They’d been dating for six weeks, two months? He was already talking marriage. They weren’t rushing into sleeping together, partly because of his Christian idea of waiting until after marriage (he’d only been Christian for a few years, so he hadn’t been waiting his whole life), but somehow he overcame that obstacle, and they actually planned it more or less, or at least that he would sleep over at her apartment for the first time, and what that probably meant, so by that point he’d come to believe that he could align his having sex with his Christianity. Anyway, her new boyfriend/future husband brought pajamas and a toothbrush, which maybe doesn’t sound sexy to you but was very sweetly sexy to her, and they started sleeping together, often, and then one day they were in her bed and he got up out of the bed to go to work, or somewhere, and he was like So you know if we get married I’ll be the head of the household, and here we’ll let you choose from her responses, which might be a) AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, b) Dude, I know it’s only been two months but I know you have met me, c) Yeah, no, or d) all of the above. This was the extent of this conversation in that moment, but a few days later when he came to understand that she’d never become a Christian, he broke things off. She brought meat loaf in a glass pan to his apartment for dinner, they had the breakup conversation, she took the leftover meat loaf and the pan with her, got to the corner, threw the pan with the meat loaf still in it onto the ground, sat on the curb, cried, hoping he’d hear the pan break/her crying and come out and fix it. He didn’t.
That night she went to a meeting and talked to her friends afterward, standing outside a church in Wicker Park. She knew that this was a kind of progress for her, that she was willing to let go of someone she loved over her own spiritual beliefs, which had been fuzzy over the years to say the least, and occasionally felt like a crisis to say the most. The recovery program she’s part of is considered to be a spiritual one, even though it’s one where you get to decide on a god of your own understanding, and if that happens to be Jesus or a whale with wings or a deflated Mylar balloon or no god at all, it’s up to you, except she wants to have more faith in her faith, basically, but she doesn’t, she has always wanted to know exactly what it is and how it works. But no amount of obsessing over this has ever gotten her there. There was a time in her young adult life when she would have converted for a dude she loved, she’d have converted all her ounces to liters, she’d have converted her dollars to donuts, she’d have converted her entire self. But by the time of the Christianity proposal, she had come to want to keep more of that self, to know that self a little better, at least enough to choose a fuzzy god of her own misunderstanding, at least enough to know that if she was going to be part of a white heteronormative marriage, she wasn’t going to add any further notions of patriarchy to that, and so she let Christian dude go, and it was painful, but this was only about two months in, she knew she’d live, she had before, and then the next day he came over to say he wanted to stay together, that she was amazing and he loved her and he didn’t want to lose her, and she reminded him she wasn’t going to be a Christian, and he said he understood, he said I’m asking you to take me back, and handed her tickets to two different concerts in the coming months, and all she could think was, You really think we’re going to be together by the time these shows come around?