SIngle and lonely...

What do you do when you leave church or religion  and have made all your memories with these people? When you have boxes of photo albums filled with their pictures? 

They own your memories.


A song triggers a memory of you dancing together in the kitchen. A smell reminds you of when the gang went on vacation that summer. A color takes you back to your roommate’s wedding.  Now there is no one. Since your time and energy went into building these imaginary relationships, now you realize you drove your real friends away years ago. What happens when these real friends survive your belief system but are not as close to you after all these years as they could have been, when blocks of their lives have come and gone without you in it....


The single lifestyle is very difficult to maintain without friendships because of the constant social pressure to not be alone.  This single lifestyle is lonely by design - especially if you live alone and you are far away from family.  To weed out relationships that are shallow would mean not having people to go to the movies with, to the restaurant, to the club,  out shopping…  If you want to go out Saturday night as most single people do-or feel they should be doing - then who are you gonna call?


Years ago when I left the church system, I could no longer be an enabler, an active participant, an agent of evil to others. This awakening was a process that unraveled over two years in the making. My fears of losing my relationships became a harsh reality. As excruciatingly painful as it was, I put it all on the line to know God personally and lost everything.

  The main AHA moment was when I decided to leave the church world. I knew for a while something was very wrong. But I was ready at this point in my life to say “This is it.” and never look back.  Church was idealized as this extended family  and the church  I was in   declared itself as a person’s only true family.  They ruthlessly manipulated this truth of relationship to keep people devoted to the church, not each other. It operated like any organization in the respect that you are ‘related by association’. If two people go to church together, that means they are friends because of church. This usually is not obvious until one person stops going to church and true colors begin to show.  The same with work situations, the same with belonging with greek organizations and the like.

 

 

 I have a friend who joined a sorority freshman year in college. She is convinced that these girls are her friends. Years after graduating she has been in their wedding parties, they take her out for her birthday every year.  Maybe they really are, I mean,  how the hell should I know?  I don’t and I could be wrong....but I know the truth will be revealed if something  ever happened causing her to question her faith and trust in her sorority....if she ever diverted from her commitment or questioned the integrity of the organization itself  would her relationships with her sorority sisters be shaken? One thing the church taught me was that the organization always comes first. When the shit hits the fan, allegiance to the group in principle always takes precedence over relationship. I secretly wonder if this dear friend of mine were to for some reason question something like the hazing process would she and her friends  still be as close. 

 

 I know that when you spend every day with people the way you do with most groups it is easy to fall into the trap of feeling  that you are close. There is a bond you share with people who share the same experiences as you-the struggles, the adversities, the highs, the lows. You are working toward a common goal, you are on the same team. The key for me has been to know that these bonds, though real, are not necessarily authentic. They only last as long as the thing that is tying you together.  That is the AHA friendship moment I really encountered at thirty- my early -life crisis. I looked up and realized all my friends  were not really friends but people bonded to me for the moment. As soon as the thing we had in common changed, they were gone.

For me, this common bond was church.

Once I left the church all my friends belonged to, they literally turned on me. Our relationships were not two-way streets like I had thought... When I no longer was committed to coming to Sunday services or supporting the efforts of the pastor and  his wife  the relationship was over. People who me knew for years now saw me as a threat. I was quickly marginalized and disposed of as easy as throwing  out the trash. 

I believed the "we are family" campaign with its bells, whistles and banners. 

I thought that if you were someone’s maid of honor that would count for something. 

 We called each other best friends.

We went on vacation together. We knew each other’s families. 

I cried with them when their children were born.

Their kids called me auntie.

We shared secrets. Our insecurities...our private thoughts....


And when the dust cleared, the pain of disillusionment seemed almost too much to bear.


  Late at night I would  lie awake wondering where they are now.

 I think about how big the kids must be...

 I wonder if they have yet broken free from the bondage of religion or are they still going through the motions...

 I hate them, I love them. 

...And I wish I could go back in time knowing what I know now. 


Moving on is a lonely time. Isolated in the confines of your newfound religion and warped view of Christian ethics, you dismembered your real authentic relationships  with yourself and with others. The real friends you did have probably have moved on. Maybe you tried to convert them and drove them completely out of your life by being condescending and obnoxious- whether or not you were aware of it. Some people were lucky. They kept relationships outside of church separate from that world. I know people who left religion and had a huge cloud of family and friends to fall back on. I know others who literally had nothing and nobody. People who came from abusive backgrounds, had no family-or whose family were emotionally unavailable – and they were all alone in the world.

 Part of my own search came from a deep sense of loneliness and a fear of having no friends. In our face book world that is a punishable- by- death offense. You need  to appear to be liked by a lot of people to be considered of value. Even a dead person is judged by how many people come to their funeral.  Once the fantasy of church life dissolved and I was thrown into the cold waters of real life I realized quick that not only were my friendships plastic, but I didn’t really like them anyway.   After all the investment, I came up empty. 

I never stopped to ask myself whether I actually liked them or not.

 I and so many people I knew who thought they were trying to do something positive and normal were in fact going about building a life of relationship based on a principle.  We were like goldfish in a bowl-it was either sink or swim, and we had to make it work if we wanted to survive. We were in the bowl of christianity and we didn't have a choice who we were in there with.  Looking back with brutal honesty, I would have never hung out with-never less be friends with 99% of the people I did.  In that slim 1 % were people I actually clicked with on a normal level, and not just because they were my "sister" or "brother" in Christ.