He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not

by Trish Ryan

  “I love you, too,” I blurted. And as he hugged me, I knew it was true.

  A WEEK OR so later we had another snowstorm. Steve picked me up on Saturday and we rented movies, planning to spend the day hanging out on his cozy couch. We’d been there for about ten minutes when his mom called, asking if he could help shovel out her stairs. “Do you mind?” he asked me, holding his hand over the phone.

  “Of course not,” I said, reaching for my boots so he could take me home. I was disappointed to see our day together disappear, but after dating so many men who’d hated their mothers, Steve’s willingness to help his out was rather endearing.

  “No, no—you stay here and relax,” he said. “This shouldn’t take long. I’ve got a trillion channels you can flip through, or you can use the computer. I’ll be back in an hour or so and we can watch the movies then.”

  A few minutes later, I was alone in Steve’s condo. And for the first time in my adult life, I had no desire whatsoever to snoop around. This was a miracle. Suspicion had been a daily reality in my prior relationships, ever since Chip had cheated on me. I’d spent hours of my life searching and picking through various bookshelves and coat pockets, looking for evidence that I wasn’t the only woman on the scene. More often than not, I’d found what I was looking for—phone numbers, hair elastics, cards expressing some other woman’s hope that my man would call. This led to awful, awkward confrontations: What is this?/Where did you get that?/Why do you still have it?/Were you spying on me?/Don’t you love me? /Don’t you trust me? /What does this mean? Each time, I secretly hoped my boyfriend would rise to the occasion, that he’d play the hero: I waited for him to throw away the offending object, sweep me into his arms, reassure me that no woman other than me existed in his world. But that was never how it happened. Not even once.

  I didn’t feel the urge to snoop on Steve. Left alone in his condo, I didn’t want to pick through his desk, rifle through his dresser drawers, or scan his e-mails for evidence of other women. I wanted to trust him. We’d been careful in what we shared about our pasts, protecting each other and our new relationship—I didn’t know the names or stories of his former girlfriends, and he hadn’t heard the drawn-out saga of my dating history, either. Neither of us had had a significant relationship since deciding to follow Jesus (Steve had met Adam, but we both agreed that that wasn’t significant), and we believed what the Bible said about how once you were following Jesus, “the old has gone, the new has come.” Accordingly, we agreed not to burden each other with sordid histories, bucking the pop-psychology tradition that to have “real communication” you need to know everything about each other. We didn’t hide from the past, but we made a point not to dwell on it, either. It was stunning how good that felt. Dating Steve was the first time I considered the possibility that jealousy and distrust might not be a part of God’s design for relationships.

  I turned on the television and wrestled with Steve’s three remote controls. I checked my e-mail and read a news report about two celebrities eloping at an island resort. And I looked in Steve’s Bible, sitting on the coffee table, tabbed, underlined, with a pen sticking out of the book of Galatians. It was the same chapter I’d read that morning. I sat there on his couch and stared out the window, amazed that we looked to the same words to guide our lives.

  STEVE AND I agreed that we wanted to follow the Bible’s rules about dating, but we had little in the way of clear guidance on what that meant or how to make it happen. Our church discussed vague theories like compatibility at dating workshops, but no one ever came out and said, “Here is a list of dos and don’ts.” So we prayed. Here’s what we heard: Don’t have sex until you get married. We didn’t realize it at the time, but this would require quite a bit of our attention. It was challenging, we soon discovered, to focus on what we were not going to do. When someone says, “Don’t think about the Eiffel Tower,” suddenly Paris is on your mind.

  It was a particularly stormy winter, so most of our dates took place indoors. We watched TV and rented movies, but that was all just a coverup; all we wanted to do was snuggle and make out. We kissed chastely for a while—gentle explorations of the new, intimate landscape of us. But eventually things would heat up, and I found myself wanting to do things we’d agreed we wouldn’t do. Apparently, we discovered, God didn’t protect Christian couples by neutralizing their hormones until they reached the altar—not at all. (To this day, when I think of those evenings, I can remember every detail of Steve’s favorite plaid shirt, which I memorized to distract myself. The thin blue line goes up to the shoulder seam, where it picks up the horizontal bit of yellow. They cross over the green together, making a little square . . .)

  We employed a teamwork approach to chastity, but it was clear from the beginning that Steve was our captain. I agreed to our goals wholeheartedly, but when push came to shove (so to speak) I was always the one ready to sell us down the river for a quick roll on the couch. Steve however, had the strength to say, “No way,” and stick to it, which made me love, trust, and long for him even more. We developed strategies to keep us out of trouble: whenever things got hot and heavy, we’d flip to Psalm 119—the longest Psalm in the Bible—and read it until we cooled down. We kept the giant book right in front of us on the coffee table, marked with a bright green Post-it; the prospect of reading 176 lines about how blessed people are who walk according to the law of the Lord was always enough to put us back in check.

  We agreed not to spend the night together, reasoning that when the Bible said, “and he lay with her,” it didn’t mean they merely shared a tent and a little spooning. It sounded quaint, but we wanted to save the intimacy of sleeping together—in all the phrase’s connotations—until marriage. So we stayed on the couch. We cuddled, we hugged, we even slid down a bit from time to time into a kind of uncomfortable semi-nap position that we pretended to love because it felt good to be that close. I liked hearing his heartbeat and feeling his fingers in my hair.

  Something amazing happened inside me as those days and nights went by and Steve ended our dates with gentle kissing and careful, A-framed hugs: I realized that he loved me. He loved me. Not my sexual wiles or flirtatious energy, not my bedroom skills or some new magazine technique I picked up in the checkout aisle at Stop & Shop, but me. There were no “perks” to our time together, no secret agenda making me wonder why he stopped by. If he said he missed me and wanted to see me, I could believe him. And as the months went by and he drove me home after every date, never once suggesting that I crash at his place, “just because we’re both so tired,” I realized that protecting me, and us, was worth something to him—that he valued what we were building enough to spend forty-five minutes in a cold car at the end of the night so that we didn’t get into trouble. Most of our dates ended by 10:00 p.m., but this was the most adored I’d ever felt.

  Despite all this love, however, I was still haunted by that awful passage in Matthew. Had Steve seen this passage, where Jesus said that anyone who married a divorced woman was committing adultery? I wondered. Did he think marrying me would be adulterous? Of the few people I dared ask about this, no one had anything encouraging to say. “I don’t know,” they’d mumble. “The Bible says God hates divorce.” None of them had been divorced, or worried about such things. They tried to hide it, but the look in their eyes showed that they weren’t entirely sure about Jesus’ promise that I was a new creation. I tried to remember the words one person prayed for me when I first came to church, a woman who knew nothing of my circumstances: “God will give you beauty for your ashes,” she said. “He will redeem what has been taken from you.”

  God, I prayed, please let this be true.

  One night when Steve came to pick me up, the look on his face told me he’d found that passage. “We need to talk,” he said, his voice grave and shaky.

  “I need to know what happened with your first marriage,” Steve said without any further introduction or preface. “I need to figure out if it’s right for us to pursue this, if J
esus is okay that we’re dating.”

  My heart sank. I couldn’t spin this, I had no crafty plan to convince or entice or seduce him. I had prayed for a man who ran his life by God’s rules, and here I had one; his decisions were beyond my manipulation. “Can we pray first?” I asked. Part of me was stalling, but mostly I wanted to make sure that if God was about to ruin my life again, He was there to witness my pain.

  “Lord,” Steve prayed, taking my hands in his, “be with us right now. Show us what You want us to see. I thank You that You brought Trish out of that marriage, and that You brought us together. But we want to make sure we do everything according to Your will, and we need Your help to do that. Be with us here tonight. In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.”

  “Amen,” I repeated, taking a deep breath. “Okay,” I forged ahead, terrified of what would come next. “What do you want to know?”

  “Just tell me what happened.”

  How could I tell him about the awful things my ex had done? The truth was, I didn’t really think of myself as “divorced,” not often, anyway. I’d put it behind me when I decided to follow Jesus, but now all that talk of being a new creation seemed like nothing more than rhetoric. “I was his third wife,” I began. “He was demanding.” I told Steve how I’d get in trouble for getting my hair cut without my ex’s permission, or folding the laundry in the wrong order. “He’d even yell at me for petting the dog,” I said, stroking Kylie’s silky ears as she lay next to us on the couch, oblivious to my angst. I described my life in those days—the constant yelling, the fear. I told Steve about the time I met a nice woman at the gym, only to have my ex tell me that he’d had an affair with her, how he went out to bars and brought home women’s phone numbers, and went to his ex-girlfriend’s house whenever we had a fight. “I don’t know where this leaves us,” I said at the end. “I took Jesus at his word that my past was put behind me when I said yes to following him, and until tonight it seemed like it was true.” Tears pooled in my eyes and I looked away.

  “It will be okay,” Steve assured me, not sounding sure himself. “I love you so much—you’re the woman I’ve been praying for,” he said, pulling me into his arms.

  The next day he called. “Can I come over?”

  “Of course,” I said. Please don’t, I thought. I’m not sure I can take it.

  “I spent last night praying,” he said when he was back in my living room, back on my couch, arms back around me in that way that felt so right. “I asked God if I could pursue you, if I could think about us building a life together. You should know something, before I tell you any more: I don’t care that you were married before. I love you, and that includes your past, your present, and, I hope, your future. If Jesus hadn’t mentioned divorce in the Bible, I wouldn’t give it any thought at all. But he did, so I have to; it’s what following Jesus is all about.”

  “You’re right,” I acknowledged. Here Steve was, showing all the character and devotion I dreamed of, right before breaking up with me. This should put quite a dent in my evangelism, I thought bitterly. I’m sure divorcées will flock to Christianity once they discover it dooms them to life alone.

  “So here’s what God told me,” Steve continued. I sucked in my breath and looked away. “Look at me,” he said, moving my chin with his giant hand. “You’re free,” he began. “Your past has been erased.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. Was I free to apply to the convent?

  “Your first marriage happened before you knew Jesus, or even understood what God meant when He created marriage. Your first husband wasn’t in a position to enter a covenant with you; he’d broken covenant with two other wives already. He deceived you, and it seems pretty clear he was unfaithful to your marriage. Jesus exempted women whose husbands had been unfaithful,” Steve reminded me. “On every level,” he said, a huge smile filling his face and lighting up his eyes, “God told me you are free, that it’s okay for us to pursue this, that I can continue to woo you and try to win your heart. I love you, Trish, and I hope I can make you as happy as you make me.”

  I collapsed into an exhausted, grateful heap in his arms, crying. Steve fished a tissue out of his pocket and dried my tears, holding me close and teasing me about my puffy eyes. I blew my nose in front of him for the first time, and that’s how we began the next phase of our relationship.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Good News in the Garden

  It would be perfect if I could tell you that I spent the next months of our dating in a state of relaxation and bliss, certain my future was in God’s hands and trusting Him to make my life complete. Unfortunately, that would be a total lie. I was still dogged by the vague, tormenting sense that time was running out—that if I didn’t close the deal and get married soon, the things Steve and I had dodged so far—jealousy, disillusionment, disappointment—would overtake us. I wanted to believe that things with Steve could be different, that things with Jesus would be different, but I wasn’t sure I had the faith. Jesus said, “Everything is possible for him who believes.” I believe, I told him. Help my unbelief . . .

  Then one morning as I put on my makeup, I heard a voice say, You and Steve will be married on June nineteenth. I dismissed it, assuming it was my imagination. My Christian dating books were filled with stories of delusional women who thought God told them when and who they would marry; they were always wrong. That’s impossible, I told myself. June is three months away, and we’re not even engaged. I pushed it out of my mind and smoothed a bit more Pink Celebration onto my cheeks.

  Three weeks later, Steve suggested a Saturday picnic at the Boston Public Garden to celebrate the first warm weekend of spring. How romantic! I thought, but I was confused. We weren’t, from what I could tell, a “picnic in the park” kind of couple. I mentioned this to Amy, who pointed out that we’d never dated in warm weather, that we might, in fact, be a “picnic in the park” kind of couple, I just didn’t know it yet.

  I stared at the grounds of the Public Garden wide-eyed as we walked in that day. I’d never been there before, and I took in the scenes I’d imagined in my childhood as Mom read us E. B. White’s classic, The Trumpet of the Swan: the lily ponds and paddle boats, the bridge under which mute swan Louis once slept. Steve looked handsome, his maroon waffle pullover falling from his broad shoulders. I smiled, remembering the encouraging words of a woman preacher I’d seen on Christian television a few months earlier, exhorting us not to settle: “Remember, ladies,” she said, “God don’t bring no shlumpy, triflin’ men. If he’s shlumpy and triflin’, he ain’t from the Lord!” Steve was neither shlumpy nor trifling, and I was happy to be starting spring with his hand wrapped around mine.

  We found a spot under some trees, spread out a blanket, and claimed our place among the other Bostonians emerging from hibernation. Steve unwrapped turkey roll-ups and fruit salad; we ate as we watched a little boy toddling after a soccer ball. I turned to Steve to thank him for planning such a magnificent, relaxing day. “You’re wonderful. I love you for doing all this for us. I can’t imagine anything better.” I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and gave him a big hug.

  “In that case,” he responded, pulling back slightly and looking in my eyes, “Will you do me the honor?” I looked down and saw a black velvet box in his hands, holding a sparkling solitaire diamond. I stared at it, astonished.

  “Where did that come from?” I blurted. “It’s so beautiful!” I felt my heart pounding as my eyes filled up with tears. Is this really happening? I wondered, afraid I might be making it up. Can this be true? I looked up and saw Steve smiling at me, his eyes twinkling, shining with a love like I’d never seen before. He wants me!? I thought, incredulous. Steve wants me to be his wife!

  “It was my grandmother’s,” Steve said, turning the diamond so its facets caught the sun. “My mom saved it for me for all these years, and I had it reset last week for you. Do you like it?”

  “I do! I mean, yes! Wait a minute,” I paused, wanting to draw out this wonderful m
oment, “I don’t think you ever finished your question . . . will I do you the honor of what?” I teased, a huge grin on my face.

  “Will you do me the honor of being my wife?” he asked, smiling, but with a serious look in his eyes.

  “Yes,” I said. “I would love to be your wife.” Steve wrapped his arms around me and pulled me to him, my head fitting into the space next to his neck, my chin on his strong shoulder. Then he slipped the ring out of the box and onto my ring finger, where we watched it sparkle for what seemed like hours.

  “We should pray,” I said, tearing my eyes away from this new treasure on my hand and looking up at Steve. “I feel like we should include God in this.”

  Steve took my hands in his and bowed his head alongside mine. “Lord, thank you. Thank you for bringing us together, thank you for the promise of marriage and new life. Bless us as we start this new chapter together. Be with us, Jesus, and knit us together. We dedicate our new family to you,” he prayed. “Your turn,” he said to me, squeezing my hands.

  “Jesus,” I said, “thank you for coming through on your promise. I’m so glad I took you seriously. Thank you for being the right God, and for bringing me the right guy!”

  Steve pulled a tiny bottle of champagne out of his bag and we shared a discreet toast, careful not to draw the attention of the mounted park police. I looked down at his grandmother’s diamond, saved by his mother for the woman who would be his wife. I was that woman.