http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/26/singleminded/?rref=opinion

I don't know about having been taught to fear being alone. If anything, I've always feared being dependent on someone. But either way, isn't that just the flip side of the coin? Much like neither thinking too much of yourself or too little of yourself is true humility, neither is the fear of being alone or too dependent good for you. In either case, fear is about control, or the lack-thereof. And this writer definitely experiences both. She straddles between the lines of either being completely afraid of being alone, or being entirely empowered by the high of being alone and "free." Her fear for both singleness and monogamy strangles her and fuels her need for drugs. Ultimately, she seems only "single-minded" for fear. I think that in the issue of singleness - in everything, really - it all boils down to one word: fear. But Love drives out that fear, right?

I was reminded of a C.S. Lewis quote when I read the article: "To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable." But vulnerability is only freeing if it's seeped in the greatest vulnerability the world has ever seen - on the cross. Until she, until we, see the freedom that resulted from Christ's self-inflicted vulnerability in his death for us, we will never be truly free - single, or not.

Joyce, L. A.