Ms.

I can't remember a time as a kid when I didn't just dream of being married. That was my number one goal in life, especially once I hit my teen years. I daydreamed about my husband, kept a journal for him, prayed for him, set up a "marriage display" in my bedroom. On the few occasions where someone dared to raise the idea that I might not end up getting married, I was terrified. How could I possibly live if God had called me to be single?

It wasn't like the typical little-girl-dreaming-of-her-wedding-day kind of thing. I actually thought very little of my wedding day. I never put a pillowcase on my head and pretended to be a bride. I didn't think about what kind of flowers or cake I might want. I didn't keep a binder like Monica Geller's. I didn't care much at all about the wedding day. I just wanted to be married.

Well, I got married. And 5 years later, I got divorced. That was an outcome I'd never thought possible.

So now, I'm single again. And people will ask from time to time if I'm dating, or if I've thought about getting remarried, and so on. And while I'm not as opposed to the idea of remarriage someday as I am to the idea of having kids someday...I really don't desire it. If I never date or marry again, I can picture myself being quite happy with that.

I've gotten to a place where I love my solitude. 20 minutes in Walmart and I am just itching to be away from people. Granted, Walmart shoppers are a particularly obnoxious and unaware bunch. But when I unload my cart and sit down in my car, I turn off the radio (if it was on...I often prefer to drive in silence anyway), I turn off the vents, and I just bask in the silence for a few moments before I back out of my parking space.

On one such occasion, it struck me. I really love being single. Not just tolerate it, or have found peace with it. I prefer it. And that's not just because my marriage was less than ideal. It's because I am so autonomous. Deciding when to eat dinner and what to cook is all up to me. What food am I in the mood for? The fact that it is invariably some type of carb-on-carb meal doesn't have to bother anyone else. Because no one else is eating it. And I can be as anal as I want about how my house is organized. (Boy, am I ever anal.) I can decorate the way I want to decorate. I can spend my money the way I want to spend it. It's all up to me. Sure, Peanut puts in her say, but at the end of the day, I don't have to consider how anyone else would like my stuff. And I love it.

As I sat in my car in the Walmart parking lot in utter silence, realizing I love being single, I realized that perhaps...despite all my years of searching for my soul mate...I was actually wired to be single. Because I don't feel lonely. I don't wish I had a man to spend my evenings with. I love my life just the way it is.

There's this idea that if you're single, there's either something wrong with you or you're to be pitied. One Bachelor contest was mocked for being 31 and still single. What was wrong with her that she wasn't married yet by 31, said her competitor. As if being married, or at least in a serious relationship, is a better, more desirable life. And maybe it is for some. But for me...I really don't feel I'm to be pitied. Life is great!

Relationship Status

I got a couple responses to my Dating blog, one in a comment and a couple in person, about the fact that I should put myself out there for a guy to find. After all, no one is going to catch a fish if she's not in the water.

But here's the thing. I used to think that being married would make me happy. I hated 1 Corinthians 7 because I felt like Paul was saying you shouldn't get married, and I just wanted to live happily ever after with my Prince Charming. And yet having been married, I know that it doesn't mean happiness.

So, thinking on this, I read 1 Corinthians 7 tonight. And I realized that Paul's point isn't really that being married or being single is preferable, although he does angle his preferences toward being single. His point is just this: be happy where you are. Don't try to force a relationship status change. I think the reason he emphasizes the joy of singleness is because that's where he was. He was setting the example of his point. He points out that being married isn't the magic cure for unhappiness; in fact, it brings with it troubles and a distraction from ministry. So there's no reason to think that singleness is this curse, that a 70-year-old never-been-married woman is doomed to misery. In fact Paul contests that a widow will be happier if she remains unmarried. This in times where widows were impoverished outcasts!

He sums it up nicely in 1 Corinthians 7:17: "Nevertheless, each one should retain the place in life that the Lord assigned to him and to which God has called him." Bottom line? If you can't be happy being single, you won't be happy being married.

Then I skipped to Song of Solomon. Not the juicy parts, but the verse the Beloved repeats over and over throughout the book: "Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you: Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires." This coming from a woman who has found true love. (We'll temporarily ignore the fact that she shared her husband with 300 other wives, plus all the concubines.) She knows the value of waiting for the right love. Not seeking out something, but being content with her situation until her love came along. Because if you rush "love" with the wrong person, you'll find yourself in a subpar relationship.

It's like when my sister was dropping me off at the train station. And as we're driving my not-quite-3-year old niece asked the age old question, "Are we there yet?" My sister jokingly responded, "Yep, we're here, should we just drop Ali off in the middle of the street?"

Annoyed as we get by the question on car trips, adults fall into this "are we there yet?" mentality all the time on the journey of life. Rather than being content with where we are right now (single or married, in love or not), we want to know if we're "there" yet. Even though, were we to look around, it's a pretty silly question. As for me? I'm not asking if I'm there yet. I know I'm right where God wants me on my life journey, and I'll just keep riding along.

Here's what I'm confident of, no matter what my future holds:

"I am still confident of this: 

I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. 

Wait for the Lord;

Be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord."

- Psalm 27:13-14

Dating

When you go through a divorce, you get a lot of people asking you if you've met somebody new. Pretty quickly, this question comes up. Even before your divorce is final. Here's my answer.

One thing I knew for sure when Dan and I decided to get a divorce—I wasn't interested in any kind of relationship until the divorce was final. As long as I was married on paper, I was going to honor that status.

The DivorceCare curriculum recommends you wait one year to date for every four years you were married. For me, this means one year—October. But they also have a checklist of how to tell when you're "ready," and by those standards I was ready a while ago. I think one thing DivorceCare doesn't really acknowledge in general as they talk about healing is that healing looks different when you were struggling in your marriage, as opposed to being surprised by an affair when you thought everything was fine. Much like losing a loved one to a long battle with cancer vs. a sudden car accident, you grieve differently.

All that to say, I'm neither waiting for October to be open to dating, nor am I planning to start actively looking to date in October.

One of my friends asked me if I'd found any possibly dates, and I said no. He said, "Do you have your fishing pole out?"

"Of course not!" I responded. "I'm the fish! I'm not fishing!"

I've done a lot of initiating in my life. I learned the hard way that this set me up to be the leader in my marriage, and that's not the way I want any possible future relationships to be. So I'm not planning to put out any fishing poles—ever. I'm open to whatever God may have for me, and if that means a life of singleness, I really am OK with that. I've finally realized something I never realized in my pre-married single life (aka my hunt for a husband era): I am a whole person. I don't need to find my "other half." I am complete in Christ.

But if God plans for me to eventually date and even remarry, I'm OK with that too. But I'm not seeking it out. I'm seeking the kingdom of God and a righteous life. I'm seeking to be like Jesus and fall more in love with him each day. And if God brings along a man to do this alongside of me, I'm open to that. But it won't be that I "found" a man, because I'm not looking. I will not set the precedent that I'm the pursuer, the fisher, the leader. God is the one who's going to bring a man with enough initiative to pursue me if that's God's plan for me.

Numb

This blog is going to be pretty personal. But hey, I tell it like it is.

Growing up, I was always a pretty emotional person. Just ask my high school best friend, Scott. He'll vouch for me. So would Jane, my college roommate.

And somewhere in the last 6 years, that changed. It was a gradual process, so much so that I didn't notice it happening until people close to me started saying they wished I'd share my feelings more. It baffled me when they said that. Me? Not sharing my feelings? That's like saying I don't eat enough cookies. (Don't worry, I do.)

But when I took a closer look, I realized they were right. And I realized why. My marriage was painful for a long time. And I'm not putting all that blame on my ex, I'm just saying it was hard. And at some point I developed the ability to become numb to it. I'd never had the ability to numb my emotions before, but I guess when you hurt enough it turns into a callous. So it wasn't that I wasn't sharing my feelings...it was that I wasn't feeling them very often in the first place.

But you know how in the movie Click, when he starts fast forwarding through the negative things like fights with his wife and his kids annoying him, he finds that the remote is automatically skipping times with his wife and kids? Even the good times? That's kind of what happened. When I learned to become numb in the area of my marriage, I didn't just become numb to the pain. I became numb to the relationship. I think that's one reason the divorce process was so much easier for me than it is for most people. Someone in the video at my Divorce Care class said, "You only grieve for the things you care about." And that summed it up for me. I wasn't grieving because I didn't care anymore.

That's not to say I'd given up or stopped loving my husband during the marriage. I was doing what I could to fight for us. It's just that I was doing it numbly. Like drinking a glass of water when your mouth is still numb from the dentist. You can get the water into your stomach, but you haven't enjoyed the refreshment of the cool water.

Anyway, I came to this realization several months ago, it's not new to me now. What is new is that I started to see this habit of numbness creeping up again when something was starting to feel painful. Only it wasn't painful enough yet to become calloused, so I couldn't really numb it. But I found myself subconsciously transferring my emotion of pain and disappointment to anger. Because anger didn't feel quite as bad. So if I could make myself feel that instead, that would be an improvement.

Fortunately, I recognized this in myself within a couple of days. And I'm giving it to God and asking him to help me be emotionally healthy. Not oversensitive, but not numb, either. Because I don't want to become so emotionally numb that I can't feel joy anymore.

Fault

Dan and I are filing for divorce. To many, it may seem sudden. The truth is, it was a long time coming. We've tried counseling, we've tried to make it work, but we could just never get on the same page. I don't want kids; he does. Neither of us did a good job appreciating the other in the way they needed. And that, on top of other problems I don't need to get into on the internet, meant we just drifted further and further apart and fought more and more.

We've talked about divorce in the past. But when it came right down to it, we were kind of playing "relationship chicken." I think we both wanted the other to be the one to say they wanted a divorce. Because then we wouldn't have to own the marriage falling apart. (And I'm just speculating about Dan's side of this—but that was how I felt.) If it had been Dan's call I could say, "Dan decided to leave me" and not take the blame. In the end, it was a pretty mutual decision and I don't think you could pin it on either one of us.

And I realized that the whole relationship chicken thing was silly. Even if it had been all Dan's decision, that wouldn't have meant I was blameless. Relationships that end rarely do so solely because of one person. Usually, the blame is pretty close to 50/50, regardless of who calls it off.

I struggle with the guilt of this decision. I never thought I'd be in this boat. But like I said, we tried counseling, we tried for years to make this work. I feel like we made the only choice we had left.

It's not a bitter divorce. I still have a love for Dan and want the best for him. And he has said he'll always have a place in his heart for me. It's just not enough. Among other things, we were never the right fit for each other, and once the blinders came off that became evident very quickly.

So, that's that. I am relieved in a sense, for all of this unhealthiness to just be done with. I'm also sad that we couldn't make it work. Sad that I broke a vow I made to Dan and to God. Sad that we didn't see the red flags 5 years ago. I'm both scared and excited about being single again. There are things I'm excited about, like not having to pick up dirty socks off the floor, and things I dread, like having to go down in the crawl space. (Spiders—black widows, even?)

What we had wasn't healthy for anyone. I felt daily like I was shrinking—my self-esteem, my ability to be myself, my joy. Dan felt similarly about being himself around me.

Dan isn't a terrible guy. I'm not angry, I'm not bitter. I'm thankful for the way he has supported me and encouraged me to pursue my dreams and come to Group. I really do want him to finish school and be successful in life. I want him to be happy. And I believe he wants that for me.

We've been friendly and mature throughout this whole process, which has made a world of difference. As we decided how to split things, we didn't really fight over anything. He extended the offer for me to keep the puppies, and he's willing to watch them if I'm out of town. I even had him read this before I posted it, because I respect him and didn't want to post anything about this that would bother him. (He said he agrees with all my sentiments.)

My goal in all of this (which I plan to post about later in more detail) was that I'd never be able to look back on this time with regrets about how I treated Dan. I didn't want to think ten years from now, "Wow, I was a jerk" or "How immature I was..." And so far, overall, I feel like we can both say we have treated each other with kindness and respect. If divorce has to happen, that's the way it should be.

Learning to Love (Sacred Marriage chapter 3)

I remember remarking to my college roommate, "You know, this is good practice for marriage." Sharing a room, having to make sacrifices for one another, dealing with who will do what chores - these are all helpful things to prepare you for marriage.

But I never really considered marriage as a good practice field for loving others. That's what chapter 3 of Sacred Marriage focuses on. Thomas writes, "I think marriage is designed to call us out of ourselves and learn to love the 'different.' Put together in the closest situation imaginable...we are forced to respect and appreciate someone who is so radically different."

So often I feel misunderstood. Like there's no one who really gets me and loves me for it. But what if everyone feels that way? What if I'm so focused on myself feeling out of place that I'm neglecting caring for others who need to feel loved? I'm different from Dan, to be sure. But I'm radically different than most people I know. So maybe my differences in personality with Dan are helping me see how to love those I encounter every day who are different.

I do focus on myself more than anyone else. Maybe my puppies come in close. I don't think it's just me. "While our society has become expert in self-care, we seemingly have lost the art of caring for others." I can hardly criticize a society of selfish people when my own life is marked by selfishness.

So I'm going to try to adopt this perspective: marriage is a place to practice love. If I can learn to act lovingly toward Dan no matter what, I can learn to act lovingly to everyone around me.

One more quote I liked, it's by Dan Allender and Tremper Longman III, quoted at the beginning of the chapter: "Every marriage moves either toward enhancing one another's glory or degrading each other." I pray I can move toward enhancing Dan's glory.

Sacred Marriage: Christ and the Church

This week my blogging group is reading chapter 2 of Sacred Marriage. I have to admit, I struggled with this chapter. It took me a while to figure out why. I was reading about how marital analogies teach us about God, and particularly about Christ and the church, and it was just bothering me for some reason.

And then I figured it out. Thomas writes, "If we are consumed with highlighting where our spouses are falling short, we will miss the divine mysteries of marriage and the lessons it has to teach us." Ah ha!  This made it all click. (Though not until I was a couple of pages later and came back to this sentence.)

Here's what was bothering me. In the analogy of Christ and the Church, he's the husband, the Church is the wife. And the Church isn't perfect. Not even close. So I can identify with that metaphor for my side of things. Church = imperfect; Me = imperfect. Not that that's God's design for the Church, but it's reality. So it makes sense to me.

But Christ is the husband in that metaphor. And Christ is perfect. Ergo, Dan should be perfect. Only he's not (and neither is your husband).

I realize this is a biblical analogy, not one Thomas made up, but it took this book to make me realize that the analogy may cause me to place unrealistic expectations on Dan. It may cause me to highlight where he's falling short, the very thing Thomas warns against. If I'm the Church, he can't look at me and say, "come on Church, live up to your name." I do that just fine - live up to an imperfect comparison. But subconsciously, do I look at Dan's imperfections and think, "come on, Jesus, live up to your name."

Love & Respect

I've been thinking a lot about marriage lately. I'm in a Sacred Marriage blogging Bible study, and was just reading Ephesians about marriage. And I started thinking back to when our couple's group read For Men Only and For Women Only, books that give you insight into your spouse's mind.

One chapter, I believe the first one, talked about men's need for respect. It likened it to women's need to feel loved. And a lot of the women in our group struggled with that. I mean, we got it, but it seemed hard. Doesn't respect need to be earned? The book talked about how we expect our husbands to love us even though we aren't always loveable, so we need to respect our husbands even when they aren't acting respectable.

I'm just now starting to wrap my head around this. Here's what I figured out. The words love and respect are both verbs. But they are also both feelings. Our husbands are to always treat us with love (and vice versa), even when we aren't being loveable, because that's what Jesus would do.

And we are always to treat our husbands with respect, even when they aren't being respectable, because that's what Jesus would do. And that's how they need to be treated.

But that's all the verb meanings of the word. Like the way you might show love to a colleague who isn't treating you fairly. Or the way you might show respect to a terrible boss because you value your job security (or are just a good, respectful person). It doesn't mean you actually feel love toward that colleague or respect for that boss.

I don't think wives need to earn love, nor do husbands need to earn respect, when we're talking about the verbs. But the emotion, you do need to earn. Not in every moment, but big picture. For Dan to feel love toward me, I need to act loveably most of the time. If that's the case, he'll make exceptions for those unloveable moments, because he knows that at my core I am a woman he feels love for. Conversely, for me to feel respect toward Dan, he needs to act respectably most of the time. Again, if he is a generally respectable person but falters here and there, that won't impact my feeling, because I respect him as the person I know he is.

So...what do you think? Agree or disagree with my conclusion?

Marriage

So...Ephesians 5 is often cited as a passage about how to be married. Specifically, people look at verses 22-33, and they say that wives are supposed to submit to their husbands, and husbands are supposed to love their wives with Christ's sacrificial love, and that's what our roles are.

But reading it in context, I don't think that's what it means. Ladies, we don't get out of the sacrificial love bit. 5:2 says to a general audience: "Live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God." Husbands aren't the only ones called to love with a sacrificial love. We're all called to love that way - not just our spouses, but everyone.

And men, you don't get out of submitting, either. Verse 21 says (still to a general audience): "Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ." Everyone is supposed to be submissive, putting others' needs before their own. Not just to spouses, but to everyone.

The call was tough enough when we thought all we had to do was submit to our husbands and love our wives. But as it turns out, we all have to submit and we all have to love sacrificially. It's how Jesus lived, after all.

Sacred Marriage (Ch. 1)

I'm in a blogging Bible study on the book Sacred Marriage. We're all reading a chapter every couple of weeks and blogging about it. I've read this book before, but I think it was during our engagement so I have a very different perspective now. Here are my thoughts on chapter 1.

The point of the book is that marriage isn't about becoming happy, but becoming holy. That like solitude for hermits, marriage can be a spiritual discipline that shapes us into the image of Christ. On page 21, Gary Thomas says, "If you want to become more like Jesus, I can't imagine any better thing to do than get married. Being married forces you to face some character issues you'd never have to face otherwise." He later talks about immorality like selfishness, anger, control-mongering, and hatred, that can be revealed through the marriage relationship.

In my first reading of the book, I wrote near this section: "True...I've really had to become a lot less selfish and I've learned a lot about my weaknesses." But here's my problem...I think I stopped. I may have learned that in the beginning. But somewhere along the line I think I decided I was good enough as a person. And sure, I could do things to be a more romantic wife, but I didn't need to grow in those spiritual areas. At least not through marriage. It's so not true, but somehow I've convinced myself of that.

And since I convinced myself of that, I think I convinced myself that I am inherently loveable, so it shouldn't be hard for Dan to love me. But just after reading this, I sang a song in church that said, "God, I'm amazed by you...How you love me." And I thought...God's love is amazing because I'm not inherently loveable. It's quite a feat for him to love me, actually. I was expecting Dan to love me like God does, forgetting what a feat that is. And this line from the book struck me: "But my wife can't be God, and I was created with a spirit that craves God. Anything less than God, and I'll feel an ache."

I'm excited to keep reading because this isn't a marriage how-to book. It's a book to help me see marriage as a tool to help me grow closer to God and reflect his character. Because as Thomas writes on page 24, "...what [we] crave more than anything else is to be intimately close to the God who made us. If that relationship is right, we won't make such severe demands on our marriage...expecting each other to compensate for spiritual emptiness."

2 Minutes

I can't remember where I read this suggestion, but I believe it was a marriage book I read when we were dating. The suggestion, however, is a great life tool for any area of your life. Here it is:

If something you need to do takes less than two minutes to do, do it now.

The book talked about things like recycling the tuna can you just used, loading a glass you had a lemonade in, or picking up a tissue you attempted to throw in the garbage but missed. This little secret, it suggested, could spare you a lot of fights about things piling up and going undone.

That may be true, but marriage aside, I think this is just plain good advice. For work, for a house you occupy by yourself or with a roommate, for personal goals, etc. It can be so overwhelming when a to-do list gets longer and longer - even if half the things on the list are two minute (or less) jobs. So save yourself the agony of feeling overwhelmed by keeping the little things off your plate.