What My Ex-Husband Got Right, Even When He Was Wrong

The viral clip of Matt Fradd talking with Peter Kreeft about loving a woman when she is ugly and old broke me open. I have a wildly fulfilling marriage but still bear the scars of another man who promised to grow old with me and wouldn’t.  And while my life is a hundred-fold better for his departure, the trauma can still ache in my bones some days.

The end of a marriage through betrayal and divorce is a deep guttural wound, one our society often leaps over. Divorce is commonplace, perhaps even expected. I've often felt like a pariah for the depth, breadth, and length of sorrow I've carried over the end of my first marriage.

No one else, not even really my children, is there to mourn with me. Most people, in a well-meaning attempt to help me feel better, focus on the positives. It's good that I'm no longer with that man. He wasn’t who I thought he was. I have an immensely fulfilling, holy, sacramental marriage with a man who loves me wildly and to whom I return all that love. I live in truth and reality. I am grateful for the life I have now. Divorce revealed deep trauma and shame that is healing and making me more the woman I am meant to be.

And yet.

The Bible speaks exquisitely about betrayal in Psalm 55.

For it is not an enemy that reviled me,

that I could bear—

Not a foe who viewed me with contempt,

from that I could hide.

But it was you, my other self,

my comrade and friend,

You, whose company I enjoyed,

at whose side I walked

in the house of God.

(Psalm 55:12-15)

There is true heartache when the one who promised you everything proves to be not the man you thought he was. Not a man at all, really, in the ways that mattered to me for the Kingdom and eternity.

Near the end of our marriage, I found these words he posted: I want a woman who knows how to take care of herself.

For years those words hung over me like a curse. Words he wrote sometime after I had my fifth child in ten years -- my weight yo-yoing in 50-pound swings over that decade. My wardrobe mostly stretched out maternity clothes or whatever I happened to walk past in Target or Costco.

He was right, which is part of why it burned. I didn't know how to take care of myself.

I didn't even know that I was worth taking care of. And as much as I thought he loved me, he didn't teach me that I was worthy of care. My life had not taught me that either.

And after I had spent all my time taking care of my children and my husband and my family and my home and my faith -- he claimed to want something more. Or frankly, something far, far less. Something that was nothing at all, really. Fleeting, wanton, trifling.

While he may not have had a woman who knew how to take care of herself, he had a woman who knew what the right things to take care of were: a soul, a family, faith, marriage, trauma.

At the time, I was in my late thirties. I had barely begun to scratch the surface of who I was and what I carried in me. I don't think that's unusual for that stage of life, but I do know I already knew to ask big questions. I wanted to go deep. I was seeking more of what the Lord and life and love had to offer me. As Psalm 34 at that first wedding proclaimed, I wanted to "taste and see that the Lord is good."

Another translation says: learn to savor how good the Lord is. That frazzled young mother was learning, and I was a woman who knew she had so much to learn. In our thirties, many of us start to realize we may not actually know anything about life or ourselves. When betrayal and divorce ripped a chasm in my heart, I fell in.

But it is from those depths that I finally gave the Lord access to my heart so He could continue his great work of love in me. He began to teach me about what it means to be a woman in the Kingdom.

He revealed what it meant to really care for oneself.  He taught me true love for others -- selfless, sacrificial love. For so long I didn't love well, I'll be the first to admit it. I loved as well as my scared, traumatized, guarded heart could love. I do not doubt that my broken love wounded my family.

But wounds always need more attention, not less and there was not a single person in my life who really saw me, who saw my wounds with a merciful heart of unconditional love, largely because I didn't realize that most of my heart was locked away. But I still desperately needed a wise, regulated, holy soul to look me deeply in the eyes in the midst of my perfectionism and control, offer kindness and compassion and say, “I think you must be hurting very deeply to act this way.”

 The Lord himself offered me that care in the wreckage of my heart. Slowly, tenderly, agonizingly, He has loved me back to life over the last 16 years, aided by my precious husband and now, my very self. I rejoice that I'm now a woman who knows how to take care of herself, her soul, and the hearts and souls of all she loves. I'm still learning to love and take care of my body, but those are words for another day.

I don't miss the man. I'm not sure the man I loved was ever real at all, but the wounds of divorce are still deep. Even with healing, the remembrance of trauma remains. I grieve for the woman I was, the shattered dreams I had. The wrongs spoken against my body and spirit can still burn. And I long for those I love to reject the lie that a woman who knows how to take care of herself is the one who is the thinnest or the most adventurous in bed or the one who gets her body nipped and tucked.

A woman who knows how to take care of herself is one who lifts her face to the lover of her soul, to the Creator who declared her good in the moment of her creation. And lets Him be the only one to tell her who she really is.

This precious woman is finally willing to believe that she is wildly, recklessly loved. She lives as the beloved.

If you know the heartache of betrayal and adultery, of having the one who promised to love you when you were old and gray decide you aren't worth the wait, I see you. The wound is deep and long and wide, but the furrows in your heart are the perfect place for true love to grow, the love of our Savior and a kind, compassionate love for ourselves.

May you learn to live as the beloved in these tender, holy places.