"You can't turn a h*e into a housewife"

Contrary to popular belief, not all women live their lives yearning for marriage. The world would love to believe this but it's simply not true and certainly wasn't for me. Marriage was a foreign concept to me for many reasons, including the fact that I grew up not seeing [good] marriages in my personal life. There were definitely couples around me who had been 'married' according to the government but according to how they lived, I didn't see a union of two people. For me, marriage was a business that I barely took notice of just like any other business that didn't have what I was looking for.

Growing up in a single parent household, marriage didn't appear to be significant. If it was, surely my parents would have been married, right? This sounds like a logical question to me now but it never popped in my head because I honestly was too afraid to question why my father wasn't around. As assumed by many who have opinions on promiscuous women, I would say that being fatherless contributed to my immoral sexual behaviour patterns in my late teens and early twenties. I say this because I believe that having an example of a healthy marriage between my father and mother would have encouraged me to respect my body and decide that if I was ever going to share it with anyone, that person would be my husband and my husband only. Of course, regardless of the marital status of my parents, I should have been taught by my present parent about the value of my body and the sacredness of sex. Knowing that my mother also didn't recieve the correct teaching from her own parents has helped me reconcile the resentment that was in my heart. Instead of saying what my mother could and should have done, I've decided that I can learn from my experiences and seek to do better.

Since I ran away from all thoughts of my absent father, the resentment I had towards men wasn't noticeable to me. The resentment wasn't overt as some may have expected it to be; it was subconscious and mostly evident by my attitude to women. I exalted them over men because I found it difficult to see the value in men. I barely vocalised it but my disregard for them was clear to see and this contributed to my disregard for marriage. During the time that I began to openly criticise marriage, I was identifying as someone who was attracted to women. I remember always making a distinction between my attraction to women and my attraction to men; I would say I was attracted to women emotionally and I was attracted to men sexually. In all honesty, I believe I was just trying to make sense of my innate desire for men even though I felt disconnected from them emotionally. This belief I lived by enabled me to keep up the pattern of sexual immorality, otherwise known as promiscuity. As long as I believed that sex and emotions could be seperated, I was able to participate in unfruitful deeds that was only useful in contributing to my low self esteem. What's a worse way of making yourself feel worthless than allowing men who don't care about you to profit from your poor decisions? So from the decreasing of my self esteem came my increasing resentment of men.

At some point, I did get tired of the life I was living so I decided to make some changes. A part of the changes I made was a change in my sexual behaviour. I decided that I wasn't going to have sex with anyone unless they were my partner. It's very interesting to me that this is the norm for a lot of women which is good and even better if the partner they speak of is a husband. The irony of my path is that I had professed that I was waiting for marriage to have sex. I know, you're probably confused. When I reflect, I am slightly confused too. I made this statement when I was a teenager, on my way home from school with some friends. There's a few possible reasons why I said it and I believe that one of them is that I was trying to paint myself as a moral person - even though my thoughts were actually far from what I said. At the time, I decided I needed a transformation of my life, I still didn't have marriage in mind but I was hoping for a serious relationship with someone who loved me and didn't just want my body.

When I met the man who is now my husband, I knew straight away that I wanted to be committed to him. Shortly after our relationship began, we spoke about marriage and I told him I was ready for it. Just like that, a relationship with a man who made me feel differently than other men, influenced my desire for something I had criticised for years of my life. During the first few months of our relationship, I shared a lot with my husband about my experiences. I told him about the times I had been sexually abused and also about my sexual behaviour that followed afterwards. Based on other people's opinions, my husband should have judged me and walked away. He should have seen me as useless damaged goods because "you can't turn a h*e into a housewife". Even though it wasn't an easy journey, my husband has consistently made every effort not to judge me by my past mistakes. We weren't always in Christ but I noticed a Christ-like love in him that was comforting and it encouraged me to not feel ashamed of my past. Reflecting on our journey, I've come to a greater understanding of God's word that says 'love covers a multitude of sins'. When you have love in your heart, you have no desire to punish people for the wrong they've done but you have a desire to encourage them to move forward and do better.

Living in a world that promotes 'cancel culture' encourages us to not forgive people for their offences, flaws and mistakes. People are hardly given the chance to transform their lives because others are constantly bringing up their past and holding them to unreasonable standards. The statement "you can't turn a h*e into a house wife" is frequently said, implying that no man would ever forgive the past of a promiscuous woman and marry her. Well, I'm here to testify that this is a massive lie. Not just because of my personal experience but because of faith. I have faith in the reality that there are countless men in the world who don't follow the pattern of the world but the pattern of Jesus Christ, forgiving others because they have been forgiven. Those of us in Christ understand that we have been forgiven of much so we decide to continuously forgive others; we understand that humans are flawed and in need of a saviour. Without Jesus, I'm pretty sure I would have fallen back into sexual immorality because my flesh is weak and it's desires always overcame my desire to be pure. The world doesn't believe in your transformation but God does.