John asks:

Have you found that "reliving" any of your experience through answering these questions has been at all useful (or therapeutic in a sense)? It seems most experiences are similar to yours - the painful anticipation, the agonizing procrastination etc. etc. Then you finally get around to it and oh, what a relief it is!

(Sounds like John has a story to tell, if he'd like. Let me know by email, if you'd like to tell us. Too cool by half to have this blog fill up with everyone's stories.)

The procrastination seems so stupid now that I look back on it. I was afraid of the pain of reliving what felt like a failure. It was a failure, but a different kind of failure.

I thought for quite a while that I failed because I chose such a nutjob to marry, that I failed to see signs of impending problems, that I failed in my role as a wife/friend/lover.

I know now that I failed in that I did not allow God to help me make the decision to marry. I didn't subject our engagement, the most serious adult decision I made up to that point, to prayer, to discernment. And I KNEW better, having gone through more than one adult re-conversion! God would not have let me down, by which I don't mean that I still wouldn't have decided to marry, or still experienced what happened, but I wouldn't have been alone in the crisis. I'll never know what would have happened if I'd asked that we form a habit of prayer (and NOT sinning, but that's another story) and that we attend church regularly together. I never gave God the chance.

Tell me, how do you bring up your faith in a dating situation? It's easy to mention the annulment process, since marital status/divorce status comes up right away. But going past that ..... for that matter, how do you bring up your faith in any new relationship situation? Meeting new friends, meeting new neighbors?