining by negation reinforces the idea that there is nothing intrinsically good about singleness. It is merely the situation of lacking what is intrinsically good in marriage.”

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Book:7 Myths about Singleness
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