Over the past month, I have been convicted to write a story. Not just any story, but a personal one that dives deep into my heart. This story will be about my growth in the area of emotional intimacy.
Before we get started, I must say this will go deeply into my heart into deep wounds that are being healed. This may get uncomfortable for you to read. I do not apologize for what I have done in my past. I accept what I have done and who I have become because of it.
In high school, I was unwilling to wait for God to act in my life. I desperately wanted a wife, kids, and a family. So, I did what most young men do. I acted on my own will and went searching for a woman that would be mine. My junior year of high school, I found her.
I started a relationship with a woman and since we both wanted and acted out of our physical desires, we ended up hurting and deeply wounding each other. I hurt her because I realized I wanted more than just physicality in a relationship and broke up with her. We later got back together and she hurt me then by cheating on me.
Deeply wounded and still seeking out a woman to make mine, I had made a plan. It was a good plan, but it was MY plan. MY plan was to go to Texas A&M, find a Christian woman, befriend her, date her, and get engaged by spring of 2014 and eventually get married. Well, as you will find out, MY plan was not God’s plan and it utterly failed and backfired in my face.
In the fall of 2010 right before classes started. I was 18 and headed off to a Christian camp called Impact. Those that know about Texas A&M may have heard of this camp. It’s a camp for incoming college freshman to the Bryan-College Station area. At this camp I went through a little healing and understanding that I was wounded and that I needed healing. What I did not understand was that a woman was not going to bring that to my life, only God can do that.
At this camp, I met a woman named Jane (name changed to protect her). She was beautiful, shorter than me, and a Christian. She met all of the criteria that I had set for the woman I wanted. We started dating within a few weeks after meeting. It was a wonderful few weeks in that we got to know each other fairly well. It was just a precursor for what was to come.
We started dating right after classes started; something that her mother had advised against. In hindsight, this was a bad thing for us to do. Instead of focusing on getting good grades and our schooling we started focusing on fixing and healing our deep wounds and placating our insecurities. We got to know each other fairly well because we spent so much time together.
We spent so much time together because of our past wounds and our mutual fear of being alone later on in life. We used each other to pacify our fears and wounds of being hurt and cheated on. Our relationship progressed extremely quickly because we started spending the night at each other’s places. We forced ourselves to be together and deeply enjoyed the emotional intimacy and physical intimacy we were having.
This came to a bit of a halt as I started learning more and more about her family. Because of our wounds, Jane and I to chose cover up our relationship for a while and this also lead us to hide what we were doing together and how much time we spending together.
Our relationship continued to progress further and further. We became physically intimate to pacify our emotional and spiritual wounds. We spent the night together to placate our worries of being alone. During this time we were still neglecting our schooling and focusing on each other’s needs and insecurities.
This started to affect my life in the normal ways a codependent relationship affects many other’s lives. I spent more and more time with Jane and less and less time with my friends and family. We spent so much time together that Jane ended up moving in with me our sophomore year. We ended up living with 3 of my friends. At first it was awkward, by my friends ended up allowing Jane over all the time.
They were passive aggressive and did not say anything for almost 8 months after Jane moved in. During these 8 months my relationship with Jane became tougher and tougher to handle. We were living the lives of our parents. We existed in a perpetual state of togetherness like a married couple does. We continued living together which went against both of our parent’s wishes. We continued to hide how far our relationship progressed.
Our relationship lead to awkward situations with my friends when I did see them. My friends kept commenting on how little they saw of me and how seldom we hung out without Jane being there. I brushed this off as them butting into my life and prying where I didn’t want them to pry. It took them about 2 months to get me to listen. They had an intervention that forcibly took me away from Jane, but they made me listen.
Looking back this intervention is something I desperately needed. I was barely passing most of my classes. I had not seen nor spent time with my family in nearly a month, even though they lived 10 minutes away. I also had not spent time with my friends in over a month. It was a rough experience to go through, especially since I didn’t want to listen.
After this intervention, I still did not act in a way that respected their wishes and they began their process of moving away from the situation. All 3 of my friends started looking into moving out and finding other people to live with, this was the straw that eventually broke the camel’s back.
At this point, I realized how much I was losing because of my relationship with Jane. I had lost 2 years of my schooling. My GPA was just over 2.0 (C average), my friends were moving out and leaving me behind, and I had stopped spending time with my friends and less and less time with family.
My parents eventually sat me down and talked with me about what was happening in my life. About 6 months into my sophomore year, my parents had found out that Jane and I were living together. They had forced me to have her move out. She “moved out,” and continued spending the night at my place.
When we talked about this, it hurt my heart because of the amount of shame and pain I had because I was not honoring my parents with my relationship. I was making poor choices and didn’t want to get out of the relationship I was in. In this codependent relationship, Jane and I had learned to operate in a way to pacify each other’s fears and insecurities.
My parents and I came to the conclusion (they talked me into it) that I needed to break up with Jane. It was painful, but I felt much better at having an out for a destructive relationship. I broke up with Jane and seemingly felt a huge weight lifted from my shoulders. Everything was painful as I thought about how much time we spent together and all that we had done together.
I waited what seemed like an eternity for the pain to go away and it didn’t. I desperately wanted to feel loved and be told that I was loved. I wanted to be told that I was good enough and worthy to be loved. I wanted to be where my parents were in their relationship. I wanted all of this quickly and easily. It felt as if this was the only thing that mattered to me.
So, instead of trying to get healing for my wounds, I went back to the woman that had helped cover them up. Jane and I started seeing each other in secret. We continued doing everything that we had done before, except that I treated her with less and less respect than I had in our relationship.
I was more and more controlling because I had left, so she too could leave and I didn’t want that. I became more and more belligerent as the time passed. I spent more time drinking and started seeking emotional intimacy from other sources. This is where things may get more uncomfortable. Proceed at your own volition.
I dove deeper and deeper into the realm of fake emotional intimacy. Since I wasn’t getting all of my fears and insecurities covered up like I was when we were openly dating, I turned to others sources. Online dating sites became common hotspots for my searches. As I continued looking and searching, and I got further and further away from what God wanted for me.
God gave me exactly what I wanted. He gave me emotional intimacy from women online. I would spend more time online than with people. I became a recluse. If I was not with Jane, I was often online searching for intimacy. My grades continued to slip the fall of my junior year because of this. Jane and I continued to see each other in secret until I found someone else to replace her. Yes this sounds terrible and it was.
I found an old ex, not the one that cheated on me, but another and I started to message and pursue her. One night she came over and we became physical. This would have not been a huge problem, except I was already in a mutually exclusive relationship with Jane.
This changed everything in my mind. I had cheated. After the pain and wounds that being cheated on had caused me, I had done the same to another. Jane knew something was different about me. She could tell that something had changed in me. I had realized that I had become the exact person that I had always told myself that I would never become.
When I told Jane, our relationship immediately ended. We spent the next few weeks moving her stuff out of my place a little at a time. I started pursuing her again because the woman that I had cheated with stopped talking to me when she found out that I was in a relationship when we had been together. So now I was truly alone. I had no woman in my life. My goal to be engaged and then get married had been destroyed and flung back in my face.
Now I was alone. I was wounded from high school (I was still carrying this wound), I was wounded from my relationship with Jane, and wounded personally by cheating on her. These wounds weighed me down and were an extremely heavy burden. I carried these wounds and burdens for about 2 years when I was introduced to Spiritual Healing while at Training Camp for the World Race. Dr. Ron was amazing at teaching us about healing and what it means to heal and be healed. He even had a session for us to seek out healing for the wounds in our lives.
Dr. Ron’s teaching lead to one of my best encounters with God and the Holy Spirit. I was in the back row in the worship center reflecting on my wounds and the amount of pain that I was carrying when one of the guys working for Adventures in Missions (AIM) came up to me and spoke to me.
He told me that God loved me and that he forgave me for the sins I had committed against him. This forgiveness dropped me to my knees and spurred on tears that I had not cried since I was a child. Ryan Otto went on to say that God wanted me to know that I was no longer a child and that I was now a man of God.
This moment brought to mind 1st Corinthians 12:11, “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, and I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” This little verse is directly before Paul goes onto say that God’s love is what completes us and that God’s love is more powerful than hope and faith.
This is where my healing began. The song, “This is where the Healing Begins,” is my song for the Race and this part of my life. According to the song, healing begins where the light meets the dark. That is, where God, the light, meets with us in our sin. He takes the wounds and heals them with grace and forgiveness. He spreads his love into the depths of our wounds and seals the cracks, dents, and brokenness we have felt inside.
To be healed of labels such as, liar and cheater, is an amazing thing. When I was forgiven, I went through a process of tears and crying that transitioned into extreme joy and laughter. This joy and laughter was a gift that brought me higher than I had allowed myself to be in a long time.
It was in this time that I realized I had been struggling with my past and I was allowing my actions and fears of those actions to dictate how I acted around people. Since then, I have learned that the amount I love myself determines the amount of love I can give to others. Love your neighbors as you love yourself has more power than I thought imaginable.
The love that was poured out on the Cross was poured out onto me that wonderful October day in 2014. This has lead me to wonderful conversations about being healed and loving deeper and even more healing that I will talk about in my next blog post.
Thanks to everyone that made it this far and has seen that I have come a long way in 6 months. Through this process I have learned to open up my heart and love deeper that I thought I could. I am learning so much about myself and who I am in Christ. More to come soon.
Love y’all and miss y’all!
Ryan Boenigk
