Life is Choices

I know the man is hard at work all day.  Wakes up before 5 am, gets home after 7pm, the energy is just not there.  But having to plan a night of sex to work into our schedule?  I allowed his sleeping and eating schedule to become more important than our sex life, when I should have heeded my own disappointed feelings around not feeling fulfilled.  The damage I was doing to my tank of self worth slowly trickled away until my sexual desire was emptied completely.  We were getting married in 2 months!  We weren’t able to solve the blockage around our sex life, and an orgasm proved impossible for me.  “Perhaps we should see a sex therapist,” he said.  After our first visit to this therapist we soon realized that help in sex meant unpeeling other crucial layers of the relationship, and by the next trip she suggested we start a list of “agreements.”  Agreements were simple things like, he is responsible to take out the trash, or Tuesday nights the tv stays off, and these tenets are to always be upheld.  Without a second’s thought he blurts out, “that we raise our children Muslim.”  We had both decided we wanted a family together, but raise them Muslim?  This was the first time he had come out with that!  Perhaps it was naivety that kept me from seeing this as a possibility, knowing that he was passionate about his religion.  But I had made peace with my partner’s differing religion, respecting his beliefs even if they were different than my own.  Surely we can find some sort of compromise.  Apparently, there was no compromising with this.  It took two days apart for me to think over the reality of what this kind of future meant.   Yet because my love was so strong for him I came to yet another place of peace and accepted graciously what I chose my future role to be in the presence of our children- an example of how to love and treat other humans no matter their differing beliefs.  I was not giving up on this man or on us, even if I couldn’t remember the last time we’d had sex.

So, I did what any natural woman who was holding on to the dream of getting married to the man of her dreams would do.  I buried my head in work and left limited time to think about that icky feeling hiding in my gut.  Until only 2 weeks until wedding bells, that feeling in my gut won against the battle of all my denial and fear- hence the volcano of spewing word lava.  He couldn’t believe that I had the audacity to yell at him.  It soon became clear how he had no concern for the voice that was crying out from inside me.  It was as if my expressions of truth didn’t matter to him.  At last, the dominating dilemma came out.  “You know,” he says, I didn’t want to say anything, but after we were married I had wanted you to convert.” 

It took .2 seconds for me to relay back that there was no way in hell I would be converting, and only two days after this “blow out” for us to admit it was over.  It didn’t matter that the caterer, the venue, the hotel rooms had all been paid for.  It didn’t matter the opinions of others.  No amount of money, or other people’s judgments should determine the course of your actions.  It took sifting through the pride and anger of ego, to accept truthfully that this person was not right, no matter how much we loved each other or how I knew that a simple change of thought on his behalf could transform everything.  It took integrity, to realize that it would not be fair to our “future children” that religion be a conflict in the home.  Instead, I would choose a relationship that honored my feelings and beliefs, allowed space for compromise and for God’s sake, honored me in the bedroom!

I have heard many stories from friends who went ahead with the wedding and didn’t break off the relationship when their intuition was telling them otherwise.  I have heard of many women converting for their husbands and raising their families in that religion.  We all have the God-given freedom of choice.  How do you decide to use yours?  Say what needs to be said, do what needs to be done.