Deconstructing My Marriage

A personal post about grieving the life I'll never know

I’m gonna spoil this right at the top to tell you this isn’t a divorce announcement. I don’t want to clickbait anyone. But I’m getting a little more personal than I usually do to share about just how hard it can be—and has been—when deconstruction hits your marriage.

My dad giving me away on June 19, 2010

Last week, in line for Space Mountain, I thought about getting a divorce.

I met my husband in January of 2009. He lived in Washington DC at the time and I lived in Orange County, California. We met at a wedding, then fell in love long-distance on the telephone. He made me feel seen and heard for the first time, and by May 2009 he had uprooted his whole life to move here and date me. We were engaged by December of 2009, and married in June 2010, just 18 months after meeting. 

It wasn’t long enough for any kind of wise consideration, but still way too long for two sexually frustrated adults under the thumb of purity culture. He was 28 and I was 27, pretty old to be single in our evangelical cultures, and as the saying goes, “we just knew.” Why wait and fall into temptation?

I had peace about our relationship, which I believed to be confirmation from the Holy Spirit. That peace, along with a few “divine appointments” lining up jobs and housing confirmed for us that God was, indeed, shining his face upon our relationship. We believed in marriage as an institution, and we believed that divorce, while a valid option for some people, wasn’t an option for us. 

We said I do in church, cried through our vows and drove away from our reception into our new life together. 

Where, like many of you, we crashed into the stark reality of being in an intimate relationship where neither party has done any work on themselves or their personal trauma.

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For a decade we muddled through without any therapy, counseling, or even friends we could be transparent with.

We just “prayed together” and tried to forgive and learn how to communicate. We’re pretty nice people in general, and we did okay at it. We had job ups and downs, threw two kids into the mix, and when I lost my ministry job, we both realized we were pretty tired of institutionalized religion and agreed to step away from it all together.

But there was always a hidden tension that came into the marriage with us; something we couldn’t explain or even name, a dark space between us that we felt but couldn’t seem to remove or to bridge, isolating us further and further as the years went on.

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Me on my honeymoon, June 2010.

The messy thing about any kind of faith deconstruction or worldview shift is that you can never isolate it just to one part of your life. 

When your values change, every part of your life that was built on those values trembles in the wake, shattering and destabilizing your foundations.

When my husband and I started questioning our faith, we didn’t realize that it was only a matter of time before we would have to challenge all the choices we made under our faith-based value system… including the choosing of each other. 

Once we both came out of denial and started telling the truth about so many other aspects of our lives, we could no longer ignore that dark space and the deep cracks in our relationship, some reaching all the way back to the beginning. 

We needed to deconstruct our marriage just as much as we needed to deconstruct our faith, and we were terrified to see if it could be rebuilt again.

On some level, we realized that the only way our marriage will survive is if we risk it all, and grant each other the freedom to choose whether to continue together, or not. We each have to feel like we can make a choice based on our new way of seeing the world, and know that if we do continue together, it’s because we both want to—and not because once upon a time, a religion we don’t believe in anymore gave us bad information about how to pick a partner.

We’ve both developed too much respect for ourselves to simply grandfather each other into a life-partnership, but we also have too much respect for our history and joint life to dismiss it without a fight.

I know this isn’t specific to just former evangelicals or to married people or to straight people. I have a hunch that these questions rise up when any relationship starts racking up the years together. Everyone is kind of a ninnymuggins when they’re young, and we aren’t the only people in committed partnerships having to face the truth that the reasons we chose a partner don’t stand up anymore.

But if you’re going to try to keep a family together, radical honesty and the freedom to choose is the only way forward. So forward we went.

Pregnant with my first child in May 2014

It hasn’t been easy, or fun, at all.

We haven’t thrown ourselves a vow renewal party just yet. There have been months we didn’t know if we would make it. We’ve given hours and hours to marriage therapy and therapy homework, each of us having to own our personal baggage and accept each other’s trauma.

We also haven’t always been on the same wavelength, which means that sometimes one person can feel great about the relationship while the other needs to venture into the dark space to try on words like “separation” and “mistake” and “custody agreement” to see if they make more sense than “for better or for worse.”  

I don’t want to get a divorce. Relationship woes aside, pragmatically speaking, it would make life with two kids really complicated, and really expensive. I’m also not navigating things like abuse, alcoholism, infidelity, emotional stonewalling or irreconcilable issues that make it impossible to stay.

But I do still want to feel like I have a choice to stay.

I do want to feel like I’m allowed to change my mind about the things I decided when I was under the spell of Christian leaders and theology that didn’t have my best interests at heart. I want to know that if I ever find myself to be deeply unhappy, that I 100% have the freedom to choose a new direction for myself.

So, it was at Disneyland, standing in a 60-minute line through the 80’s neon splendor of Space Mountain, that the questions I’d been asking myself subconsciously for years finally found their way into my conscious mind. It was my turn to reckon with the dark space, to give myself permission to honestly consider leaving my marriage, and to try on the idea of what reality would look like if I were to take a different path.

In the hospital with my second baby, November 2016.

This level of self-honesty was incredibly painful. For days I felt raw, scared, and disoriented.

And yet it also gave me so much helpful information.

Being radically honest and fully free to choose my future allowed me to name the real feelings behind all the vague anger and frustration I’ve had surrounding my marriage and other life choices.

For the first time, I’m able to name the dark space: it’s the graveyard of all the unmet expectations and dreams we’ve racked up over the years, and all the unrequited hopes for life that we’ve barely allowed ourselves to acknowledge, let alone grieve.

Giving myself permission to REALLY consider leaving is what finally allowed me to stop blaming that 27-year-old woman in the wedding dress, and grieve with her instead that she was sold an idea of marriage from a publishing industry and a romance-obsessed culture, and discovered instead that two broken people in love do not a fairytale make.

Giving myself permission to grieve with her also allowed me to release some of the anger I feel toward both my partner and myself, and realize that maybe it wasn’t his fault or my fault that we’ve ended up here.

We thought we were doing the right thing to get what we wanted… 

And we just plain old got duped.

I remember holding my kids’ hands at this beach and pleading with God to save me from the despair I was feeling in my pastoral job and my marriage, two months before I was fired from the church and started deconstructing, November 2018.

It’s neither his fault or my fault that:

• Purity culture painted an unrealistic picture of marriage.

• 1,000 sermons on how to have a godly marriage proved to be worthless advice.

• We didn’t know what really mattered in picking a life partner.

• We thought that praying and reading the Bible would be enough to keep a marriage together.

• We didn’t know that therapy was a thing that could help us.

• We thought that if we could have kids, that was what we should do.

We were products of our environment, faithful adherants to the path of good evangelical kids, and now we’re here, with full recognition of all the choices we forfeited and all the potential we’ll never realize.

It is a lot, and all of it is worth grieving as inconveniently, loudly and long as it takes.

We could have known better, but we didn’t, and now we have to take responsibility for that.

But we also have the autonomy to decide what happens next.

In NYC for my 40th birthday trip by myself, September 2023. My necklace says I am Strong, Brave, Loved, and you can see in my face that I’m starting to believe it.

When you actually process the ambiguous grief of the life you’ll never live, it can clear your vision to see the reality of your present without the lens of regret.

It was in weeping with Joy the bride that I saw the first glimmer of hope that I, Joy the forty-year-old woman, might be able to *finally* let go of the life and marriage she always wanted and embrace the life and marriage that she has.

At this point, my spouse and I both agree that even though we had the wrong reasons, we managed to pick the right person, and that’s worth staying and fighting for.

But I know each person reading this is at a different place in that choosing.

Some of you have decided that leaving is the loving way.

Some of you have decided to stay and fight.

Some of you are terrified to realize you have a choice.

Some of you are grateful to not have to deal with this.

Some of you have been unpartnered for longer than you would like.

Every way you go is hard.

So from one woman in the thick of rewriting her love story with herself and her real life relationships to you, I wish you sincerely the most wisdom, the most gentleness, and the most honesty with yourself as you figure it out.

Happy Valentine’s Day,

Joy

P.S. This post has been read and approved for sharing by my husband, with the promise that it does not contain any pictures of him inside.

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