Modern love. The podcast is supported by produced by the island, a W B war, Boston. From the New York Times and Wb B are Boston. This is modern love stories of love loss, Dempsey. I'm your host, Magneto property Kristen, share old, grew up in an event Jellicoe christian community. That shaped the way she thought about love. But then she gradual, it from college and moved to New York City ideas about love and faith were thrown into chaos,

her essays read by Rachel Vice who produces and stars in the new film disobedience. When you were raised to be a good christian gal, you don't just go to church you date. The church church is the significant other with whom you spend weekends and evenings the boy friend, whose friends become your friends, the girl friend, with whom you shall all your dreams. I was a really good pristine go so I didn't just date. The church I married it after graduating from image western college, whose motto is for Christ and his kingdom. I moved to New York. City was my first time out of the Van Cocoon and my prior,

he was finding a church. I could love commit my life too, and make my spiritual and social centre. My search ended in Brooklyn, where I found a church of young, creative people and fledgling professionals who, like me, we're looking for a faith less burdened by fundamentalism. We forged a quick camera jury, including with our pasta, who is this watch friend and Pierre spiritual leader, we hung out in the pews on Sundays, but also in bars and each other's living rooms. Throughout the week soon this congregation became my beloved. I took my membership vows and began leading a Bible study, teaching Sunday school attending weekly planning meetings and signing up for countless other duties.

Committed to this church with a vigor and joy of a new bride like most single women in my position, my next priority was finding a husband in this church. There is a motif of love triangles and Christianity, like the love of the father. The son And the Holy Spirit, evangelical ISM, one o one- also teaches the holy Trinity of Matrimony Man, woman church. So I scanned the pews each week. Looking for someone with an honor dawned ring finger. One Sunday, I noticed a new woman in a suede jacket has short dark hair tucked under a brimmed hat,

Our conversation was unremarkable. Yes, I was captivated I tossed out the most Evangel invite. Do you want to come to my Bible study? She did then she came over for dinner. Then she began sleeping on my couch. We met for coffee and whisky and eventually lost track. You pay for each other's tabs. I convinced her that biking in New York wasn't too hazardous, so she bought bicycle on Craigslist when she crashed twice. We went back to my apartment, where I cleaned pebbles out of her skin and

And if tat ankle, then we unknowingly went to a museum exhibition featuring gay and lesbian art, and I was forced to think about us, but I wouldn't let myself acknowledge what was so painfully obvious. over the following months, however, has just began begun extra shoes in my closet In bringing home groceries to expand my diet of frozen burritos, I couldn't deny that I was falling in love. And with that realization I fell off cloud nine and stared into the fires of hell. I finally came out to myself, then I scrambled right back in. At stake was my soul and identity. My,

and spiritual cosmology. My relationships with friends, family god- holy Trinity of husband, wife and church haunted me even as it slipped out of reach. It was a crisis of eternal proportions. I fell deep into an inferno of shame and panic. My fear of hell shot down any capacity to imagine a future with Jess. I repented of what Christine's call my struggle with same sex attraction, but still I found comparable delight in her. I read countless books on homosexuality and yet clarity escaped me fighting for Solace

Convince myself that jess- and I would just friends that worked until one night when we went to the ballet and I kissed her, she told me she loved me. For the first time I felt complete loved known lying beside her healed, my past and present self. It also confirmed my worst fears. I woke up terrified. I needed to kick Jess out and end things with her immediately, but first we had to go to brunch.

it was the kind of brunch we couldn't skip a going away celebration for a good friend. We barely endured the long mimosas and eggs Benedict as we contemplated our catastrophic cli changed lives, Allah, Adam and Eve Post, fruit, full guilt. Finally, the check was squared and we left to confront the reality of us. Ass, we walked Jes notice to destroy homeless man standing in traffic, never one to it.

Nor a person in need. She called him over to the sidewalk where he began to share his story of the wounds life had inflicted upon him. Jess listened patiently. I stood aloof and awkward while she offered to buy him lunch when they exited a nearby bodega. The man had a bag of food, a hot coffee and something like a smile on his face. How much the man asked? Oh, nothing, it's a gift! How much a man insisted

Ok, well, just hesitated a dollar he reached into his jacket, pulled out a coin, pass, counting out four quarters and placing them in jest his hand, and he left just looked at the quarters. These are the most valuable things anyone is ever given me. She said I don't even know what to do with them. For most of my life, I had been given a slew of definitions around love and relationships that were easy to verify with scripture, just as a flat.

Was once confirmed by looking at the horizon, but watch just interact with this man. I saw a new horizon on that was more complicated. In Jes I saw the love Jesus preached one unconstrained by conditions and extended to everyone, especially the forgotten. The stranger Jesus never mentioned her sexuality. His cause Molly.

He was not started with Creed's crimes in contempt. Its absence was loving the marginalised, every fiber of Jess's being reflected this. She embody the attributes. Jesus was most passionate about compassion, kindness, justice. How could loving someone who loved so well be wrong? I felt my cramped religious framework of SK I caught Amazin beginning to collapse. What once seemed like a bleak choice between losing my soul or losing my most cherished friend was in fact a lesson that true love is the only thing that could save me.

there is still much turmoil ahead. Many people opposed our relationship and insisted that if we loved each other, we didn't love God, our pasta was one. We had first condemned confess what we then considered ass sinful relationship, but over time we discussed are evolved. Thinking with him, hoping that our years, if faithfully serving the charge, would be our witness and that our pasta, a friend, would agree to disagree. Where are the ology diverged? Instead, he gave us an ultimatum break up or lose the church. Memberships.

Soon after the church divorced us looking back through that messy love triangle between gas, our church and me, I kept asking myself what Christ love required and the refrain I kept hearing was love your neighbor as yourself. Just didn't usher me into only true romantic love, but also true. I got pay love. showing me that the most foundational precept is the trinity of loving God and your neighbor. As you love yourself,. we eventually found a new church that champions this belief and embraces all people.

now have the joy of serving as an elder there, two years after our first kiss Jess, and I sneaked onto an empty Rhode, island beach. Only a few stars and a cloudy moon illuminated are running and jumping as we let freedom eradicate our shame as our eyes adjusted to the darkness. We saw a lifeguard tower and clambered up with the ocean at our feet and the horizon at eye level. We sat side by side in the night air, that's right, something Jess suggested pulling.

The journal. We shared note less stingy over this. I insisted a moment seemed perfect, as is well all right something and we can read it later, just scribbled. Then hand me the open notebook shining, her phone's flashlight on it. The lights was a shocking intrusion upon a private darkness, so I also had to turn it off. Instead, she pushed the channel into my hands. When I look down, I saw a hole cut out in the middle of all the pages inside layer ring my head spun. I waited for her to ask me those for fated words, but she was silent. Amendment didn't need one

I took the pen and wrote yes on the page. She put the silver band on my finger and gave me matching ring to place on hers. Then she if I remembered the homeless man we had met that morning after brunch. I laughed of course why I figured out what to do with those quarters. They were melted into our rings, fifty cents, each the that's Rachel Vice reading Chris,

insurance essay when Eve and Eve, but the apple will catch up with Kristen. After the break I love my boyfriend and I often play stalling, be together by together I mean, Next to each other playing individually and not cheating, sometimes when I open up spelling bee- and I see that you have completed a few words on your own- I feel a little betrayed. Sorry, it may have happened I have one friend I will send screenshots from spelling bee of inappropriate words that I always get nervous. I sent it to my parents or something like that

me and my dad. We like to play fun together and I wish other out. I forgot to see it. J, a c k, p, o t, Jack yeah yeah now run. Nice I'm same as earth's sky, the digital puzzles editor for the New York Times. You can try spelling bee and all our games at N Y Times dot com, slash games, Kristen and Jess have been married for about two and a half years now and Kristen says their life is the normal, but that normalcy was hard won during Christians coming out process. She says people from her past urged her to repent. People like old pastors or college friends and for them they felt so compelled because they but I thought it was their own mandate to basically save my soul

when you get those notes from people who you've loved in the past, who you you've met, ought to you indifferent circles. Even if you had spoken, the Montagnier slaves Stillwell meaningfully to you in some ways and then of the blue. You get a note, saying homosexuality. Sinful you, need to abandon this and reconsider your life choices and returned to Jesus. It's extremely her. Full, because there is no chance for our conversation. They dont account for all the hard working and all the struggle I had done tons of praying and researching hand wringing and night not turn into it lately after she undressed were kicked out of their church. Chris and says she had to re, evaluate everything she believed in terms of what my faith is now it's really hard to describe, because I d No, I think, several years ago I thought it's take the few years to reconstruct what I believe in

It's been many years later and I'm still reconstructing- and I think it's very obvious. Now that it's going to be a lifelong process, but wouldn't change that for anything, I think losing that framework was sort the best thing that my faith could have gone through. It really taught how to examine beliefs and faith in the Bible and examining everything has brought me much closer to real truth, and it's also brought her closer to the truth about her marriage to Jess. You know at first when I did meet her and realized. I was falling in love with her it was so intense. There was this high of being in love and feeling known for the first time with the. Terror of. I might go to hell if I pursue this and the intensity of that was it was almost too much at times. I think, remembering the privilege that we have to

together and to delight in each other still and it just live our life freely and to be in a place where we can of our marriage, validated by most people we meet and by our workplaces. I think now it just feels very normal and that's absolutely wonderful and fantastic Kristen share old she and just live in Brooklyn where they are. Still wearing the rings made out of quarters which are now The wedding bands we ve got more after the break

I love following my boyfriend and I often play spelling bee together. By together I mean. X to each other playing individually and not cheating, sometimes when I open up spelling bee- and I see that you have completed a few words on your own- I feel a little betrayed in theory. They may have happened again, I have one friend, I will send screenshots from spelling bee of inappropriate words and I was getting nervous. I sent it to my parents or something like that.

Me and my dad. We like to play fun together, and I wish the out I forgot to see it. J, a c k, p o t Jack yeah yeah now run nice I'm same as earth's. The digital puzzles editor for the New York Times. You can try spelling bee and all our games at N times, dot com, slash games. here's Daniel Jones, editor of the modern love column for the New York Times If we're religious, we have ideas about what should shouldn't be and what is or is it moral and then that comes up against true acts of generosity and true acts of goodness and true acts of love, and in this case that you know religious struck

Sure and belief. System fell short of what was really happening in real life and what was truly. the meeting fallen and valuable, and it was. It was just such a wonderful journey to see her struggle with us and come through it and embrace what she had to recognize as love and here's Rachel Vice the intense love that the right to has, for God for Jesus her faith and that it was all encompassing and everything to harm for her. And then she fell in love with the person, a woman Jes and because of the nature of that love she no longer fit into the church where she needed to be needed to be made

To be held by, and I can't think of a bigger existential crisis that a human being could be in, and I felt Jesus is love for her ass. She told the story and I found it very moving thanks again to Rachel for reading this week's essay. Her new film is disobedience, which is playing in select theaters now next week, Kim Dickens from here, the walking dead. I realized. I was waiting for my increasingly handsome husband with his newly sober eyes to want me with abandoned. He once had, because that's what sex had always been for me a measure of my desirability. if I was no longer desirable, then was only a matter of time before I would be left standing alone like my mother,

is a production of the New York Times and Wbur Boston, NPR station it's produced directed and they did by Jessica Albert John Parodi, Caitlin O Keefe and am receive written. sound design and original scoring by Matt. Read the idea for the modern love. Podcast was conceived by LISA Tobin. I would add, those are executive, pretty serve Daniel Jones. The editor of modern love for the New York Times and adviser to the show music for the plant cast. Courtesy of a piano I'm making trucker body see you next The.