Struggles of Single Women in Youth Ministry
Balance, loneliness, and assumptions make it harder than we realize
In a previous post, I discussed the struggles of mothers who work in youth ministry. Today, I will discuss the distinct challenges faced by single women in youth ministry. As a single woman who served in youth ministry for 13 years myself, I know many of these struggles firsthand, and I’ve talked with many others who have felt the same things.
Like mothers serving in youth ministry, single women also struggle with work-life balance. This challenge just presents itself in different ways for single women than for the mothers in youth ministry.
Youth work tends to be really demanding of your time and energy, no matter your gender or station in life. A lot of the work happens after typical working hours, as programs, relational ministry, overnight retreats, and messages from students and parents end up seeping into hours that one might normally use to have a fulfilling life outside of work. Single women feel the weight of this, as they also try to balance it with running their own lives as single women. Often singles need more time than others realize to take care of all of their personal life responsibilities, for the simple reason that no one else shares the load with them.
Sometimes the work-life balance challenge can become even harder as others assume that work-life balance shouldn’t be a difficulty for singles. It’s easy for coworkers to assume that single people have less on their plates (because they’re not tending to spouses and kids at home) and therefore ask them to take on more. This may especially be true of male coworkers and supervisors, who don’t realize that women take on more household labor and have less free time than men, regardless of marital or parental status.1 Congregants may also assume that single women in youth ministry are or should be available for frequent and even last-minute childcare. I’ve heard some share that it’s hard to get others to understand why they can’t always say “yes” to these asks. The reality is that they still have all the responsibilities of being an adult, and they’re trying to manage it as one person.
Single women in youth ministry also struggle with loneliness. Unlike their married ministry peers, they have no one who’s waiting for them at home that they can talk with about their stressors from the day. They also may not have many female ministry peers they can connect with about this, either. The loneliness of being a female in youth ministry2 can be further complicated by the loneliness of being a single female in the church, since many American churches don’t know what to do with single adults.
When single women in youth ministry are lonely, they may also be stressed not only about their ministry responsibilities but also their personal life responsibilities. Both work and life can present a weight of responsibility that feels like too much for them to carry on their own. And when others assume that single women in youth ministry can take on more because they are single, this can lead to a heavier load and a heavier weight of loneliness. Working with teens girls is emotionally taxing in itself, and single women can be pouring from an empty cup if they aren’t proactive about seeking out relational support that fills up their cup.
You’ll notice that these challenges are made worse by faulty assumptions about single women in youth ministry. Honestly, I also used to assume that I had more capacity than my married peers. But early last year, two married ministry peers helped me begin to view things differently.
In one instance, I was chatting with a friend on the final morning of a weekend youth retreat about how we were both looking forward to getting home and recovering. In a few hours, she would be home with her husband and children, and I remarked how she probably wouldn’t be able to rest as well as me because of that. Her response surprised me, as she pointed out that I actually had it worse than her, because no one was waiting for me at home and preparing food for me once I got there. All personal responsibilities fell to me once I got home, no matter how tired I was, whereas she had a husband who could enable her to get the rest and nourishment she needed.
In the second instance, I was connecting over a meal with a pastor and his wife I had only met a few days previous, when the topic of rest came up and they inquired about what that was like for me as a single person in ministry. The pastor shared something he’d learned from Pete Scazzero’s The Emotionally Healthy Leader — that singles usually need more time than marrieds to build the relationships necessary to sustain them in ministry. Whereas married couples naturally see and connect with each other at home,3 single people have to seek out and make plans with others in order to have close spiritual companions and support. This pastor said that Pete’s writing had shaped how he continued to minister to the single adults in his congregation.
I don’t actually have more capacity than my married friends. We have different responsibilities, yes, but they also have someone who’s sharing some of the load, whereas I don’t. They each have a built-in relationship in their lives that fills their cups regularly, whereas I have to put in more effort to have similar relationships. In other words, the differences lie in what our inputs and outputs are. We just tend to assume that the inputs and outputs for single people look much better than they actually do, because we overlook just how much output the single life demands.
These insights have been incredibly helpful to me. And they also help us to see that the struggles of work-life balance and loneliness are interrelated. When single women in youth ministry don’t have healthy work-life balance, it will be much harder for them to build the relationships they need to combat loneliness, because they actually need more time than married couples to build and maintain life-giving relationships, not less.
When as singles we assume that we have it easier than married ministry peers, we’re actually just making it harder on ourselves.
As one study puts it, “simply being a woman is linked to spending more time on unpaid childcare and household work and having less free time, even when controlling for age, income, race/ ethnicity, parental status, and marital status.” The Free-Time Gender Gap: How Unpaid Care and Household Labor Reinforced Women’s Inequality.
I talked more broadly about the loneliness that women in youth ministry face in this post:
Not that married couples don’t have to be intentional about their marriages, too… it’s just that it’s naturally built into their lives already, and the other person is often waiting at home for them, whereas this is rarely the case for singles, unless they happen to live with their closest friend (and even if this is the case, they as friends likely aren’t as committed to planning their lives around each other in the way that married couples are).