another question about divorce

This pertains to things we have shared via private email but I'll be a little more open here, for the sake of those reading the blog who may be similarly confused.

Given what you know of my marriage, could I, as a Christian, divorce and marry again from your point of view? My feelings won't be hurt no matter what you say, so don't hold back although some details, as I know you know, aren't meant to be public.

Given how I was raised, with the belief that divorce is always wrong and that there is no Christian remarriage possible, no matter what has been done to you, given the fact that to this day, in the church in which I was raised (okay so I only attended until I was 14/15, something like that), divorced people are still not allowed to participate in Communion, and given the fact that in the eyes of many, unless you actually repent a divorce, you are going to go to Hell, it was not easy for me to leave my husband.

I believe I have stated before that I don't go to church, except at Christmas and for funerals and weddings, and have never been baptised in any church and yet, still, it was so very hard to leave. And Catholics talk about "Catholic guilt." Humph. Mennonites have more than their fair share of Mennonite guilt.

I am seventy-five percent sure that my husband never cheated on me physically, although I think that it was only that the opportunity did not present itself. My husband had never been faithful to any woman and has an ex-wife and a series of ex live-in girlfriends behind him. So on the literal, biblical sense of adultery, I have no grounds for divorce.

He never hit me, so I don't have any grounds there either. The only grounds for divorce I have is the violence he did to my soul and the fact that I am an adulteress. I am sure I am not the perfect wife either. To be told what a favor it is that your husband married you right from the start though, does a number on one's head. For years I didn't think I was abused - he didn't hit me. Abuse happens to low class, trashy types. I am far too independent, have too much pride, am too smart - it couldn't happen to me, like those women who are too stupid to get out of a bad relationship. That's what I kept telling myself. So, I tried harder. I lived his life, not mine. The harder I tried, the further short I fell in his eyes. The more of his life I lived, the more he wanted. I confided in no one because it was all clearly my fault, even if I didn't understand what it was that I was doing so wrong, and I feared that if I talked about it to anyone, then they would simply corroborate what my husband was already telling me: how lucky I was to have him. And also because I am an intensely private person. I joke around sorrow. I don't spill my heart.

Submitting myself, as in being a doormat, did not work. I was a doormat. I prayed to be a better wife so that my husband would love me. I didn't pray that he would change. Every single thing that went wrong, I blamed myself for, convinced myself that it was my fault. I prayed for me.

There are some people who see love and the natural expression of it - that one wants to make the other happy - as a weakness to be exploited, not as something to be reciprocated. To do something that I knew would make my husband happy because I loved him - that, as far as he was concerned, was only his due. It never occurred to him at all that when people love each other, that love and caring goes both ways, like day follows night. This, I know now but not then, was an issue in all his previous relationships. They all ended because of his infidelity - which I don't think was physical in my case, but emotionally and mentally my husband was never faithful. If there was a way he could take my "good works" and spin them to make them look bad, he did.

So as you know, I eventually left and we have been reconciled for many years by now but nothing has changed. I do not like the way that I left - I should have left in a classier way than I did but I just flipped, like a circuit breaker that's been overloaded. From one day to the next, I could not take it any more.

While I was gone, he even became a "born-again Christian" in the presence of one my religious relatives. That made me look bad, you see (if he's a born-again Christian, by definition, I would be the polar opposite, a godless heathen) and has caused a rift in the family. This relative knows better now, but he didn't know then that he was being used as a weapon against me. The irony is that this relative, being a very old-fashioned Mennonite, never believed our marriage was valid to begin with, since my husband had a previous marriage behind him. Yet, in spite of that, he told my husband (who was delighted to share the news with me and my family) that I was going to Hell, for having left him in violation of the Christian idea of no divorce.

So I am damned if I do and damned if I don't. Those certain Mennonite who have always looked askance at my marriage to a divorced man, and considered it not to be a marriage in the eyes of God, would damn me for having left a marriage, when following their logic, it never was a marriage to begin with. Odd, isn't it?

Layla