I posted about this guy on here four years ago. I met him on Reddit during a time I was searching for a special friend. I had prayed to God for weeks to send me someone I could feel connection to. We hit it off pretty well and could talk for hours. We took to texting and calling and video messaging. He is a believer as well.
I took a flight to see him last week. It was just a day trip and I made sure my dad knew where I was going and when I expected to be back. We spent the day visiting parks and driving around. He showed me his town and the places where he grew up. I had a good time. When it was time for me to go back home he waited with me at the airport until my flight was ready. We held hands and it was the most amazing feeling ever. I felt so comfortable around him! I thanked God on my flight home for letting me experience that. I am 28 years old now and have never been in any sort of relationship with a guy before, so this was quite special to me.
A week before my visit, we had talked about moving on with our lives. The truth is, neither of us is willing to relocate if things were to get serious. We're both resistant to change. The purpose of my visit was really to have closure and say goodbye.
But now that I visited him, I have been finding myself wanting to see him again. I really would like to continue getting to know him in person. I felt peaceful around him. I have talked to him online for four years and it was just crazy how we finally got to spend time together in real life. It went better than I thought.
We aren't talking anymore, but I just can't help but feel sad. I know I need to move on. I have been trying to talk to other guys and be open to new friendships. But none of them are Christian. It's really hard to find a Christian guy who is single now that I am almost 30 years old. One of the guys I have been talking to lives near me and already wants to take me out but he isn't a believer and I am not sure what his intentions are. I don't feel the way with them the way I did with my Reddit friend.
My friend is autistic and has some issues, he was apparently abused by a church when he was little and has trouble believing God loves him. His whole family is a wreck and his dad is toxic. He is also very, very depressed. But I still care about him, and I want him to get help and become a healthy person.
Part of me wants to reach back out to my friend and ask if he wants to continue getting to know each other in person. But the logical part of me says to just let it go if this is what he wants and to respect that. This was such a special relationship in my life and it just doesn't feel right to let it fly away like this.
You may be well-caught at this point and unable to hear what I'm going to tell you, but here goes anyway:
God intends for us to center everything in our lives upon Him. It's what He made us for, actually. And when we live in a tight orbit around Him, everything oriented toward knowing and communing with Him, we find contentment, and fulfillment, and peace that can be experienced no other way.
God has made us capable of romance, building into us a powerful longing for the marriage relationship. In part because this longing is so strong, it is very important for it to be submitted to God's control, to His timing and His purposes, and for His glory. To the degree this isn't so, to that same degree the carnal, fleshly part of us will foul what God intended for our great good. And since this fouling is of something as powerful as the longing for human, marital intimacy, the effect of that fouling is typically very acute and damaging.
But "love is blind." It might not overlook glaring and grossly unpleasant things, perhaps, but the seemingly smaller issues are blotted out in the brilliance of romantic love. It is the small things, though, that balloon to excruciating proportions after marriage is entered into. The guy whose messiness seems so "cute" before marriage becomes the guy his wife wants to throw into a garbage compacter when, for the millionth time, he leaves his clothing lying all over the bedroom floor. The woman who is a hard-to-win prima donna prior to marriage, a difficult and thus exciting prize to be won, six months into marriage is viewed as a domineering, selfish drama queen who can never be satisfied. The moody, morose, introverted, marriage prospect with the great hair, who sings and plays the guitar so well, after marriage becomes a lead anchor to adventure, contentment and joy, wanting endlessly to hide away at home and pluck tunelessly on the guitar. And so on.
So, those little things you're overlooking right now, those things the joy of hand-holding and easy, comfortable fellowship blind you to, will be the very things that will bite you
very hard on the rear end when you're married. Your friend's resistance to change is a particularly serious problem because marriage requires an enormous amount of change. A good marriage is a marriage of flexible people, people who can deny themselves, sacrificing their need to have things patterned and comfortable for themselves for the sake of their spouse, people who can compromise with each other. Is this your friend?
The "baggage" you described that your friend is carrying around is also going to show up in a more serious relationship in ugly, painful ways. As we all are, your friend is the sum of his past experiences, shaped (and bent) by a variety of influences in ways that sound like they'd be pretty corrosive to a healthy - which is to say, God-honoring - marriage. You can't change anyone, really; not in the ways that truly count. The kind of change your friend sounds like he needs, though, can only come from his Maker, the one he has trouble believing in and trusting.
Anyway, you wouldn't be the first person to be snared by romance and swept into a relationship they come to wish they'd let go of when they had the chance. Just saying.
