Fidelia's Sisters: An online publication by, for, and about young clergy women, published by The Young Clergy Women Project.

Like most single women, I still have moments of heart-palpitating, tear-gushing desire for Mr. Right to waltz into my life.  Maybe the map was only a couple of years off?  But this thinking gets tiresome and I’m beginning to accept that my desire for marriage and children may be more fantasy than true possibility.   

There are three actual possibilities:

1. God did not create a Mr. Right for me, and I need to receive this gift of singleness joyfully (gulp).
2. Mr. Right is out there, but still, I’m tired of waiting for him.  I was to have the security that a family offers now.
3. Mr. Right has found a different path and has eluded the wedded bliss (God’s Plan “A”) a life with me would bring both of us. 

The solution: I am building a friendship family.  Though not quite as secure as a husband (well, that’s debatable, given the rate of divorce), a friendship family will be there for me when I am having a hard time.  A friendship family will go camping with me or hiking or on vacations.  A friendship family is a group of people I’ll cook for and I’ll babysit for their children.  A friendship family is a group of people I will love.  And with any luck, they’ll probably wind up loving me.  And love is what we’re really looking for, isn’t it?  

My friend Brian introduced me to the friendship family idea.  He too, is a single, thoughtful, human being, needing to be loved by people who know his whole story.  Recently he was sharing that he was looking for a job change, but when I asked him if he’d consider moving, he said that he hadn’t and wouldn’t.  “I’ve got too many friends here. They’re like family.”  Thus, the “friendship family” idea was born.   

If our generation isn’t going to get busy forming nuclear families, maybe we all have to focus on something that is attainable – a group of close friends.  We’ve got to redraw the maps.   

Some of you have these blessed friendship families already. You are not the wanderlust ones. Like my friend Brian, you haven’t moved in 5 years or longer and you probably haven’t moved far from your parents.  I, however, love to wander.  I love to move, to experience different places and different people.  I grew up in Connecticut, went to college in Indiana, then for seminary I went to Massachusetts.  Then, after seminary, I took my mentor’s advice seriously to “go wherever I found the right fit in a church.”  So I thought the right fit was in a small town in Michigan.  As a result, my friends are salted all over the eastern time zone!  At least the phone calls don’t require math. 

So, I’m concluding that it is time for me to invest in friendships.  And not just the ones that are salted all over the time zone, but I want to invest in a group of friends that all know each other.  I want friends who talk about me when I’m not there, friends who work together to try to find solutions for each other.  It is time to stop moving all over the place.  It is time to settle in and re-focus myself on attainable pleasures – friends, not husbands and babies and weddings cakes and flowers.  

Good-bye, heart-palpitating, tear-gushing desire for a man.  If he surprisingly does waltz into my life, I’m sure you won’t be hard to find.  But it’s time to lay you aside and focus my heart’s attention on the people who have been with me through it all: the people I call my friends and the people that I may feel someday are like family

Rev. Karen Potter serves as the Associate Pastor for youth and families at First Congregational Church UCC, of Saint Joseph, Michigan.  She was ordained in the United Church of Christ in November 2008 and is a recent graduate of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.