By Movieguide® Staff
Author and podcaster Annie F. Downs opened up about why she feels “satisfied” with single life.
“I’m 45, never been married, no kids, and I feel more satisfied than I ever have in being unmarried,” she said during an episode of Katherine Wolf’s “Hope Heals” podcast. “And part of that, unfortunately, is you and I are in the age bracket of watching a lot of marriages struggle.”
Downs continued, “There is a thing that my single friends and I will say to each other pretty frequently…’There are worse things than being single.’ And so that’s part of it, is I have a real reality check of watching people that are 20 years into a marriage, and some of the challenges they have that I don’t have.”
She acknowledged that she feels “lonely a lot” but explained that now, she views the feeling in a different way.
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“Loneliness used to be an alarm for me, and I have decided it’s not an alarm. It is just a street sign,” Downs said. “And so — because everybody feels lonely. Married people feel lonely, single people feel lonely, parents feel lonely, empty-nesters feel lonely, everybody feels lonely. And so, instead of it causing me panic, or causing me to make some massive shift, I just go, ‘Oh, there’s just something to pay attention to here. There’s something that I need. There’s things that are just hard to be alone in your life, and I really grieve not having a partner to hang out with and comfort each other and to take care of each other.”
She concluded, “Five out of seven days, I would — I hope God still gives me that. Five out of seven days, I wish that was my reality. Two out of seven days, I’m like, ‘That looks really hard and I have gotten this far and I think I’ll be okay.’”
Downs has previously addressed her single life in a blog post on her website, where she wrote about not wanting to become “the poster gal for Single Christian Life.”
However, she continued, “I felt a real push from Him over the last few months to write about the honest emotions that are happening in this season of my life. If I wait until I’m married to tell you what this feels like, it won’t be authentic. It will be a memory. Hope comes in more concentrated doses if you are getting it from someone IN the moment, versus in the memory.”
“So I’m not the poster girl for Single Christian Life,” Downs finished. “I’m the poster girl for Hope.”
Recently, Downs has been preparing to celebrate the Advent season. She even created an Advent study, titled “Stay Tuned,” to help others find the joy in waiting.
“We all know the joys of waiting, right?” she wrote in an Instagram post. “You’re sensing the air quotes and eye roll in my tone aren’t you? Further complicated when it feels like we’re waiting on God… to move, to speak, to do a miracle. Then when we finally make it to the end of the year, we’re invited into a whole season of waiting called Advent.”
Downs continued, “That’s why I wrote Stay Tuned. A three-week Advent study that will walk us through Psalm 1 to help us become the kind of people who stay rooted even when life feels like it’s on pause…I promise you won’t be the same by the time we’re done.”
While Downs acknowledged there are downsides to still being single, she is choosing to focus on the positives of this time in her life.
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