# When I was about 16, the adult male sponsor of my Christian youth group asked to speak to me privately one night before our meeting. He said he'd noticed that when our group members hugged each other in welcome or goodbye, I hugged boys and girls just the same. With his wife nodding supportively beside him, he physically demonstrated the "side hug", and made me actually practice the difference. He told me that he would be watching to see that this is the way I hugged boys from now on. The reason, he said, was that giving a "regular" hug to a boy would "cause that boy problems". His vague euphemisms gave me the impression that "regular" hugging was pretty much throwing yourself sexually at a boy. I found this whole instructional episode confusing, as I didn't see anything unusual, excessive, or remotely suggestive about the social hugs occasionally exchanged in the group. I felt weirdly ashamed even though I didn't think I had done anything wrong. I wondered why he hadn't talked to the boys who obviously must have been "regular"-hugging me.
# In the first few years of my marriage, my then-husband and I needed to reach out for some relationship counseling. Our pastor recommended a local Christian therapist. When I called him to make the appointment, he said he wanted me to know that he was "not a male chauvinist". Multiple times during our session, though, he asked me questions, and while I answered he just looked me over, obviously not listening to my response, and then when I was finished he allowed a couple seconds of silence before turning to my husband and saying, "She sure is a pretty little thing, isn't she?" Before we left, he pronounced his diagnosis that the cause of many of the relationship problems we were having was my refusal to accept my husband's regular phone calls during my work day, teaching fourth grade. I needed to stop making my husband feel like I didn't have time for him. I protested that I had nothing but time for my husband, any time except when I was actively teaching. I just didn't understand why it was necessary, or even OK, for him to disregard my real and important work--to pull me out of a classroom full of children in the middle of a lesson to say things like, "What do you think we should do this weekend?" But the therapist said that wasn't a good excuse, and that since he was also a teacher (of a couple college classes), he knew that it was possible for me to be available whenever my husband wanted to talk.
# Hanging out late with a group of friends after a choir event as a college undergrad, one of the guys in the group suddenly and randomly said to me, "Show me your foot." Curious but not alarmed, I slipped off one of my flats and stood barefoot on the chapel floor for a couple of seconds. At that point he pronounced my feet "not bad", but said that when he got married, he was going to marry a girl with "pretty feet".
# When my husband told me that he was no longer interested in continuing our marriage, and I asked him why, he said it was because I did not respect him as a man or as a husband, and did not care about the things that were important to him. When I asked for an example of my showing disrespect or not caring about something that was important to him, he pointed out that he had been telling me for several years that I was too fat, and I had showed contempt for him by not addressing this problem.
# I got engaged for the first time at 19. When we tried to set a wedding date, my new fiance chose a mid-December Saturday during the holiday break. I hate winter and cold; my home church is rural and can be hard to get to in winter; I didn't want to squeeze a wedding in during a short school vacation. But when I said all this, he told me that none of it mattered, as his choice was that we would be getting married at the Chicagoland church where his father was a pastor, and the members of that congregation were busy and important--they could not be expected to travel to the middle of nowhere in downstate Illinois. Not only that, but getting married at a semester break instead of waiting until spring would help our financial aid, which made the date a financial decision, and it's the man who makes the financial decisions. When I said I didn't think this was a workable model for our relationship, and we should put the brakes on any date until we could get on the same page, he gave me an ultimatum, saying I either agreed to marry him on that day or not at all. When I said I could not go forward like that, he demanded his ring back. Afterwards, he let our whole Bible college campus know how devastated he was that I had broken up with him. When he began stalking me, I was universally shamed for "stringing him along". This lasted for three years.
# Working in a ministry position that involved many community meetings with other ministry leaders, a male co-worker came into my office, shut the door, and began to explain to me why I needed to immediately stop having work meetings with men in public places like restaurants, as these meetings "looked like a date". I was divorced at this time, and he said he knew that I "didn't have a marriage to worry about", but that I needed to be responsible for the marriages of the men who met with me, and this was not good for their marriages. Besides, he said, "you work with the single moms, and we don't want these moms thinking they can do what you're doing."
# In my undergraduate World Missions class, one of the assignments was to complete a spiritual gift inventory. When I turned mine in with its very clear results showing I was strongly gifted in leadership and administration, my professor returned the graded copy with his handwritten note in the margin--"Sounds like great qualities for a pastor's wife!"
# The summer that my first engagement was broken, I went on a three-month mission trip to work with a church plant in Canada. The missionary I was working with told me that it sounded to him as though I hadn't "respected" my fiance the way I should. I was offended at this suggestion, but I eventually came to understand that by "respect" he did not mean "have respect for", as a person. He meant "obey," as in the way his wife, for example, would not wear any clothing that showed her arms or shoulders, because he said so. So I had ruined my relationship, by doing things like refusing when my fiance told me to find a new doctor because he wasn't comfortable with me seeing a male one.
#After my divorce, a lay leader at my church told me how disappointed he was that he'd been fooled into believing we'd had a "real Christian marriage".
# Sitting in a work meeting with a colleague, we were discussing the need for churches to invest in programs that were in touch with the real lives of people in the community, and met a felt need. The only two people in this meeting were myself, a divorced woman, and him, a married man. He posited that churches should hold marriage classes and seminars, because, he said, they have *universal* appeal--"Everyone wants to improve their marriage."
