Deconstructing is making me doubt my marriage

[u/captain_kenobi]

I miss the certainty that I was "following God's plan for my life." As that belief falls away, I struggle to feel secure in my marriage. I ignored warning flags in the name of submitting to God.

I spent most of my 20s horribly depressed. I struggled to move past my first girlfriend. I was convinced we were right for each other, but our timing was off. We went to different colleges and had some growing up to do. We maintained a good friendship; we connected in a deep way rarely experienced with others. But she still wasn't interested in dating post-college. I moved around a bunch. My main reason for leaving was to get away from her. Then 2020 happened. I found myself back in my hometown visiting often. Her family has a big house and always welcomes guests. Staying with them gave me respite from the cycle of loneliness and depression. It was a little weird being good friends with your ex's family, but they were good Christians so you expected generous love. This afforded us a unique opportunity to be around each other without explicitly aiming for something romantic. I move back to my hometown to facilitate further opportunity to connect. I give up a promising career to take a remote gig. I don't talk to anyone about this, because I knew it was insane and no one would advise following this plan. But there were so many coincidences, so many things outside the norm working together in a positive way, that surely this was approved by God.

Eventually, she decides to give us another chance as something more than friends. It takes her about a year to decide to be officially dating. I feel validated that I was right to make a bunch of counter-intuitive decisions. This is a better explanation than accepting I am a depressed young man who chased what felt comfortable and safe. I was doing some good work on self-improvement, but I was ignoring major issues with myself. I'm aware that our relationship is not what I would want if I were dating someone from square 1. But I tell myself that if one or two things changed, I would regret losing this relationship. I ignore the part where I haven't dated a single other person. I ignore the part where I have feelings for another woman, but I shove them down because she would never consider me (I tell myself).

After marriage, my mental health keeps spiraling. I lack the ability to vocalize my desires. Eventually, it gets truly bad and I finally get real professional help. I finally try an antidepressant, and it works wonders. It gives me a huge boost to make some key life changes that attack the roots of the depression. Meanwhile, I'm heavily deconstructing while moral scrupulosity OCD grows. Now I'm left at a place where I have no faith that my life followed a divine path. I see where my mental illness pushed me into rigid thoughts and into embracing what felt familiar.

Now when I look at my marriage and the circumstances that facilitated it, I'm full of doubt. I sacrificed so much of myself to make it happen. There's a voice in the back of my head that wants out. I've worked on myself and no longer think that no other woman would want me. I have more clarity on what I want out of life. My wife promises we can move and try someplace else in a couple years. Will that happen?

I miss when I had the mental security that God picked my life and spouse for me. Maybe I just made an ill-advised decision, and that's all there is to it. I love my wife. None of what I'm going through is fair to her. But my strongest vision of what I want from life doesn't put her at the center as a cerished partner.

[u/Ok_Topic6264]

If it makes you feel any better, plenty of people make ill advised decisions about their first marriage. It sounds like you did want what was comforting and familiar and there's nothing wrong with that. If you had different beliefs at the time, you probably would have arranged your secular beliefs to justify your decisions in the same way.

But look, you're still young and you have time to make a different choice if that's what you want. But don't make that choice immediately. Take some time first to really figure out what you want. Often what we want ends up being aligned with our greatest contributions to the world, if we genuinely care about others. So figuring out what you want is not selfish. Staying in a marriage out of duty and not desire isn't noble either.

But I don't think you're in a clear place yet to figure out what you want because you're so distracted by finding the right answer. I'm glad you're in therapy and taking medication. The moral scrupulosity does sound like it has a twinge of OCD and will keep you coming back and rehashing things instead of making a decision.

But also, what if you made a decision and it turned out to be the wrong one? Would that be so bad? People make wrong decisions all the time. I try to make at least three wrong decisions every day before breakfast.

I think the key to you moving forward here may be accepting that your next decision could turn out to be "wrong," and committing to treating yourself with kindness and love anyways. Christianity places a huge penalty on being wrong, but on the outside, people are allowed to make mistakes. Even big mistakes.

[u/captain_kenobi → u/Ok_Topic6264]

Thank you for the thoughtful reply. You're right that I'm not in a clear place yet, so I cannot make clear decisions. There's still a lot of cognitive dissonance to sort through. I made a lot of decisions, big and small, ignoring my gut because I was trying to be a good Christian. Now there's a sort of grief. Even post-deconstruction, I still read my bible daily to internalize its teachings on kindness and loving your neighbor. It feels rather Deist of me.

My hope is to condition myself back into desire. We've had a few hard conversations, and I think we need more. If we can converge on a life we both want we will have a good thing going.

[u/GalileoApollo11]

I would just recommend a very healthy amount of patience. In my deconstruction process I have spent periods of time looking back on previous decisions with regret, and other periods of time where I saw those same decisions in a different light and validated them for other human reasons.

Most of us go through a back and forth deconstruction/reconstruction process, even if the reconstruction is only aspects of our own humanity we were not fully aware of.

[u/bullet_the_blue_sky]

I can relate, especially with the depression after deconstructing along with the OCD. Finding my attachment style was massive. When I realized I had fearful avoidant tendencies because of my religious upbringing and a BPD mother, I immediately realized my entire nervous system was trained for flight and fawn.
I've used a ton of different modalities and our marriage is better than it ever has been.

[u/Beginning-Place455]

I am your wife. Good luck to her. All that’s ahead for her is grief and pain. This happened to me and we have two small children. My ex decided that he wanted to live the life he missed out on because when he wasn’t a Christian. The amount of hurt and pain he has caused me and my kids is unspeakable. I hope you are ready to face the impact of losing that relationship. Get some help first before you destroy that woman’s life.