AL: My late teens were not my finest hour. I look back on that time in my life and am ashamed of the way I treated people, especially Lisa and my parents. I was not respectful toward Lisa and I continually deceived and lied to my parents. In addition, I was no longer a good role model for my brothers, who had grown up being able to trust and depend on me. I still feel especially bad about the way I treated Jase during that time. He was the oldest of my younger brothers and could see through my deceit, so I bullied him to shut him up. That’s no way to treat a brother who is trying to help you, but the evil in my life had blinded me to his good intentions.
Both of my parents have written in their books that Jase was ultimately the one who told them how I was living. There came a point at which he refused to let them continue to give me the benefit of the doubt. My behavior was a crisis in our family, and Jase is the one who forced all of us to face it. I was furious and resentful at the time, but now I am so grateful to him for loving me enough to do everything he could do to pull me out of a destructive lifestyle, even though it meant I had to leave home.
When I think back about that season of my life, I think one event sums it up better than anything else—my fall through the ceiling at the grocery store. That happened because I was in an area clearly marked off-limits. In my rebellion, like a lot of teenagers, I wanted to do exactly what I was not supposed to do. I was not respectful of the rules of the store, and I simply was not wise. Thankfully, I did not get hurt as a result of that incident, but I did end up embarrassed and in a mess of raw meat. That’s what happens when a person is foolish—he gets messed up!
Proverbs 9:10 says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” No matter what you have done in your life, no matter how foolish you have been or how many stupid mistakes you have made (and I made plenty!), every day is a new opportunity to choose to be wise and to live in wisdom for the rest of your life.
LISA: One of the biggest problems I have ever had was the fact that I did not simply have a normal teenage crush on Al; I really did worship him. I gave him priority over everything and everyone else in my life. I loved him more than I loved anyone else, and I basically existed to please him. He was not domineering or demanding, so I cannot say he intimidated me into thinking I had to please him, but I wanted so desperately to be loved and to be with him that I said yes to anything I thought would make him happy—cigarettes, alcohol, recreational drugs, and sex. In my desperation to please him, I basically went from a “good girl” to a wild child in a matter of a few months after I started dating him. I did not have the strength or even the desire to uphold my own standards. When I look back at those early days with Al—starting with me as a starry-eyed sixth grader dreaming of my Prince Charming all the way through to our deeply disappointing first date years later—I can hardly believe the range of feelings I went through. Talk about a roller coaster of emotions! I know being in love—whether it’s puppy love or the real thing—does funny things to a girl’s heart. Where Al was concerned, my heart was like a thoroughbred, running after him at full speed with all its might, blind to the things going on around me, determined to win the prize. From the age of twelve to the age of fifteen, I was basically obsessed with Al. I adored him way too much, and that was not healthy or good for either one of us.
I was basically obsessed with Al. I adored him way too much, and that was not healthy or good for either one of us.
As Al and I have counseled couples and individuals through the years, we have found that women who have been abused by men either hate men or adore them and feel excessively needy toward them. If they adore men, they are never able to truly have an intimate, healthy relationship with a man because their adoration keeps them from relating to men as normal human beings. They view men as perfect (though no one is perfect), almost as gods, and then get their hearts broken when these men do something to disappoint them—usually something that would not be a huge problem in a healthy relationship. Many of these women go through men almost the way people flip through a magazine.
If women hate men as a result of abuse, they may end up in same-sex relationships, or they become embittered toward men in general, including their own husbands, if they get married. Alan and I have counseled some couples where the wife holds back love for her husband because she feels that he will take advantage of her, the way she was taken advantage of as a child. Either way, these women end up emotionally incapable of developing or maintaining the kind of relationship God intended for a man and a woman to have. I was definitely one who adored men, specifically one young man, Al. In years to come, that adoration would prove detrimental to me and hurtful to him, and almost destroyed our relationship.
Al and I can look back now, after thirty years of marriage, with absolute conviction that we were always meant to be together. We believe God would have led us into marriage at some point, with or without our painful history as teenagers. Though, of course, we ultimately ended up with each other, we did not get off to a good start, and we could have grown our relationship in a much better way. Had we built our relationship on a solid foundation, we most likely would have avoided much of the heartache we have endured. Not everyone realizes the drama we faced before we got married, so we’ll tell that part of our story in the next chapter.