Surrendering the Fated Romance

Earlier this week, I jumped on a Zoom call with a dear friend of mine (the fabulous, insightful and brave as heck, Carrie Maya). We were just two friends, chatting, catching up, pretending to attempt to do some work side by side because this whole work from home jam can be tough. And then we started talking about dating. And purity culture. And the fated romances we had both been taught to wait for. In past lives, we had sung the songs (Cue Rebecca St. James’ “Wait for me”), and we had read the books, the most famous of which would be Josh Harris’s “I kissed dating goodbye” (although now, as I dive into the archives, purity culture had gone before him. Long before him. I kinda feel like he was set up, just like we were).

As Carrie started talking about the fated romance and musing about how brave I was to actually be tiptoeing into the weird waters of dating, I mused that in a way, I felt like I was still saving myself for marriage, and found it difficult to get past that notion. It rang true for both of us - unnervingly so. In a “Why the heck did I acknowledge that?” kind of way.

Carrie and I come from slightly different places on this, because our deconstruction journeys and our romantic lives have been different. But it affected us both anyway. You can read her courageous dialogue on it here, and it wouldn’t even slightly do it justice for me to try and explain the complexity and honesty with which she approached this topic. Trigger warnings apply.

My position is this: I waited for “the one.” We were set up by my dad, who was also our pastor. After our breakup, our reunion didn’t happen until it was essentially green-lit by the presiding apostle/prophet over our then-church’s network. I was surrounded by “prophets” and people in the know. But nobody saw it coming that gay conversion therapy wouldn’t work. And nobody mentioned to me that there was any inkling of the possibility that he was truly gay. I walked, completely naive and uninformed, into a situation that could not be won. This relationship was always destined for divorce.

It’s complicated. Knowing all of this, knowing I have the absolute right to be angry (and I am), I would also do it all over again if I had of known how our lives would pan out.

I had the fated romance. A beautiful, decade long relationship with an incredible man. We rescued each other. We had two incredible (and cute) kids together. We moved mountains. We laughed. We cried. We gained. We lost. We were meant for each other.

I’m also divorcing. Because you can’t cure gay. Because gay isn’t a disease. It isn’t wrong. It isn’t even unbiblical when you read that book without bias or bad translation. I’m proud of him for taking on deconstruction and the navigating of his sexuality (and acceptance thereof) with such selflessness and integrity. Our marriage didn’t dissolve. It evolved beyond.

Anyway. Here I am at age 37, dating for the first time in my life. Completely clueless about how to go about that. I know I’m attractive, stable, intelligent, financially solvent, funny, capable, and fascinating. But golly gee wouldn’t it be nice if I could actually feel anything.

Purity culture, courtship culture, the message that you shouldn’t allow emotional entanglements or any physical contact with a person until you were sure they were “the one” left me feeling almost disembodied. It sure made the honeymoon…different. Upon reading other accounts of purity culture deconstruction, I see that is a common thing.

Disembodiment seems like something a lot of ex-evangelicals feel. When you were raised in an environment that relied so heavily on the “prophetic unction” you learn to look for the feeling. You learn to join that feeling with what you believe to be the “still small voice of God.” You also learn in many circles that, when it comes to relationships, a woman’s worth is connected to her marital status. So as a woman, I let myself dull a bubbly personality lest I be confused for flirtatious. I learned to pray about how I should approach certain relationships so I could get the cosmic green light to feel for anyone. After my first breakup with P (my now ex-husband), I remember heading around to my parents place to confide in my mother. To cry on her shoulder. She ended up 'anointing me with oil’ and praying to cut the soul ties between me and P.

Comfort came in the form of deliverance (which those outside church would call a slightly gentler form of ‘exorcism’). It wasn’t…comforting. Although I think its possible my mother may have been doing what she was instructed to do, or perhaps what she thought was best. I don’t blame her for this. We were all part of a system.

So I guess what I’m saying is this: we deconstructed ones, we post-Christians, or exvangelicals, or whatever you want to call us - we have a mixed relationship with our bodies. On one hand we learned to look to our gut feeling as a way to connect with “God” and hear from him. We also learned to divorce ourselves from our bodies as we navigated courtship and relationships. What is chemistry? Golly gee, I dunno.

All I know is that I can sit across the table from a good looking, employed, stable, financially solvent, intelligent, witty, nice-smelling (hey that’s important) man and feel nothing. Only the feeling that I should be attracted to him.

I can’t quite run with should. And my conversation with Carrie made it clear why. I’m still waiting for God, or some higher authority to give the green light. I had three higher authorities say “yes” to my marriage with P. Three people/entities I could blame for my divorce. P isn’t one of them. I’m not one of them. Dammit, I don’t even call our relationship a failed marriage. I view it as wildly successful.

But still, isn’t it nice to have someone to blame. People often ask me why people join cults. The truest answer is, you don’t. You join the nicest group of people you’ve ever met, make the best friends you’ve ever had, are introduced to the highest “truth” you’ve ever heard, enter a thought reform process and then find that its too darn hard to leave because of all that you will lose or of all the ways you’ll be exposed if you do. But there’s another inkling that nips at my heels.

Its this: We all want to live empowered lives. But we also don’t want to be held responsible if it all comes crashing down. If you invest in the wrong business, or marry the wrong person, or if you fall ill, or are the victim of a crime. Cult’s and high demand groups, even healthier religions, give us an out. We can say ‘God’ willed it and we just have to make sense of it all. We can say ‘we followed God’ or whatever deity we are following, and absolve ourselves of the feeling that we got it wrong. We also can’t take credit if we get it right. Glory be to Jesus. Who ironically never sought glory.

So back to that disembodied feeling. I didn’t really bother with dating during Covid. I just did a rough count and I think over the last 13 months I’ve been on 16 first dates and 3 second dates. I’m a conservative type when it comes to dating - I’ll tell you that up front. But I can say that every single date I’ve been on included wonderful conversation (apart from that one dude who really just wanted to sell me ice - not kidding). But I left feeling nothing. I left feeling confusion over what chemistry should feel like. I had a glass of wine with an old friend and, at the time I was in the early stages of dating a lovely guy. But my friend asked “Does any part of you want to jump the table and pash him?”

I said no. On paper, he was everything. But I couldn’t feel a damn thing. So the third date never happened.

My “aha” moment happened with my therapist. She helped me discover that the way I coped with leaving the prophetic movement, the way I coped with the PTSD from abuse that happened in religious settings, was to move out of my feelings and into my head. While I can aspire to feel things and rationalise things, the former is deeply uncomfortable for me while the latter gives me a feeling of safety and even superiority. I can rationalise what happened to me, and what my experiences of life have been. It’s easier than feeling them.

But you can’t rationalise love or chemistry, can you?

So I’m learning a few things. I’m learning to ask myself “what do I think about this?” and then move quickly to “what do I feel about this, both physically and emotionally?” And then to repeat that cycle of “head” and. “body.” I say “body” because a gut feeling is literally in your gut (enteric nervous system if you want to be techy about it). Our emotions also manifest in physical tells - shaking, elevated heart rate, fuzzy head, sweating, other uh, happier sensations. But we in church were erroneously taught that the body was evil. As it turns out, it isn’t. Our body is a temple. A life-sustaining, intelligent, and sacred thing that should not be absent from our experience of life.

It is but one of the many ways church taught me contradictions that I’m now unravelling. I was taught that my thoughts could not be trusted. Only the spirit. I was taught that my body was to be subjugated, but also that it was a temple. There are so many things left to unravel.

Think and feel. Think and feel. It’s okay to do both. My body isn’t evil. My thoughts are not evil. I am not evil.

I suppose dating is a small act of courage. It is so because I am deciding to own my future; mistakes and successes. I am deciding to ignore the threats of judgement and accept that my own assessment of risk and my efforts to keep myself safe are okay. I am unlearning shame. I am unlearning fear. I am unlearning the idea of the divine as an old white man in the sky who watches everything with a judgemental eye and a trident full of lightening ready to strike me. I am learning to laugh at the “cloud of witnesses” notion that literally had me wondering whether they watched me all the time, or whether I got to sit on the loo, or lather myself up in the shower unsupervised.

Do I need to date? No. Am I unhappy single? No. But this small act of courage helps me reclaim who I always should have been: a woman who experiences life fully, who is present in her body and not divorced from it, who can feel life and not just rationalise it.

I don’t think I believe in “the one” anymore. I certainly don’t believe in one “gold standard” future and anything else being substandard. I believe we get to design the lives we want. We get to create a beautiful masterpiece. And if there are mistakes or “didn’t expect that” moments, so be it. It doesn’t affect our value as people.

I write this today because I know there are so darn many of us who feel this way. Or think this way. This is deconstruction, hey. Its confronting the things we were taught, both implicitly and explicitly, and in rebuilding the lives we deserve, having left behind the Calvinist bullshit that has us believe that we are dirty, depraved and unworthy.

Hey - you are worthy, you are good, you are beautiful, not defined by your mistakes, not prohibited from fully revelling in the joy or success your life may bring. Read that line as many times as you need to. It’s the truth.