Weird Question

[Rita]

PLC et al -- I think the purpose of this forum is to support those who choose to stand and to support those who choose to stop standing. The site is called, "Divorcebusting," not "Faith/Hopebusting." There were many times I came to this board looking for ways to keep standing and got a really harsh message. All that those messages did was to scare me away for months and make me lonelier. Even now I am sometimes "walk on eggshells" when I post to avoid getting messages like that!

Loving yourself and not allowing someone to hurt and abuse you is more godly then continually allowing someone to disrespect you and your marriage in the name of religion. ...

I think the real test in all this is learning how to stand up for ourselves and earn back dignity and respect.

Juju, I would never try to convince you to believe in God, and likewise I don't think you should use God in an argument against what our faith teaches us. In fact that God that I believe in allowed everyone to disrespect him and in fact to kill him out of love for me -- and even for you or anyone else who doesn't believe that. We can walk in dignity and love through the darkest of struggles. God is present with us, helping us walk, during all the other horrible things we humans do to each other -- wars, disease, poverty, abuse, addiction. If you are not a person of faith, there is no way you are going to understand that. But standing in humility for a broken marriage, if done out of faith, is an act of great love, even if it doesn't "work." Some of us are not doing it to get our spouse back. We are doing it to grow in faith and get closer to God.

You can read many testimonies of marriages restored out of abuse, addiction, etc., on faith-based sites, and you can find them here as well. You can read stories of marriages that were never restored but of a spouse who grew into joy, with or without a new partner. You can find stories with the ending we don't wish for and an LBS who is bitter or an LBS who is joyful. I don't plan to remarry but I see my stand as what I do for my children, even if I begin to doubt my husband could ever be healed. Saying that we should not stand because so many marriages don't make it out of MLC is like saying we should never get married because so many marriages end in divorce.

I wish I had made stronger boundaries a lot earlier in my stand but I had to get to that place via experience. And it could have gone either way; I know many people who have restored marriages out of dead, awful, impossible circumstances. I think the point of this forum is to help each person find his/her own path out of the destruction of MLC, and we have to tread lightly when we come from different foundations of belief.