Single, Dating, Engaged, Married: Navigating Life and Love in the Modern Age

By Ben Stuart

10 min read

Why does it matter? Because the relational confusion you're feeling isn't a technique problem — it's a misdiagnosed hunger.

We have more access to potential partners than any humans in history, and the loneliness has only gotten worse. Young adults, the most app-saturated generation alive, now report higher loneliness scores than any other age group. That's not irony. That's a diagnosis. The problem isn't your profile, your conversation skills, or your city's dating pool: you're arriving at every relationship carrying a need that no other person was built to satisfy. Stuart's claim, backed by neuroscience, divorce statistics, and a willingness to use his own embarrassments as exhibits, is that every stage of romantic life (singleness, dating, engagement, marriage) is a God-designed season with a specific purpose you can spend or squander. Miss the purpose of singleness and you'll waste it. Misunderstand dating and you'll treat it like a status to maintain rather than a process to use. Understand what marriage is actually a picture of, and it becomes far larger — and more livable — than personal happiness ever was.

You're Bringing God-Sized Needs to People-Sized Partners

Two recreational divers surface off the Caribbean coast in far worse shape than when they went under. The dive had been a simple crash-course outing — paired partners, standard protocol. But when the man's oxygen stopped flowing, the training vanished instantly. He grabbed his partner, shook her, yanked the regulator from her mouth, pushed her head down to use her as a ladder, then rocketed them both to the surface without decompressing. They both got the bends. Ben Stuart isn't retelling this for the medical outcome. He's interested in what the chaos revealed: when you're starved of what you need to survive, you stop being a partner and start being a predator. Scarcity produces desperation. Desperation produces exploitation.

That's the hidden engine in a surprising number of troubled relationships — not incompatibility, not bad timing, not miscommunication. Scarcity. The diver wasn't malicious; he was drowning. Stuart argues that most of us bring the same dynamic to romance. Disconnected from any stable source of love and worth, we arrive at relationships with a need so vast only an inexhaustible source could fill it, and we hand that need to another person. They can't meet it. Nobody can. So we grip tighter, demand more, and mistake the whole desperate transaction for love.

Stuart did an honest inventory of his own college-age fantasies about romance and found the same pattern. He'd imagined himself as the heroic, self-sacrificing partner, and then noticed that in every scene, he was the one coming out looking impressive. The endgame was always his own ego getting topped off. He wasn't picturing someone to give to. He was picturing someone to pull from.

The fix Stuart proposes isn't a better approach to dating. It's a supply problem. Love is designed to flow in one direction: from God outward, through you, to the people around you. When you're connected to that source, you don't arrive with a hollow tank hoping your partner will pressurize it. You arrive with air to spare. The diver who has enough doesn't grab someone else's regulator. He offers his.

The Stage You're Trying to Skip Has Gifts You Can't Get Back

Singleness is not the gap between your current situation and your real life. It's a season with specific freedoms that marriage will close off — not reduce, close off. They don't roll over. They expire.

The year Stuart got married, a tsunami off Thailand's coast killed nearly a quarter million people. He called a friend with the news. The friend said: "Yeah — I'm going." Stuart already knew he would. His friend had a flexible job, no dependents, no shared finances to consult. He booked a flight and left for a humanitarian crisis. Stuart, newly married and broke, watched from home. What he felt wasn't resentment. It was a clear-eyed recognition that his friend's singleness had made that possible. His own marriage had foreclosed it. Not because he'd made the wrong choice. Because the math had changed.

Stuart names this honestly. Marriage isn't diminishment. He says plainly he wouldn't trade his. But when you're single, you carry one life, and you can redirect it fast. A crisis breaks, a need surfaces, a door opens — you can go. When you're married, every major pivot runs through multiple lives, multiple obligations, multiple people who depend on you showing up tomorrow. His friend's freedom wasn't just simpler. It was structurally different.

Paul, writing to the church at Corinth, called singleness a gift. Strategy, not consolation. The single person can respond to the world without running the math first. And when they get there, they show up without the part of them that's already somewhere else. The question is what you do with both before the window closes.

You Don't Know What You Want in a Partner — and Science Has Proved It

What if the mental checklist you've spent years building is making you worse at finding someone, not better?

In 2008, Match.com was struggling. Algorithmically perfect couples kept abandoning each other after one date. So the company hired Amarnath Thombre to find the flaw. He expected a coding problem. What he found was a people problem: when he compared what users typed they wanted (height, hair color, education level) against who they actually contacted, there was zero correlation. Their actual behavior on the site had nothing to do with their stated preferences.

Stuart saw the same pattern among his college friends. One guy spent years declaring he wanted a tattooed, adventurous woman. He married a quiet, introverted woman who had never kissed anyone. Stuart, meanwhile, ended up with the tattooed wild girl his friend had been describing all along. Neither man got his checklist. Both got what they actually wanted.

Descriptions pull from things you've seen — filtered photos, romantic movies, idealized versions of yourself — not from the actual experience of being with someone. You end up measuring real people against a composite only an imaginary person could match. Stuart's take: instead of asking whether someone fits your specifications, ask whether you could build a life with them. One is shopping. The other is choosing.

God Only Recognizes Two Relationship Categories — and Dating Isn't One of Them

Think of it this way: two people show up at an event, and by the end of the night, someone announces "we're official." Nobody signed anything. Nobody negotiated terms. But from that moment on, both parties are operating under a new set of rules — rules neither of them wrote and neither of them saw in advance. That's the architecture of "dating" as most people practice it. The confusion is structural.

Stuart walks through what happens once two people go official. A woman expects her boyfriend to text daily. He doesn't know this rule. She tells him he's "supposed to." He's genuinely confused about where the obligation came from, because it came from nowhere in particular, or everywhere in general, which is the same problem. The same logic runs in the other direction with physical touch. Once she becomes a girlfriend, a whole new category suddenly opens up, not because anyone agreed to it, but because the status implies it.

Here's Stuart's move: the Bible recognizes exactly two relational categories between people. You're either brother and sister in the community of faith, or you're husband and wife in a covenant. The boyfriend/girlfriend category is a cultural invention, and God doesn't recognize it. This sounds theological and abstract right up until you trace the implication. If there's no intermediate status, there are no intermediate rules. The obligations you thought came with "being official" were never sanctioned. Neither were the privileges.

Which means the question "how far is too far?" (which has generated more anxious late-night conversations than almost anything else in Christian dating culture) is based on a premise that was never real. Paul told a young pastor named Timothy to treat younger women as sisters, with complete purity. That instruction doesn't have a clause suspending it when you start dating someone. If the sister-to-wife line hasn't been crossed (which only marriage crosses), Paul's instruction still stands. Stuart doesn't dress this up: the question "how far is too far with your sister?" has an obvious answer.

That reframe is liberating rather than restrictive. If dating isn't a status you inhabit, it's a process of evaluation, two people who remain, under God, brother and sister, honestly assessing whether they want to cross into the entirely different weight of a marriage covenant. The unwritten rules were never binding. Neither were the assumed privileges. What remains is a simple question: are you a fit?

The Neuroscience of Sex Makes the Moral Case Better Than Morality Can

Norman Doidge is a psychiatrist, and Stuart had assumed his findings were overstated — until he had five separate conversations with young men describing exactly that experience. The complaint was always the same: they couldn't be aroused by their wives. Not a physical problem. A wiring problem. Years of increasingly intense pornography had trained their dopamine systems to demand that level of stimulation to fire at all. Real intimacy, slow and personal and reciprocal, registered as nothing.

The mechanism isn't mysterious. Sex activates the same dopamine circuitry engaged by addictive drugs. Anthropologist Helen Fisher adds a second layer: sex also releases oxytocin, the bonding hormone triggered during breastfeeding. The brain isn't designed to experience sex and walk away neutral. It's designed to attach you to whoever you slept with.

Which means "casual sex" isn't a cultural attitude you can choose to adopt. It's a biological category that doesn't exist. When you bond repeatedly and then break the bond, you're not practicing freedom — you're accumulating neurological damage. When you substitute a screen for a person, you're training a system built for attachment to attach to nothing real. Eventually, the circuitry can't respond to anything else.

Donna Freitas spent ten years studying campus sexuality nationwide and found that 41 percent of students said hook-ups left them feeling profoundly unhappy, disrespected, or abused. The best the remaining 59 percent could offer was "fine." Not one student called it amazing. And yet students told her they felt it was their only option, privately wishing someone would just ask them on a date.

The theological case for sexual restraint arrives at the same destination. The neuroscience gets you there without it.

Real Commitment Is Revealed by What It Survives, Not by How It Feels

Every candidate who enters Navy SEAL training has already passed the physical screening. Their bodies can handle it — that's confirmed before they start. Yet three out of four wash out. The reason is built into the program's design: instructors cycle candidates through cold-water immersions and sand-encrusted beach runs, then periodically offer warm blankets, rides in a car, and Snickers bars. All they have to do is quit. The trials escalate until the question becomes impossible to dodge: how badly do I actually want this? When the discomfort is bad enough and the offer is good enough, most men ring out. What separates the ones who stay isn't physical capacity. It's resolve.

Ben Stuart uses this as his model for knowing when you're ready to cross from dating into engagement. The feeling of certainty you're waiting for — the moment it all clicks and you just know — isn't coming. Or if it does, it's unreliable. What you can evaluate is the commitment itself. Real commitment reveals itself under two pressures: trials and temptations. Can the relationship survive serious disagreement? What happens when an ex shows back up, or someone you've always found attractive pays attention to you? If you reach into yourself during those moments and find a settled resolve to stay, not a feeling that might shift but a decision, that's different from infatuation. Infatuation burns fast and has no embers. That's what you're looking for.

Stuart names four criteria, and all four need to be present. Commitment: not whether you can endure someone's flaws, but whether you want to work through problems with them. Communication: when conflict happens, stay with what the other person did and how you felt — the moment you add what they were trying to do, the conversation becomes a trial. Confession: before the engagement, both people need one honest conversation about their past — what they've done and what was done to them. Not a full deposition. Enough that if the other person responds with love rather than distance, you know something real. What they say in that moment tells you more than almost anything. Community: a small circle of honest married friends who can see what the two of you can't.

This isn't romance by checklist. It's a pressure test run before the stakes become permanent.

Loving Your Spouse Well Is a Public Act With Civilizational Consequences

Marriage feels like the most private arrangement two people can make. It isn't.

In AD 370, a Roman emperor named Valentinian, an active opponent of Christianity, issued a written order demanding that Christian missionaries stop calling on the homes of pagan women. The movement had become attractive enough to pagan women that a hostile ruler put a law behind his objections.

Sociologist Rodney Stark traced why. The Roman world Valentinian ruled ran on contempt for women: new wives were typically thirteen years old, female infants were routinely abandoned, and men bought sex cheaply through prostitution. The math broke: fewer women, more exploitation, a society shaped entirely by unchecked male appetite. When men's sexuality goes ungoverned, women and children lose. The men do too — you can only sustain that behavior by killing off the parts of yourself that know better.

Christians in that world operated differently. They married adult women. They stayed. They raised their daughters instead of abandoning them. Something measurable followed: women and children flourished, families stayed together, and pagan women noticed, in numbers large enough to alarm an emperor.

Stuart's mandate for the husband: take the first move on the hard decisions, sacrifice his preferences so his spouse can become fully who she's built to be under God. The wife's part is to receive and affirm that leadership — not waiting for a man too fearful to try, but welcoming his attempts and affirming them out loud. When both live this way, the marriage stops being a closed loop of mutual need and becomes something legible to anyone watching: a living argument about what love actually looks like. Couples who point outward together, toward a shared mission, find the marriage gets stronger precisely because neither one is staring at it. When enough couples make that argument well, whole cultures shift.

That's where Stuart lands. Godly romance doesn't set out to reshape a culture. It does it as a byproduct. Live it well enough, and apparently you'll need a formal edict to slow it down.

The Relational Question Is Always Downstream of the God Question

Get the supply problem wrong — show up to relationships carrying God-sized needs in a people-sized container — and nothing Stuart covers will fix the hunger you're bringing to the table. Get it right, and the questions that felt consuming become navigable: who to pursue, when to commit, how to stay when it stops feeling effortless.

That's the thread running through everything. The single person who can change course because they're not already bleeding out from loneliness. The person who arrives at a relationship with something to give instead of arriving empty and hoping the other person compensates. The couple who enters a covenant with open eyes rather than a satisfied checklist. All of it runs on the same fuel.

Which is why Valentinian's edict is where the argument lands. He wasn't responding to a missionary campaign. He was responding to what he saw inside ordinary homes — men who stayed, daughters who were raised, spouses treated as worth the sustained effort — and concluded it was dangerous enough to require an imperial law. The supply problem, solved at the household level, turned out to be visible from the outside.

The diver who runs out of air grabs for the nearest regulator. The diver with air to spare has choices. Stuart's whole argument is that you want to be the second kind before you ever get in the water.