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Look, for example, at singleness. The word ‘single’ can be used to describe someone who is not married, someone who is neither married nor cohabiting, or someone who is not currently in a significant romantic or sexual relationship. Up until the late twentieth century, singleness (in the first of these senses) tended to be deprecated in many English contexts. Unmarried people – especially women – have often been seen primarily as people who lack something: they have not managed to find a partner, or they have somehow been prevented from marrying. Unmarried women were often marginalized, stigmatized and pitied. Countless novels, plays and films have reinforced this popular view, captured in pejorative phrases such as ‘old maid’, ‘spinster’ and ‘on the shelf’. Yet, however invisible they have sometimes been, we know that there have, since the Middle Ages, been large numbers of unmarried people, both women and men, in both rural and urban contexts.

All of the kinds of change listed above have affected the prevalence, the variety and the perception of single people in our society. And singleness today – in any of the senses given above – is far more complex than it first appears. It includes the widowed, the separated, the divorced, and those who have never married. It also includes those who defer marriage until later, waiting until they have obtained occupational and financial security. It can include people living in a variety of family contexts, some who live in other kinds of shared accommodation, and some who live alone. For some, singleness is a choice; for others, it is a result of circumstance; for most, it might be something in between. For some, it may be empowering, for others painful; for most it will be as complex as any other kind of status. For some Christians, as we will discuss later, singleness may be part of a calling or vocation which may take different forms, including the joining of a monastic community and the life lived with others that this brings.