What does the Bible say about divorce? What should a Christian wife do if her husband leaves suddenly? How should she process her grievance, 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 wounds 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 caused me to become involved with Randy, stemmed from struggling with introverted social anxiety throughout my 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 the way I might feel sorry for a wounded animal. It made perfect sense that I would fall into Randy’s clutches and have trouble getting out of it. And so, after just over a year of dating, she proposed to him.
matrimonial affairs
As they date, each party presents their best side. They hide their flaws, flaws that can annoy the other and threaten to split the relationship. Accepting each other’s flaws, over time, becomes a channel of 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’s no sugarcoating 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 do me as much damage 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 enough for him. He didn’t want to be confined by marriage. If he had 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 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. It was only later that I learned 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 in a memory available on Amazon. No More Games: When Christian Faith and Marriage Collide. It was time to tell it, for my sake and for whoever could help by reading it.