Divorce was Never an option

Divorce Was Never an Option — Because Marriage Never Felt Like One

I never believed in divorce. Not because I thought marriage was sacred, but because I never thought marriage was real for me.

I’ve been proposed to twice. I walked away both times. I’ve walked away from most relationships before they got to the altar. People say I have “commitment issues.” I say I never had a blueprint. I didn’t have a positive male role model in my family. My own father wasn’t one. He wasn’t there. Not in the way that teaches you what a man is supposed to be when he stays. He entered my life as an adult, when I was already grown and already guarded.

The closest thing I had to a father was a therapist. A man with a Ph.D. who sat with me for years. He listened. He didn’t leave. He didn’t use God to justify hurting me. He taught me what stability felt like in a room. That was more fathering than I got from blood.

I think I got closure with my father in 2024. Not through a conversation. Through a sentence I said in a jail cell in 2023: “My father is dead to me.” It wasn’t rage. It was release. I buried the fantasy that he would become the dad I needed. And when I did that, I turned to the church and said, “My Godly father is Rev. Cecil Williams.”

That’s the funny thing. I saw visions of Rev. Cecil in that cell. His face. His hands open. His church with the doors that never shut. And Rev. Cecil wasn’t dead yet. People will call that psychosis. But with mental health issues, visions are different when you’re present. I remember the whole ordeal. Every word. Every breath. It wasn’t a break from reality. It was reality breaking me open. Meds don’t silence that. Meds give me the clarity to know the difference between a hallucination and a revelation.

That’s why I don’t fear my mind anymore. I was stable on meds. I was present. I was aware. And I chose a new father. Not the one who was absent, but the one whose legacy was presence. Rev. Cecil built Glide on the idea that everybody is worthy. That’s the kind of father I could believe in.

I think that’s also why I wrestle with Christians who lean hard on the King James Version. Not the text itself — it’s beautiful. But the way it gets used. Like a wall. Like proof. Like you’re not saved if you read NIV or NRSV or if you pray without “thee” and “thou.” Maybe that’s why there’s such a difference between the Black church and the white church sometimes. One had to find God in brush arbors and back pews, in a Jesus who looked like their suffering. The other inherited a God that looked like power. Same Bible. Different wounds. Different readings.

I don’t believe in divorce because I never believed I’d be chosen and kept. I believed I’d be left. So I left first. A dozen times before it got that far. But I’m learning now that marriage isn’t the only covenant. There’s the covenant I made with myself in that cell. The one I made in the baptismal water in Salem. The one I make every morning when I go to work.

I may never marry. I may never need to. I have a Godly father whose vision I saw before he died. I have a therapist who fathered me into sanity. I have a self I’m no longer divorcing.

I don’t need a husband to be whole. I need to keep telling the truth. Lord have mercy, I’m finally mine.