By Esther Marikea Tan Su Cheng
I found some old letters addressed to two of my ex-boyfriends the other day and what I read made me cringe! God has been reminding me of the relationships I’ve had and as I remember each of these guys He brings to mind, I wonder what I saw in them then! I guess I must have been blinded by my desire to be loved, to be accepted, and to be special in someone’s eyes that drove me to just jump into a relationship with any guy who showed that he was interested in me like I was in him.
My first relationship happened when I was 19. Too old, by the standards of the romance novels and Hollywood movies I had been feasting on. So you can imagine my hunger and eagerness (and desperation!) at the possibility that this guy I was conversing with could turn out to be a boyfriend! A real boyfriend! At the ripe old age of 19!
I met this guy on mIRC. In case you don’t know (where have you been?), mIRC is a popular software for chatting online. I was crazy about IRC because it was novel and exciting. Anyway, I started chatting with this guy, K and we were spending a lot of time chatting over the phone before we decided to meet up. I was already attracted to him because he could speak English well. Yes, believe it or not, I was attracted to a guy I had never even seen the face of because I thought he could speak English fairly well. *cringe-worthy moment*
My heart was brimming with excitement, I couldn’t think of anything else except that this would be my dream coming true, my Prince had finally arrived at my doorstep! Boy! Was I excited at the very real possibility that I could be having someone to call my own real soon!
We finally met up at Bugis Junction after several weeks of conversing with each other. He didn’t turn out to be ugly, thank goodness. I was already besotted with him even though I prayed quite faithfully that he didn’t turn out to be ugly!
He asked me to be his girlfriend, yes, over IRC, when we got home that night after the first date. I, of course, agreed! That was the moment I had been dreaming of and hoping for all my life, wasn’t it? Yes! My dream came true! It was about time! There is a God after all!
Well, truth be told, the five months that we were together was hardly the stuff that romance novels were made up of. He wasn’t the man of my dreams that I had waited 19 long years for. If anything, the relationship I had waited all my life for brought me to a decadence I never thought I would experience.
To be with K, I stayed away from home for weeks at a stretch which broke my parents’ heart. I smoked heavily, experimented with drugs. The only thing I did not do was to worship the 小鬼 (ghost child, a kind of occult idol) that K and his friends were worshipping to help with their shady businesses.
All throughout the relationship, I felt God (I had already accepted Christ when I was 15) calling me back to Him. But out of the intense shame and guilt from the decadent lifestyle that I had been leading, I could not see myself returning to Him, to a church, to my friends whom I had dumped for K. Even though my conscience told me that K was bad for me, I could not leave…
In my dreams one night, I saw God waving me to Him, beckoning me to go to Him. I woke up crying. An opportunity to get involved in a local theatre production I desperately wanted to be a part of gave me the perfect reason to be apart from K. He also had to go to JB for ‘business’, whatever that was. Perfect!
The intense feeling that this relationship was so wrong for me did not escape me even though we were physically apart.. One night, while we were both on IRC, I told him that we should break up. He agreed, after calling me a “bitch”. It was after we broke up that he told me that he was still sleeping around with his ex-girlfriend behind my back. But by then, I was more than relieved to get away from him to care that he had cheated on me.
The relationship left me broken in more ways than one. By the end of it, all that was left of me was an empty carcass that needed more love than ever to heal the deep scathing wounds within me. If I was hungry for love before the relationship, now I was dying for it.
So I became a woman with a mission – find love to heal the wounds that were hurting me so badly. I was back on IRC with a vengeance and it was not too long after that I met E, my second boyfriend. I bared my heart and soul to him and he seemed to understand and still accepted me for who I was even after I told him how much of a filth I thought I was.
The only problem was that he was in Australia pursuing his degree at that time and all I could do was to wait for him to come online to chat with him. There was only dial-up at that time, so you can imagine the horrendous damage the waiting online was doing to my parents’ wallets, and it wasn’t a pretty sight…
In addition to that, I was also making calls to him every Friday. Now that I think about it, he never did once call me! He did get me a gift for my birthday though and I was over the moon when I received it. I thought I had finally met the man of my dreams, and he was E.
He came back to Singapore in December 1999 and that was also the first time we met face-to-face. Again, I had been praying faithfully that he didn’t turn out to be ugly and when he didn’t, I thought God was smiling on me finally! I thought that God knew how much I was hurting from the broken relationship with K and decided to bless me with E, the man whom I thought loved me for me. He had to, right? I mean after I shared my story with him, and he still stuck around, I’m sure it means that he loved me, right?
The answer is a resounding NO! *TOOT* He claimed that I wasn’t serious about the relationship and broke up with me. Though in hindsight, I think he broke up with me because I didn’t want to sleep with him. Regardless, the break up left me broken x 2 because I thought he was the answer to my broken heart and now that the answer to the broken heart broke my heart once more, I was just like a porcelain doll cruelly hurled to the ground and shattered into a million pieces.
I picked myself up and went straight back to IRC again. There I met my third boyfriend who just disappeared after a month together. Yes, that’s right, he just disappeared. He didn’t contact me, he didn’t answer the phone when I called or sms-ed him. I became quite a deranged person after that. My friends had to put up with my endless wondering-aloud of what happened to him, my tears, and my anger, etc.
Eventually, I found out that he had gone back to his ex-girlfriend because she had threatened suicide. I only had myself to blame because I was after all, the catalyst that brought about the demise of their relationship prematurely.
The relationship that came after that lasted a lot longer than all the three previous relationships combined. We were together for 3 years. I thought we were going to last forever.
The most recent relationship was with a non-believer who broke up with me because he did not want to suffer with me in future. Apparently I did not have enough money in my bank account for the comfortable lifestyle he wanted. The tiny amount of love that I had managed to find for myself disappeared with that judgment on my bank account. Instead of kind love, I found cruel judgment that essentially told me that I wasn’t good enough.
Because of the relationship, I stopped attending church, I stopped going for cell and I stopped staying in close contact with the friends I had from church. I was terribly ashamed that I had gone against better judgment to start dating a non-believer and I was sure that all my friends in church would see me that way as well.
It was with the break up that God opened my eyes to see what had been there all along. He showed me that the love I had been longing for and dreamt of had been with me all the while - it was in their endless and selfless giving that my parents showed that they loved me, it was in the jump-to-my-defense-no-questions-asked when I informed my friends of the break up and the reason he broke up with me, it was in the hugs that I received from friends that told me instantly that I was loved, it was the worth of me that I saw in their eyes that told me that they loved me, it was in the tears that they shed just because I was hurting that told me that they loved me…
All these and more, were God’s way of showing me in the way that I would understand best, that He loved me for me. Yes, that elusive love that I had been searching for all along had been with me all the while. Each time my heart got broken, He was always the first to arrive at the scene, pick up the broken pieces and to lovingly glue the broken pieces back together. I just never allowed Him to complete His healing work in me before I hurriedly snatched the broken pieces from Him to give to someone else who came along.
It is in Him that I found the love I have been searching for, the love that gave and gave, the love that forgives and forgives, the love that accepts and accepts, the love that hopes and hopes, the love that will make sure that only the best is given to me, His beloved princess because I am worth it. I have to be, because Jesus chose to die for me.
Published with permission.
(This testimony was shared in Forerunners Friendship ConneXion 2006 by Esther herself.)
