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dogman30
Guest
Hello everyone, I’ve been reading through these forums off and on for a good while but decided to register and post a prayer intention on here. I hope this is the right place to post this. To make a long story short I’ve been dating a woman for almost 2 years now and things have become pretty serious. She’s been talking for a while about wanting to marry, not in the immediate future, but indicating that she wants to know our relationship is at least heading in some direction forward and not just treading water. We began dating as I was starting the RCIA process; she’s Protestant, and I have become Catholic since 2013. I’m at a crossroads point where I feel very conflicted. Intellectually my mind is screaming at me that I need to end this relationship, while emotionally I am frozen in place, not wanting to rock the boat and endure another break-up, or lose the woman to whom I have devoted nearly the past 2 years of my life. The run-down of this situation is that I have struggled a lot in this relationship with purity; we have made “fooling around” the norm. I know this “fooling around” stuff is wrong and I have initiated some discussions about this before that ultimately went nowhere, as we ended up repeating the same mistakes over and over. This has been a rather predictable cycle throughout our relationship, with me going to confession over and over for the same stuff and making feeble attempts to save the relationship while maintaining purity, and with her not being overly helpful in regards to my desire to scale back the level of physical intimacy to what I believe is acceptable by Church standards. She believes she is in a good relationship with God and sees no conflict with our fooling around, whereas I have felt a constant tension between God and the Church, and my affections for her. This past spring I finally just gave up the internal fight; I haven’t been to confession or Mass since March or February of this year, and have only attended Protestant Sunday school off and on with her to maintain appearances. I am at this point feeling emotionally distant from her and have become a total wreck spiritually. She’s never been openly hostile to my Catholic faith and has even remarked that she wished I would start going back to Mass. I became so unhappy in this relationship that I cheated on her once back in June with someone I didn’t even know or care about. I am thankfully coming back to my senses and realizing my real need to return to the Church, go to confession, and actually practice the faith that I miraculously haven’t completely lost to this point. Intellectually I know that I have already destroyed the relationship with my act of betrayal (though she doesn’t know this), and almost 2 years have shown me that I cannot maintain this relationship because she’s unwilling to give up the “fooling around”, and I know I cannot serve 2 masters. I went to Mass this past Sunday for the first time in 5 or 6 months and am planning to attend confession next week, assuming I don’t chicken out. I have some extremely burdensome and embarassing things I need to confess and have scouted out a parish that’s over an hour from where I live to make an anonymous confession to the priest during their Reconciliation hours. I know she knows something is wrong in our relationship, and she’s tried unsuccessfully lately to get me to discuss our future together. Tomorrow morning we’re going to meet with a pastor from her church to discuss the direction of our relationship. I’m very apprehensive because I think this relationship just needs to end so I can focus on healing my broken relationship with God and plugging back into the Church’s sacramental life. I’m just scared to death and apprehensive over the thought of losing somebody who I still do care about (even though I’ve betrayed her and feel distant from her, I still loathe the thought of seeing her heart-broken). My faith is much more important than any worldly attachments but it’s still very difficult to just give up someone who has been so central in my life since 2012. I figure tomorrow’s meeting is as good as any to just be brutally honest with her: I don’t have any desire to move into marriage, and I don’t even like kids much less the thought of having my own. I will spare her the intense hurt of knowing that someone she loves cheated on her, but I need to quit leading her on when I feel that I cannot effectively practice my faith and be with her at the same time. I have failed to even be a half-way decent Catholic in the year since confirmation. Prayers are greatly appreciated, and if anyone has any insight to share, that too will be appreciated and considered. Also, should I make a lengthy general confession that covers all the elapsed time since confirmation? I’m fairly confident that my last confession was a good confession but something keeps nagging at me and telling me that I need to do a general confession for the past 1+ year, at least as a way of making a fresh new start since my allegiances have been competing and pulling me all sorts of different directions since confirmation.
): people are comforted by familiar relationships and environments, even when they’re bad. People would rather face the devil they know than the devil they don’t. Yes, you’ve spent a significant amount of time in this relationship, so you know how it works, even though it means you’re compromising on your values and your faith. Breaking up and being single afterwards will require some adjustment, sure. It’s normal and natural to be concerned about that. But it’s not for own good to fear it to the degree that you continue on doing what you’re doing - you have several years of evidence that tells you it’s never going to lead you where you ought to be going. It’s OK to be sad about that and to grieve the loss of the relationship when you do break it off, too. The fact that it’s the right thing to do in no way means that it will be easy (the corollary being that if it feels hard, that doesn’t mean that it’s the wrong thing to do.)