I once knowingly got engaged to a man who had formerly slept with prostitutes.

Writing those words and seeing them on the page now fills me with horror. What?! I can’t believe I did that. But at the time, I was convinced I was following a good path. How did I get there? I’ve spent a lot of time over the last decade processing and pondering that.

My husband’s family refers to my ex-fiancé as Chris. One day my mother-in-law couldn’t remember his name. “What’s his name? Chris?” And it stuck. I feel loved by this quirky state of affairs. In their minds, his real name wasn’t worth the brain space of remembering. I think it was their way of stating something about my value, and I’ll take it. Therefore, I’ll refer to my ex-fiancé as Chris. It’s also my way of trying to honor his anonymity in the midst of hard things I may say.

When I first met Chris, we had been emailing and talking on the phone already for weeks. We met on E-harmony. I was in my late twenties and had yet to have been asked on a date. Perhaps a side-effect of the purity culture in which I was raised. So online dating was my way of being vulnerable, of saying, I want to open to the possibility of a relationship, a way to socially-acceptably communicate, “I’m interested. Whose brave enough to pursue me?” Chris was one of the first to seriously answer.

The day I met him, I was instantly turned off by his physical appearance. He was six years older. He was already balding some, rough around the edges, and his teeth were a mess. But I instantly stopped myself. I told myself it was shallow to judge someone based on their appearance. It wasn’t nice to think those things. I didn’t feel physically attracted to him, but I still had to give him a chance.

Our whole relationship was filled with moments like this, times I learned or encountered something new that made me uncomfortable and then I rationalized my way past it with Christian kindness. When I learned about the prostitutes I was sitting on the counter in my internship leader’s kitchen. Chris was visiting for the weekend. The granite was hard and cold beneath my body. I braced my hands against it, looking down a bit at Chris who stood nearby and wanted to glance away in shame as he confessed this.

My initial internal reaction was to feel utterly revolted. I’ll be transparent and confess that I was twenty-six years old and had never slept with a man. The thought of continuing in this relationship and eventually sharing my bed with a man who was far widely more “experienced” than me in this area and who would carry a history of prostitutes and who-knew-what-else into my body and my emotional intimacy was daunting. Part of me wanted to run away. Possibly puke.

But I didn’t let any of that show.

I immediately set all of that aside and began caring for Chris in a co-dependent way. He was ashamed of sharing this with me. He was insecure about it. He feared losing me over it. It was in his past. He wouldn’t dare do anything like that now. Jesus had forgiven him. It was my job to do that too. I looked him straight in the eye to reassure him of my love and that I wasn’t going anywhere. Christian nice won out over a careful reconsideration of healthy boundaries in light of new information. I thought I was being like Jesus and doing what God wanted.

I spent most of my relationship with Chris reassuring his insecurities. His greatest fear was that I would walk away and abandon him. He was child-like in his pettiness. I was embroiled in a demanding internship (what I would later find words to say was a cult), but if I didn’t respond to his texts quickly enough, he tail-spun into emotional second-guessing, and I had to spend tons of energy talking him down and reassuring him I wasn’t going anywhere. My reassurance often came in the form of saying yes to things sooner than I was comfortable. I held his hand before I was ready as a way to make him happy and assure him I was seriously considering saying yes to a relationship with him. I kissed him before I was ready. I got engaged before I was ready.

The reasons for this are complex. With pleasing as one of my coping mechanisms, I was afraid of disappointing him. It caused me too much anxiety. I had also never had anyone else communicate with me that I was worth pursuing; I didn’t want to lose that. I didn’t want to “fail” at the relationship. I was also loving him in a co-dependent way, trying to fix all his pain and his faults with aggressive compassion. Did I feel “called” to change his life for the better? I felt convinced my love could transform things. In the end, it just broke me.

What complicated things was that underlying the whole relationship I lived with an unacknowledged sense of anxiety and internal chaos. Some buried part of me was seeing the red flags and was shouting warnings. Sometimes I heard these warnings, and I took them to God. I thought I heard God say to trust him and move forward. So as a dutiful Christian, I kept moving forward despite how I felt. It was a type of emotional and spiritual martyrdom. How valiant of me to offer the best of my life to communicating love to this broken man.

Today, I don’t think that was the voice of God at all. I’m not sure exactly what it was. I didn’t trust myself to hear from God for years afterwards. I still don’t hear in the same way I did before. But I think that’s a good thing. I’ve learned to discern the “voice of God” by listening to the internal litmus test of my inner being. God is not a God of chaos. Where he leads, I find there is a settledness, a calm. There is a knowingness that what I feel led to do or how I feel led to be is the next step. I trust that instead.

I believe Chris had narcissistic tendencies. When confronted he had an angry, brusque side that emerged. He wasn’t willing to take a long honest look at the state of his own being. He jumped through surface hoops of doing what others thought he needed to do to marry me, but his heart wasn’t in the process. He never did own his portion of why the relationship didn’t work out. From his perspective it was all my fault since I’m the one who broke it off. He was the victim in the matter. I did what he always feared—I walked away and left.

What Chris needed wasn’t my co-dependent permissive love. He needed hard boundaries. He needed tough love.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for the transforming love of God. I believe people can change. I believe in giving them second chances. But I also believe in the law of reaping and sowing. If a man is an abusive or absentee parent and his kids are estranged and never want to talk to him, having a transformative spiritual experience will not automatically change that. Jesus may not hold his past against him, but his kids probably still will. And they probably should. This “new man” will still reap the consequences of his earlier behavior and character, probably for the rest of his life. If he can reconcile with his children at all, it will take long years of hard work and proving that the change is real and valid. As it should. It will take full ownership of his past, not denial of it. Those consequences don’t naturally go away.

Jesus doesn’t fix everything.

I know that may sound controversial, but it’s what I fully believe. He doesn’t heal everyone, either physically or spiritually. He doesn’t wipe out injustice. He doesn’t change the past. He doesn’t obliterate pain. Believing he does is a type of emotional prosperity gospel. What I do believe God offers is presence in the midst of the grief and pain of that journey. The real transformation may come from this theoretical man’s willingness to sit in that pain and be present to what has been and what still is without running away or justifying himself or being angry at his children. That is true cruciform transformation.

A version of faith that says differently is not a version of faith I want to partake in any longer.

Chris slept with prostitutes. That was a part of his story. He needed to fully own that, not pretend it hadn’t happened and expect me to pretend it hadn’t happened. I don’t know why it took me so long to see that. But eventually I did.

The effects of “Christian nice” can be heartbreaking. It often leaves the truly vulnerable more vulnerable, and gives those who are power-hungry more room to take advantage. Like when women are told to respect and submit to their husbands even when they are being abused at home. Or when congregations welcome those with a past with open arms without setting clear boundaries. Whether he meant to or not, Chris took advantage of my genuine care and my co-dependent decisions. When I saw his finances were a wreck, I refinanced his car loan to get rid of a 19% interest rate. When we broke up, he had the title, and I had the loan. He sent two $100 checks and walked away. I paid off the loan.

Sometimes I think about what my life might have been like if I had actually married Chris. I came really close. It would’ve been miserable. Post-marriage all these already problematic issues would’ve gotten worse. I would’ve done my darndest to make it work, but I would’ve worked myself into the ground—financially, practically, physically, emotionally, spiritually—to try and make it work. I think he would’ve been emotionally and spiritually abusive. Maybe physically. It might’ve taken me a decade, but eventually I think it would’ve led to a divorce, maybe once I had several children in tow. It would’ve been a mess. And I would’ve bought into the notion that God hates divorce and tried to martyr myself to sticking it out until it got so bad I had entirely lost myself. Then I would’ve hung my head in shame and felt like it was somehow my fault when I walked away.

“Christian nice” happens when forgiveness is preached over boundaries. When I walked into my relationship with Chris, I didn’t even know what boundaries were. Years later I could look back and see how I gave way too many of them away, both to him and to the cult I became a part of. “Christian nice” failed me in my relationship with Chris. It failed Chris too. I spent most of a year keeping him from facing the things he needed to face, of saving him from the consequences of his life choices. In some ways, walking away was the most loving thing I could do for him.

I don’t know if he every fully faced himself or not. He still owes me thousands of dollars, so probably not. But I can hope that the pain of my “abandonment” might be a place of transformation for his life. His betrayal of me was certainly a catalyst for growth in my own.