Answer

If I Never Marry in This Life, Can I Still Have an Eternal Family?

You have been told that eternal marriage is required for exaltation, and you are not married, and there is no sign of it changing. Holding both of those at once can make the doctrine feel like a door closing on you through no decision of your own.

Yes, you can. Eternal marriage is required for exaltation, and you do not have to receive that sealing in this life to receive the blessing. Those two facts sit together, and holding only the first is what turns this question into a closed door. No one will be denied eternal life for an opportunity they never had.

Eternal Truths

The requirement describes the destination, not a hurdle placed in front of it. The Lord taught that the highest degree of the celestial glory is entered through the new and everlasting covenant of marriage (Doctrine and Covenants 131:1-4). Exaltation is not a status conferred on an individual. It is a relationship, and the sealing is what establishes it.

God judges an opportunity you never got by what you wanted and how you lived. Joseph Smith was shown that the Lord judges “according to the desire of their hearts” (Doctrine and Covenants 137:7-9). That principle was taught about those who die without the gospel, and it does not become narrower when applied to marriage.

Apostles have said this plainly rather than gently. Elder D. Todd Christofferson addressed those without marriage or children in “Why Marriage, Why Family”, naming the reasons plainly, including a lack of viable prospects and same-sex attraction, and then testifying that the Atonement of Jesus Christ “has anticipated and, in the end, will compensate all deprivation and loss for those who turn to Him,” and that “no one is predestined to receive less than all that the Father has.” That is stated without hedging, which is rare.

What Can Make This Confusing?

In a Church that talks about families constantly, it is easy to start reading your worth off your relationship status. Nothing in the doctrine supports that and plenty of it contradicts it, but the culture around the doctrine can teach it anyway, one lesson and one comment at a time. The other confusion is thinking the covenant path begins at marriage. It does not. It begins at baptism, for everyone.

Questions to Think About

• Have I started using my relationship status as a measure of my standing before God?
• Which covenants are available to me right now that I have not made or am not keeping?
• What am I postponing until a marriage that has not arrived?

What You Can Do

Go to the temple this month if you are endowed, and start the conversation about being endowed if you are not. People who describe finding purpose in the temple while single are not describing a consolation prize. They are describing the covenant path itself. If your situation is more complicated, divorced, widowed, or living faithfully with same-sex attraction, the promise was made without conditions about how you arrived here. The essay behind this Answer works through it in more detail.

Jesus Christ has promised that nothing you were never given the chance to receive will be held against you, and He can give you a full life now rather than a waiting room.