My guest this week is my wife, Michelle. Though I have deconverted from Christianity, Michelle is very much a dedicated Christian. We still love each other and we are making it work in an “unequally yoked” relationship. We have an honest conversation about how we got to now and how we go forward in the future.

When you told me ….
It was the first time when I felt like “we are real” and I am seeing what is really going on inside of you.
And that felt, in spite of all the bad stuff that was there, that at least felt good.

Michelle does work that is social work adjacent. She is a better practicing humanist than I am. I admire her for who she is as a person. I admire her for the work she does. And, yes, I admire her for her faith.

We sit down at our kitchen table for an honesty contest. You can hear the love, but you can also hear the tension and the hurt. We discuss how we met, how we have “deconstructed” over the years, when I told her I could no longer believe, and how we are making it work “unequally yoked.”

Almost from a week in from the point that you told me,
I was released to have my own relationship and faith and to dig as hard as I wanted to and as deep as I wanted to and not be holding back …
So that significantly changed and I felt free.

In this episode, we respond to listener questions about our loving relationship when one of us believes and the other does not. Send in your questions for a potential future episode with Michelle and me.

Links

Unequally Yoked verse 2 Corinthians 6:14 – 15
https://www.bible.com/bible/107/2CO.6.14-15.NET

Recovery From Religion has a resource page with a section entitled: Spouses/ Partners With Mixed Belief Systems (from a secular perspective)
https://www.recoveringfromreligion.org/religious-resources

Unequally Yoked (from the Christian perspective)
https://thriveglobal.com/stories/what-does-it-mean-to-be-unequally-yoked/

Interact

Chosen Family Grace
https://gracefulatheist.wordpress.com/2020/11/14/chosen-family-grace/

Michelle and I discuss her listening to the Sarah: Believing Spouse of an Atheist Deconvert episode
https://gracefulatheist.wordpress.com/2019/12/12/sarah-believing-spouse-of-an-atheist-deconvert/

Send in a voice message

Support the podcast
Patreon https://www.patreon.com/gracefulatheist
Paypal: paypal.me/gracefulatheist

Attribution

Photo: Sneha ss, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

“Waves” track written and produced by Makaih Beats