Impact of Religious Trauma Series: The Unchaperoned Life | Post 4 of 6
I want to say something that men in this situation almost never say.
I wasn't ready.
Not for what she needed. Not for what she was asking. Not for the thing she had every right to ask for — a partner who could look her in the eye and say, without ambiguity, yes. Forever. Let's do this.
I couldn't say that. And I stayed anyway.
I stayed because the mornings were warm and cuddling on the couch was good and someone was reaching for my hand again after years of learning not to reach. I stayed because it felt, in most moments, like the real thing. And I told myself that staying was hope, that staying was trying, that staying was giving something real a real chance.
But some part of me knew. And the honest thing that Post 2 didn't quite finish saying is that the incompatibility wasn't only about her standards. It was about mine. About the fact that I am still, genuinely, working through my fear of forever.
That's the article nobody writes. So let's write it.
What "Forever" Actually Feels Like From the Inside
When I imagine being with someone for the rest of my life — truly imagine it, not the warm fantasy version but the actual lived reality of it — what I want is simple:
Someone I still feel completely comfortable and authentic with at the end. Someone I'm not performing for. Someone who knows the worst of me and hasn't left. If there's something after this life, I want to still be glad she's there.
That's what I'm looking for. And I mean it completely.
The fear isn't about her. It's about what happens a few years in, when the warmth settles and the conditions start to surface. The fear is waking up to find that love has become a scoreboard again. That I'm not enough because I don't practice faith the way she does. That desire has become something to manage rather than something to celebrate. That keeping the peace has quietly become more important than telling the truth.
The fear, if I'm being precise about it, is losing myself again. The way you lose yourself slowly in a marriage where love was always conditional on performance and the conditions kept shifting.
I've lived that. And the scar tissue it leaves doesn't just fade because you found someone new.
The Soccer Field
There's a moment I keep coming back to from my divorce, which took nearly two and a half years to finalize — long enough to understand exactly why family law in America almost forces people to treat each other without compassion, despite once promising to look out for one another.
Custody hadn't been formalized yet. My kids were still with their mom full time. I was coaching my youngest daughter's elementary school soccer team — one of the ways I stayed present in her life during the separation. After the game, I asked if I could take her and her older sister to lunch.
The older daughter, a teenager five years her senior, protested. She didn't want to go, and she didn't want her little sister to go without her. What unfolded next was something I had watched play out in different forms for twenty years: my ex-wife, trying to smooth over the teenager's tantrum the way she always had, turned on me. In front of both girls, she said I was being controlling, that I was trying to force the kids to do something they didn't want. And then the line that still lands in my chest: it was too bad the kids didn't love me enough to want to spend time with me.
Said in front of my daughters. Said in a tone designed to land.
What I understood in that moment — viscerally, not intellectually — was what twenty years of that dynamic had actually produced. My teenager had learned that this technique worked. My youngest, who had spent most of her young life at home with her mom, surrounded by her older sister, didn't feel safe enough to simply choose to come to lunch with her dad. Not because she didn't love me — but because the air in that moment made choosing me feel like a betrayal. A betrayal of her mom and sister that had real, daily consequences.
I had spent twenty years making myself small to keep the peace. I had never once enforced a boundary that cost me anything. And now I was watching it cost me my children's perception of who I was.
To avoid making a scene as the other soccer parents headed to the parking lot, I left without my kids. My ex-wife called from the van, my daughters inside, and directed her frustration at me with more insulting language. I asked her, quietly, to please speak to me like an adult. She continued.
And then I did something I had never done in twenty years.
I hung up.
She called back, stunned. I told her: I am willing to talk to you at any time, but I will not stay on the line while you berate me. She started again. I hung up again.
I sat in my car and felt something I didn't immediately recognize. It took me a moment to name it.
It was the first real boundary I had set in twenty years. And I was in my forties.
That's what a long relationship inside a framework that teaches endurance over honesty can do to a person. It doesn't just damage the relationship. It damages your ability to know, in real time, where you end and someone else's anger begins. It teaches your children, quietly and by example, that love means absorbing whatever comes at you without complaint.
Rebuilding that sense of self — learning to trust your own perception again after years of having it reframed — is not a weekend workshop. It's a long, quiet, unglamorous excavation.
I know because I did it. And I want to tell you what it actually looked like.
What Doing the Work Actually Means
After my divorce, I did all the things you're supposed to do. I kept busy. I dated. I ran and hiked and listened to podcasts and filled every silence with something. I told myself I was thriving, and in some ways I was.
But the real work started when I began a three-year relationship with a woman I'll call Ann — one that became, in ways I didn't fully appreciate until it was over, the most important education of my adult life.
Ann was the one who named what was actually happening. She didn't use clinical language or lecture me about attachment theory. She just kept showing up — consistently, honestly, without the background static of score-keeping or conditional love — and watched how I responded to that. And what she saw was a man who was braced for impact in a relationship where there wasn't any coming.
She introduced me to EMDR therapy. If you haven't heard of it, EMDR is a form of trauma processing where you move your eyes back and forth, or hold small vibrating devices called "tappers" in your hands, while your brain reprocesses painful memories. It sounds unusual. It works. I went every week for an hour and a half, sitting with a therapist and a set of tappers and the accumulated weight of what I'd been carrying, letting my nervous system slowly update its threat assessment.
I went to Tony Robbins workshops and Brendan Burchard events. I attended Joe Dispenza progressive intensives with Ann, where the work isn't just intellectual — it's physical, it's meditative, it's about creating new emotional states in the body, not just new ideas in the mind. Dispenza talks about how the body keeps score of every emotional pattern it's ever experienced, and how the only way to genuinely change is to feel the new reality before it exists — to rehearse the elevated emotion of the life you want until your nervous system accepts it as possible.
The church calls a version of this faith — acting on belief before the evidence arrives. The mechanism, it turns out, is remarkably similar.
Ann and I did couples retreats together. We had weekly check-ins, quarterly planning sessions, and annual conversations about where we were and where we wanted to go. I learned how to hold space for someone — to sit with her discomfort without trying to fix it, to support her yoga practice and her business even when they weren't things I would have chosen for myself. I learned that two people don't have to share every interest to be genuinely compatible. That a woman can cheer for a man going off with his friends without feeling abandoned — and actually think better of him for it.
These weren't small lessons. They were, for someone who had spent twenty years in a marriage where most differences were perceived as threats, genuinely revolutionary.
The Phone Call That Changed Everything
I want to tell you about a specific moment, because the concepts are easy to agree with and hard to actually feel.
Ann and I had just had our first weekend together. I was driving back to Utah on the I-15 — a long stretch of desert highway with plenty of time to think — when my phone rang and her name appeared on the screen.
My stomach dropped. I braced.
I didn't pick up right away. I sat with it ringing, already composing responses to whatever criticism or withdrawal or we need to talk was coming. Because that's what phone calls after good weekends had meant for twenty years. The warmth of the weekend was evidence of something owed. The morning after was when the bill arrived.
I called her back.
She just wanted to see how my drive was going.
The relief that came over me was physical. Not just emotional — physical. Something in my chest unclenched that I hadn't even known was clenched. And in that moment, I understood something I couldn't have understood from a book or a workshop or a therapy session alone:
This is what a stable relationship feels like. This is what it means to be with someone who isn't keeping score.
She wasn't calling to collect. She was calling because she was thinking about me. That's it. That's the whole thing.
It sounds so small. And it landed like a revelation.
Brené Brown writes in The Gifts of Imperfection that "belonging is the innate human desire to be part of something larger than us." But she's careful to distinguish belonging from fitting in. Fitting in requires you to be what the situation demands. Belonging requires you to show up as yourself and be accepted anyway. For those of us from high-demand religious cultures, we've spent most of our lives learning to fit in. The experience of actually belonging — of being wanted as we are, not as we're performing — can feel almost incomprehensible the first time it arrives.
That phone call was belonging. And once you've felt it, you understand in your body what you've been missing and what you're actually looking for.
Why It Still Didn't Last
Three years of real work. Real growth. Real love, in the ways that matter.
And we still couldn't build a shared world.
She wasn't LDS. She lived in coastal Orange County. I had relocated to Southern Utah. The cultural geography of our lives — her world, my world, the places where they overlapped and the places where they just didn't — created a friction that neither of us could fully resolve. She never felt completely at ease inside Mormon culture, even when she tried. I never felt fully released from my attachment to it, even when I wanted to be. Neither of us wanted to be the permanent outsider in the other person's life.
We didn't fight about it. We just couldn't resolve it. And the unresolved thing became, slowly, the relationship itself.
I want her to know — and she may read this — that what we had was real. That the warmth I feel toward her and the gratitude I have for those three years hasn't diminished. That the fact we couldn't build a shared world isn't a verdict on either of us. It's just the honest truth of where we each were.
And I want to say something harder: the work I did in that relationship — the therapy, the workshops, the retreats, the thousands of hours of honest conversation — changed me in ways that will outlast us. She didn't just love me. She helped me become someone more capable of being loved.
That's not nothing. That's, in some ways, everything.
And here's the sentence I've had to sit with since:
I learned what marriage is supposed to be from someone I never married.
I learned about healthy intimacy, real communication, repair, commitment, respect, planning, and mutual support — the actual foundations of a lasting partnership — from a relationship that didn't come with a ring or a certificate or a covenant.
I don't say that as an indictment of the institution. I say it as an honest accounting of what the institution, as I experienced it, failed to teach me. The church gave me a wedding. It gave me a ceremony and a framework for what a righteous marriage looked like from the outside. What it didn't give me — what no worthiness interview or temple recommend or General Conference talk quite prepared me for — was how to actually be with someone. How to stay present in conflict. How to repair after hurt without attacking or disappearing. How to let someone love me without waiting for the conditions to appear.
That's not something you learn from doctrine. It's something you learn from practice — from stumbling, from being called on it gently, from someone patient enough to show you what it looks like when it's done right.
Ann was that person for me. And the fact that we didn't end up together doesn't diminish what she gave me. If anything, it makes it more worth saying out loud — because there are a lot of people reading this who are somewhere in the middle of the same kind of relationship. One that's teaching them things their marriage never did. One they're not sure how to value because it doesn't fit the script.
It counts. It more than counts. Don't let the absence of a certificate tell you otherwise.
What I Should Have Said to Lisa Earlier
Here's what I can say now that I couldn't quite say then:
I don't know if I want to get married again. And I stayed in something with you that required marriage as its destination without being fully honest about the level of that uncertainty. That wasn't fair to you.
Not because my feelings weren't real — they were. Not because the relationship wasn't worth having — it was. But because she was operating on a framework where courtship has a purpose and a direction, and I was operating on something closer to let's see what this is and where it goes. Those are not the same journey. And the kindest thing I could have done for both of us was to say that more clearly at the beginning.
I want to be careful here, because this is where the article could easily become something it isn't meant to be. I'm not here to criticize the church or the sincerity of the people who live by its standards. But I will say this, as someone who grew up inside that tradition and knows its history:
The ideal of complete physical restraint before marriage has always lived in some tension with the reality of how human beings — including some of the faith's most revered early figures — actually navigated love, covenant, and desire. The doctrine is clear, but human nature is complicated. And the gap between those two things has caused a great deal of quiet suffering for people who loved each other and couldn't quite keep the rules and couldn't quite talk about that either.
That suffering deserves to be named. Not to shame the institution. But to extend some grace to the people caught inside it — on both sides of the line.
The Real Reason "Forever" Is Hard
Here's what I want to offer, if you're reading this and recognizing yourself in any of it:
The reason "forever" feels terrifying to so many midlife singles from this background isn't weakness. It's that we've watched the institution fail. We've watched covenants break. We've watched people who did everything right end up alone or diminished or in court. And we've done what this culture trained us to do with uncomfortable truths: performed confidence we didn't have, and called it faith.
Tony Robbins talks about the difference between a decision and a preference. A preference is something you want. A decision is something you commit to fully — burning the boats, no looking back. Most of us in midlife relationships are operating from preferences while calling them decisions. We prefer forever. We haven't yet decided it.
That gap is where most midlife relationships quietly die.
It's not a moral failure. It's incomplete healing. Because before you can decide forever with someone else, you have to decide something harder first:
I am willing to risk loss again. I am willing to be changed by love again. I am willing to build something knowing it might not last — and do it anyway, because the alternative is a life that stays safely small.
That decision doesn't come from finding the right person. It comes from doing enough of your own work that you can finally show up for one.
The work looks like sitting in a therapist's office with tappers in your hands, letting old wounds get processed instead of carried. It looks like being a fifty-something man listening to relationship audiobooks in his truck. It looks like a Tony Robbins weekend where you walk on fire not because the fire isn't hot but because you need to know your fear doesn't have to run you. It looks like crying over years spent in self-pity and self-flagellation instead of joy. It looks like sitting in silence and allowing yourself to feel the grief of losing a committed relationship because you weren't ready. It looks like a phone call from someone who just wanted to know how your drive was going — and letting that land, fully, without bracing for what comes next.
It looks like learning, slowly and imperfectly, that love doesn't have to cost you yourself.
What I'm Still Learning
I'm writing this in real time. I don't have it resolved.
I'm old enough to know what I want, honest enough to admit I'm not fully ready to reach for it without flinching, and stubborn enough to keep going anyway. The three years with Ann showed me what's possible. The books and therapy showed me what was in the way. The work since has been closing the gap between those two things.
I know what I'm looking for now in a way I didn't when I was twenty-two and just trying to do everything right. It looks like someone who understands where I came from without being imprisoned by it. Someone whose faith is theirs — genuinely, not performed for a community. Someone who can choose physical intimacy from a place of desire and wholeness rather than obligation.
Someone I can pray with in the morning and go to bed with at night feeling naked, vulnerable, and completely safe.
I know that's real because I've felt pieces of it. And I know it requires two people who have both done the work (and are still doing the work) — not two people who are still running from the same things in different directions.
I'm not there yet. But I'm closer than I was. And that, I've learned, is enough to keep going.
Unchaperoned Life exists for people who are done performing worthiness — and ready to find out what love actually looks like when it's built on something real.
Next: "Part 5: The Tyranny of Choice — Why You Keep Almost Choosing and Never Quite Landing"