Sydney-based Neri Morris recently released her first book, ‘Single Me: Learning To Love The Unwanted Path Of Singleness’. She talks to DAVID ADAMS about why she wrote it, her own experience of being single and what the church can do to better include and support single people…
Sydney-based Neri Morris recently released her first book, Single Me: Learning to Love the Unwanted Path of Singleness. Morris, who is marketing and communications at Seed and creative director of ethical and sustainable fashion marketplace ThreadHarvest, talks about why she wrote the book, her own experience of being single and what the church can do to better include and support single people…
Congratulations on the book. What prompted you to write it?
“It was partly a prompting from God at Hillsong Conference two years ago and partly my own personal experience. I’d been often wondering – certainly [as] I entered my 30s and found myself single and not really wanting to be – what God would have for me in this season…I’d been on a bit of a journey of trying to figure out what God has for me here and…I just felt a prompting in my spirit to write a book about it because I feel like there’s many people in the same, if not very similar, situation that I am and have found themselves single later in life and not really wanting to be there. So, that was kind of the prompting that led to the book.”
Neri Morris. PICTURE: Supplied.
And that was who the audience you had in mind was – people in a similar situation to yourself?
“Yeah – when I looked at the options out there, I didn’t find a lot that was about particularly singleness itself. A lot of the books out there are more geared to what to do while you’re waiting or how to get out of being single…or dating or marriage. There was nothing that I found that kind of spoke directly to singleness itself, not as a season to get out of but addressing it as something that is worth embracing and loving for what it is. And so I wrote a book that I would want to read which wasn’t a list of ‘You should do this’ and ‘This is how you do that’ – it’s very story-driven from a…desire to want to connect with the reader, for them to read stories or content and go, ‘Oh, yeah, I resonate with that, I’ve had a similar experience’ or ‘My story is this’…”
You’ve obviously bared your life to some degree in the book. Was that an uncomfortable experience?
“Yes and no. I love telling stories and I’ve never really shied away from sharing personal experiences, certainly amongst close friends and family members…There was this sense that I knew I had to share my story to be vulnerable, so I had to muster the confidence and the courage to do that. [There’s been] moments of knowing that it was the right thing to do but then definitely having moments of going ‘Oh, no, what have I done? Do I really want people to know this about me or know this part of my story?’ So it’s been a bit of a see-saw…”
“[T]he person I would marry now and have that oneness with would be different from the person I would have chosen at 25. Because we’re different as we progress through life. So I think soulmates…is more about having that oneness with someone rather than it being just a single person, there’s only one of them, that’s it and if you miss it, you miss it.”
You talk about your faith a lot in the book. Can you tell us a little bit about how you came to Christ?
“I grew up in a Christian home so grew up going to church and youth camps and the like. I made a conscious decision to follow Jesus when I was 15 at a youth camp as so many other people have and have been on that journey ever since of learning and discovery and just seeking to get to know God…I love that exploration of seeking God and trying to know more about Him because I know I will never know everything there is to know about Him.”
One of the concepts you talk about in the book is that of ‘soulmates’. But you have a bit of a different take on what a ‘soulmate’ is. Can you explain that?
“I grew up with, I guess, the ‘Disney ‘concept of a soulmate – that there is one person that is meant to be for you for the rest of your life. [But] the more that I have progressed on this journey of singleness and dating – and also listened to other people’s stories and observed what’s out there in the world, I feel like I have come to the realisation that soulmates…exist but not in the way that we have been told that they do.
“I look at someone like a widower, for example, who ends up getting married again. Now did they only have one soulmate or do they have two? And, if they have one, then why are with someone else, isn’t that then, someone else’s soulmate? Or what if you meet your soulmate but then, for whatever reason…you end up breaking up with them and you never get to be with them again? So are you then not allowed to love again?
“So I think the whole idea of soulmates is a bit skewed in the sense [that] we think it’s just this one person whereas I think it’s more [that] when you’re at a point in your life when you are ready for marriage and for that next stage of life…you can have that oneness [with someone]. I’m very hesitant to say they can become your soulmate because I think it’s a sense of going ‘I’m bringing my whole self into this; they’re bringing their whole self into it and right now this is a time where we could be one and enter into marriage’. So the person I would marry now and have that oneness with would be different from the person I would have chosen at 25. Because we’re different as we progress through life. So I think soulmates…is more about having that oneness with someone rather than it being just a single person; [that] there’s only one of them, that’s it, and if you miss it, you miss it.”
One of the other concepts you talk about in the book is the idea of being ‘actively single’. What do you mean by that?
“I think being actively single is about honouring where you’re at – so embracing singleness for what it is and acknowledging the great things about it like freedom to do what you want, freedom to sleep diagonally in the bed, freedom to not have to wake up to the needs of a child or someone else…I think that being actively single is embracing that and living that fully, so not holding back on experiencing the things you want to experience. If you want to travel the world, go travel the world and not wait for someone to come long to do that with – you can do that on your own. But, on the flipside, I think it’s also acknowledging the work that you need to do internally on yourself and being open to getting out there and meeting new people and maybe dating people that you wouldn’t normally have considered. Not hiding yourself away, not just waiting for that person to just appear, but kind of bringing yourself to that area of your life as well. So being active in both ways.”
One of the themes that you dip in and out of in the book is how churches treat single people or speak around the world issue of singleness. Do you think that the attitudes and the way in which churches respond to the idea of singleness is simply reflective of how wider society does or do you think that church culture actually makes it worse?
“I personally think that church culture actually makes it worse but not from a place of trying to be vindictive or exclusive or mean…The Bible talks of marriage, it’s obviously something that is given to us, it’s a wonderful thing, a contract, that [God] said ‘This is something that I want you guys to live and experience’ but we get very focused on it. And [that’s partly] because of the culture in which the Bible was written in – women didn’t have a lot of rights, marriage was very important – whereas we now live in a society where women can provide for themselves and no longer rely on a man to be our protector and our provider – we can essentially do that for ourselves.
“So the world has shifted into this new era – people are getting married later, the divorce rate is 50 per cent so you’ve got a lot more people experiencing divorce, we’ve got the LGBTQI community to factor in as they seek to reconcile, those who are Christians, their faith and their sexuality. So we’ve got all these new dynamics out there that are the reasons that people are single and the church, I feel, is not necessarily acknowledging and providing support to all those areas.
“We have a childrens and a families pastor but there is no singles pastor or, if there is, if the church has some awareness of it, it’s kind of relegated to the young adults pastor because only young adults are single apparently…So there’s not a real sense of awareness within the church context around single people, the reasons why someone’s single and how they can be supported…What I just want to do is kind of highlight the way that church can be alienating to a single person in the hope that it stimulates conversations within the church context around how we can better support these people who are single in our congregations.”
Do you have any strategies around how churches can do that better? What are the sorts of things that churches can do?
“People have asked me this question and the more I’ve thought about it, the more I don’t like the idea of saying, ‘I have the answers guys, you just need to do XYZ’ because I don’t think it’s as simple as that. I think what needs to happen is churches themselves – the pastor or leadership of a church – need to go ‘OK, we’ve got people [who are single] within our congregation. Who are they?’ Then go have a conversation with them. Then get together as a church family, whatever that might look like, and discuss ways the church family can support them. Because in some instances maybe the church is big enough to have a singles pastor and that would be great or maybe it’s [just]…the single people in our church have identified that they want to be included more in [a particular] way. Or maybe we just need to be more proactive in inviting them around for dinner more often. I just think there’s so many different ways but it needs to be unique to that church context because the single people in that church are going to be single for different reasons than the church next door. So I don’t think it’s a one size fits all response…”
You also talk about, for you, singleness being a season and the aspect of waiting – one of the chapters being on endurance. Clearly that means that at this stage, one day you’re still hoping to be married? And did you have in mind when writing the book, people for whom singleness is a choice and they’re not looking for that?
“[I] can only write from my context and my experience, right? My hope and belief and desire is for a husband and to eventually be married one day, that’s what I would like. But I acknowledge that people are single for various reasons and I hope to actually write a follow-up book to this one that is filled with stories of people who are single for various reasons – so a widower, a divorcee, an LGBTQI individual, someone who has the ‘calling’ of singleness on their life…But then I think there’s a season of singleness for people who aren’t necessarily called to it but are experiencing it.
“So I would like to eventually write a book…that speaks to the unique reasons anyone can be single because they vary. I can only write from my experience so I’ve written it that way, unapologetically…but I still believe that the lessons and the things that I have learned and understood transcend the experience itself. An example of that would be [that] I’ve had married friends comment how the book really resonated with them because it talks of an unwanted past and they’ve experienced that in their own context…So while the single context itself didn’t resonate, the overall message did.”
And that’s another book for your list because I understand you’re also writing a novel?
“Yes. I’ve written the first in what I hope will be a series of five. This book’s called Fortified and the series is based around the concept of the single women in the Bible and what they were able to achieve because they were single. I’ve chosen to bring the stories into a more modern context – so this first book…is based on the story of Rahab but it’s set in 1945 in Dresden, Germany…So my hope in writing this series is again an exploration of singleness itself but in a different way, a more narrative way.
“I just wanted to have stories for single people…There’s a lot of marriage stories in the Bible and we often hear about those but there’s also stories in there of single people and what they could achieve because they were single – Rahab would not have been able to accept the spies into her home and hide them if she were married…So I just wanted to explore that kind of concept so I’m looking at women like Lydia, Mary and Martha, Mary Magdalene, potentially Esther, and taking those stories and looking at it through this kind of ‘single’ lens but in narrative way.”
Single Me: Learning to Love the Unwanted Path of Singleness is out now (also availavle via Neri’s website). Fortfied is expected to be released early next year. Both are available via Neri Morris’ website.
Neri Morris is a member of the Sight Advisory Board.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. This article contains affiliate links.
