Liars, and the Men Who Love Them

Who's to know if your soul will fade at all,

the one you sold to fool the world
You lost your self-esteem along the way, yeah
And you should know that the lies won't hide your flaws,
no sense in hiding all of yours
You gave up on your dreams along the way, yeah
--Seether

I believe church culture cultivates liars.

There I go making a blanket statement again. OK, so I don't mean everyone who goes to church is a liar...I mean the church culture gives some of us good fertile soil in which to plant lies about who we are. And as the Chinese proverb says, I have three fingers pointed at myself.

Some people don't need to lie. If you have never felt, when among church people, that you had to behave differently, dress differently, talk differently than you normally would, then skip this. If you have never: lied about your "quiet time" that wasn't...pretended to know the words to a song during worship...hid Coors or National Geographic when your church friends came over...or changed the music in your car to seem more religious, you are not in need of these words.

Then there are the rest of us.

Every time we deliberately present ourselves as something we are not in order to feel more accepted in church culture, we are lying. We are donning a mask, hiding behind a facade of feigned righteousness, often based on ludicrous standards.

I happened to marry into a particularly conservative Christian family, where certain standards were held in high esteem. I don't mean to say there is anything wrong with having standards, only that some were completely beyond my reach...I just wasn't that woman. I found myself hiding large parts of myself in order to feel accepted. I'll talk more about that in another post.

As I said before, when I met my husband I was much like I am now, but between then and now, there were many years of cramming my very round self into a very square hole. I changed, dramatically, in order to please and to feel safe. I actually succeeded for a number of years; as long as I could keep it up.

Why? My primary worry was what people would think if I let my true self out, especially after so many years of lying. I worried most about my husband...would he leave me if he realized? I never should have doubted him; he knew who I had been when we had met, and he had loved *that* me enough to marry me, way back then.

When I transitioned back to my true self, he actually said, "Now that's the woman I married".

The strangest, most surreal part of it all was the statment I just made. For all those years, I had tried to become the woman I thought my husband wanted me to be...more like his mother and the other women in the denomination he grew up in than like the woman I had been when we met. Yet, he always believed I was changing because I wanted to.

I can't say to any other woman how this "coming out" might affect your marriage. If needed, the timing and process is for you and your Creator to work out the details of. So please know I'm not advocating some aggressive bra-burning agenda; I only wish to share my experiences in the hopes it might encourage even one of you that one day you will be free to be you again.

However, I do know from experience if I had let my husband in on my misery so much sooner, it may have been an easier and less painful process.

I cannot say for certain, but I have a sneaking suspicion that in some churches, husbands are taught that Better Christian Woman is the ideal wife. I know that in my years, I looked very much like the wife my husband was taught to expect, so he never could see through that to recognize my misery. So there is a myth there on the other side of the equation; men, communicate with your wife about how your dreams and expectations for her might be more like her dreams and expectations for herself, and less like the expectations the church puts upon her.

Pt 1: Chili All Over the Kitchen
Pt 2: Harlots, Heretics and Hussies
Pt 3: Liars and the Men Who Love Them
Pt 4: A Narrow Path, a Crooked Line, Fly