Christian Dumping

The Bible does not contain any version of the "Let's just be friends" speech. There really isn't a section in there for how to have an amicable breakup. In the Bible, both Old Testament and New, two things that ought to be together, stay together. So, as this blog is winding down, I wanted to give some advice as to how to give someone the boot in the most Christian manner, and uh… I'm not sure that there is one.

Breaking off a relationship can seem like a cruel act, and can seem like an unchristian one at that, when one remembers St. Paul's description of love as being patient, enduring all things.

Christians are supposed to be faithful in all things, bearing all tasks given to them. But, there's a line between bearing your cross that's been given to you and building your own cross to squash you. Continuing to date or marrying the wrong person falls into the latter category.

Once you're married, you've got a whole new set of commitments, and the nature of your struggle changes. You can't leave your marriage because you fall out of love or you get bored with your partner. Jesus made his view about divorce pretty clear in Matthew 19: "What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder" (Verse 7). And, from here, keeping a marriage together isn't just obeying God's commandments, but accepting the help that God gives to those who are held together in the covenant of marriage. That help comes in the form of the sacraments.

Before marriage, though, you have a very important choice to make, and you can back out of it at any time. A few days before our wedding, our priest said to us that we could back out of it right then if we wanted. (We didn't.)

Marriage imagery in the Bible

The Bible is full of imagery of marriage and coming together, but it doesn't contain any stories of broken engagements because bride and groom weren't getting along so well. Still, the sections including the marriage imagery can be instructive to us. There are cheery marriage sections, and the not-so-cheery. First, the cheery, in the Song of Solomon:

"You have ravished my heart, my sister, my bride, you have ravished my heart with a glance of your eyes, with one jewel of your necklace. How sweet is your love, my sister, my bride! How much better is your love than wine, and the fragrance of your oils than any spice! Your lips distil nectar, my bride; honey and milk are under your tongue; the scent of your garments is like the scent of Lebanon." (Song 4:9-11)

This is a lovely poetic description of a man's love for his wife, and can be loosely understood as a metaphor for how God loves Israel. And then, there's tough love in the prophecy of Ezekiel:

"Yet you were not like a harlot, because you scorned hire. Adulterous wife, who receives strangers instead of her husband! Men give gifts to all harlots; but you gave gifts to all your lovers, bribing them to come to you from every side for your harlotries. So you were different from other women in your harlotries: none solicited you to play the harlot; and you gave hire; while no hire was given to you; therefore you were different" (Ez 16:31-34).

The Lord's indictment of His bride's (Israel's) adultery gets worse from there.

Anyone who's been married a long time will tell you that marriage has its challenges, and that it's not all Song of Solomon, and you've got to be ready to endure disappointments. Even so, if you see your relationship heading in an Ezekielish kind of direction, it'd probably be a good idea to break it off before you get stuck in this very bad marriage being described here. It's true that the Old Testament prophecies are explanations of God's enduring love through all offenses committed against Him, but He's got a lot more time to endure it, being eternal, than we do.

If your boyfriend or girlfriend is doing things requiring a divine patience that you haven't got, it's probably a sign you should accept your human limitations and break it off. Otherwise, if you marry this impossible pain in the neck, you're going to be wishing your husband or wife would meet some Old Testament end – barbarian invasion, sores and boils, swarms of frogs, hot rocks from the skies, etc.

The cost of a broken engagement is far less than a bad marriage.

What economics class can teach you about dating

A lot people can't imagine breaking up because of all the time they've spent with their partner. With that understandable feeling in mind, let's consider the following three economics problems:

1. You've got football tickets, and you spent $300 on them. Your seats are at the 50-yard line, which was the maximum you could have spent while still being able to pay the rent. You're really enthusiastic about going. The day before the game, the weather forecast predicts freezing rain, which you know will make you miserable, and probably sick. There isn't enough time to sell your tickets, and you can't afford more tickets later on in the season. Should you go?

2. A movie company has spent $100 million on a making a movie, and now that the editing process is complete, both the director and the actors agree that it's a dud. The company knows that if it's released, it'll be reviewed poorly, and the company's financial analyst estimates is that it would make only $10 million just from the people who are diehard fans of the actors. Advertising the film would cost $8 million. Should the company do it?

3. A young man has been dating a young woman from another state for two years. Now they're engaged, and she quit her job and moved across the country to be near him. They've set a date and told their friends about it, and made a non-refundable deposit on a reception hall. As the date moves closer, the young man is feeling angry and depressed and is less sure about it. Every time he thinks about telling his fiancée what he's thinking, he feels really guilty about all the sacrifices she's made. Obviously, she loves him. What should this young man do?

All three of these quandaries have something in common – a lot of irrelevant information. The only thing that should matter in these decision is the potential for future benefit.

With the football tickets, you should not go to the game. Throw out your tickets and watch it on TV from your warm apartment. You'll never get your money back, so the only question is whether you'll enjoy yourself, and you know freezing rain will make you miserable.

With the movie company, they should run the film. The $100 million spent will never be recovered, so the question becomes whether their future profit (receipts) will be greater than their future expense (advertising). Yes, they'll make $2 million.

For the young man with the girl having moved across the country, he should postpone the wedding until he's more sure of himself, or cancel it outright. True, this young lady is likely to get very angry with him for making her waste all kinds of time, but there's no way to get any of that back. The only important question is why he's so angry and depressed. He has to look forward – will the marriage be successful?

Your business teacher would call this "ignoring sunk costs." You absolutely must. If you've been seeing a so-so guy for five years, don't say that it's just natural to take it to the next step when you've been together that long. If it's not working, dump him!

Or, if you're seeing a guy from church who got thrown out of Sunday school at the age of 8 for streaking (and your mother was the Sunday school director who gave him the boot) don't hold that against him now that he's 22. The enmity between your mother and his parents is a sunk cost, too.

An extreme example of this concept comes from a co-worker of mine who randomly blurted out one day that marriages ought to be more expensive than divorces. I gave her a confused stare, and she explained: It costs $100 to get a marriage certificate in our county, but $500 for the fees involved with a divorce. She'd gotten married because her family was pressuring her to do it because she was pregnant. This marriage lasted less than a year because this woman was not interested in raising two children – the baby and the baby's father – at once. She says she's happier as a single mother, and wishes she hadn't listened to her family.

Don't expect your friends to understand

A good portion of your friends are going to consider what you're doing to be treason – dumping someone they think is nice, and they're going to expect you to give a good reason. I suppose at this point, it would be convenient to say "He's an al-Qaeda terrorist," but really you don't need a good reason. "We're not getting along that well," is a good enough reason.

Back when I was a bachelor, I had this married friend of mine who kept telling me about how marriage was about compromise and sacrifice. When I'd tell him that I wasn't getting along with a girl, he'd lecture me about how I needed to get over whatever my problem was because marriage is hard work. His advice was good for a married person, but not so good for a single person. His struggle was to preserve the bond that God had made, mine was whether to ask for it.

He would argue with his wife and then later apologize, I would argue with girls and then quit calling them. I was allowed to do that, and he wasn't – but he couldn't see that. I broke up with two very nice girls because I was bored, and this friend of mine who knew their resumes (regular church-goers, hard workers, intelligent, etc.) thought this was scandalous and we had to stop talking for a while.

One girl I was dating was disturbed by the fact I stayed single for a year after we broke up – she took it as an additional insult that I preferred being alone to being with her.

Another couple I knew in college broke up after two years together because the guy went all philosophical, becoming a vegan and rejecting all organized authority to the point of chewing out his friends when they called the cops to report a man in the street who was waving a knife around. "Don't call the Establishment," my friend shouted, "the People need to resolve this!" The girl was tolerant of his philosophical searching, but the relationship eventually fell apart when she quit listening to him go on about the evils of petroleum. In our dorm, the other girls thought this was horrible – a good relationship ruined by too much philosophy! I said it was the natural thing to do – she was sick of hearing him talk (and I was, too) and the guy was actively resisting adulthood. Their hearts just weren't in it anymore, which was reason enough to stop.

So you don't need an excuse. Don't fly away to enroll in graduate school to justify breaking up. Don't run away to a monastery. This would be worse – using the "I'm called to be a monastic" excuse is just being flighty with God.

The speech

There is no nice way to deliver this speech. You cannot sugar-coat a knife. Whatever you say to your sweetie in rejecting him or her is going to cut through mercilessly. I remember getting turned down for a date, and the girl said she'd been flattered by my offer. The very fact that she would use the word "flattered" hurt me because it's a word that exists in English only for telling boys to buzz off.

It wasn't that cruel of a thing to say, but it sure felt that way.

There are some truly cruel things you could say, such as:

• "I'd rather be a virgin martyr than marry you."
• "Our relationship has me so depressed I'm inhaling incense."
• "Go to the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth!"
• "You're a lot prettier with your headscarf on."
• "You'd be cute in a klobuk."

Most people are not trying to be cruel at the moment of a breakup, and the classic line is to say, "Let's just be friends," or, "I think we'd be better together as good friends," which shows that you're not trying to be mean, but you're trying to get rid of them, which isn't really that friendly.

Here's a more direct way that I think is better: "We're not getting along that well, and I don't want to go further. We can't be together any more, and it'll be a while before I call you again." If you're reading this article, thinking of what to say at The Moment of Cataclysmic Heartbreak, that last part probably sounded a little cruel. But, it's the truth. The "just friends" talk implies friendship (meaning interaction), and neither of you is going to figure out how to deal with the loss of the other if you're talking all the time.

There is one meaningful act you can offer your estranged sweetie: intercession. Say, "I'll pray for you," and mean it. The Communion we have in Christ is not weakened by a lack of romantic affection.

The recovery

The time after a break-up is a fragile one, but a opportunity for great learning. When you're in a bad relationship, you're discovering what you don't want in a partner. But, when you're in a bad relationship, you're probably trying to fix the problems. After the break-up, you have the ability to look back and see things you tried to ignore – things your family and friends may have warned you about.

Here, you have learned what marriage is not, or what I like to call the apophatic method of dating.

The apophatic method of theology is when you describe God by what God is not – God is not like us, God is not prone to our mood swings, etc. (The opposite is cataphatic, and that's when you describe God by what He is.)

The apophatic method of dating teaches you whether you can tolerate being married to someone who doesn't want to be religious. A previous boyfriend of my wife was dissatisfied with the religion he grew up with, and she thought he'd find what he was looking for in Orthodoxy. But the boy persistently refused to come to church, and she learned what an acceptable husband is not – she needed someone who would come to church.

When I was in Ukraine, I thought the women were beautiful and mysterious, and I even found one who went to church regularly. We saw each other for a little while, but she spoke no English. I'd been speaking Russian for eight months at that point, and my language abilities were pretty basic. She was very kind, but I realized what I couldn't deal with – I needed to be able to communicate fluently with my wife. I left Ukraine single, which some folks in my town viewed as a national insult.

My failed relationships hurt a lot when they fell apart, and they still hurt a lot when I look back. Last I heard, the Ukrainian girl I mentioned earlier was working in a sausage factory with bad wages.

But, I'm glad I went through those heartbreaks, and that my wife endured them, too. I really know what a gift I have now.

Winding down

This post, I think, is the end of the Orthromance blog unless someone can give me an idea for what to write next. Miri and I celebrated our first anniversary this month, and the marital bliss has overshadowed the memory of the pain of being single, and, alas, I am running out of ideas. I think now I'll try turning the preceding posts into a book because, as it turns out, there isn't much Christian humor out there on the topic of romance.

I am going to be updating my personal blog more often, and those posts will be general updates about what my wife and I and our dog have been up to recently.

I might post something about romance on this blog every now and again, but I would still love to hear from you and to read your comments!