Dear Diary,
My desire for a dumb man has ruined my life. Or maybe it just exposed who I really am…
I Thought God Told Me Who My Husband Was
The Lifelong Craving To Be Loved…
The desire to be loved has consumed me since I was at least three years old. I’d make funny faces or do little dances in an effort to be found cute by the people around me. I remember that even at that tender age I wanted a boyfriend. Delusionally, I thought (and hoped) that the friends of my older brothers “liked me, liked me”.
I wrote my first list for my dream boyfriend the summer I turned 12. Everyone told me that the middle school I was going to was big and would have many kids from other districts attending. While I wasn’t one of the girls in elementary school that the boys had one-day “relationships” with. I thought for sure that my odds were increasing, and that it would be inevitable that someone at junior high would like me.
I became a few vowels short from being a mute, when I moved to a new school in the middle of my 8th grade year. But I held out hope that once I got to high school, the one person I had been praying for would be there.
It wasn’t until I was 18 and in college that I would finally find that one person who did “like me, like me”… A 38 year old man whom I’d met on a dating app. We stayed up for hours that first night just texting… It felt magical to finally have someone to talk to… And impossible that I’d ever experience something like it ever again.
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The Desperate Attempts To Feel Loved…
For the next 10 years, I used dating apps off and on. Only meeting someone in person every other year or so. But always giving them my body to try to fill that need for connection and intimacy. And never with a man I was attracted to.
It was in my head that only a man could give me the love I desired. Because a (good) romantic partner is all encompassing for friendship, love, connection, and intimacy. Plus, men who liked me were the only ones to stick around despite my awkwardness and social anxiety. Probably because the brain fog from their erections made it seem worth the trouble to talk to me.
So from three years old to 28, I cried. I lost sleep. I wished. I hoped. I prayed. I cut. All from my desire to be loved.
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The Desire To Be Loved Primed Me To Fall For A Marriage Promise…
With the groundwork of my deep rooted desire for love now laid. Can you imagine the joy I felt when I thought God told me who my husband was? And the crash that came when I found out I was wrong?
The promise of a husband was so real to me that I felt joined to this man in my spirit. The air around me was thick. My hope for it was astronomically high. There was no way it wasn’t from God.
The supposed promise checked all the boxes:
- There was the block on my dating life.
- There was the promise that I was a man’s wife.
- There was a pattern of events on specific days that made be believe I would meet my husband on January 16, 2025.
- I did “meet” someone on that day and he matched VERY specific things on my list.
- There was the (short-lived) influx of exes trying to come back into my life, people associating me with marriage, and rare male attention while out and about.
It all felt too supernatural to not be God. I felt special because I thought he shared a sweet secret with me that would change my life forever. That he was finally answering the prayer of three year old me. That all the tears that fell over never being chosen or seen were finally going to be made up for.
That I finally wasn’t going to be alone anymore…
Read About How I Received The Promise Of Husband:
- I Thought God Told Me Who My Husband Was – I Was Wrong (coming soon)
My Mental Health Slowly Deteriorated
I Watched As Everyone Around Me Got What I Thought Was Promised To Me…
Proverbs 13:12 says, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick…”
Instead of me being blessed with the one thing I wanted most in the world. I watched as family member after family member got married. One after another. Each having a baby… then a few months later announcing that they were already pregnant with their second. Even the ones younger than me. Even the people I followed on social media starting and expanding their families…
With the last of the single people in my family now having children and/or getting married, I just knew my name had to be on that list as well. Even with nothing happening around me, no prospects in sight, I was blinded with hope that God had someone for me too.
But that someone never came.
The Disappointment Destroyed Me…
Proverbs 17:22, “A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.”
It didn’t take long for me to realize that the thickness I was feeling in the air was just the shadow of depression waiting to engulf me. The obsession over the promise and the person was already wearing on my mind. Making it hard for me to think straight. But after one too many pregnancy announcements, depression’s full weight beared on my shoulders and I could no longer stand.
I would find myself crying no matter where I was. From flat out bawling one second to the next second going straight faced and feeling nothing at all.
I no longer had words to pray. My mind was completely blank whenever I tried.
I could no longer read the Bible because the words didn’t make sense and reading about how good God was made me angry because it didn’t feel like he was being very good.
Instead, it felt like he was laughing at my pain. Causing it by stabbing me in the heart and twisting the knife over and over. Then ignoring my pleads for help.
I Couldn’t Find Help For My Mental Health…
Besides the perception that God wasn’t helping me, I couldn’t find a therapist because they were all booked up. I don’t have friends so I had nobody to call.
After one particular bad experience, I went to church to try to speak to my Pastor, but it happened to be his three year anniversary with the church. So it didn’t feel appropriate to tell him my woes.
I did eventually tell my parents and my brother what had been happening and broke down in front of them. I was unashamed because it felt like I was dying anyway. But as it is when you aren’t first in someone’s life, the day passed and nobody was around to see that I was still hurting.
The crazy thing about the “promise” is that as soon as the man was introduced to me, my normal loneliness and anxiety was ramped up to 100 percent. I had had my first panic attack at a family event. I couldn’t lift my head at work to meet peoples eyes. I’d almost resorted to cutting like I did in my youth.
It was undoubtedly a spiritual attack and unfortunately I didn’t have the community to help me through it.
No words I choose will accurately describe what I felt all of 2025. I wanted to unalive myself, but I stuffed my face instead and gained 20 pounds in just a few months.
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But God Freed Me From The Deception
What I didn’t mention about the guy who I thought I would marry, is that I never even knew what he looked like. Yes. I was obsessing over a faceless man.
I go into more detail in my post, I Thought God Told Me Who My Husband Was – I Was Wrong (coming soon), but just to explain why I didn’t know what he looked like…
On January 16, 2025, my mom called to tell me that some new guy at her job wanted to go hiking with me. He hadn’t seen a picture of me. It was only a friendly offer because he wanted to meet new people in town. I latched on to the idea that he was my promised husband, because as I said, his description matched specific things on my list, and Jan 16 was the exact date I was expecting God to show me someone.
My belief is that God wouldn’t give us someone we’re unattracted to, so I refused to look the guy up because I wanted my first sight of him to be exciting and special. But towards the end of December I typed his name into Facebook. Turns out he wasn’t my type. And judging by the women in his pictures I would have never been his either.
Eleven long months of lamenting over A MAN of all things… And it completely destroyed me.
Through it, God Exposed What Was In My Heart
With each passing day I would tell myself, “This has to be real, there’s no way God would trick me”, “God would never let the devil trick me like this. Not with something I’ve wanted so bad for all my life”.
But as time moved on, without a word from God or from the man. I progressively got more angry, distraught, irritable, and depressed. Eventually my heart hardened and I stopped feeling anything at all to the point where it scared me.
It took me a long time. But I’m starting to understand why God allowed me to go through this devastation. He wanted to expose the nastiness that was in my heart:
- Jealousy
- Pride
- Anger
- Bitterness
- Entitlement
- Schadenfreude
- Hate
- Callousness
- Apathy
- Idolatry of men/people
I Almost Stopped Believing There Was A God…
Isaiah 55: 10 – 11 ” As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, 11 so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.”
The feelings of abandonment I had in that season where unlike anything I’ve felt before. I thought God hated me. I thought he wasn’t real at all. I thought he wasn’t good at all. I rolled my eyes at the sound of Jesus’s name. I called everyone liars for singing his praise and I questioned if he really helps us with all things. It was a chore to even open my Bible.
One thing I never did think about God though, was that HE was liar. I never once thought that God lied to me about that man being my husband or about me being a man’s wife. I know that God just allowed me to be deceived either by my own misunderstanding and deep rooted desires or he allowed the devil to trick to me. Either way, if God says something it WILL come to pass and since this didn’t, I know it wasn’t from him.
It was all to unravel who I was and to rebuild me as a new creation. To show me that my faith was built on sand. Or in other words, the expectation that if I followed him he would give me the gift of a dumb stupid man.
Final Thoughts
I worried about how this post would make me look since this is a Christian blog and in my other posts I often praise God for the very things I stopped believing him to be.
But what I went through is not uncommon for believers because the devils whole goal is to steal our faith in God. While I wavered and am still trying to rebuild my life in Christ, the important part is that I didn’t give up completely.
It looked pretty uncertain for a long time, but I found out that I HATE living without God. I missed him in my darkness. I felt sick without him. I needed him. Life felt purposeless without him and there’s no reason to keep living if I’m living without him.
As someone who’s spent the vast majority of their life in the house, there’s been few opportunity for me to experience drama and adversity. This was my first truly tough season. And now it’s given me a deeper understanding of what it means when the Bible says God is merciful, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love, and doesn’t treat us as our sins deserve (Psalm 103).
What’s the worst thing that happened to you because of your desire to be loved?
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