It Is Better to Marry Than to Burn

Good thing I didn’t listen to Saint Paul after all.

Photo by Wesley Balten on Unsplash

When I look back at my college journals, both the handwriting and the young woman are tightly wound. I took my religion so seriously back then. I filled notebooks with prayer after prayer to a god I believed cared about my every thought and emotion. According to my journals, those thoughts and feelings were only holy when I quoted the Bible or cried out for forgiveness in prayer.

When I was nineteen, I fell in love with a man whose life was a mess. I fell in love with him because he played the guitar, wore his heart on his sleeve, and was taller than me. But I also fell in love with him because he had a life he wanted to “turn over to Jesus.” My God could do anything and redeem anyone. My God could even redeem a divorced man almost nine years older than me. God could change a man’s life so completely, and we could marry and be chosen by God for full-time ministry.

My journals tell the truth. I never found a resolution to marry this man.

See, I found this man very attractive. I liked his hair, laugh, and the way he said my name. And he was very attracted to me. But good Christians didn’t have sex if they weren’t married. I wasn’t even convinced divorced Christians could get married again. I would stand in the Christian bookstores, reading every book I could find on the subject to see if we qualified for a holy loophole. But it could never be justified for sure. So if we couldn’t have sex or get married, we were left with years of angst instead.

Oh, did I mention this man was already a father? Well, he was. Could God’s plan for me be to marry a man so we could have sex, and I could be the mother at nineteen to three little boys? I know, you just choked on your tea. But God had big plans for my life and theirs! And oh, how they needed a mother.

Every Friday night, I babysat the three boys until my boyfriend finished his swing shift. I fed them Kraft macaroni and cheese, read them Bible stories, and tucked them in with prayers and kisses. When their dad got home around midnight, we would make out on the couch and then peel ourselves off of each other, and I would leave. Back in the safety of my childhood bedroom, I would faceplant myself into the carpet and plead in prayer for God to help me stay celibate.

We did everything we could to do the right thing and stay out of bed with each other. And somehow we did. We spent our Saturday nights hosting worship sing-a-longs in his apartment with friends and Sunday mornings in church with only a passionate kiss in between. Is it possible that the strict purity rules my religion dictated saved me from a boatload of complicated heartache? In this instance, I think it did.

After years of debate and frustration, we sat across from each other over lunch, and I finally told him and myself the truth. “I don’t want to marry you. I want to have sex with you.” Breaking that moral code was still not an option, and I had decided I had to move on. “Can’t you see us married to other people and friends?” Oh, hell, no, was his response. In his mind, there was only one happy ending, and it included me as his wife. Thankfully, the day finally came where I ultimately walked away.

When I found this man again twenty years later, thanks to Facebook, the emotions pulled on me like beach waves. Facebook entered my life when I still worked very hard always to do the right thing. I was a fulltime homemaker and educator, teaching my children at home. Doing God’s will was a 24/7 job. But Facebook allowed me to begin to wade into murky waters, where right and wrong weren’t as clear. I wanted to know what happened to those boys and their dad. Who became their mother? Had he married someone he was still with? Did he now believe we had done the right thing, having gone our separate ways?

Maybe a holier and more self-controlled person would have ignored these questions and not pushed the “Add Friend” button. But the dam of perfect living had begun to crack under pressure, and I found myself desperate for some release. Finding and reaching out to ex-boyfriends on Facebook at forty years old was still not what my religion would have permitted me to do. Except, I wanted proof I had made the right choice. It was a risky question that demanded exploration.

More to come…

What was it like for you to find people from your past on Facebook? A complicated question, I know. But do tell, if you want! I’d love to hear your stories.