The Not So Distant Past

So, Emily and Noah were an official couple.  This is a big thing at their college.  The goal of many students is to find a spouse while in college.  Emily was very emotionally immature and sexually naive.  We had sheltered her to the point that she didn't know how to deal with the feelings she was having toward Noah.  Most people have their first dating relationship while in their teens.  They experience love, joy, lust, heartbreak, sexual experimentation and healing from the emotional pain that all these things sometimes cause.  Emily, and as it turns out, Noah had no idea what they were in for and what to do with their new found love.  Yes, they fell fast and hard.  Well, we thought they both fell fast and hard.  We saw from the beginning of their relationship that they weren't evenly matched.  Emily's grades were much better than Noah's.  Emily had a definite plan for her life while Noah had no clear idea of what he wanted to do.  Emily was up to this point a very motivated, self-disciplined student. She had and still has a very loving, protective relationship with her brother.  Noah has five siblings and is only really civil to the brother who is closest in age to him.  And Emily seemed to be much more emotionally invested in the relationship than Noah.

While dating, Noah told Emily that he had struggled with an ongoing sin, but not the nature of the sin.  They prayed together and did daily devotions together and Noah assured Emily that he was overcoming his sin due in part to her support.  During this time, Emily's devotion and loyalty were undivided.  She came to put Noah's well-being above everyone else's, including her own.  She identified herself as "Noah's Girlfriend" and lost some of herself.  She let go of many of her friendships.  Noah treated Emily alright most of the time.  He would sometimes take out his anger on her.  Sometimes he was verbally abusive about Emily's appearance.  While nowhere near fat, Emily was not a size two.  Emily started to diet and exercise to lose weight.

The Summer between their Junior and Senior years, Emily and Noah Skyped, talked and texted endlessly. One month she spent 4,000 minutes on the phone with him!  Emily went to his home in another state to attend a friend of Noah's wedding.  Noah came to our home for 10 days towards the end of Summer to meet us and the extended family.  I found out later that there were behaviors Noah was exhibiting that made Emily feel like she should break up with him. She has not shared what those behaviors were, but I am sure they will come out eventually. Each time she felt this way, she would pray about it.  She says that God gave her peace about them being together and that she felt like she was supposed to help him become the godly man he wanted to be.  We all know that you can't change someone.  Maybe if Emily had had previous experience with dating she would have know this.  I'd like to think so, but some women never learn the reality of this. 

Now might be the right time to share that both Emily and Noah were committed to remaining sexually pure until marriage. They didn't want to even kiss because they knew hormones would make them want take it further.  Emily felt cherished by Noah.  She thought he valued her virtue and wanted to keep her sexually untouched.  She didn't realize that the sin he was struggling with was a pornography addiction.  She didn't know that because his only sexual information came from pornography, his views of sex and how women should be treated were skewed.  During his time at our home, we were uncomfortable with the amount of physical affection Emily and Noah showed each other.  It was nothing that most outside of our belief system would bat an eye at, but to us it was startling.

Between the time we had last seen her at Christmas and when she returned home in May, Emily had dropped from a size 12 to a size 10.  We attributed the weight loss to the newness of a relationship.  Spending so much time talking at meals getting to know each other better that eating was not the priority.  Nervousness about eating in front of a new boyfriend.  We also knew she was exercising with a friend who was getting married over the summer and wanted to lose some weight before the wedding.

Emily was supposed to graduate early.  She had worked very hard toward her goal of finishing school at the end of the Fall semester.  During Noah's visit to our home, we spoke to them regarding their future plans.  Noah wanted to be a Pastor stateside and Emily's goal had always been to go back to Uganda.  Now Emily had decided that maybe Uganda wasn't right for her and that she would make a better Pastor's wife.  I have no doubt that she would make an excellent Pastor's wife, just not to Noah.  It is a thankless, selfless job and those are two of Emily's gifts.  We were concerned about the sudden change in her plans.  They assured us that they had been talking for months about how both of them would be able to adapt what they had always before thought of as God's will for their lives so they could be together.  God's will for their lives had not changed.  Emily stopped putting God's will first and put Noah's needs first.  It was decided that Emily would be allowed to change her schedule for the Fall semester to a lighter load and then attend the Spring semester to finish up her degree and take some graduate level classes.  This was a financial burden that we had not planned on.

During the Fall semester, even though her class load was smaller, Emily struggled with having enough time to complete her assignments.  Always an excellent student, she was having to give up hours of sleep every night to get her work done.  It didn't make sense until we found out that she was helping Noah with his work.  He had taken and failed Greek I and was taking it again that semester.  As Emily had aced not only Greek I, but the next three semesters of Greek as well, she was able to help him alot.  Hours every evening were spent in the library together working on HIS homework while hers went undone until it was time for lights out.  This forced her to break the rules, staying up later and getting up earlier than allowed.

Somewhere early in the semester, Emily found out about Noah's porn addiction.  I'm not sure how she found out.  I can't imagine he told her, but maybe he did.  His brother (also a student there) and Noah's best friend both knew, so it may have some from one of them.  The best friend always treated Emily badly, but the brother thought of her as a sister.  The fact that he was viewing pornography while dating her made her feel dirty and disgusting.  She though she was surely fat compared to the women Noah must be seeing on the computer.  Emily knew she had to lose weight if she were to keep Noah.  She so strongly identified herself as his girlfriend and part of a couple that she couldn't imagine not having him.  She is worth so much more!  This also put her in a position of having to keep a secret for him.  If the school found out, he would be expelled.  If the school found out that she knew and didn't report him, she would get expelled.  Yeah, the rules are archaic, but they knew the rules when they decided to attend school there.  These were adults being treated like children

Emily went with Noah and his brother to their house for Thanksgiving.  Of course, they had to take Emily's car, just as they did anytime they went anywhere.  Noah's family loved Emily.  They treated her like a daughter and a sister.  Noah's 16 year old sister, who was sort of reclusive, shared her room with Emily and they were fast friends.  The sister spent alot of time with Emily.  That was a good thing, because while they were there, Noah ignored Emily almost completely.  When he did pay attention to her, it was not nice.  She had passed up the opportunity to spend the holiday with family because Noah wanted her to be with him but his priority while home was to play video games with his friends.  During those six days, they did not do one thing alone together.  Emily decided to stop eating.