My Marriage: The good, The Bad, and how we are getting through it

A year ago, I was invited to share my testimony at my church during our Wednesday night supper/testimony time. At the time, I wasn't comfortable sharing it as there would be kids listening... my kids, just to name a few. I wasn't ready to share the icky parts of my past with my then 4 & 7 year-olds. Then, last spring I was invited to share my testimony at my friend's MOPS group. I decided that was a group that maybe, just maybe, my story could help. So, with a little bit of fear and trembling, I shared with a group of 30-40 moms. It went really well. I stuck around for a small group discussion after and the feed back from the ladies reminded me how I wasn't alone. We all have our stories... and sadly, so many had stories very similar to my own.

Last night, at our church's Trunk-or-Treat, we had a guy from a local prison ministry come and visit. I shared how I had been approached to share my testimony before and he asked if I would be interested in sharing at the prison. Wow! Another chance for God to use my messy story? You bet! Well, nothing is set in stone yet, but I decided to read through and edit my testimony a little bit. I forwarded it on to him to decide if it was something he felt would be encouraging to those in his group. As I wait to hear from him, I decided to put it out here. My marriage is still a work in progress, so be kind if you comment.

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My story is probably similar to some of yours. When I was asked me to share about my marriage struggles with your group, I was flattered and glad my roller coaster story could finally serve a purpose and help somebody who feels alone in their struggles. However, the more I thought about my story, the less I felt like I should do this. Things went through my head, like: “My story is nothing special. I haven’t been through the hard stuff that she has. Maybe all these struggles I’ve had are all in my head and nobody will care about what I say.”

On April 20, 2014, my husband Galen and I will be celebrating our 12th wedding anniversary and our 13th year together. We have 2 wonderful kids. We have a nice little house and 2 cars. My husband’s job is nothing glamorous, but he earns enough money that I’m able to be a stay-at-home mom. Through Dave Ramsey and FPU we’ve paid off about $10,000 of debt in less than 1 year. Some may say my life looks perfect. That we have it all together but 4 years ago I thought it was ending and I’d be a single parent. Let me back up and start from the beginning.

1        Growing up

I was born and raised to Christian parents in a Christian home. Growing up on a farm in the middle of nowhere Minnesota had its challenges. I was the 3rd child out of 4. The professional counselors always talk about daddy issues being a cause of girls making bad choices as they grow up. I can see how that is possible. My dad was always busy with the cows or in the field. If I wanted to spend time with dad, I had to be working beside him. I was little and not so strong, so I avoided work as much as I could get away with it. As a farm kid, money was tight. We didn’t go on shopping trips or family vacations. We never went to the movie theater or skating rink. I can count on both hands how many parties (birthday or otherwise) that I was invited to or was able to have at my home. In a time with no cell phones, everybody was long distance. Before the internet and with no car, communication outside of school, church or 4-H was limited.

My older sister was smart, and beautiful and had tons of friends. She always seemed happy and I wanted to be just like her. As I grew up, I had to work harder and harder to be noticed. I wasn’t stylish or popular in any way. I was shy and uncomfortable with my size (I’ve always been kind of a runt). I thought I must be missing out on something because I didn’t have a BFF or boyfriends. So I felt I had to do something to get somebody’s attention. I started reading my mom’s romance books that I found hidden in a box in the storage shed. I learned to flirt. If I could look prettier, be sexier, be something different, maybe somebody would like me and I wouldn’t be lonely.

2        the past

Loneliness and depression were common companions. I lived in my books. In the escape that those perfect lives provided. My sister dated some “bad boys” so I followed suit. I befriended the wild boys that lived down the road. All summer long, we’d be at the state park 3 miles away where my family ran the “Snack Shack”. One summer day, when i was about 15, my younger brother and I were up there to manage the shack. The neighbor boys had come swimming, so my brother and I took turns having fun. As I mentioned earlier, money was tight so my swimsuit was worn and no longer fitting right. The shoulder straps kept falling off which attracted the attention of these hormonal teenage boys. I tried acting like it was no big deal because I liked the attention. But one of the boys got the wrong idea. He came behind me and tried to pull the straps off me and lifted me out of the water to show his cousins. I was humiliated and heartbroken because this was a boy I really liked and trusted. A boy that I had hoped I could prove my parents wrong, that he wasn’t as bad as they thought. Trying to keep this a secret from my family so I could still be allowed to have a social life was impossible. I only told my cousin, who was staying with my grandma for the summer. In an attempt to help me and protect me, he told my Grandma, who told my mom.

It should’ve been ok that my parents didn’t want me around those boys anymore, but it made me more rebellious. I wanted to be in control of my life and who my friends were. I was so lonely and desperate to feel wanted that I was willing to sacrifice myself to any kind of attention/abuse. When a 14 year old from my church became pregnant, I was no longer allowed to be friends with her because I might copy her behavior. When my 16 year old cousin became pregnant, I was told I would be disowned if I allowed anything like that to happen to me. Our youth leader often talked about the dangers of premarital sex and being unequally yoked. So I had the constant argument in my head and heart about sex being good or bad.

So, what did I do? When my sister went off to Moorhead State, I followed. I got connected with a family friend of my mom who had a boy a year younger than I was. My parents knew his parents! Finally a boy they would approve of! Well, not really. It didn’t take long for us to start dating anyway. And our relationship became physical. We never had sex because I had my parents’ words hanging over my head. But because I wanted to be wanted, I allowed everything else to happen. Once I did, I felt cheap and dirty. I wanted it to stop, but didn’t know how and didn’t want to lose the only person who I felt cared about me. The conflict in my head and heart about sex and God grew exponentially as I became involved in the Campus Ambassador’s group on campus.

My sister had completed her 4 years at MSU and before she got married, and wanted to attend a Bible college in Canada for a year. Since I had such an emotional conflict going on in my heart regarding the relationship I was in, I decided to follow her to Canada and attend the same school a year later. I dumped the guy from Moorhead and started dating a Canadian. He was 10 years older than me and a deacon at his church so I trusted him. He told me he felt God meant for us to be together. Since I had already considered myself used/damaged goods, and thought we were getting married, I also let things get physically out of hand. He was emotionally abusive and controlling but I denied this to everyone. After the school year, I moved away to save money for our wedding. The distance allowed me to see who he was and how he treated me. I broke it off.

The string of bad relationships continued from there: A drug dealing/alcohol user with jealousy issues and a temper; a high school sweetheart with nice words but full of lies; more emotional abuse, more sexual abuse, lots of bad choices like one night stands and friends with benefits. I got to the point where I was tired of it all. I was tired of the games and the abuse. I prayed God would forgive my bad choices and take control. If he wanted me to be with somebody, he needed to bring him into my life in an obvious way.

3        Beginning with Galen

Around 1999, I moved to Fargo to escape one of those abusive relationships. At a singles Bible Study, I had met Nathan who got me to go with him to Skateland. After that relationship went south, I stopped going skating for fear of running into him. About a year later, my good friend Laura convinced me to go back to Skateland. This is where I met my husband. I had been in my apartment earlier that evening, monkeying with my calendar, the kind where you tear a page off every day. It was getting a big ridge of the rubbery binding sticking up and looking messy so I got out my exacto knife to cut it off. I was wearing my favorite jeans and the knife slipped, slicing a whole in my pants and a deep gouge in my leg. That evening at skateland, after doing a few laps, Laura and I were sitting at a table visiting when Galen came and sat nearby. I vaguely remember seeing him the year previous, as he was an employee of Skateland at the time. I thought he was kinda cute and was impressed by his skating abilities. Anyway, I was telling Laura how I sliced my jeans and my leg. He asked me why I would do that. Those who know me and my family would not be surprised by what came out of my mouth. Totally straight faced I said, “Because I like the feel of pain and the sight of blood.” My personality only intrigued Galen and he wanted to get to know me more.

We spent the first week on the phone or hanging out at the park, just getting to know each other. That weekend, I was asked to drive my 10 year old niece to Watertown where I’d meet up with her parents. I don’t do well with driving long distances. I get sleepy behind the wheel. So, I asked him if he’d like to drive with us. The trip to Watertown was pretty quiet as it is hard to talk with a 10 year old in the car. But on the drive home I decided to take my chances. I told him that I was done dating just for fun and I enjoyed his company. I shared a summary of my baggage and told him this is who I am. If you can accept me in spite of all this, I’d like to see where this goes. He also opened up and shared his story with me.

He grew up with parents who became Christians after they had his older siblings. He was raised as almost an only child as his brother and sister were 10 and 8 years older than him.  I’ve always thought that God created Him specifically for me as his Mom had had her tubes tied for almost 8 years before he was conceived. Her doctor had suggested she get an abortion since he was unplanned and so much younger than his siblings. I’m glad she chose to have him. Anyway, Galen had his share of baggage too: Past relationships that became sexual, rejection issues, and pornography. We agreed to take a chance on each other. This was early April 2001.

Our relationship moved rather quickly. After dating for a month, I knew I wanted to marry him. On August 22nd, my 25th birthday, he proposed to me in my livingroom. My co-workers had teased me, asking if I’d get a big rock for my birthday, and of course, I had told him what they were saying so he proposed with this: (show ring – a key chain ring with a large rock wired to it). Sex before marriage happened and both of us felt lots of guilt but weren’t sure we wanted to stop. He has a really close relationship with his sister and she challenged us to abstain for that last month. It was hard, but we did it to prove that we could. We were married April 20th, 2002. For Our honeymoon, we got a jacuzzi room at the C’mon Inn here in town. Nervous, although we had had sex before, it felt different now. It was allowed... even encouraged... and I was scared and self-conscious. He was so sweet. Knowing I had been stressed and worn out, we took a nap and he gave me a massage and we soaked in the hot tub. Not a lot happened on our honeymoon and I was ok with that.

By now, the internet was available and online porn became interesting. I had never seen it before but decided to watch with him. We purchased dvd’s together and would watch them together. It felt wrong, but I’d rather he watched it with me than alone. He went to a Promise Keepers event in the cities and came home determined to break that addiction that porn had become. We broke and trashed all the videos. This was the start of a vicious cycle in our marriage. You see, because of my past and the abuse I experience, now that I was securely married, a part of my heart didn’t see sex as necessary anymore. It had become a way to hold onto a guy, to feel loved. We agreed before we married that divorce would never be an option so he was stuck with me, for better or for worse.

I struggled with depression and anxiety, so I saw a counselor at The Village. We worked through a few of my issues, mostly in regards to my family, and life appeared better. I had been on and off anti-depressants for years, never finding the one that would make me feel normal. Because of where I was, sex wasn’t important. And because of his own issues, he couldn’t ask even though his need was great. So after I went to bed, he’d get online and find release. I would catch him at it and he’d feel bad. We started watching together again. Then I’d get guilty and convince him we had to quit. And for a while things would be fine. But it would start over and over again.

4        4 years ago

By 2008, he was working for a work-a-holic who had him going out of town all the time, home mostly on weekends. I was a stay at home mom of a 4 year old and a 1 year old. After catching him watching porn again and finding out he had been lying to me for months, I had had enough. We cried and yelled. We pointed fingers and placed blame on each other. I had been failing him as a wife. His love language is physical touch and I wasn’t meeting that need. He had been failing me, too. My love language is quality time, but with his job he was never home. When he was home, he needed me and sex. But I had a hard time giving him what he needed because I wasn’t getting what I needed. We had read the love languages book. We had been to the Family Life Marriage Conference. We knew what needed to be done, but neither one of us wanted to be the one to do the giving. We both thought we needed to be filled by the other one first. In addition to this, sex was painful. I kept experiencing tearing of my perineum.  The fear of tearing would cause me to be tense during sex which made the likelihood of me tearing greater. I avoided sex because i didn’t want it to hurt and he didn’t ask because he didn’t want to hurt me.

I went to a physical therapy specialist to help stretch out my perineum so I wouldn’t tear anymore. Also, I went back to counseling, this time at Valley Christian Counseling Center. We worked through so many things: my relationship with my parents, my past relationships, where we were now, his addiction and how it was affecting me. I joined a support group for the wives of porn addicts and found some healing with this group of women. I shared our struggles with all the Christian women I knew as I asked for prayer support.  I wanted to be covered with God’s protection and never felt like my prayers were enough. A friend, whose husband also dealt with this addiction, referred me to the Partner’s for Purity website: This online forum was my lifeline. The people there answered my questions because they had been where I was. There was even a male available to answer my questions from the point of view of a former addict. I also found out that 2 of my friends were in failing marriages partially because of the damage of porn addiction to their relationship. Their marriages ended that year in divorce.

We tried couples counseling at VCCC, but Galen wasn’t in a place where he could hear that he was in the wrong, that his actions were hurting me and our marriage. He went to a couple sessions on his own and tried the Porn Addicts support group but never felt he was being heard. I reached out to a friend, a former high school crush, and was tempted to have an affair. It only took a couple days and several hours talking on the phone to him to realize how much I loved Galen and I didn’t want to ruin our marriage any further by another stupid choice.

Instead, I started reading books and websites on low libidos and recovering from porn addiction. I found blog after blog of good advice. I stumbled across a podcast called “One Extraordinary Marriage” where they found the key to improving their life was to create greater intimacy in all areas. I shared their first podcast with Galen, which only made him feel worse, as it was titled “60 days of Sex”. They told the story of how they set out to attempt to have sex every day for 60 days to see what happened to their life. Galen saw this as impossible in our relationship and it made him depressed. But I kept listening. Podcast number 7 was called, “Pornography: A Secret that can destroy your marriage”. I listened and cried. I asked Galen to listen to that one podcast. If he listened to nothing else, this one was important.

Almost 1 year after I confronted him with the choice: Porn or his family, He decided. He listened to that podcast.  And then he started listening to the other podcasts this couple did. He started meeting with our pastor every week and I noticed changes taking place. Love was growing again. I continued to work on me, and healing from the pain his addiction caused. He became willing to use Covenant Eyes (A filter for the computer).

5        Today

In 2012, we celebrated our 10 year anniversary by renewing our vows in front of a small group of family and friends. We want our marriage to be an example to our kids that it’s not always easy to be married, but God can equip us with the right tools to help us work through anything. Our relationship is far from perfect. We still have fights. We still struggle to have an amount of sex that makes both of us happy. However, we have experienced such growth through this. It no longer takes months before a problem surfaces in a fight, but often comes out in the open within a few days. We are learning how to talk things out and how to listen to each other better. In February, another website we have both started following made a 10-day challenge to couples: to have sex once a day for 10 days in a row. This was our 3rd attempt at a challenge like this and our first successful one. It went so well that I said I’d attempt it again in a few months.

            Conclusion:

The MOPS theme verse this year is: 1 Peter 4:8-11 (The Message) “Most of all, love each other as if your life depended on it. Love makes up for practically anything. Be quick to give a meal to the hungry, a bed to the homeless — cheerfully. Be generous with the different things God gave you, passing them around so all get in on it: if words, let it be God's words; if help, let it be God's hearty help. That way, God's bright presence will be evident in everything through Jesus, and he'll get all the credit as the One mighty in everything — encores to the end of time. Oh, yes!”

At any point in the past, if you had asked me if I felt God was there, helping us, I’d probably have said no in the moment. It’s hard to see him when it feels like life is falling apart. Looking back with my eyes wide open today, I can see that He was there. He put the people I needed in places I could find them, the blogs and books, the friends. In the hard times, I blindly trusted Him; that He will guide our steps and our words, and, above all, His love will shine through. And that we can give Him praise even in the storms.