Finding Strength Part III: Faith Crisis, Sex Drought, Less Love, Suicidal Thoughts by Anonymous
He belongs to a very large family and is one of 7 siblings. Unfortunately, he hasn’t felt close to any of them since his mother died when he was 13 years old. She fought a vicious battle with Melanoma that progressed to a point where she was left comatose and dying in their home until it took her life. He watched his mother die slowly. He witnessed her declining every day until she took her last breaths.
Shortly after his mother died, his father remarried, and the family moved two hours away. He had just lost his mother, a stranger was now living in his home and trying to control him as if she were his mother, and he had to say goodbye to all of his friends. He understandably entered a deep depression. Unfortunately, he never received any kind of counseling or learned healthy coping skills. He bottled up all of his emotions for many years to come. His only outlet for letting out his pent-up frustration was through video games. It became his escape from reality.
Fast forward to 2014- My husband and I are now a few months into our marriage. Things are going well. We are happy and building many fun memories. We make each other laugh and we are working towards becoming “worthy” to have our second wedding. As part of this worthiness process, we each met regularly with church leadership. We do so both together as a couple as well as individually. As we continued to make strides towards the couple we wanted to be, his devotion to the religion began to waiver. He stopped coming to church with me, but I continued to go alone. A few months into our marriage, he was given the news that he was worthy enough to enter the temple. This was really hard for me. I was happy for him, but also frustrated. On top of attending church sparingly, I knew my husband had a pornography habit. It didn’t bother me much because I didn’t see it having a negative impact on our marriage. However, pornography is definitely something that’s not allowed if you want to pass the worthiness interviews. I asked him if he had been honest about his habits, and he swore he had been.
When I met with the church leadership the next time, I asked if we could revisit the idea of me getting the approval as welI. I was told that I still had a lot of work to do and that my spirit just wasn’t strong enough. This led me to work extra diligently. I gave up everything in my life except for work and religion once again. I studied for hours a night hoping that it would be enough. It never was. I tried to keep my hopes up, but the day never came. He began attending religious ceremonies with his family that required the worthiness that I had not reached. This ostracized me from his family even further and made it seem like I was the “unworthy” half of our marriage.
My frustration began to build. Around this time, the bishop from church started having me meet with him privately in his home. One day he made a series of sexually charged comments that made me extremely uncomfortable. I felt trapped. If I was going to become the wife I longed to be, I needed to put up with this disgusting man. He was the gate keeper that would allow me to progress in my marriage and in my spirituality. Unfortunately, my anger and frustration only intensified as the weeks went on. I found myself doubting God’s decisions. Why would God allow this disgusting man to be in a position of power, and how could I do the right thing if I was being held back?
During this time of extreme anger and disgust, I came across a document that someone had shared to their social media profile. This document shattered my entire world. Everything I had convinced myself was true was ripped out from under me as I began to question whether this religion was true or not. I researched like my life depended on it. In a way, I knew it did. I took every action a “worthy” person would take. I read my scriptures, I prayed, I diligently went to church, and I studied harder than I ever had in my entire life. I read for hours every night and stuck to only the resources approved by the church. Unfortunately, even using only approved resources, I came to the realization that I did not believe in this religion and could no longer be part of it. I was so deep in this web of lies that I began suffering from deep anxiety and depression. I knew in my heart that If I came clean and told my husband I was leaving our religion that it would create huge rifts in my marriage and in my relationship with my new family, but I also knew I had to start living authentically if I ever wanted to be happy again.
In 2015 I formally resigned from the religion. My husband had not been attending church for the better part of a year, but when we had the conversation I had been dreading, he became very upset. He told me that he could not be married to me any longer and we started discussing what needed to happen next. I was devastated. I felt like I had ruined this man’s life and that I deserved everything coming to me. However, we eventually came to the conclusion that we were going to wait and see if we could navigate a mixed faith relationship. Eventually he became curious about my decision and started asking questions. He found his own answers that ultimately led him to the same conclusion that I had come to. Crisis averted… time to live happily ever after, or so we thought.
The next few years were full of many ups and downs. We navigated climbing out of poverty, career shifts, going back to school, the heartbreak of infertility, buying our first home, and adopting 2 beautiful dogs. We weren’t perfect, but we were happy. We had more good days than bad, and we seemed to be on a good path. I never would have imagined what the future would bring for us.
From the time that we got married up until when we bought our first home together in 2016, I put on an extra 100 pounds. I was suffering through undiagnosed medical issues. I was in so much pain and the frustration of never finding relief was building. No matter how many specialists I saw, or lifestyle changes I made, my health continued to decline. As my health declined, my weight climbed. I began working out with a personal trainer 5 times a week and adhering to a strict ketogenic diet. While I was promised these two changes would help me reach my peak health, they had the opposite effect. In the summer of 2017I reached a new level of illness that I had never expected.
At this point of my life I had been in eating disorder recovery for many years with only a few small relapses. I knew I didn’t want to live my life controlled by my eating disorder again, but I was desperate to feel confident in my own skin. I slowly regressed into a full-blown relapse and once again my eating disorder commandeered control of my life. This relapse led me once again into a period of my marriage where my primary form of communication with my husband was lying. He had never known me when I was sick with an eating disorder in the past, so he had no clue how sick I was becoming right under his eyes.
However, even though I was restricting my calories to dangerously low levels and forcing myself to throw up when I did allow myself to eat, I was not losing any weight. As a last resort I went to an alternative medicine doctor. I had tried everything else, so I was open to alternatives outside of the mainstream medical field, even if it meant that the visit wasn’t covered by my medical insurance. This appointment offered great insight into my health and gave me a very detailed action plan on what I needed to do to start seeing relief. I remember leaving that appointment with my heart full of hope once again! I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I was going to run as fast as I could to reach it. Unfortunately, I had not been training for this run, and ran into some major speed bumps within the first few weeks of starting down this new path.
At this point we were about 4.5 years into our marriage, and we were only having sex once every few months. Sex simply wasn’t on my mind, but I subconsciously knew that the reason I was no longer interested in sex was because of how much I hated my body. If I could hardly look at my own naked body without feeling disgusted by its flaws, how could my husband be attracted enough to me to want to engage in sex? The reality was that he had lost all desire as well.
In November 2018, the day we were celebrating our 5th wedding anniversary, we did what many married couples do, and we got into a stupid argument. However, this stupid argument is important. It changed the course of my entire life. At this point, I can’t even remember what the original argument was about, but I clearly remember that it ended with me waking up in a puddle of my tears on the bathroom floor. When I woke up, I grabbed a few of my things and left without saying a word. During our fight my husband admitted that he didn’t love me. Every negative thought I had ever had about myself surfaced. I played the track over and over in my head. “I don’t love you anymore.” Translated to “You’re too fat,” “You’re disgusting,” “You aren’t good enough,” “Your personality isn’t good enough to compensate for your physical flaws,” “You are a bad wife,” “You don’t deserve love.” While he didn’t say any of these words, he may as well have. I locked myself in the bathroom and cried myself to sleep. He tried to comfort me, but I never opened the door. Eventually he went upstairs to sleep, which gave me the window of opportunity that I needed to escape.
I remember that it was dark outside and that it was pouring rain. I pulled over in a parking lot and cried for hours in silence. I realized in that moment that I was truly alone. I had ostracized myself from everyone in my life and at this point I had nobody to call. My entire life had been built around one person, and that person had just rejected me. He hadn’t even noticed that I left our home. If the one person who knew me most intimately couldn’t love me, I figured that nobody else would ever be able to. And I didn’t blame him at all. I had done this by lying to him and pretending to be something I wasn’t. I felt years of guilt pounding in my chest. I remembered the months after Maddie’s death, betraying her by sleeping with her boyfriend after she died, becoming a ranging alcoholic even though alcohol is what took her life, and promising her parents I’d find a way to live my life to the fullest for both of us. I examined my life and realized I had let her parents down, which meant I had also let her down. I started to think of all of the lies I had told him in our relationship. I kept running through the years of mistakes and lies and playing them over and over in my mind. I even thought of my parents and how I had ruined their lives by causing them to live in a constant state of worry during my teen years. I convinced myself that the world would be better off without me in it. I had caused so many people so much pain, and I needed to put an end to it. I had all of the reasons I needed to justify killing myself. I stopped crying and, in that moment, while parked in a dark and rainy parking lot in the middle of the night, I started to write a letter to leave behind.
Before finishing the letter, I began to nod off to sleep. Once I could no longer hold my head up, I decided that I would rest my eyes for a few hours. I knew I couldn’t go home, and I had realized that I left my wallet in the house, so I had no money to pay for a hotel. I curled up in the front seat of my car and covered my legs with my jacket. I woke up to light streaming in and the sound of kids playing in the park. I immediately felt the heat of embarrassment rise in my chest. I turned on my car and drove off without planning where I was going. Before I knew it, muscle memory and autopilot had me pulling into my neighborhood. When I realized where I was, I decided I was going to drive past my house and see if he was home. If he wasn’t home, I would go in and grab my wallet. If he was home, I would turn around and drive the other way.
When I pulled up to my house, he was outside about to hop in his car. He said he had been up all night worried about me. He convinced me to come inside and talk. This conversation was painful, but also very cathartic. He didn’t realize it at the time, but his words helped talk me off the ledge. He explained that he still loved me and cared about me as a person, but that he was no longer physically attracted to me and did not have any romantic feelings towards me. While this was still really hard for me to hear, it was enough for me to realize that suicide was definitely not the answer. We talked through a few scenarios and decided that we would take some strides to change this. I would continue to work on losing weight and we would both work on showing more affection and being loving spouses.
We talked for hours until we had both calmed down and there was nothing more that could be said. We had tickets to a comedy show for that evening to celebrate our anniversary, so we eventually decided to lighten the mood and head to the show. If only the distraction of this comedy show could have lasted the rest of our lives!
When you table hard conversations, you eventually need to reopen them. I was scared to reopen this one, though. I knew once I did that, we would have to face the reality that our marriage might be over. For the next 3 months neither one of us brought it up. I cried myself to sleep most nights after he fell asleep next to me. He would wake up sometimes and hear me crying, but admits now that he was also afraid to pry because he knew it would open up the conversation we were both avoiding.