There’s a chapter in Little Women where the March sisters join Laurie and Laurie’s English friends for a day at the beach. Alcott describes a scene where Kate Vaughn, the haughtiest of Laurie’s friends and the one closest in age to Meg, intentionally insults Meg because she’s noticed that Meg has caught the attention of Mr Brooke, Laurie’s tutor. It’s unclear whether Kate actually likes Mr Brooke herself or whether she just wants to be the centre of attention, but what is clear is that she cannot stand that Mr Brooke likes Meg. To make up for the humiliation of having been overlooked for a girl who has to work as a governess to make money, Kate gives Meg a back-handed compliment about her German speaking abilities in an attempt to embarrass her in front of Mr Brooke. Her design is rendered void when Mr Brooke, instead of being adequately repelled by Meg’s poor German, finds it endearing instead and is even more enthralled by her. Kate, very irritated by this, gets up from the grass they are all sitting on and leaves, muttering unkind things about Meg under her breath as she does so.¹ 

From the way Alcott presents it, it’s clear that the scene is supposed to be humorous at Kate’s expense, and it is. Through her attempt to humiliate Meg, Kate ends up looking ridiculous, immature, and insecure. But at the time of my reading Little Women it had not been long since I had escaped Meg’s position, having endured Kate-like digs for a year and a half from a ‘friend’, all with the intent of securing the affections of a boy. So while I find the humour in the episode much more easily now, seeing it clearly as a reflection of Kate’s internal problems, when I first read that chapter, I could only see the sadness and pain of being in Meg’s position due to the memories it evoked of my own experience.

I first realised that a friend had been in a one-sided competition with me when, after watching me from across the room as a mutual friend gave me his jacket to keep me warm at an event I had gone to and then pretending not to see or hear me as I said goodbye to her, she began a habit of intently seeking me out at group events and in private to inform me of facts I already knew about his life, a habit she would sustain with increasing intensity for the entirety of my final year of university. I already knew the things about him she seemed to think would be news to me from my own conversations with him, the boy in question being a good friend of mine who I spoke to quite regularly at the time. Out of all the young people in my church, this friend is the one I was closest to at the time because of his warmth and kindness towards me as both a new Christian and a newcomer to a group with already established dynamics, because of the things we shared in common, and because of the interest he showed in my life and in my interests. I was also joining this church, and this group of friends, as a twenty-one year old who had not had their same Christian upbringing, had not grown up immersed in church life and Christian culture and therefore could not share in some of the experiences of growing up in church that they were able to speak about, a factor that would heighten the isolation I would occasionally come to feel in that circle. At the same time that this friend was asking me to tell him more about my interests, which included history, medieval literature, poetry, art, Christian allegory in the form of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien’s writings, these interests were being ruthlessly denigrated by our mutual friend in my interactions with her apart from him. 

This friend was the one I finally confided in about my difficulties at church because he was the one who habitually sought after me to check how I was and who was most attentive to my spiritual state and personal wellness. As I withdrew more from church life, feeling more and more unwelcome due to my female friend’s behaviour, this friend was the one who made sure to catch up with me at the end of a service, who stopped me to talk before  I left for the five-minute walk home to the flat I shared with my friend to ask if he would see me at an upcoming church event and to consistently invite me to church or parachurch events that he probably already knew I would say no to. The idea behind my female friend’s insistence on telling me information about his life was as transparent as the purpose of Kate’s slight towards Meg: if I could be convinced of the intimacy of their relationship, I’d be so intimidated by it that I’d stay away from him completely. What this female friend didn’t seem to know was that there was no Napoleonic campaign for my male friend’s affection on my side and that she needn’t have tried so hard at my expense to claim him for herself because by the time her behaviour was becoming its most aggressive, I had long since lost romantic interest in this friend and he and I had had multiple conversations, initiated by me, about the nature of our friendship.  

Her attempt to undermine my confidence—and hopefully compromise my ability to remain in friendship with him—was not limited to seeking me out in public to tell me facts about him (things like his food likes and dislikes, who he shared his student house with, what extracurriculars he might have planned one weekend that meant he would not be at church that Sunday, and the aspirations and university plans of his siblings, who I’d met and who had told me of these aspirations and plans themselves). It also included the other usual schoolgirl methods of diminishing your target’s self-esteem. On a nice countryside walk, I had been told that while girls who studied literature were intelligent, which is what I studied and loved discussing with those who shared that love or were just interested in my interest in it, they were nowhere near as intelligent as girls who studied linguistics, which happened to be her subject of choice. When I confided in her that I was distressed because an acquaintance had expressed interest in me that I did not reciprocate, this friend took care to inform me that I was “nothing special”, repeating that I really shouldn’t be too flattered by it because “they’d do it to anyone”. As it turned out, this person had genuinely liked me, and did not, in fact, go around “doing it to anyone”.  (A word of warning probably painfully obvious to everybody but me at the time: if a friend can look you in the eye and tell you with a straight face that you are nothing special at the beginning of your friendship, that ‘friend’ probably does not have towards you the feelings of warmth and goodwill typical for friends to have towards one another, and they are not somebody you should strive to maintain a close relationship with.)

She would go on to endlessly dissect and find fault with almost everything about me, the things most easy to target being those born out of my secular upbringing. My parents had been most irresponsible and shown poor judgement indeed in allowing my sister and I to watch Hannah Montana or The Devil Wears Prada and devour non-Christian fiction growing up (think pre-teen girls’ fiction like Cathy Cassidy, Cathy Hopkins, Jacqueline Wilson, Meg Cabot), the gospel music I listened to when I had become a Christian was of an inferior quality and my faith suspect as a result because my playlist was not composed of the trusted evangelical artists whose lyrics had been proven to be biblically sound. My choice of degree was not edifying, nor was my taste in entertainment, and in our students’ group chat, the resources I shared aimed at building up our faith, the jokes I made, and the answers I gave to questions of any nature were always lacking somehow and everybody needed to know it.

My enjoyment of things different to her would be chalked up to spiritual immaturity and not just that we had innately different (God-given) dispositions, and most devastatingly of all of these things, she would go on to cast me in the role of temptress, inventing motives of vanity and sexual waywardness on my part through pointed statements about how women whose hearts are in the right place would go about dressing themselves in the morning instead of whatever she had surmised was on my mind as I dressed myself in the mornings. Apparently seeing that these things were not changing how I interacted with other congregants in church or in my friendships with our mutual friends, she would graduate from these ‘little’ tactics intended to chip away at my sense of self-worth to the bigger one of covert social exclusion, seemingly with the intention of gatekeeping opportunities for me to interact with him and the other students in church.

This came in the form of discouraging me from serving in church in certain capacities (capacities which I would learn he served in, as did she), stressing that those roles were designated for those who had a spiritual maturity that she had divined I did not have and she did; in the form of withholding information about voluntary opportunities to serve in parachurch ministries that she and this male friend happened to be involved with, which I would only learn about through his telling me about them and inviting me to them; and in the form of ‘forgetting’ to invite me to edifying communal events that he would be attending, which I would learn about from mutual friends who invited me and from my pastor’s wife who seemed surprised to learn that this close friend who seemed to have such an investment in my life and spiritual growth, daughter of one of the elders at the church, had not mentioned them to me herself.

This behaviour would eventually become as direct as completely ignoring me at events I had shown up to, such as the one at the beginning of this post, and asking me to leave others. I started to suspect sexual jealousy might be the cause of her behaviour towards me when she began to glare at me when any male among the student population at church spoke to me and openly indicated any kind of bonhomie with me through joking and laughing, and when, after she had been friendly with me at an evangelistic event when it had just been the two of us, she asked me to leave once two of our male friends had arrived, one of them being the one whose life facts she would pursue me to inform me of. The more this boy in particular showed me any warmth or kindness or alluded to any kind of closeness between the two of us outside of the group dynamic through his references to an inside joke or his use of an affectionate nickname for me, the more hostile this friend became to me until eventually there was no friendship at all.

What solidified the suspicions I’d grown to have that this friend did not have my best interests at heart despite the intensity of her messages enquiring about my life (so that she could pray for me) was the visible glee on her face at my anxiety about what the future held as I was nearing the end of my degree, her salivation at the thought that I lacked the relevant experience to do what I’d thrown out as a potential career path when she’d asked about my future plans (and subsequent annoyance when I corrected her about her misconception about what said role actually was) and the disappointment on her face when I told her I had found overwhelming peace about my future since praying about it. At this point, we had not spoken for months, having distanced myself from her when her negative comments and slights about what felt like anything I had to contribute to group conversations had increased to a frequency and intensity I no longer found bearable. 

The fact that my ‘friend’’s passive aggressive behaviour preceded my deepening friendship with our mutual male friend suggests to me that there was a pre-existing insecurity issue in her, of which the onslaught of comments in which she positioned herself as superior to me were admissions. And while there were certainly elements of the need for queen bee status among the young people in our church in my friend’s need to compete with me in quite literally every arena (since I loved music so much, did I know Vivaldi’s Four Seasons? and could I read this Bible passage aloud in Spanish if I had got an A* in my Spanish GCSE? Ok, I was a fan of musical theatre but had I been trained in it?), the fact that the frequency and the increasing force of her digs directly correlated with my friendship with our mutual friend growing closer —with his getting me a book I’d been interested in without me asking him to, with the two of us going on a walk with our church that she and our other friends had not been present for and her learning about it, or with him joking with me after church or initiating conversations with me before I left and her seeing it — revealed that there was so much more to the situation. The measures that this girl was willing to take to be the exclusive recipient of our friend’s attention and the changing character of her behaviour towards me once she suspected that he might really enjoy my company as much as hers was more immediately reflective of an anxiety around singleness as a young woman that cannot be divorced from conservative evangelical culture’s idolatry of marriage for women. 

2.

A while ago I heard someone say that women only compete with one another when they are starving. The way in which evangelical Christianity instils in young girls an appetite for marriage and motherhood above all else explains a lot about my friend’s behaviour towards me. Simply put, my friend was starving for the prospect of a relationship that would eventually lead to marriage. For whatever reason, she had decided that this particular friend of ours was going to be the one to satiate that hunger, and whatever would get in the way of that had to be eliminated. Unfortunately for me, that whatever came in the form of me when I joined her church one February morning in 2022. This male friend of ours had joined the church the previous autumn as a first year student and after a few months of my being in the church (around the same time that this boy and I had become close), my female ‘friend’ would go on to treat me as an interloper and dubious force threatening the purity of her community rather than as a sister-in-Christ for the remainder of my time there. Like recognises like and as a twenty-one year old who’d had her fair share of crushes over the years, it was extremely obvious to me that my female friend had romantic interest in our male friend. While there may have been some other things going on with her, her treatment of me once she had reason to believe that the affections of the boy she seemed to have designated as her ticket to marriage and motherhood were otherwise occupied was also undoubtedly the product of evangelical Christian culture’s distortion of the significance of marriage for women.

I can’t stress enough how hellish she made life for me in competing with me for a boy I no longer wanted but through coming to understand the immense pressure that she was under to be attached as soon as possible —one which I did not share because I did not share her religious background or upbringing—I was able to sympathise with her and begin to heal from the effects of all that she’d inflicted on me during that time. I hadn’t quite realised the preoccupation with early marriage for women in some pockets of Christianity until I joined a conservative evangelical church. I had grown up nominally Christian with no real knowledge of the person of Jesus and I certainly had not had any run-in with the brand of Christianity that is complementarian evangelical Christianity. It was through regular and sustained time with people who had grown up in conservative evangelicalism and exposure to their culture in various ways that I came to see just how much marriage is propped up as the pinnacle of female Christian existence, and a husband something to be acquired as early as possible, conferring true, demonstrable-through-a-ring value onto you as a woman (the kind of value that having been made by and for Jesus Himself just couldn’t quite match). These are not things that anybody would say outright because they are distinctly anti-Christian sentiments, but in the same way that a person’s cultural practices may be positioned as the norm by their community and other cultures’ practices maligned, these values are often instilled and perpetuated in unspoken ways. 

My first Bible when I became a Christian at nineteen was a beautiful women-authored women’s devotional Bible that I picked out of all other contenders vying for my custom because of its visual appeal. (It had ample margin-space for noting observations, which as a literature student was paradise itself, and beautifully illustrated title pages for each book of the Bible.) It served me well in the beginning of my faith as a Bible-cum-notebook as I violently annotated the gospels and the New Testament letters while reading them for the first time. Once the novelty of how pretty it was wore off and I started to actually read the devotionals, I noticed that the content was clearly directed at married women with children. My not being married with children didn’t stop me from benefitting from those devotionals because although the specifics of the stories that the authors used to illustrate their message(s) was were not ones I could immediately relate to, the principles being exhorted were applicable to all Christians irrespective of gender, age, marital status and so on. I did, however, find it remarkable that it had been marketed as a women’s Bible, leading me to expect a Bible with devotionals representative of Christian womanhood more broadly, in all its various forms, rather than a wives’ or mothers’ Bible, which is what it actually was. Five years down the line, I still love that Bible for sentimental reasons and it’s still in use although it’s just one lift away from giving up the ghost, but that Bible would be my introduction to the evangelical reinvention of the word ‘woman’ that is not just present in evangelical women’s resources, but also permeates everyday speech in these Christian circles.

As a demographic, ‘Christian women’ refers to all adult females who are Christians. This includes all adult females, meaning it includes the ones who are older adults and the ones who have just recently come into adulthood, the ones who are married and the ones who are not (who are engaged or dating or single), the ones who mothers and the ones who are not, who serve in their churches in some official capacity and the ones who do not, the ones who labour inside the home and the ones who labour outside of it, the ones who are in higher education and the ones who are not, the ones who like frilly dresses and pink slippers and scented candles and the ones who do not, the ones who are vegetarian and vegan and the ones who consume animals and their products, and so on. Yet, as I came to learn not just through my first Bible but through many other resources aimed at Christian women, in some Christian communities, the phrase ‘Christian woman’ is synonymous with wife and mother (and within that, there is a very narrow idea of what this wifehood and motherhood can look like) with a ‘good’ woman possessing both identities, the former ideally before the latter.

As I became more involved in my faith, I noticed that unless explicitly specified as otherwise, Christian ‘women’s’ content —the topics at women’s conferences, the material for women’s devotionals, the advice given in women’s small groups etc— generally referred to that which pertains to being a wife and a mother, the implication quite literally being that there is no womanhood for a Christian female outside of these identities. That this seemingly wasn’t strange to anyone else suggested to me that for this specific group of Christians, this was normal, and the sincerity with which a girl’s late teens was spoken of as a perfectly viable time to begin thinking and preparing seriously for marriage told me that for them, it was also right. 

By contrast, in my upbringing outside of this specific Christian culture, the idea of being married at eighteen, nineteen or twenty was an almost comical thing, and by my graduation at twenty-two, while less preposterous-seeming than it had been to me at nineteen, the thought of marriage was still not on my radar and I would have considered any other twenty-two year old woman an exceptionally young bride. Towards the end of my time in that church, I went to a lunch hosted by a couple who were at the time planning their son’s wedding. As the dinner was nearing a close, the father remarked on the singleness of their soon to be daughter-in-law’s older sister, who was twenty-three at the time, and spoke about it with graveness, hypothesising that perhaps there were no godly men around her and inquiring if anybody knew of any godly men that she could be introduced to, as though it was a most dire situation to be found unmarried as a woman at twenty three. I, being twenty-two at the time and very single, was startled not only by the solemnity with which her singleness was treated, but also by the implication that at twenty-three, this woman was not perhaps at the beginning stages of potentially finding love, but seemed to have already passed it and very concerningly so. It also struck me that whether this woman wanted to be introduced to any men as marriage prospects was not relevant because it was presumed to be a sure thing. For the rest of my time at their house, I wondered whether this woman knew that her soon to be brother-in-law’s parents thought of her as defective in her current state of singleness (or spinsterhood at her ripe twenty-three years), and seemed to pity her. 

This is the culture that my ‘friend’ had grown up in. She had grown up hearing things like this about being in your early twenties and “still” single, had heard singleness spoken of as a deficiency that must be remedied as soon as it is legally possible, and had had it instilled in her that not only was it most desirable to have met the person you will marry before you finish university and have married him by the time you were graduating (ring by spring!), it was problematic if you hadn’t. Is it any wonder, then, that she would make sure our mutual friend, who for whatever reason she had latched onto specifically as her person as though she believed she would find no other prospect if it did not work with him, would be hers at any cost, even if that cost was the dignity of another woman?

Seeing as how womanhood in some Christian communities is conceived of as the state of being a wife and mother and how being married with children is indirectly posited as the state in which a woman is her most valuable, it isn’t at all surprising that young women who have grown up in these circles would have marrying as soon as possible at the forefront of their minds. Given that these circles also tend to adhere to a theology of differences between the sexes that sometimes goes further than what the Bible itself asserts about them (propping up as a scriptural truth the idea that women cannot be agents in their own romantic relationships because it robs men of their opportunity to act as men, for example) it is not hard to see why a girl from this background, desirous of marriage not just for its provision of companionship but also because of her internalisation of the faulty belief that she will matter more as a married woman than as a single one, would resort to the means that my friend did to ensure that our male friend’s interest remained solely in her. 

While secular culture has historically and famously propped up marriage as the ideal for women in much the same ways as the evangelical church does (Bridget Jones’ ‘spinsterhood’ at thirty-two, which dwarfed her very fulfilling friendships, her career, and her ownership of a flat in Borough Market, was so deeply felt that she actually resolved to starve herself in an effort to boost her perceived marriageability), growing up, I found these messages much less concentrated, and therefore easier to resist, than those same message once I had entered the evangelical Christian world. Because of the pluralistic nature of secular society, they were also slightly easier to tune out in favour of the ones you thought were actually true instead, such as that there is no correlation between a woman’s value and her marital status. In church, anti-biblical messages like these, which infiltrate the body through women’s Bibles that are actually wives’ and mothers’ Bibles in disguise or through the stigmatisation of singleness past twenty-one are harder to not be affected by, especially if you have never experienced life outside of your church community. I did not grow up so bombarded by indirect messages that if I had not married by twenty-three my life was meaningless, so I never really felt it. As a result, when I entered church life at twenty-one, I did not see other single women in church as my competitors for the ‘ring by spring’.

In a religion where women already outnumber men, teaching girls from a young age that their reason for existing is to be a suitable helpmeet for a man and bear him many children is a recipe for androcentrism in those girls and consequently, strained relationships between women, who will automatically secretly view other women as their rivals. The fact that my friend’s aggression towards me was at its most direct at events that our male friend was absent from (or if he was there, was displayed in private, out of his view, as was the case in the situation where I had been asked to leave an event that I’d shown up to help set up, and at the event where he had given me his jacket,) shows that there was a vested interest in maintaining a certain perception of herself to him, exemplifying this androcentrism perfectly. As long as our male friend thought her to be godly and therefore a suitable candidate for a ‘helpmeet’, whether or not she was godly in her relationships with other women was inconsequential because godliness mattered insofar as it got you the attention of a man who would then hopefully make you his wife. The modesty in dress, the gentle and quiet spirit, the praying publicly and broadcasting your concern for others was not actually about honouring Jesus with your life, it was about marketing yourself as the best contender out of all the other girls for the title of wife.

 As my degree was coming to an end and the possibility of returning to my home city became clearer to my friend, she became obsessively interested in my future plans, enquiring intently about what I planned to do next and where exactly I planned to live. After learning the date I had mentioned in passing as the day I would be moving back home, she then messaged me on that day to ask how the move had gone. The way this was asked, along with the fact that these questions were the first time in months she had spoken to me, and formed one of the last times this friend would speak to me, made it painfully clear that she was asking for confirmation that I was now definitely out of Manchester for the foreseeable, and far enough away from our male friend to no longer pose a threat to her. Sacrificing the teachings of Jesus at the altar of the possibility of getting into a relationship that would end in marriage, my friend had tirelessly targeted me over eighteen months to secure what she and many other girls raised in evangelical Christianity had been indirectly taught was the most important thing for a woman to have: the undivided devotion of a male, along with which came the prospect of marriage and motherhood and that most prized status of wife. 

By the time I was handing in my dissertation and receiving my final uni results, I was in a very bad place and was overwhelmingly glad to be going home because the extent that my friend was willing to go to to be the sole recipient of our friend’s attention, and her obsession with me in order to tear me down had reached unsettling heights and had drained the joy out of my life. In what I can only assume were ‘keep your enemies closer’ manoeuvres, despite barely speaking to me in person, she had requested a recording of my baptism—which she had been present for—from a member of the church who informed me of this when he provided me with one for my parents who were unable to be there, had requested my sister’s wedding pictures, wanted to know what I was doing, when, and who with, and always wanted to come to the flat I shared with my friend. While the stalking on her part may be an outlier in the general trend, it’s undeniable that the conservative evangelical teaching on womanhood through the assertion that a woman’s highest calling is to be a wife and a mother creates an appetite for wifehood so potent that girls are willing to bully, exclude, deceive, manipulate and use others in order to ensure they have a spouse by the time they are twenty-five (at the latest).

Instead of seeking first the kingdom of God and surrendering themselves to His will, which may mean marriage one day and equally may not, they are indirectly taught to aspire to and ensure they secure for themselves marriage first because in that culture, the absolute worst thing a Christian woman can be is unmarried and childless. The reason my friend was desperate enough to resort to trying to eliminate the competition through bullying to secure his affection for herself rather than entrust her relationship status to God, as is the way with everything else, is because of the sheer pressure to be attached to a man as a woman in this culture.

An aspect of the idolatry of marriage in evangelical Christianity I rarely see discussed is how it impacts how women relate to one another in the church. If we think that every other woman shares the belief that the pinnacle of our existence as women is to be married, then we will naturally believe that every other single woman is doing everything in her power to gain the affections of the single men in church because it’s what we’re doing. This is why my friend indirectly accused me of dressing and grooming myself specifically for the eyes of men rather than in accordance with the style I’d possessed before ever joining that church. This male-worship is not exclusive to single women, but equally reflected in the married women whose default posture towards a single woman they deem attractive entering their church is suspicion because they harbour a fear that not only will their husbands eyes will wander, but that this wandering will be readily accommodated by its object, who is so desperate to leave her unenviable state of singleness that she is willing to destroy an existing marriage to acquire her own. 

I’ve always found it extremely telling when women are quick to use another woman’s singleness as an insult of her character. The very idea that we can console ourselves with “at least” being married, or having a boyfriend in spite of whatever else may be lacking in our lives—that merely being romantically attached to a man is in itself something to brag about—suggests magnitudes about where the bragging woman derives her sense of self-worth. Extreme competitiveness in the way I encountered is the result of a culture that indirectly tells women that they gain meaning and entry into higher society when they are attached to a man and especially have the children to legitimate and consolidate this partnership. After all, an unmarried woman is a life unfulfilled and a womb wasted.

As long as men are the prize, women’s relationships with one another will continue to suffer. Despite the fact that evangelical Christian culture tacitly props men up as the sole ticket to fulfilment in a woman’s life, men are not the prize and their opinion of you is not any more important than another woman’s opinion of you. What my ‘friend’ didn’t seem to realise was that whether married or not, whether in a relationship heading towards marriage or not, her life already had immense meaning and value because she had been made intentionally by God. Married or unmarried, twelve children or none, all our lives have inherent value because we have each been made intentionally by God for differing but equally good works and purposes. Contrary to what our churches often actually tell women without realising it, there is significance for women outside of marriage and motherhood too and God may be glorified more by your daughter or sister or niece being single without children than He would be by her being married with children. 

We tell very contradictory stories when we say that true fulfilment is found in Jesus alone but speak of single womanhood as an interim period that must be endured until the real fulfilment of getting married and raising children comes, dwarfing all that Jesus is. What of the divorced women who will not remarry, the gay Christian women who have vowed themselves to celibacy, the empty nesters and the mothers whose children are no longer alive, not to mention those women who cannot conceive with their husbands? We say that we relinquish all authority over our own lives and surrender our will to His because we want whatever He wants for our lives but when we are desperate to have our children married by a certain age and frantically manipulate our circumstances to ensure this happens (whether that’s sending them to a specific university with the sole intention of their returning engaged or postponing a planned move to another university in order to keep them in the vicinity of the boy you have set your sights on as your future son-in-law) do we really feel this way?

Hunger is what causes a woman to look at a new woman in their group as interloper rather than sister, communicating a deeply held belief that there can only be one of us in this space. It’s what causes a woman to look another woman up and down as she meets her for the first time, assessing her body and her face intently and mentally deciding whether she is a potential threat or not. It’s what causes you to glare at the girl you were friendly with just days ago because you’ve just seen the boy you like give her his jacket and pretend not to see or hear her as she’s saying goodbye to you. It’s what causes you to ask the only other girl who came to help you with something to leave and tell her that she is no longer needed as soon as boys enter the room. Living in the fear that another woman might be liked more than you comes from being taught that your life begins to have meaning when a boy or a man ‘picks’ you to be his girlfriend, with the expectation of wifehood following soon after. And so the female life after twelve becomes about gaining male approval. The golden calf of marriage is what causes a woman to make it her life mission to dim another woman’s shine at any cost, or to resent a woman for the very kindness that causes her to be the only one to respond to you when everybody else is silent out of fear that it might draw a modicum of attention to her. 

Men, and the things they bring (entrance into wifedom or motherhood) aren’t the prize. Looking more like Jesus on this side of heaven is. If you get the ring by spring but have had to trample on every other woman to get it, denigrating other women at every opportunity available to position yourself as the best option, who (or what) exactly have you been worshipping? Because it can’t be the Jesus that teaches us what is proper treatment for other people, even those women you fear might ‘take’ what you so desperately desire from you. I was to my friend what Meg was to Kate Vaughn, and what many other single Christian women find themselves to be in the minds of their married counterparts because of the idolatry of marriage.

The potentiality for healthy female friendships is blasted by the this of men as the prize of a woman’s life that sects of evangelical Christianity all but encourage. Our relationships with one another would flourish if we challenged this belief, and the accompanying rat-race mentality to the altar that necessitates a view of one another as sworn enemies. My hope is that we would de-centre marriage, motherhood and men from the conception of Christian womanhood and instead acknowledge the biblical truth that our lives are actually primarily for the glory of God whether this is married or unmarried, and that we would see how our relationships with one another can be so pure, mutually supportive and devoid of competition (as friendships should be) as a result. 

1.  The chapter of Little Women that this takes place in is ‘Castles In The Air’.
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