Divorce: When "Love, Honor and Cherish" is a Lie

Divorce. I was actually filing for divorce.

How? How had I gotten here? I'm a pastor. I don't divorce. I just don't. I told myself when things started going downhill it didn't matter how off-kilter things got—I'd made a vow that I would stay with and support this person "for better or for worse, till death parts us." Despite the fact that seven months after we were married he was arrested by Federal Marshals (for the first, but not last time) and officially diagnosed with a fun cocktail of personality disorders, I still held on. I'd taken a vow. A vow before God that I could not break. I'd just have to get through it... somehow. The manipulation, the emotional abuse, that was just a part of the deal I'd made.

Yet, here I was, sitting across from an attorney having to answer the question, "So why do you want a divorce?" and hearing me answer, "Because my husband's crazy. And he's in prison. And I just can't do this anymore." That was pretty much all I said at that point because the tears started to stream and wouldn't stop throughout the rest of the meeting. She asked a few more standard questions that I don't remember before I finally left her office a blubbering mess and wound up a puddle on my living room floor while a friend kept telling me to try to keep breathing.

Anger would soon replace a lot of my grief as I began to delve into evidence, emails and paperwork which revealed that the individual I thought I'd married was not the person I actually married. I won't go into details, but it was a rabbit hole of lies, threats, protection orders, and deceptions dating back two decades that I was completely unaware of. Once I'd unmasked the facade, the full power of his narcissistic rage was unleashed upon me and I spent the next year fending off attacks that tried to destroy me personally, professionally, and financially.

There's nothing easy about divorce. Even if you're not going through the trauma of realizing you have been married to a sociopath who'd been manipulating and emotionally abusing you for years, divorce still is a painful, painful thing. It's like the ripping apart of your soul and for a while, you just hemorrhage and wonder if the bleeding will ever stop, or if you'll finally just be emptied of everything and it's just going to eventually kill you.

And then there's that whole "I'm a pastor and I took a vow, how can I do this?" struggle I was facing. I knew I could not keep living the way I'd been living the past three years, but divorce? How could I do that either? I have to stand up in front of hundreds of people EVERY weekend and talk about faith, commitment... all those things that were supposed to be a part of my marriage.

Yet, here I was, penning a letter explaining to 400 households how my marriage had utterly failed.

Guilt. Shame. Embarrassment. Yeah, that doesn't even touch the surface of emotions I was feeling.

Now, I'll grant you, being told by my therapist, "You do realize you're married to a sociopath, right?" helped make that decision a little easier, but it would still take me some time to realize that for all these years, I'd been focusing on the wrong part of the vow.

Most people do. The part most people cite is that whole "for better or for worse until death parts us" bit and think "that was my vow. This is just the 'worse' that we promised to stick through them on."

Perhaps. But... we seem to always forget that there was a first part to that vow. There was a promise to "love, honor and cherish... for better or for worse until death parts us."

In many marriages, the first part of that vow, "to love, honor and cherish," is so egregiously violated, the second part becomes a moot point. Because if you're not loving, honoring and cherishing the person you married, what did you promise to do?

I know I did not stand up there in front of my pastor and colleague on my wedding day and state, "I promise to put up with all sorts of lies, abuse, and manipulation until I'm a completely broken shell of a person, for better or for worse, until death parts us." Pretty sure that was NOT the vow I took.

Pretty sure the vow he took as well was a promise to love, honor and cherish me, too—and given that vow was broken the moment he said it because there was this pile of lies he was hiding from me, it kind of made the rest of the vow null and void.

I'm also pretty sure God's intention for marriage is that two whole people are brought together into a whole relationship. Sort of like multiplication.  My fabulous therapist explained it to me like this... 1x1=1. Two whole people equal a whole and healthy relationship. But when you only bring half of one person into a relationship... 1x1/2 = 1/2. God's intent is not that our relationship be only half a relationship, or if two halves are brought together, they only equal a quarter of a relationship. Or worse yet... when you try to combine a whole, healthy person with someone who is so deceptive that their entire being is a lie, then you get: 1x0=0. The whole person becomes broken down and negated by the vacuum and chaos of the other. Who they were as a person gets totally annihilated in the midst of this destructive relationship.

There literally is no relationship at that point. At least nothing that is recognizable in the way in which God intends human marital relationships. The relationship is dead.

"Until death parts us." Most of us think this death is physical death, but the death of the relationship is a real thing, too. It lies shattered on the pile of hurt and deception that's been building up.

Marriage is a relationship that yes, requires work and a lot of self-sacrifice on both parts. It's not the romantic happily ever after we imagine from Disney movies. It involves doing things you don't want to do sometimes. It involves forgiving when you're still angry. It involves communication and honesty. But when both parties realize this is a partnership and they've been brought together to help edify and strengthen the other—that's when the marriage vow is being fulfilled. No, it is not easy and I'm not talking about quirky habits where they don't shut cabinet doors or toilet seats, or maybe they aren't quite the perfect person you once idolized them to be, or that they can't make mistakes... sometimes big mistakes. Disappointment in your marriage—that it wasn't the fairy tale you envisioned—and a destructive marriage are not the same thing.

People make mistakes in relationships. Its inevitable. Marriage does not mean there won't be mistakes, there won't be errors, there won't be things that you do that harm your spouse. That's going to happen. That's where forgiveness and love—by both parties—has to come in.

When the Bible describes the marital bond, it talks about serving one another out of reverence for Christ. (Ephesians 5:21) It also states that men are to love their wives the same way they love themselves. They should not abuse themselves and likewise should not abuse their spouse.

Abuse comes in many forms. Physical. Emotional. Mental.

Thus there has to come a point where forgiving over and over for the same harmful thing, being beaten down, being made to feel on a regular basis like your life is spinning out of control for no better reason than your spouse can't seem to learn to follow ANY rules and cares about no one but himself, is leading you down a path that has destroyed you rather than edified you... that's when you need to realize your marriage is destructive and nothing good will come from you staying together, other than you fulfill his need to be a toy he can yank around at his whim. That you're just a chess piece in his weird and twisted game. You become less of a person at that point. You are not a partner, you are a pawn.

God did not create you—or marriage—so that you would spend your life as a game piece, as an anxious mess, fearful of the person you share your life and bed with, wondering when the narcissistic rage is going to become more than just word vomit and turn physically violent.

That's not a marriage. That's not a partnership. That's its own prison sentence into destruction.

And that is not the vow you took. The vow you both took was broken long ago. Dissolving the legality of that marriage at this point is just paperwork because it ceased being a marriage—or in some cases never really was a marriage—due to the deceptive nature of one of the participants. The vow was a lie from the start, and thus invalid.

Now this is not an affirmation that one can just decide to get divorced when things get a little rough. This is about destructive, harmful marriages that will never BE a marriage, but will only be a means through which one person controls and harms another in some way. Where all the love, care and support in the world you pour into it falls into an empty abyss that simply feeds the monster.

Divorce stinks. There's no getting around that. Even when you know it's what has to happen for your own survival, it still hurts in your heart like no other pain you've ever felt before.

The bright spot is that there IS healing. Gaping wounds eventually heal over and become scars. Perhaps a bit more hardened than before, and the scar tissue never disappears, but the hemorrhaging eventually stops. Blood flow eventually returns to the other parts of your body and life. Life will never be the same, but you have a future now that has hope. A future that God continues to be a part of and guides you through. A future that involves a WHOLE you.

Some day, maybe even all the walls you've built up and surrounded yourself with so that you don't ever wind up in that situation again begin to crumble a little. But don't rush it. We need our walls sometimes to protect ourselves so our healing can be complete. Just be sure to leave a gate that can be opened at some point by someone, because when we keep everything out, we also keep everything in that eventually needs to be shared with others and the world.