When He Went Back To His Ex - And Told Me God Was Calling Him To Do So.

The Night Everything Changed

It was a completely normal night.

The man I was dating had been out of town for work and had just gotten back late the night before. When he came over that evening, I rushed to the door, wrapped my arms around him, kissed him hello.

He kissed me back.
Held me for a second.
Then pulled away, looked me in the eye, and said:

“We need to talk.”

My heart sank immediately.
I knew.

The fucked up part is that this wasn’t some whirlwind relationship I had recklessly thrown myself into.

It started slowly.

Slowly enough that I trusted it.

Slowly enough that I thought I was making good decisions.

And then somewhere along the way it gained speed.

He made me feel seen in a way I hadn’t felt in a very long time… maybe never.

More importantly, he made me feel safe.

He behaved like a man who was building something with me. And when I hesitated, he gave me reasons not to.

He was actively coaxing me into the relationship. Eventually I believed what he was showing me. I went all-in too.

Which is why what happened next didn’t just feel like heartbreak.

It felt like I had been lied to, tricked, deceived, scammed.

When You Just Know

He had been separated from his ex-wife for long enough that I believed his previous marriage was actually behind him.

I knew there had been betrayal in that marriage. I knew how deeply that hurt him. I knew enough about their history to believe that chapter of his life was closed. I believed in us.

But when he said, “We need to talk,” something in me immediately knew… this had something to do with her.

And it did.

She wanted to reconcile.

And he was going back.

He Went Back to the Woman Who Cheated on Him

He sat there in tears, telling me how important I was to him.
How special I was.
How much he valued our connection.

How much our relationship meant to him.

And then he told me he was going back to his ex-wife.

The woman who, according to what he’d shared with me, had been unfaithful in their marriage.

I was devastated.

But I would be lying if I said devastation was the only thing I felt.

I was fucking baffled.

The Part I’m Not Supposed To Say Out Loud.

We’re all supposed to be evolved enough not to compare ourselves to other woman.

But I compared. How could I fucking not?

I knew infidelity has been part of their marriage. I knew trust had been broken between them.

And then I looked at what I’d brought into my relationship with him.

I hadn’t cheated on him. I hadn’t betrayed him. I wasn’t asking him to repair damage I inflicted onto him, onto the relationship… and calling it some sort of bullshit fresh start.

I had loved him. I had supported him. I had trusted him.

And I had slowly allowed myself to become vulnerable with him because he made me believe it was safe to do that.

So yes, there was a part of me that was screaming - How the fuck is she the option you chose?

Maybe that’s not the most enlightened thought I’ve ever had. But it’s an honest one.

I thought I was the better option.

Not because I think I’m a better human than another woman in every conceivable way, but because I believed my character was superior.

I believe fidelity matters.

And knowing what I knew about their marriage made his decision substantially harder for me to understand.

My brain started building the case.

I’m loyal.

She cheated.

I treated him well.

She hurt him.

I was here.

I was safe.

I loved him.

So how the fuck could I not be the obvious choice?

I Was Asking The Wrong Question.

I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to solve that equation.

Eventually I realized relationships don’t work like job interviews.

People don’t necessarily evaluate two women, compare character references and award the position to whichever candidate scores the highest.

His decision wasn’t proof that she was better than me.

But, and this was considerably harder for me to accept, it also wasn’t proof that I could have earned any different outcome for making any different decisions or by being “better.”

Whatever pulled him back belonged to him.

His history.

His marriage.

His feelings.

His faith.

His family.

I could be loyal and loving and emotionally available and not override whatever it was pulling him away from me and back to her.

I couldn’t outperform whatever remained unresolved between them.

And eventually I realized I had been asking the wrong question.

I kept asking: Why did he choose her over me?

The question I should have been asking was: Why did he ask me to build a relationship with him when choosing her was apparently still an option?

When God Became the Explanation.

What happened next made the breakup even harder for me to process.

He told me he felt God was calling him back to his marriage.

That faith was part of why he needed to go back.

Maybe he genuinely believed that.

I need to be fair enough to say that. I’m not qualified to tell another person what God did or didn’t say to them.

But, fuck… did I struggle with what that explanation required me to believe.

Because if God was responsible for the decisions, where did that leave me? Was I just a tool God placed in his path to comfort him while he figured it out? Why would God put me in this man’s path only for him to destroy my trust, my faith in love… so many things ran through my head. I couldn’t understand why I was somehow less important in this equation to God, if indeed this was all God’s will, as my now ex-boyfriend was claiming it to be.

Was I supposed to believe that God wanted him to make me feel safe? For him to encourage me to trust him. Where was God when he was building a relationship with me, coaxing me to go all in, convincing me we had a future? Was God just watching until he decided to call him back to his old relationship?

I couldn’t make that make sense.

Because that interpretation also seemed to make God responsible for the enormous amount of pain I was feeling, and if I know anything, I know God didn’t create that.

God was not responsible for the part that hurt me.

He was. God didn’t build a relationship with me. He did.

God didn’t ask me to trust him and the future we had. He did.

God didn’t make me feel safe enough to let my guard down. He did.

God wasn’t actually responsible for making sure he dealt with his previous marriage before building something new with me.

That was his job.

What The Fuck Was I Supposed to Say to God?

There was another reason the God explanation bothered me so much.

It felt impossible to argue with.

What the fuck was I supposed to say?

No, actually I think God wants you to be with me?

Of course I couldn’t say that.

The minute the decision became God’s will, there was almost nothing left to discuss. It gave the ending an authority I couldn’t challenge without somehow positioning myself against his faith. And I wasn’t against his faith, in fact at one point I had actually admired him for it.

I was against his faith becoming a scapegoat for his lack of accountability.

Whether he intended it that way or not, that’s how it felt to be on the receiving end of it.

I would have preferred something much harder and much more human:

I wasn’t as over my marriage as I thought I was.

I actually wasn’t ready.

I built something with you before I understood myself well enough to know whether I could sustain it.

I hurt you because I got it wrong.

That I could have understood. It wouldn’t have hurt less.

But at least the responsibility would have belonged to the person who made the decisions. Not with God.

Faith Doesn’t Eliminate Accountability

I believe that faith can be an enormous part of healing. I just don’t believe that faith automatically proves the emotional work has been done.

And I don’t believe invoking God automatically makes a decision righteous or removes responsibility for the people hurt by it.

Religion can give us meaning. It can give us community. It can give us hope.

But, I think, us humans are perfectly capable of using religion to make our own decisions feel cleaner than they actually are.

I don’t know whether that’s what he did. But I know that’s what it felt like to me.

What I wanted wasn’t a theological explanation. I wanted accountability.

I Have a Name for What This Feels Like Now

I’ve spent too much time trying to understand why this particular breakup fucked with my head as badly as it did.

It wasn’t simply because he chose someone else.

The ending made me question the reality of everything that came before it.

The man I thought I was dating was emotionally available, he was ready, he was intentional, he was safe. He was actively engaging in building something with me.

At least, that’s what I was led to believe based on what he said and what he did.

Then suddenly I was standing in front of evidence that he had never been as free from his previous relationship as he had professed.

I have a name for that now, I call it Emotional Catfishing.

I don’t use that term because I think he sat down and devised some calculated scheme to con me. I don’t know that he knowingly lied, maybe he genuinely believed he was ready.

But that’s part of the problem.

The relationship capacity I believed I was investing in turned out NOT to be the relationship capacity he could actually sustain.

Maybe he didn’t know. I still think knowing though, was his responsibility.

If you’re going to ask another human being to invest their time, trust and vulnerability based on what you say, and show, that you are capable of offering, knowing yourself is the bare minimum.

Intent explains your actions, it doesn’t absolve you from the responsibility of their consequences.

I Don’t Think The Answer is “Wait a Year.”

For a while, I thought the lesson was simple: Don’t date someone too soon after their marriage ends.

I don’t think that’s the lesson anymore. Time does matter, but people can spend years avoiding themselves. And someone can also do an enormous amount of emotional work in considerably less time.

I care much less now about how many months have passed and much more about what someone has actually done with them.

Can he talk honestly about what happened? Can he identify his own contribution to the failure of the relationship? Is his previous relationship actually in the past, or does it still have enough emotional power to materially interfere with the one he’s trying to build with me? Has he built an independent life? What did he learn? What would he do differently?

And most importantly: does his behavior demonstrate the relationship readiness he’s telling me he has?

This last one is one of the biggest reasons I’m much slower about choosing men now.

I’m Not Grateful Yet.

I’d love to tell you I walked away immediately grateful that God had ultimately protected me from the wrong man.

I didn’t.

I was fucking devastated.

There were days I would have happily traded every profound lesson I’d supposedly learned just to have him back.

Part of me wanted their reconciliation to fail.

Part of me wanted him to wake up one morning and realize he had made an enormous mistake.

I wanted him to come back and choose me so I could finally stop wondering why I hadn’t been enough the first time.

I’m not particularly proud of every one of those thoughts. And maybe someday I’ll look back and believe wholeheartedly that God protected me. Maybe part of me already does.

But I don’t want to rewrite heartbreak into wisdom before I’ve actually earned the wisdom.

I loved him. I trusted him. I thought what we had was real. Losing it hurt like hell.

I can believe that something wasn’t right for me and still grieve what I thought it was. Those things aren’t mutually exclusive.

What I Know Now.

I still don’t know what exactly was real for him. That’s one of the hardest parts.

I know what was real for me. I loved him. I trusted him. I felt safe with him. And when the relationship ended, I was left trying to reconcile the man who had made me feel that safe with the man who could walk away from everything we built.

Maybe someday I’ll understand that better. Maybe I won’t.

What I understand now is that someone’s intentions don’t erase their responsibility for what they invite another person to believe.

If you’re going to ask someone to go all-in with you, you have a responsibility to know whether you’re actually capable of staying at the table.

XOXO,

That Mama