Stories

What’s on Megan’s Mind?

We’ve re-opened the matchmaking pipeline to ladies, which has been so exciting! As I’m writing this (a mere 3 days into the sale) we’ve already had about 23 ladies register. I can’t wait to meet all of you!

As I’m gearing up for another season of intake, I’m remembering and holding the stories that I’ve heard from our clients that we’ve met so far. I’ve been honored to sit with 518 clients over the past three years and hear their stories. I don’t say that to claim any specific level of expertise on singleness or loneliness or even Apostolic relationships– according to Malcolm Gladwell, those consultations have gotten me about 5% of the way toward being an expert. I’m deeply grateful for that, although I feel like there is so much more to learn.

The things that have stuck with me are the stories. I’ve spoken to so many of you about some of the most difficult moments of your life: breakups, discoveries that led to divorce, rejection, the loss of a spouse to a slow illness. It would be difficult to pull all of the stories together into some sort of summary, although I believe there’s probably a book to be written about all this at some point (wink). But I thought I would send a quick set of encouraging notes to you all, based on those 518 stories, and all of the stories I’m about to hear. 

Here’s what those stories have taught me:

1. You can do everything right, and still not be chosen. Relationships don’t happen as a result of godliness or faithfulness or talent or flirting skill–all of those things can help, for sure. But a lot of us who did get married were able to do so because we were fortunate enough to have a viable prospect attending church with us. We were lucky in that there were more voices rooting for us to get together than there were voices trying to separate us. Not everyone has had that privileged experience, and if you feel like you checked every box and were still left on a shelf, that is not necessarily your fault. 

2. Grief is inevitable. Growth is intentional. I have met people who have undergone abuse that has left me shaking and weeping after our consultation. I’ve heard of horrible losses–traumatic deaths of partners that I could not imagine surviving. I’ve talked to many, many people who have been through the horrors of divorce. Those stories have shown me that none of us get to avoid grief, entirely. We don’t have a choice about suffering some losses in life, but we do have a choice of how we use those losses to better ourselves. There is a clear difference to me between clients who attend therapy, involve themselves in grief support, and connect with a purpose beyond the grief, and clients who have become stuck in the world that their grief created and haven’t escaped from it. Dating readiness and matchability are directly correlated with being willing to do the work to process the trauma and the suffering and connect it to a broader purpose. 

3. Addiction is our painkiller. For those singles who are hurting because of loneliness, there are a million things that are poised and ready to numb your grief. All of them are only effective in the short-term, and all of them have side effects. Romance novels and streamable dramas (of the Christian flavor or not), pornography, achievement, recreation, even obsession with taking on certain ministerial roles, can be misused as an analgesic when the loneliness gets to be too much.  In those moments, the goal becomes to turn off the feeling parts of us, or steal the emotions we long for from a page or a screen. As the poet Dylan Thomas wrote, “Do not go gentle into that good night.” The escape is a kind of death to ourselves, and we can’t afford that in a dying world that needs us to bring life back to it.

4. Being anchored to a church body is not a nice-to-have, it is a must-have. Singleness can be isolating, and many of you have expressed to me how easy it is to feel invisible in the work you provide to the church. We’ve seen over and over that the individuals who are best positioned to date and marry are ones who have a close relationship with their church leadership and who are staying deeply, emotionally connected to the work of the Kingdom. Please note, I didn’t say “those who are busiest working in the church are best positioned.” Busyness can be its own painkiller, sometimes. 

5. Wanting to be married is from God. After looking into the faces of 500+ single people who desire partnership, I will never be convinced that their longing is misplaced. Do some people want marriage to fix problems that it can’t solve? Yes, absolutely. Do people (of both genders) have unrealistic expectations that they have to grapple with when meeting real prospects? Certainly. But I would still insist that the vast majority of us aren’t designed to do life alone. Paul had an amazing ministry, but where would Paul have been without Priscilla and Aquilla, and all the other nameless families who hosted first-century churches and baked the bread that the disciples broke together? Singleness is a season that most of us will experience during our lifetime, at some point–I persist in a belief that it is not intended to be our entire life.

6. You are not crazy, and you are not alone. You may feel like you’re on an island–you may be the only single person in your stage of life in your church. It may feel like nobody has quite the same combination of challenging factors at play in their lives. All of that aloneness can make things feel so hopeless, and I just want you to understand that everyone is seeing what you’re seeing. The lack of ‘viable’ prospects. The situationships. The challenges of meeting online, the bots, the scams, the awkward set-ups. It’s horribly universal, but that doesn’t mean that it will always be this way. I believe the needle is slowly moving. 

I hope to share some stories in a more detailed fashion one day, because I think this community of people has so much wisdom and insight to gift to the Church. For now, I hope this makes you feel a bit more seen, and a bit less alone. 

Sincerely, and with love,

Megan

Resources

I just want to remind everyone that we’re now accepting calls via our Synchrony Voicemail! Call 352-358-7393 to ask a dating question and we may select it for an upcoming podcast.

Announcements

Our pipeline is OPEN for new female clients! Please visit our website to register. 

Gentlemen, you’re welcome to join at any time. Remember that we have a freemium model in place for you right now, which means that you can go through your consultation and meet your first match for free. We have so many incredible ladies waiting to meet someone that we’re trying to keep the barriers as low as possible, so tell your homies (or your cousins, or your brothers-in-law, or that one guy you sit with sometimes at District Conference). 

Remember: existing clients and returning clients who have had a Synchrony consultation in the past do NOT need a new consultation. Just email [email protected] to let her know that you’d like to re-join the pipeline, and she’ll make sure you’re moved into the active for matching portion of our pool.

As a reminder, we’ve cancelled all of our subscriptions–if you got a cancellation notice, that doesn’t mean we’ve stopped working with you! It just means that we’ll no longer be charging you to wait for a match.

Pipeline Profile

This is normally the place where I’d give a “by the numbers” update, but nothing has really shifted since my last update, as we’ve been sort of immersed in answering questions about the sale and processing intake. Let me apologize to those of you who have an outstanding question sitting in my email inbox– I promise I’ll get there!

Gentlemen, if you’re waiting on a match– thanks for your patience. I’m about to meet another 200 amazing Apostolic ladies, so now is not the time to give up. I appreciate you waiting on us, I believe we’ll have a lot of introductions to make in the coming weeks. 

Hey Single Friend, 

Welcome to Love Notes! I’m so excited that you’re here. If you’re new: Love Notes are weekly updates from Megan, designed to give you a boost of encouragement and keep you looped in on all of the happenings at The Synchrony Project. These are always written straight from my heart, never with AI.