A Fake Ring, Real Temptation, and a Golden Marriage

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we continue with our American stories. And our next story comes to us from Sarah Wells, author of American Honey: A Field Guide to Resisting Temptation. Let’s take a listen.

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Speaker 2: I grew up on a farm in the frayed edge of suburbia. I would say it was in Auburn Township, a pretty traditional upbringing with a stay-at-home mom and a working-class dad. Kind of pull yourself up from the bootstraps type of home life, and that was what I expected the future to look like. I had one degree in mind when I would graduate from college, and that was my Mrs. I had dreams of being a writer, of teaching, but it was always in the background that what would really happen is I would meet the man in my dreams, and we would live happily ever after. I would stay home and raise my kids just like my mom had done. And so that was the mission that I had coming into high school and into my college career, always keeping in mind my dad. My dad was this and is somebody that I’ve always looked up to tremendously. I adored my dad and wanted to be with my dad all the time, and he was kind of my model for the kind of man that I wanted to marry. And so I went through, like many girls do, a boy-crazy phase, where from probably the age of thirteen to twenty-one, I had a boyfriend every month, of long-term boyfriend relationships. And as soon as that one would end, I would start in and find a new one, and I really craved love and adoration. My dad was a hard-working dad. He was always gone early in the morning, working late into the evening, and I think that I craved his attention so much that I had kind of a gaping hole of desire from a young teenager all the way through to college. Eventually, I met my now-husband, Brandon. We met when I was nineteen, and I was ready to marry him. Ten days into dating him, I was certain that he was going to be the one, but I was also certain that every previous boyfriend was going to be the one. So this is it, actually amazing information, that I had met my husband. And so we dated for ten months and got engaged and got married four months later. And after my husband proposed to me, I was rifling through his side dresser drawer, looking for receipts for the dinner that we had gone on the night that he was engaged. I was putting together a scrapbook to memorialize our short engagement, and I came across a receipt that I thought was the dinner receipt. It turned out to be the receipt for my engagement ring, which looked beautiful. It was shiny, and I loved to look at it. I loved everyone who complimented it, and I was like, “Yes, it is a beautiful ring, thank you.” But it turned out that my ring was not that I thought it was. It turned out to be on sale at a department store. It was far less than what I thought he had spent on my ring. And these things are things that I didn’t think mattered to me. I didn’t think that it was a big deal to wear expensive rings. I didn’t wear expensive jewelry. I was a kind of dirt-under-your-fingernails type of girl. But that mattered, and the need to feel worthy and to be invested in as his future bride mattered to me. It was really hard to get over it, and I wanted to just suck it up and go on and just get married, but I couldn’t do it. It was too big of a block to our relationship. And so I confronted him about it and asked him, like, or I didn’t ask him. I told him I found the receipt for my ring, and obviously he knew immediately that this was a problem. So, what I was used to… Another expectation that I had growing up was that people didn’t really say they’re sorry. They would be defensive or redirect blame. And when I confessed to my husband, my fiancé at the time, that I had found this receipt, I expected him to be defensive and to make a big deal about it and turn it back on me. And when instead he apologized and asked for forgiveness, I was blown away, like, “Oh, this this man is not exactly who I thought he was” in a good way. But marriage ended up being a whole lot more work than I expected, and then having babies ended up being a whole lot more work than I expected. It didn’t work out just that you got pregnant. It actually turned out that you got pregnant and then didn’t get pregnant and miscarried or struggled to get pregnant. I had two miscarriages before we had our first child, our daughter, Lydia. Then I thought, “Oh, well, this is it! I’m, I’m back on track. I’m happily married, my husband has a job. I’m going to stay home with my daughter, who is beautiful and tiny and cute.” And about six weeks into my maternity leave, I felt like half my brain had fallen out of my head and I couldn’t put half of a sentence together anymore. And I called my boss and was like, “I have to come back to work. I don’t know who I am and I don’t know how I’m going to do this.” And I was twenty-four at the time. And all of this turned into this early twenties, late twenties, a season of thinking that I was one type of person and discovering that I was actually a whole other kind of person. I learned that I looked up to my dad, not because that was maybe the type of guy I wanted to marry, but the kind of person that I was. I was a hard-working person. I loved to invest all of myself into a team of people or into projects and that kind of thing. And my husband ended up being the stay-at-home parent and being the one who was raising our children, which was shocking to everyone involved, including us, myself, and my husband. I knew that things at home when I took my full-time job were not great for my husband. He wasn’t enjoying being a stay-at-home dad nearly as much as he thought he might. But I didn’t have a real good picture until one morning we were dancing around each other in the kitchen getting breakfast ready. I was in my pantsuit with my travel mug and my phone and my purse, and was ready to walk out the door to the job that I loved and that I felt like suddenly I was made for. And my husband was in his warm-up pants and an untucked T-shirt, and he’s not shaven for the last however many days, who knows. And our daughter’s screaming in the high chair, and my infant son is wailing in the rocker. And I go to pass my husband on the way out of the kitchen and say, “Goodbye, I’ll see you at lunch,” and he slams the kitchen cabinet and turns to me, and I meet my life.

00:09:04
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Sarah Wells tell the story of her life and ultimately her family life. Well, we’re going to find out how that ends. And how that works. When we come back with Sarah Wells’s story, her book, American Honey: A Field Guide to Resisting Temptation. Her story, her husband’s too, continues here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories and author Sarah Wells, her memoir American Honey: A Field Guide to Resisting Temptation. When we last left off, her husband was expressing some discontent with being a stay-at-home dad. Let’s pick up when we last left off: “I need my life.”

00:10:01
Speaker 2: And I’m like, “What?” I felt completely out of the blue, and I didn’t know what to say because I was so shocked that the life that I felt like we were, was it kind of a dream life? Because I had everything I wanted. I had the husband, I had a job, I had children. I couldn’t see how he couldn’t see the beauty of our life. He was struggling to find work. We found a church community and started to build friendships, and that helped. We started to go on dates on a weekly basis to try to stay connected in that way. But what he really needed was to find another outlet and a work outlet. The stay-at-home parent thing wasn’t working for him. He eventually found work and was and began working as a contractor for ESPN and Fox and started working on the road. Sometimes I would get to go with him, and it was heaven. We went to dinner, we would go out dancing and sing karaoke and do all these things that we loved together and made each other laugh. And then we would come home, and reality would sink back in. He would go back on the road by himself, and I would go back to work by myself. And in the midst of all of that, other people became very important to me. My friends became very important to me, but also conversations with other people became really important. And I was blindsided by a developing friendship with a friend who was a man, and we totally hit it off. I was in a writing community, and he shared a lot of the same interests, and we just really connected. He was funny. We started texting a lot, and suddenly we were texting a whole lot. And all of a sudden, I realized how much I was sharing of my life with this stranger out of the kind of out of the blue, and not with my husband. One day, I had been texting with this person on and off throughout the day. I felt really uneasy about it and told my husband, “Hey, I’m gonna run over to my friend’s house for a little bit.” And I was telling her about this relationship, and she said, “Sarah, have you said good night to him?” And the color drained out of my face, and I realized, “Yes, I just wished him good night like fifteen minutes ago.” And she’s like, “Oh, that’s a bad sign.” And she said, “You need to end it, and you need to tell your husband.” And I was like, “What are you talking about? None of these things. This is a big deal. This is so not a big deal.” And I told her, “I don’t think I can do that,” and she’s like, “Well, if you don’t do that, this will just keep happening where you will find yourself drawn to someone else who is saying all the right things but is the wrong person.” And so I told my husband what was happening, and we had kind of a fight about it. He felt bad, and then we continued on with our regular life. So after nine years of being married to Brandon, we had three children. We’d had four miscarriages. We had three dogs. We had bought a house together. We had sold a house together. We had refinished a house together. We had invested so much of ourselves into our shared life, and we had, on top of all of that, decided to change our diets. And suddenly I was feeling fit and fine and healthy and not pregnant. For the first time in nine years, I was myself. And this created other attention that I didn’t anticipate from other people besides my husband. So at one evening event, I was having a great conversation with my colleague, and he was starting to go through a divorce or thinking about getting a divorce. And I just felt really bad for him because my marriage was great, and I didn’t want them to separate. And so I found myself having to make a conscious choice whether to destroy my life or preserve my life. I never, air quote, “I never did anything.” Nothing ever happened but the emotional energy and the mental energy of washing my daughter’s hair in the tub and only thinking about whether he was going to text me that night, or whether he was going to send me an email that said something inappropriate in it, and how would I handle that. It came to another head, and there was another moment where I was in the car with my colleague, and he started rubbing my back and we were in my driveway. My husband wasn’t home, my children weren’t home, and it was time for me to get out of the car. Here’s that intersection, here’s the opportunity. Either you destroy your relationship with your the rest of your life, or you get out of the car. And I felt this. I heard this voice say, “Sarah, get out of the car now!” And it was not audible, obviously, but I heard it, and I said, “I have to get out of this car!” So I swung the door open. I said, “Good night, thank you for bringing me home,” and slammed the door and walked into the house. And as I walked through the door, the light from his headlights scanned across my wedding picture that was hanging on the wall, and I felt this weight lift off of me, like freedom. You are no longer enslaved by this thing. You don’t have, like, you don’t have to resist this en more. It’s done, it’s over, this will never be a thing again. And I felt strong and ready to face whatever was going to come next with my husband, which ended up being doing a lot of confessing and having a lot of conversations where we’re standing in the middle of the kitchen together, holding each other, crying. I’m apologizing. It’s like, “I forgive you for whatever it is that you feel like you need to be forgiven for.” And that’s the man that I married, and that’s the foundation that carried us through into healing, into rebuilding trust, and into being able to confide in each other about everything. To celebrate our tenth anniversary, we headed out of town for one of Brandon’s work weekends. Right before heading out to dinner, he said, “I have something for you that I think you should wear to dinner.” And I felt embarrassed about this because it’s been ten years, and I love my wedding ring. It’s pretty. I’m over the receipt. We’re fine now, you know. And this investment in a real diamond ring and a real engagement ring felt extravagant. And so Brandon opened up this case, and it was beautiful, absolutely beautiful ring. And then he said, “I have something else for you,” and handed me an envelope. And inside was the lyrics to a song that he had started to write for me, and I started bawling. It was so touching to me to have him think about what our marriage meant to him and what our relationship was about. It was at far ex the price of any engagement ring. The engagement ring ended up being a real bonus course because, no, I haven’t on my finger all the time, but the real gift of having this start of a song that he had composed for me touched me far deeper than any engagement ring could ever have reached.

00:19:20
Speaker 1: And an excellent job by Greg on the production on the piece and the storytelling editing. And a special thanks to Farrewell’s for sharing her story with all of us, and her story of her bouts with temptation, and her book is American Honey: A Field Guide to Resisting Temptation. Go to your local bookstore or wherever you get your books to get it. And there’s that critical moment where she says something so important: “I was no longer enslaved by this thing.” And the enslavement was not her marriage. The marriage gave her freedom. It’s the temptation that enslaved her. That’s a deep Christian notion. But you don’t have to be a Christian who have experienced this notion. The story of a marriage in the end, and what saved it. Farrewells’s story, her husband’s, too, here on Our American Stories.