“Love so many people use your name in vain”-Musiq Soulchild
I have bee through utter hell in my divorce, but as Psalm 127:1 says “Unless the Lord builds a house, the laborers labor in vain”. The emotional & financial costs have been staggering and are still being accrued as I’m writing. I have never experienced so much sustained torture in all of my life. Some days I’m cool, other days I’m just ready to die. Learning how to cope has been trial and error. From antidepressants, therapy, support groups, friends, blogging, music, prayer and other not so positive things. For the past three years I have just been a young woman trying not to lose her sanity & raise two beautiful children and get them through this mess their father & I created. But ever so often I have to look at myself in the mirror and ask “Wow you’re really smart Charmaine how did you get into this mess ?” The answer is quite simple: lust.
In our hypersexualized society, we have forgotten what sex is really about. It is the foundation of a strong home and thus a strong society. This is not some sentimental notion, but the reality that sex is primarily about producing children. Yes because of birth control we can ignore this fact but its divine purpose without human intervention is to create families. Because of birth control no one asks the right questions or does the hard work of really investing a person’s background or character. If the sex is great couples don’t discuss important family building questions like: how do you handle finances, where do you see yourself in 10 years, what is your position on family worship, etc.
I think artists are some of the worst culprits of this because so many end up in relationships with people who are not supportive of their careers. No matter how fine or nice a person is, if they can’t accept you’re going to be on tour, possibly be broke, wooed by many and miss holidays sometimes, the relationship WILL NOT work. (On the other hand artists have 2 do their part to compensate for their lifestyle to maintain a marriage but that’s a different story)
If by chance your lucky enough to make it to the alter after tasting the forbidden fruit, you often wake up years later after the haze of lust has worn off realizing you are married to a complete stranger or even worst sleeping with the enemy. This most definitely happens when a couple isn’t like bunny rabbits any more & kids enter the picture. You can no longer drink in each others flesh as many times as you used to & have to deal with each other sober minded. See, lust has a way of making one blind to the others imperfections. This is what happened in my marriage.
At some point in our marriage, I began to realize I honestly wanted nothing to do with my ex-husband unless we were in the bedroom. He was a former stripper and a doctor so he knew his way around a woman’s body, but knew nothing about nurturing a woman’s soul. I once wrote in a medical spouses’ forum: the best way to ruin a date with my husband is to invite my husband. But when I am really honesty with myself I really can’t be oh woe is me because I knew this guy wasn’t right for me from day one.
On our very first date his bank card did not work and I end up paying for the date. This also happened on the third date. On our fourth date hanging out with my jazz band, once we got into the car he started literally screaming at me and banging the car steering wheel about how disrespected he felt with me talking to other guys. Once I was safely in my house, I told him to never call me again. But the next day he bought flowers and candy to my parents to apologize and I found myself back in his controlling clutches.
One night after hanging with my friend, he was in the parking lot of my house waiting for me getting drunk. All this insanity happened in the first few months of dating him. But the lack of valuing myself created a deep lust for attention even if it wasn’t healthy attention. Emotional lust coupled with physical lust made me his slave for 10 years. I confused possessiveness with love. I was simply an object in his eyes. In my pride, I also like being married to a good looking charismatic man and objectively speaking he was very intelligent. On paper he was everything a woman wanted. To the outside world we looked like the perfect couple, but on the inside I was dying.
The denial slowly began to fade away Christmas of 2007 when after carefully wrapping my little families presents and decorating the house, I noticed there was not one gift for me. I had understood in past years because of finances due to medical school that some holidays would go without gifts, but this year my husband was making 6 figures. The illusion that we were this wonderful Godly family began to crack & crumble over the next year until we were finally separated and ultimately divorced.
As I have reflected on my time with him I realized I had sacrificed my dignity, emotional well being, career not for love but lust. He didn’t love me and I didn’t love him. We were just two highly intelligent ambitious people who had great sex but no sincere spiritual or emotional connection.