What does the Bible say about divorce? What is a Christian wife to do if her husband suddenly leaves? How should she process her grief, anger, embarrassment, guilt, and other emotions while trying to manage her career and home while suddenly living on a reduced income?
Instead of being two healthy people coming together, Randy and I were both immature and brought our own wounds into our marriage. His baggage was deeper and more corrupt than mine, though. But I didn’t know or understand it until much too late.
Marriage and Codependency
My codependency-the trait that caused me to become entangled with Randy-stemmed from struggling with introverted social anxiety throughout life. I was always a follower, never an initiator. So, when he worked his way into my life, I followed. I didn’t even like him. But I went along with him. I tried to break up with him, but his stalker mentality kept him hanging onto me.
I was a compassionate girl which 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 grips and have trouble getting out of them. And so, after dating a little more than a year, he proposed marriage.
Marriage Issues
While dating, each party puts forth their best side. They hide their flaws-flaws that can bother each other and threaten to divide the relationship. Accepting each other’s flaws, over time, becomes a channel for growth in a good marriage. The trouble I fell into wasn’t because of simple flaws. It was because of dysfunction. Mine and his. There’s no sugar-coating the deep psychological wounds some people deal with from their DNA or upbringing.
I’m convinced Satan loves to work with such damaged characters-unhealed people-to create havoc. A dysfunctional man such as Randy made the perfect candidate for spinning an enormous three-dimensional web, perfect to trap me, a weak unsuspecting prey. Satan wanted to do as much damage as possible to me for as long as he could, masked behind the idea of love and marriage.
What to Do When He Leaves
And then, after a few years of marriage (which really wasn’t much of a marriage), he decided I wasn’t enough for him. He didn’t want to be confined by marriage. If he’d simply 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 God hated divorce. I didn’t know if a divorced woman could remarry and still go to heaven. I didn’t know what my options were. So I hung on to my fake marriage trying to work things out. Only later did I learn God created divorce for specific reasons. My story was one of the reasons that fit.
If you’d like to read my story, I’ve recently put it into a memoir available on Amazon No More Games: When Christian Faith and Marriage Collide. It was time to tell it, for my sake and for the sake of whomever might be helped by reading it.
