Anniversary

Yesterday would have been my (Jeremiah’s) 12 year anniversary.

I was 18 when I met my ex, and started dating a year later, so we had been together for 16 years.

We got separated at the beginning of last year, after a which seems like a much smaller window of time than the actual 18 months have been. Partly, we have COVID-19, which has made the first half of 2020 seem like half a decade, to thank for that.

There are plenty of reasons that the relationship didn’t work, some of which I’ll discuss in later blog posts, and some of which, for her sake, I won’t.

It’s a bizarre experience to provide relationship therapy for couples on the brink of divorce when my own relationship was exploding rather spectacularly, the fuel of our own extreme amounts of avoidance serving as the centripetal force.

It’s a bizarre experience to lead trainings on consent, sexuality, and pleasure when my own relationship was paralyzed with anxiety pertaining to sexuality.

It’s a bizarre experience to be in a Christian context, where the rite of passage into adulthood is getting married, and where success is defined by how long you stay in said marriage, till death do us part.

The other reason that the last 18 months has seemed like a decade is because of the immense amount of growth and self-reflection that I’ve done.

I recognize my own role in the demise of my marriage—my avoidant tendencies, my desire to have other people like me, which has inhibited my ability to be truly authentic and communicate what I actually think, my sense that I have to protect people when I actually don’t, the ways that I bought into stereotypical gender roles, especially around the administration of my marriage.

Essentially, the mask of Whiteness that I referred to in the last blog post.

I’m willing to do whatever it takes to ensure that I don’t find myself in or create the position that I was in during my marriage.

I’ve been really fortunate to have opportunities to practice being the person I want to be. I’ve invested a lot of money in therapy and training in couples therapy, and have a number of professional colleagues who are helping me break patterns of avoidance and step into bravery and authenticity.

I’ve been ridiculously lucky to find and develop my relationship with Julia, who simultaneously challenges me and gives me the space to say what I really need. Julia will share her own stories on this blog; I daily practice getting to listen to said stories without jumping in to rescue or fix.

I’m definitely a work in progress, and am hopeful that the trajectory of the last 18 months will lead to more experiences of authenticity and courage.

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Sexvangelicals is for folks who are works in progress.

Our Christian societies have established healthy relationships as a norm for successful adulthood without actually telling us how to be in a healthy relationship. Jesus gives us quite a few examples of how to effectively resolve conflict, but the Church has zeroed in on values of sacrifice and self-censuring of voice and body at the expense of, say, confronting people directly or the communication skills to create radical inclusiveness.

Sexvangelicals is a space where we can dream and practice what fully authentic, intimate relationships could look like.

Julia and I will share our own stories and experiences through the podcast and blog, and will also share data, theory, and communication techniques from the fields of couples and sex therapy.

June 28 will always be my anniversary. I won’t get the chance to go on vacations to Canada or Europe on future June 28s. I won’t have the space to retell the story of my marriage with the person who has more historical knowledge of me than anyone else.

But I still want to use my anniversary as an annual check-in, where I ask myself:

• What are my values?

• What are the characteristics that I want to be in my relationship?

• How am I doing at being the person that I want to be?

• How do I communicate this with the important people in my life? “With” is the key word here, as I hope that engaging others in dialogue around my values allows me to hear the experiences of others.