----- Original Message -----
From: QUANDO A “FIXAÇÃO” PASSA POR AMOR
To: contato@caiofabio.com
Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2006 8:58 AM
Subject: Não consigo esquecer meu ex-marido (I can’t forget my ex-husband)

 

 

Pastor Caio,

 

I’m in a very serious inner conflict. Until over six years ago I was married to a man who was the love of my life. He was the first in every way. Many times he made a pledge of love.

 

He and I worked at the same place, but he lived in a different city. After he was out of a job, my parents didn’t let him sleep at my home. They were afraid of the neighbors’ chitchat. As things grew more difficult, we decided to get married in order to be together. He was still unemployed. Then our quarrels started. He cried a lot over the circumstances and was jealous of everything I did. If I, for instance, took a different street when driving, he got suspicious.

 

Our denominations were different: He attended the Christian Congregation of Brazil and I’m a member of the Assembly of God. This was another reason for us to argue. I was the only one working, so we were living with my parents. He would wake up late and never went job seeking. He wanted me to rent a house so we could leave my parents’.

 

But he was out of a job and I thought it unfair to bear all the home expenses by myself. I asked him to find a job first so that we could divide the rent and the other costs.

 

At that time I was intending to take a technical course that would be very good for me. And this was the cause of our divorce!

 

When I told him I was going to study, he turned his gaze to me and said, “You’ve made your choice. Now stay with your course. Goodbye!”

 

Pastor, to this day I haven’t understood what happened. We were legally married. He just didn’t talk to me about it at all. He packed up, in spite of my begging, turned around and got out of my life as if I were nothing!

 

He shattered my dreams and my love. I became a sad, depressed person, because I thought I now had a taint in my life, so if a man approached me, he would only mean to take advantage of a divorced woman.

 

So I hid my past from everybody!

 

I moved to a different city and had a depression for over three years. I thought I couldn’t date anybody because adultery wasn’t the cause of my divorce, and the Bible is very clear about marriage being an alliance, a covenant that can’t be broken unless an adultery happens.

 

I was only nineteen years old, and I was in great distress. Time passed and I met a young man. We started dating and decided to get married. Now I’m twenty-nine and we have a beautiful son, but I can’t forget my ex-husband. I’ve already heard lectures on inner healing, I pray nonstop, but to no avail…

 

Please, Pastor, help me!

 

 

__________________________________________

 

 

 

 

 

Dear friend,

 

Grace and Peace!

 

 

Let’s not even take in account the mad things that happened before your “marriage” to the “love of your life”. Among them, and among so many, the “evangelical-truth-premise” was put into effect: the premise that teaches us that we meet our sex need by getting married. It also says that in order that nobody stops considering us as the holy converts-perverts who we’re proud to say we are or to pass ourselves off as “something similar”, we should do whatever it is—to keep up appearances only. By doing so, we strain out a mosquito and swallow a camel, just like the Pharisees do.

 

With regard to the “love of your life”, I suggest that you see a therapist as soon as possible. After all, only a very disturbed soul can go through the distressing drama of having to “fix up your life” to be able to find another man (you’ve always wanted to marry again), and, after finding him, be distressed because of the “love of your life”. Not to mention that to call a guy like that “the love of your life”, you have to be inexistent as an individual—that is, to become “nothing”, as you said. In your case, it happened because your great insecurity misled you to give yourself over to a childish, jealous, lazy, disaffective and irresponsible man, thinking that he could be “the love of your life”.

 

In fact, due to your unfinished affair with him, given the way he went away, you developed a sense of guilt. Yes—you even feel guilty of having done everything the right way (although, paradoxically, everything was wrong from the start). 

 

Well, the sort of fixation that you developed is usually the mixing of a number of factors: Memories of good times (the bad ones are forgotten then), plus the lack of explanation for his sudden departing, plus the pain you were in (pain takes roots that are connected to the very subject that causes the pain), plus the guilty thought that he left because you weren’t “good enough” to make him stay, plus the huge insecurity that this happening brought about in your soul, plus the religious neurosis that says that getting married now means rebellion against your “marriage” (which you assume to be the one you supposedly had with him), plus the fear of undergoing pain again—all of these things make your ex-husband “rise from the dead” now that you’ve found someone who wants to marry you.

 

This isn’t happening because he has a real meaning to you (if he did, you wouldn’t even have looked for a new boyfriend), but because of two facts: a) Since there’s a man who’s interested in you now, your self-image is starting to recover, and this creates the illusion that if at that time you had been as you are now (that is, capable of drawing a man’s interest), then he would be with you now, and b) Your religious guilt regarding a second marriage, about which you are definitely sure that “the Bible is very clear about marriage being an alliance, a covenant that can’t be broken unless an adultery happens”.

 

But if it’s a covenant that can’t be broken, how, then, yours was? If it cannot be, then you cannot do it. Or did you mean, “it shouldn’t be broken”?

 

However, irrespective of what this still means to you, the important thing is to point out that you’ve never been married; that that paper doesn’t marry anybody who, at heart, isn’t already truly married; and that you’re a single woman who was “sent away” by the man who once said he was your husband.

 

Therefore, from any perspective whatever, even if we follow your legalistic path, I have to say that you’re free because you were sent away—if you’d rather feel like the women who lived millenniums ago.

 

However, mind you: Jesus died to save us from this burden too. Yes—in Him, this law was taken where it belongs: death.

 

You’re not suffering from love; it’s just fixation. No one who doesn’t love himself/herself first has any power to love someone else. And I don’t believe you love yourself in a sound way, because if you did, you wouldn’t call that guy “the love of my life”; you’d call him just “a kid who passed by”.

 

Excuse me for saying so, but this melting of the “Christian Congregation of Brazil” and the “Assembly of God” can only create two kinds of marriage when a couple is persuaded by their respective groups. Either a fixed marriage, based on thoughts like, “We’ll stick together, no matter what, because one day we said we would” or, on the other hand, a fixation that says, “Marriage is one in a lifetime, so the man who ‘arrived first’ is the man of my life.”

 

All this happens because of the false premise that every marriage “validated” by the “church” or by the “notary public” is also validated in Heaven. But a marriage is only true for a man and a woman if it happens in their hearts. Otherwise, all the earthly powers will only provide us with a marriage certificate, a marriage agreement, and legal, binding obligations.

 

 

Yes, for if speaking in the languages of men and angels, if prophesying, if moving mountains by faith, if being able to fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, if giving all your possessions to the poor, if surrendering your body to the flames, or whatever other virtues that can be expressed as something historically visible are of no value before God if done without love, and if lived without love … why, then, the very thing that has been the major symbol of love among humans from the beginning—the marriage of a man and a woman—could happen and be without love and still have any worth in God’s sight?

 

The type of love that maintains marriages that don’t have the sort of love that must exist between a man and a woman is the kind of love with which you are told to love your enemies, not your partner in life and in bed.

 

As I see it, it’s more than clear that if speaking in tongues but having not love is a “nuisance” to God as a resounding brass or the clanging of metals, then, for a reason that is superior in meaning, a marriage only “profits” if it’s fruit of true love. Otherwise, let everybody know that a marriage without love is something existentially pagan. It’s like the worshiping of the foolish. It’s like what is nothing wanting to be seen as something.

 

When I say “profits” I’m talking about what is meaningful with God.

 

After all, even if the donor doesn’t give out of love, the famished one who receives the benefit will suffer no harm. However, even though the donor has given everything, in God’s eyes it’s as if he/she had given nothing, because before God only love can give a meaning to anything.

 

Even faith without love profits nothing, as true faith is only the faith that, according to Paul, “works through love”. ¹

 

If this criterion is legitimate for everything, why does the “church” put marriage outside of such spiritual reality, as if getting married or prolonging a marriage without love had any value with God?

 

We all need to know that probably the unhealthiest atmosphere of humankind has been that of marriage. I say so because for millenniums, marriage had almost nothing to do with love, but only financial, social, religious, moral, circumstantial or even political interests.

 

In the old days, very few women married the men they already loved. Most were given, traded, sold, used, delivered or whatever else involved some kind of deal.

 

A woman was either money or a prize.

 

Some of them, especially due to their culture and customs, ended up “learning” to love their husbands, although more often than not, conjugal love had little importance. What really mattered to such couples was the family, which also had its economic-social role.

 

However, reading the Genesis we see that Adam’s “shout” was a “Eureka!” when God brought him a woman:

 

“This is now…!”, he exclaimed.

 

So, from the beginning, such an encounter would bring about a “Whoopee!”, a “Wow!”, a “This is now…!”

 

If it turned out to be registry business or any other type of interest without love, it has to do with “the hardness of our hearts”, not the revelation of God.

 

That’s why Jesus is so strict regarding divorce, because back then every man would choose, at his convenience, a woman he desired or was interested in for some reason, with no love at all, only based on interests and deals, and when he no longer desired her, he simply “sent her away”.

 

If the man was a religious, preferably a Pharisee, and was bored at his wife, he would just “send her away”, leaving her on her own, with no father, no mother, and with her days numbered, especially in those days, when no support for women existed as male sexism was ruthless.

 

In this way, the “castaway” woman became a taboo, an unclean being. Moreover, such a situation also caused the one who married the “sent away” woman to be deemed an adulterer.

 

That’s why Jesus said, in those days, in that context, in that way, that every man who “sent away” his wife “caused (exposed) her to become an adulteress”.

 

Therefore, what Jesus says, rather than being an Obligation Law according to the law of death, is a cry for protection against the forsaking the wives were subjected to by their husbands, who were full of trivial, sexist whims. Many of them often changed wives under the pretext that they didn’t like the poor creature’s feet!

 

But from the “legal” viewpoint, such a pretext was enough to grant the machos a divorce and throw the women into a pit of judgment and prejudice. In this environment, she would either become a beggar or marry someone else even if only for the sake of survival. But the adulteress’ karma would forever follow her.

 

Believing that a legal marriage without love is a real marriage “before God”—being, therefore, never-ending due to a simple agreement signed by the two parts (you unsuitably called it analliance, but when an alliance allies, it hardly ever dis-allies)—is the same as believing in a law of karma.

 

Yes, because without love, any marriage is karma if it has to be maintained at any cost.

 

So, back to your question, I’ll only tell you two more things:

 

1. Even if you loved this man whom you call “the love of my life” it wouldn’t be worth it, because he does not love you. A man who really loves a woman never does what he did. Take it from me. Come to your senses in this!

 

2. Even if he wanted you back, you should not want him anymore. After all, how could you trust a man who says “Goodbye!” and never says anything else afterwards? People like that scare me! I admire people who only say goodbye after they do everything in their power. In this case, “goodbye” has to be a real goodbye, which means casting the situation on God and saying, “Enough.” However, this can’t be done recklessly as he did. In my opinion, he could no longer stand the situation as a whole (you were included), so he used your “selfishness” (although he was the selfish one) to “justify” his departing. Otherwise, if there were anything else, even if it only were a sexual desire for you and nothing else, he would have looked for you afterwards—either out of care or out of desire. After all, he was still your “husband”, thus, in a comfortable “position” to only treat you as a “girlfriend” when you both wanted to. However, even this he didn’t want.

 

Therefore, now I only have two more things to say to you:

 

1. Don’t marry a man you don’t love or a man you aren’t sure you love. Don’t rush. Get to know your boyfriend better. Take it easy. What’s the hurry? It’s your life, so don’t let anyone tell you what to do unless he/she stands by you to help. Therefore, only marry your boyfriend if you both are already married to each other.

 

2. Be mindful: What you feel for your “ex-whatever-he-was” (he could be anything but your husband) is nothing but your own fiction novel, fruit of your insecurity and a guilt feeling. After all, without self-love and self-respect, nobody has the power to love somebody else. You can only love another person if you love yourself. Well, if you loved and respected yourself, a guy who treated you as he did wouldn’t even be in your memories, or, at most, would be remembered as a “brain file”, but no longer as an affective memory. Therefore, looking into your own attitude I can say that you don’t love him. A woman who loves herself as a woman doesn’t love forever a man who doesn’t love her, and everyone who keeps on loving without being loved doesn’t love in fact. They only hold on to a “psychological hologram”, a creation of the soul, but which has nothing to do with the real person, let alone love.

 

This is all I have to tell you for now.

 

 

In Him, in Whom only what is is worth, and in Whom all that is only is if it is in love,

 

 

Caio