Christian separation and divorce: my story
What does the Bible say about divorce? What is a Christian wife to do if her husband suddenly leaves? How should she process her hurt, anger, shame, guilt and other emotions from her as she tries to manage her career and her home while she is suddenly living on a reduced income?
Instead of being two healthy people together, Randy and I were immature and brought our own hurts into our marriage. However, his baggage was deeper and more corrupt than mine. But I didn’t know or understand until it was too late.
Marriage and Codependency
My codependency, the trait that got me hooked up with Randy, came from struggling with introverted social anxiety throughout life. I was always a follower, never an initiator. So when he made his way into my life, I followed him. I didn’t even like it. But I went along with him. I tried to break up with him, but his stalker mentality kept him clinging to me.
She was a compassionate girl who led me to feel sorry for Randy like I might feel sorry for an injured animal. It made perfect sense that I would fall into Randy’s clutches and have trouble getting out of them. And so, after just over a year of dating, she proposed to him.
marital affairs
As they walk out, each party presents their best side. They hide their flaws, flaws that can upset the other and threaten to split the relationship. Accepting each other’s flaws, over time, becomes a channel for growth in a good marriage. The problem I fell into was not due to simple failures. It was due to dysfunction. Mine and yours. There is no way to sugarcoat the deep psychological wounds some people deal with because of their DNA or upbringing.
I am convinced that Satan loves to work with such damaged characters, unhealed people, to create havoc. A dysfunctional man like Randy was the perfect candidate to spin a huge three-dimensional web, perfect for ensnaring me, weak and unsuspecting prey. Satan wanted to hurt me as much as possible for as long as possible, masked behind the idea of love and marriage.
what to do when you leave
And then, after a few years of marriage (which wasn’t really a great marriage), he decided that I wasn’t good enough for him. He did not want to be confined by marriage. If he had just married me for sex, I guess that wasn’t enough to keep him married. And so he left, came back and left again.
As a Christian, I was taught that God hated divorce. He didn’t know if a divorced woman could remarry and still go to heaven. I didn’t know what my options were. So I held on to my fake marriage trying to fix things. Only later did I learn that God created divorce for specific reasons. My story was one of the reasons that fit.
If you’d like to read my story, I recently put it up in a memory available on Amazon. No More Games: When Christian Faith and Marriage Collide. It was time to tell it, for my own good and for whoever could help by reading it.