Couples therapy helped me divorce the church

Cindy DiTiberio just asked, “Have you been helped by couples therapy? Hurt by it?”

Both, my babies. Both.

Actually, that’s not true. Even when it hurt, it still helped me on-net. Today I’m going to talk about the “counseling” I got during my now-deceased marriage (RIP).

The problem with marrying at 22 and 25 is that you have no idea who you are or what you want. I don’t think that’s the reason early marriage predicts divorce. I think it’s more a question of who tends to marry young. But, at least in my case, it didn’t help.

I wanted to marry my husband. We’d been together for three years. I met him at 19. I loved him. My family didn’t pressure me. They honestly didn’t really like us together. They saw things I didn’t.

But the church is another story. I felt intense, explicit pressure to wait until marriage to have sex with my husband and to absolutely never even think about cohabitating.

So, with graduation looming, I planned to marry him the same month I graduated at least in part to avoid moving back in with my parents in Huntsville while I looked for a job.

In the year leading up to our wedding, I told him I was worried about his job situation. The gap between my anxiety level and his really should have been a much bigger clue as to how things would eventually shake out. This wasn’t, after all, a disagreement about our wedding colors. I must have assumed that he knew something I didn’t.