The End
So my Elders don’t think I should move out and give up on my marriage. They’re wrong, I know they are, which makes it easier to listen to other things I’m told over the next few months. In a last ditch effort to keep me, my husband decides to go to the Elders and confess his wrongs. He does this not for his own spiritual well being, but because he knows the Elders will try to influence me to stand by my man. So the plan is, he’ll get disfellowshipped and then I can’t leave while he’s in this weakened state. Little did he know he wasn’t trapping me, he was doing quite the opposite, not only was he making sure I left him, but he was forcing me to face my religious convictions head on without my “blind faith.”
I stick to my decision, I move out, but I continue to go to meetings. My husband continues to stop by, stalk me, call me at random to yell at me and come over to sleep on my couch saying he’s visiting my son. So I have to make the divorce legal, even at this point it was hard to do. It’s very hard to accept the fact that I’ve spent a decade of my life unhappy, it’s a death of a marriage and it’s always sad. At that point I still thought very much like a Jehovah’s Witness and I was conflicted, even though I kept going ahead with what I knew was the right thing to do. I couldn’t stay in my marriage, but the Jehovah’s Witness in me kept saying, “he didn’t cheat on you.” So I made up my mind eventually I would have sex with someone new and break our marital bond, who knows, maybe eventually my husband would straighten himself out and he could marry some teenage Witness virgin and ruin her life. I’d seen it happen with plenty of middle age Witness men, age doesn’t matter when you’re a witness, in fact nothing you did before you got baptised matters.
So now we’re at the end, the figurative straw. My husband finally accepts the marriage is over after many months and in a final act of chivalry tells the Elders that he cheated on me so I can be free to remarry and stay a Jehovah’s Witness. He lied so I can keep my religion, how sweet. Except it wasn’t a lie since he had a new child a few months after our divorce was final. I have no idea what he would have done if I had stayed he couldn’t exactly hide a child. I thank God, if I had listened to my Elders and stayed I would have been devastated by this news, my God knew better and gave me the strength to leave and the comfort to not feel bad about it most of the time. So to pinpoint the moment I quit being one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, one conversation changed everything. The gist of it was my Elder told me if I had been satisfying my husband at home, he wouldn’t have cheated. I don’t remember anything said after that, my whole life defined by this one moment. This man was wrong. I had been verbally and physically abused, yet I had still catered to this mans every need. My plans had always been arranged around cooking this man’s dinner, breakfast and being home to be his slave and I didn’t do enough? I did everything right, even to the point of losing who I was. My Elder and everyone like him became men to me. Just misguided men.
