#26 What he said: A conversation with my guy friend
| Divorce is a touchy subject in religious circles |
Today's Guy: I'll call him "DC" for divorcing Christian, as he requested to remain anonymous.
How long I've known him: Going on fifteen years.
Divorce is a touchy subject in the Christian faith. Some feel as though divorce is never sanctioned. That vows are promises to your spouse and God, and that divorce brings about a sin against God in that respect. Some feel that divorce is permissible under certain conditions, namely adultery. Yet others feel that divorce is allowable in any situation because God forgives you of all things, including divorce. No matter where you land in that debate, divorce is hard. When you have to reconcile your faith with the ending of your marriage, it is doubly difficult.
ME: We're going to talk about the dissolution of your marriage (lawyer speak for divorce), but what20 I want to know firstly is: Before you were married, how did you operate in the dating world?
DC: Hmm...good question. I don't know that I had a strong grip how to "operate" in the dating world. Because of what I do, I always felt that I had to be relatively secretive to prevent myself and my lady friends from having to deal with too much undue scrutiny. So, most of the time, the relationships I developed were with people I was working with or I had other pre-established connections with, and we operated in private until I felt the connection was strong enough to put them in the public eye.
ME: Did how you viewed dating, determine who you would marry or if you would marry?
DC: Well, I always knew I was going to get married one day, so I was looking at each relationship as a potential marriage relationship. I got to the point early on where once I could be reasonably certain that I couldn't see myself marrying someone, I would end the relationship. My thought was basically that if we're not for each other, then any time we're spending together after that moment of realization is keeping each of us from finding the one who is.
ME: I know you're a student of and practitioner of religion. How did your spiritual/religious views align with your relationship views prior to marriage?
DC: Yes, my faith is very important to me, and I try to be a diligent student and practitioner of Christianity. So my views are completely aligned...my practices though...sigh...sometimes not so much. Of course, the Bible dictates that sex is for married people, and I completely believe that, I just didn't always practice it. I would go through phases of strength/weakness when it came celibacy in relationships, and it wasn't that I didn't still believe that that's what I should be doing. It was more that I failed to be conscientious enough about keeping myself out of compromising positions.
Outside of that, I believe strongly in marriage as a lifelong spiritual institution and I never intended to divorce once I married. I felt like entertaining the possibility of divorce was always like carrying a "get out of jail free" card in case you didn't like how things panned out. I believe that real relationships have ups and downs, and that our strength in them comes from not only our commitment to our spouse, but our commitment to the marriage itself.
ME: I understand how deeply you view the sacred nature of marriage. When you met your wife, did you immediately know you would marry her? If not, at what point did you determine she would be your wife?
DC: I won't say that I immediately knew that I would marry her, but it wasn't long. Something about her just enamored me, and I remember within a week or two of our first date, I told one of my close friends that she was going to be my wife. There were things about her that just enamored me and I after some conversations and a couple get-togethers, I felt like she was it.
ME: Sounds like you knew fairly early that she would be “THE ONE”. How much did you and your wife explore the realities of marriage prior to getting married? (E.g., expectations, conflict resolution, preparation/planning?)
DC: Well, I think we explored what we thought marriage was going to be. We both came from homes with married parents, but her father had been adulterous and mine had been abusive, so neither relationship was one we could really use as a model for our own. We talked a lot about the ideas of marriage, but not the practicalities, like house cleaning, cooking, work/home balance, relationship building, etc.
Even when we did touch on those, I think we did so through lenses of infatuation rather than reality. In addition, we didn't really receive enough counsel prior to engagement or marriage that would help us in dealing with those issues. In retrospect, I think that our premarital advising sessions were woefully inadequate, in that a) we didn't come with enough real questions, and b) the pastor we met with didn't dig deep enough in our conversations to challenge any of our preconceived notions about marriage.
ME: What was marriage like in reality vs expectations?
DC: I think the marriage started off really well, but in some ways it was fool's gold. When we got married, she was still in grad school and my work schedule was very light, meaning that the dynamic that we built wasn't based on the reality that we were going to face when she entered the work force and I returned to my previous position. So, the stress and strain of "real life" didn't hit us until the second year of marriage, and I believe it was that point that small cracks started showing in our union. We had to adjust our roles and practices, and I think we didn't necessarily do a good job communicating desires and expectations to each other.
ME: It seems like a lot of people plan for the good times in marriage, but don’t prepare for the bad. Tell me what you feel led to the ending of your relationship?
DC: Well, although we had our share of ups and downs, there are a few things that I'm certain led us to a point of no return. I don't like conflict, and in order to "avoid" it, many times I would keep concerns quiet rather than put them out in the open, and when I did bring them up it always felt like it ended up being an adversarial exchange. That led me to retreat into myself a bit, creating some distance between us that she wasn't fond of, and over time I felt like I was the only one really trying to push us forward.
For her part there were things I said or did that hurt her feelings, and even though I apologized and thought we were moving on, what came up toward the end was that she had been holding all of that stuff against me anyway, continuing to come back to those years-old wounds as reasons that there were current difficulties between us.
There's more, but to make a long story short, I made a decision and commitment between myself and the Lord that I was not going to give up on us and so I started seeking counsel to improve and mature my marriage perspective, and my efforts to bring us closer together resulted in increased conflict, so it seemed like the more we communicated, the further apart we became.
I started having feelings of paranoia, and they overwhelmed me one day to the point that I confronted her about them, and she revealed to me that she was involved in an affair, which she had entered into six months prior and was an active relationship. After about a week of discussion/arguments in which she repeatedly refused to commit to ending that relationship, and after being in prayer and seeking counsel, I found peace in the decision to divorce her.
ME: Were there ways you could have fixed whatever happened?
DC: I can think of many ways that I could functioned differently in order to prevent some of the conflicts we had; however, there was nothing I could do to "fix" what happened. I was unwilling to reward her unfaithfulness by "competing" with her boyfriend to win her back, and she was unwilling to give him up and make a sincere effort to reestablish our relationship. She wanted time to sort her feelings out, but I was not going to make myself subject to the outcome of her soul-searching process, mainly because I needed to honor my own.
ME: How would you change what happened in your marriage to have a different outcome?
DC: At this point I wouldn't change what happened because I don't want that marriage back. In hindsight, there are so many things I would have changed about how I handled everything, and those things may have led us in a completely different direction. We probably would never had married. Nevertheless, the past is the past, and I've learned a great deal about who I am, who I am trying to be, and what needs to change in me to get there.
I believe that everything happens for a reason, and I think a lot of the reason is because of our choices. There are lessons I needed to learn, and of those, I have learned many simply from reflecting on the rise and demise of my relationship with my ex-wife.
I think that if there were other ways that I could have learned those lessons, then I would have, but it was because of my choices that I was placed in a position so I had to learn the hard way. Now that I have learned them, I have applied that wisdom in moving forward in future relationships.
