My Heart Got Married And I Didn't Know It: Unspoken Vows and Shattered Dreams

My Heart Got Married And I Didn’t Know It

Unspoken Vows and Shattered Dreams

Lora C. Jobe, BSN

Barbara U. Prescott, PhD

My Heart Got Married And I Didn’t Know It

Unspoken Vows and Shattered Dreams

Copyright © 2009 Lora C. Jobe and Barbara U. Prescott. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Resource Publications

A Division of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

ISBN 13: 978-1-60608-635-3

EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-7521-7

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: Heart Marriage and Heart Divorce

Chapter 2: How to Recognize the Signs

Chapter 3: Sexual Intimacy—The Great Deceiver

Chapter 4: Monogamy

Chapter 5: Cohabitation

Chapter 6: Reluctance to Marry Over Time

Chapter 7: How to Recognize the Signs

Chapter 8: How to Navigate Heart Divorce

Chapter 9: How to Avoid Heart Marriage

Chapter 10: Serial Heart Marriage

Chapter 11: Making Heart Marriage Work

Chapter 12: Happily Ever After

Frequently Asked Questions

A Note from the Authors

Bibliography

This book is lovingly dedicated to

our families.

Sarah, Dan, Naomi, and Fay

Lisa and Rob

Mark, Jr.

Allie

Allie IV and Allison

Acknowledgments

There are many people to thank for their support, encouragement, and kindness during the writing and publishing of our book.

First, of course, are our families. To Sarah, Lisa, and Mark, Jr. for your never-ending enthusiasm about the phenomenon of heart marriage and for your unwavering belief that the book would get published.

To Allie, a wonderful husband, friend and unbridled cheerleader, who is a constant source of love and strength. To Allie IV and Allison whose sweet encouragement and sincere approval of the book’s message felt like the highest praise.

To the folks at Rutba House in Durham, North Carolina, especially Jonathan Wilson-Hargrove, who listened and asked questions about the concept early in the writing, you are loved and appreciated.

There were a few trusted readers along the way who kept us focused on telling the stories— Mimi Vestal, Barbara Ricks, Macon Ivy, Lyn and Tom Everett, Gloria Brown, and Dianne Homra.

Our appreciation goes to Ellen Pruitt, a fellow author, who shared her experience and gave us fortuitous tips that helped tremendously in the early going.

Thank you to Angela Petty, a beautiful young woman whose personal response to the concept of heart marriage even before the book was completed gave us confidence that it could positively impact lives. And to Jessica Skidmore, who requested and read a couple of chapters and said, These women are telling my story and they don’t even know me. Your candor motivated and humbled us.

We thoroughly enjoyed the copyediting process and owe a debt of gratitude to Nancy Shoptaw, who did an excellent job editing while gently challenging us to tighten the work.

Many thanks to Teresa Bullock who did graphic design work along the way.

To our book club friends, Les Belles Lettres, you kept us laughing! You are the best!

To Charlie Chilton, Amy Mendzela, Kathy Bucy, Emily Turner and the many other friends and family who go unnamed, thank you for being with us on this journey and for your smiles, hugs, emails, prayers and ideas. You are all so dear to us.

Introduction

My life experiences of fifty-plus years have revealed certain traits about the human heart. As Woody Allen said, The heart wants what the heart wants (Isaacson, The Heart, last paragraph).

As a young woman, I watched a friend struggle in an on and off again relationship with a man who was not right for her. They had started dating very young, about age fifteen, had quickly become sexually intimate, and continued to date throughout high school. They broke up several times during college, but the breakups were so painful that they would reunite. During these years, her sisters and friends married. Eventually, after dating for fifteen years, the couple married. Within a year, they were divorced. Lots of folks were surprised. After all, they had dated for years, lived together for some of those years, and couldn’t seem to live without each other. What I came to understand was that what they had needed all along was a divorce, but because they had never legally married, there was no mechanism for the unbinding of their hearts.

Over the years, I saw more than a few friends and acquaintances struggle through intimate, long term relationships that finally culminated in marriage only to be dissolved in a year or two by divorce. As cohabiting became more common in the 1980s and 90s, increasing numbers of young couples chose to live together to avoid the complications and responsibilities of marriage until they felt more prepared. What they didn’t know was that their hearts would get married anyway, and if the relationship fell apart, the breakup would be every bit as wrenching as a divorce. This painful dissolution would occur without the words to define it or the support systems in place to work through it.

I began to share ideas about this phenomenon with my coauthor who is a professional therapist. She confirmed that she had seen many couples for marriage counseling who reported that they had misgivings about their relationship and knew before the wedding that something was wrong and that they should not marry. These couples had usually been sexually intimate, dated for a long time, and many had lived with each other. As a result, they often felt compelled to go through with the marriage. Just as I had personally observed, she said that it began to appear to her that the couples, without realizing it, had to get married in order to get a proper divorce.

We are living in a time that has been described as the Post-Sexual Revolution. The cultural norms and behaviors of couples have shifted and yet we have not fully explored the implications and fallout of these changes. This book is an effort to describe the phenomenon of heart marriage and heart divorce and how to avoid the pain and devastation that can result. Although unnamed, this phenomenon has been around for a long time. However, with the increase in cohabitation and the loosening of a traditional view of marriage, more and more couples are at risk of falling prey to heart marriage. Being able to name and recognize the signs of such a relationship, as well as see a viable way out, will hopefully enable more couples to make better decisions so that they can enjoy the benefits of a healthy marriage.

Lora C. Jobe

1

Heart Marriage and Heart Divorce

Unspoken Vows and Shattered Dreams

Alice and James

Alice was a raven-haired beauty who made A’s through high school and college. At a prestigious university she excelled academically and was involved in student government. She was active in a human rights organization and sought ways to make the world a better place. Alice met James during their freshman year at a school mixer. James came from a wealthy southern family and was a solid student. He was socially comfortable and was usually the life of the party. When he and Alice began dating, they seemed to perfectly complement one another. He softened her type A driving ambition, and she enlightened him about world affairs. They dated throughout college, became sexually intimate, and talked about a future together. Upon graduation, they attended several weddings of college friends but did not feel this was the time for them to get married. Alice applied to graduate schools and was accepted everywhere she applied. James wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, so he planned to work for a couple of years while exploring his options. The two moved to Nashville where she could pursue a graduate degree and he could work in business with some longtime family friends. They discussed living together, but decided against it for the time being. They also discussed marriage and generally felt they would marry after graduate school.

While they maintained separate apartments, James spent most nights with Alice. They ate dinner together, went out with mutual friends, vacationed with their families, and traveled together in Europe. It seemed natural that they would marry after several years together, but there always seemed to be a reason to wait. Alice wanted James to get serious about his career and to find a cause that would excite and motivate him to volunteer in the community. James wanted Alice to relax a little bit more. They each considered breaking off the relationship, but after all the years of dating, that option felt horrifying. Neither one of them could imagine starting over with someone else.

After seven years together, Alice had her Masters in Social Work and was hired at a respected nonprofit agency. James had a position doing consulting work. At his father’s urging and with his mother’s advice, he planned a trip to New England to ask Alice to marry him. James knew Alice wanted a perfect experience, from the proposal to the engagement to the wedding ceremony and reception. At a cozy bed and breakfast, he proposed and gave her a two-carat diamond ring that had been his great grandmother’s. They began planning a huge society wedding that would take place over the course of a weekend at a luxury resort. The planning would take a year and a half.

During their engagement, they found a cute house in a great neighborhood and decided to buy it and move in together. Alice was frequently distracted with her demanding career and the wedding details, and she found that James often irritated her, as he did not seem to understand the amount of work involved in planning a wedding of this magnitude. James found himself fantasizing about other women and wishing Alice would agree to elope. They both pushed through these thoughts and rationalized that this was just a difficult time and that things would be better once they got married.

After the wedding, which was a very elaborate and special occasion, the couple honeymooned in the British Virgin Islands. They relaxed, enjoyed sex, which had been on the wane for the last year or so, and talked about the future. James was surprised and a bit bewildered when Alice suggested he find a more challenging job, with better opportunities for advancement. And Alice was aggravated when James said he would like to start a family and that maybe it was time for Alice to quit her volunteer work in the evenings.

Over the next few months, they had bitter arguments over the division of labor in the house and their lack of agreement on starting a family. When Alice broached the subject of a return to school to get her PhD, James left and spent the night with a friend. This one night separation shocked them into going to marriage counseling. After several sessions, they both realized that they did not see a future together. James moved into an apartment and Alice went to an attorney. They were devastated and heartbroken, but realized that for many years they had not acknowledged their growing differences. Friends and family were bewildered when their divorce was final before their second anniversary. What happened?

Alice and James are just one example of a phenomenon that we will call heart marriage. A heart marriage is a relationship in which the couple is intimately bound together and practices the behaviors of marriage without the intentional and articulated agreement between both parties to marry. Marriage, on the other hand is the intentional, intimate, and legal union of a man and woman who become husband and wife.

Long before Alice and James stood before the minister at the altar, they were married in many of the traditional ways and were bound together because of them. They dated exclusively and had an intimate sexual relationship for many years. Their living arrangement looked very much like a marriage, with shared living spaces and involvement in each other’s daily activities. Both families accepted their relationship and treated them like a married couple. By mimicking all the behaviors of marriage, their hearts had become married, but they did not realize that is what had happened.

Before legally marrying, the idea of breaking up was very painful to Alice and James. They would grieve for the lost future they had imagined together and be gripped by the fear of being alone and lonely. These feelings were so wrenching and their separations so difficult that the two concluded they should be together. So they got married. Once they were married, there was a word to describe that kind of painful separation and that word is divorce. If Alice and James had been able to recognize that their hearts were married and that the hurt involved in splitting is comparable to getting a divorce, they would have been better prepared to negotiate the difficult work of separation at that time.

Everyone recognizes and understands that divorce is often devastating to the parties involved and to their families and friends. There should be a way to describe the painful process when a heart marriage is dissolving so that it too can be recognized and understood. This dissolution can best be described as a heart divorce. A heart divorce is simply the formal, clearly articulated and agreed upon dissolution of a heart marriage. The emotions of a heart divorce are very similar to those of a legal divorce. The sense of loss, depression, and heartbreak is as real as when a legal marriage is dissolved. By labeling what is happening, the couple is better able to acknowledge, discuss, and understand their feelings. Their support systems, such as family, friends, and professionals, also can understand more clearly the severity of the emotional response, which enables them to offer the kind of support needed by the couple.

Several things have happened in our society in the last fifty years that have changed sexual behavior and attitudes. First, with the advent of the birth control pill in the late 1960s and the risk of pregnancy minimized, sexual intimacy before marriage has become more common and acceptable. Additionally, with more educational and professional options available, women began to delay marriage. Finally, with the delay in marriage, it is increasingly common for couples to live together before marriage for a number of reasons. Couples who are already having sex and are together constantly say that it makes financial sense to live together. They may want to try out marriage by cohabiting before plunging into a legal marriage. Frequently, the couple does plan to marry at some time in the future but often the dreams and plans for the future have not been fully discussed and the couple