The following is adapted from a diary entry, which I copied and added many extra details to about two years later. Those details were as accurate as I could still remember:
11/15/94–12:23 AM
Blackness again. The letter is known to Persephone, but I’ve cleared things up with her, and she’s not mad at me anymore.
It still angers me that she even knows about that or the one before it. She refused to see the first one–he offered to show it to her! What a creep.
I thought, after the Tracy letter, which he didn’t show me out of respect for her, that he was more trustworthy than that. But no, he is not to be trusted.
The spiritual marriage has entered the grapevine–probably through Dirk, Persephone says–and is known to people who have no business knowing. She says, “Tell a world, tell a Dirk.”
She herself heard it not through Phil, but through a freshman girl in Muehlmeier who said to her, “I’m really not supposed to tell anyone this, BUT…” I have no idea who all it’s spread to.
I feel weird and indignant at everyone, just when I’m walking around the cafeteria! I feel like they’re all looking at me and judging me now. This could even reflect on InterVarsity.
I don’t like these small-town grapevines. People always have to know other people’s business. Well, get your nose out of my affairs, you busybody! I feel so humiliated. I don’t even like to leave the apartment.
I’m beginning to think about pressing charges, even–breach of contract plus rape. Yes, there have been several times he’s raped me, and only once did I realize that’s what he did. It took a speaker here at school the other week to help me realize that.
God, convict him! That week we were back together, engaged, married even–he apparently wasn’t intending to honor the marriage contract–that’s rape because it was false pretenses!
Persephone pulled me aside after lunch on Sunday to talk to me, and to give me a letter she had written to me.
As I sat there reading it, I felt more and more indignant, and had plenty to say on it because it seemed written by someone who didn’t even know what my letter truly said.
It sounded more like Phil had totally distorted everything for her.
It talked about forgiveness as if it never even entered my mind! I explained that the purpose of the letter, as clearly stated in the letter, was so I could forgive!
There were other things, too, which I’ll mention later, though I won’t necessarily say if they were in the letter or not.
I was mad that Phil had told her about it, but she said that some things should be told. I don’t think this was one of those things, though. I said that nowadays I do nothing without God’s okay, and this I felt had God’s okay.
Persephone thinks Dirk thinks he knows everything. Considering the things he’s told Phil (who listens to him) and me (who doesn’t), I agree. She doesn’t like him, and doesn’t like having to see him all the time because he’s Phil’s best friend.
There have also been things Phil did to me or that we went through that he told her about, without respect for me, thinking she would take his side. Instead, she told him he’s an a–hole. He also doesn’t like that she’s friends with me! She thinks he’s afraid of something.
She says her dad … is very much like Phil. Her mother wonders why she’d want to date someone so much like her father.
She said if I think what he did to me on certain occasions was rape, there are people I should talk to about it. [I didn’t because I didn’t want my parents to find about the spiritual marriage/sex.]
I never told him I could sue him for breach of contract, and he didn’t realize I could until she told him, and that shocked him. [I didn’t want to, but felt empowered simply because I could do it, but didn’t.]
She said it probably wouldn’t work anyway because, in this day and age, people break engagements all the time. But I saw a promo for a news story recently that said people can sue for it, and my dad had brought it up in the first place. I’d never heard of it myself until then.
Persephone said in her letter that, in the Old Testament, when the husband put the wife away, they were divorced. I don’t know why she thought it necessary to say this. I’ve never said, and I don’t believe, that Phil and I are still married. It’s a divorce, and I admit it.
But, though I’m allowed to marry again, having been put away for no fault of my own, if Phil were to marry another, he’d be committing adultery. [I was following Christian rules on divorce, which are different from legal ones.]
Persephone says she doesn’t intend to marry anyone because she knows she herself is grounds for divorce. Phil doesn’t like this. Apparently, so soon after throwing aside his wife, he’s talking about marriage with another woman.
She says Phil says he loves her and she says to that, “No, you don’t!”
She says she knows from her parents (actor-father, maybe? I forget) what real comedy is, and that Phil doesn’t. (Phil makes constant jokes and references that are often lost on others.)
After the Bible verses in my letters were mentioned, the things I said about sin and such, Persephone said, “One thing I’ve seen is that when a person starts using the Bible as a defense, they’ve lost the argument.”
That’s a load of hooey when you’re dealing with Christians. Christians are the ones who usually respect the Bible–who count it as the Official Guidebook, the Final Authority on anything.
When you use Bible verses taken in context, you use the strongest argument you could possibly use with another Christian. That’s the thing that I have seen.
I remember Phil telling me at the beginning of the semester that he was starting to practice better hygiene so he’d be attractive to other women, but I guess he hasn’t kept that up. Persephone keeps having to throw soap and a towel at him and tell him to clean up before she’ll let him in her room! (In some ways, I do admire her spunk.)
He shaved his beard soon after we broke up the first time, I guess as another way to appear more attractive, but probably not until after he tried out for a part in the play and knew whether or not he’d need a beard for the part.
I think he looks silly without a beard and Anna agrees with me, but Persephone says she won’t let him grow one because he looks like a scuzzball and kind of scares her.
When I mentioned the time I snubbed him in Jubilee, she said she heard about that. She thinks that the way to effectively ignore a guy is not to treat him differently from other guys–not snub him completely, because that makes him feel special, set apart from other guys.
I’m not so sure this is true. Mom always tells me not to talk to the guy who’s done me wrong, but to ignore him–first Peter, now Phil.
And Dad thinks the effectiveness of the “snubbing” method you choose depends on the guy. He doesn’t think anything else would get through to Phil but to snub him completely.
In the letter she says that instead of “marrying,” we should’ve just called it premarital sex and taken the responsibility and consequences “like adults”–an unfair judgment of something she wasn’t even a part of.
And Phil and I had agreed with each other that just being engaged doesn’t mean you can sleep together, so if we hadn’t been married, we would’ve been wracked with such guilt if we’d had sex! This way, there was no guilt or shame, because it’s not a sin to have sex with your own spouse.
She tells me that the first time we got “married,” Phil really thought he’d marry me. The second time, he was just horny! Isn’t that rape?–
–Oh, gosh, and I remember how pushy he was, too, that second time! How he’d push me on the bed as soon as we got into my room and we were alone, without a “how’d you do,” and cover us with my afghan.
Once or twice, when I was preparing for the usual position, he poked his thing in my face–and it was smelly this time, unlike before–for me to suck, and held onto my head so I had to do it.
I told Persephone how he’d also say last summer, when I didn’t want to do anything but vaginal sex, “Sure, have your way, you always get your way!”–Persephone said, “It’s your body!”
She and I both agree he lays on guilt trips all the time. She also says he gets horny and says to her what he often said to me: “Don’t you want a beautiful baby?”–
But she doesn’t even want kids, she wants her tubes tied at a certain age (twenty-two or twenty-five, I believe), so whenever he tries anything with her, she hits him in the balls. She says he’s “an idiot, sexually.”
I told her about the time Phil threw a tantrum and I thought it was his dream-self, not his real, conscious self. I spoke of how awful it was, how awful he acted. Persephone said something like, “Well, that’s over now,” and I should get over it. Her words seemed callous.
[I thought we were sharing? Why did she say this about this particular incident, but not about the others? That makes no sense at all!]
She spoke of Phil’s increasing troubles at home and called his mother a dragon. (Later, she would tell me he practically lived with her in Muehlmeier for a while because of his bad homelife. I remembered I didn’t allow him to stay overnight in my room in Krueger, for two reasons: 1) It was against the rules, and 2) Clarissa wouldn’t have liked it.)
She says even Tracy agreed to do something with him and Persephone recently. It shocked us all–Persephone, me, probably Phil. He ended up driving so erratically that Tracy (obviously when the minivan was stopped) got him to go down on his knees, and demanded his keys from him!
What’s really odd is that Persephone says she doesn’t even like Phil! At least, not as a boyfriend. She rips on him whenever he’s not around, and would have preferred dating James, whom she liked at the beginning of the year.
She said she’d just sent James a letter saying how she felt when Phil asked her out, and then James tried to talk to her but Phil came over. She thought James was sullen after that because: “I think I was the first female to get through to him, and then he saw me with Phil, and he didn’t like that!”
I liked him once, too, and thought he liked me, and then finally ended up with Phil; I wonder if he ever knew I liked him? I know I started dating Phil maybe a few months after I first tried to ask James out….
She thinks it’ll take me at least a year to forgive Phil.
She also says she was taught to believe in the Bible, but be wary of it because it was written by man. I don’t agree, since I believe it was written by God through man….
She also thinks that she, the freshman, knows more about human nature than some of us in the group who are older, but I don’t really think that’s true. She doesn’t even know some of the things I’ve gone through in the past, and I don’t think she should judge us so quickly.
Persephone says Phil had another nervous breakdown after he got my letter….Two breakdowns in seven months?!…Why doesn’t he get help? He doesn’t need a girlfriend, he needs a psychiatrist!
Pearl says so, too; she says he totally doesn’t seem ready for a girlfriend.
Dad already thought he was psycho and on the edge, and he said the other night that he didn’t even know about the first breakdown!
Persephone didn’t even stick around to take care of him–she stuck her roommate Trina with him while she went to do something with the Mirror! I thought it was so very un-loving of her.
I gave up a review for the Botany lab final to take care of him, a review in the woods that sounded like so much fun, and Mrs. Rev understood and said he was lucky to have me!–I held my tongue, though, when Persephone told me what she did.
At the end, she said that not only does she have no reason to be mad at me after all–she took away her letter, which no one else had seen, and started folding it up, like it wasn’t needed anymore–but she will also try to steer Phil away from me, out of respect for my feelings.
Also, I said that, as I told my friends, the breakup with Charles didn’t bother me at all. I mentioned my crush on Mike, and she said he must be an acquired taste. She said she’d like Jim Carrey, and I said, “He must be an acquired taste!”…
I find my observations on Phil are the same as Persephone’s on many counts. She knows exactly what he’s like, things it took me months to find out. For example, he rips on things important to her–i.e., the Mirror–like he did to me–i.e., InterVarsity [and my friends].
There are plenty of other things, too, but I really must go to bed. First class is canceled tomorrow, but not my 10:30.–1:43 AM
I heard later on that, the next school year, Persephone chased Mike! She must have acquired the taste.
Also, on November 30, I saw in action how Phil ripped on the thing important to Persephone: He wrote a letter to the editor about how terrible The Mirror was, with inaccuracies, proofreading problems–and even accused the staff of lying about addressing student concerns, and only printing letters from staff members!
His letter was often confusing. I wonder what Persephone thought of this baffling and flaming letter against her important thing.
As for what she said about knowing more about human nature than my friends and I did–She was dating a guy she didn’t like, she didn’t even seem to like him much as a human being, and knew full well what he was and what he’d done to me, but stayed with him–and she said she knew more about human nature???
I certainly was reassured to hear she took pains to keep from sleeping with Phil. I didn’t like to think of Phil sleeping with anyone else, not while my body still remembered what it was like to sleep with him and still longed for his touch, and physically hurt to think of him with any other woman in his bed.
Phil had argued that I should find someone with my own ideas of fun and partying, as if that somehow determined lifelong day-to-day happiness. Well, he found someone who liked to party, but seemed to forget about the things he said were most important to him in a wife.
Phil refused to use birth control for religious reasons; Persephone did not want children and planned to get her tubes tied. I had agreed to use natural family planning because it meant so much to him, but she would use a permanent form of birth control.
After he complained so much that I would not convert to Catholicism, I don’t know why he wanted to date someone who would have obviously refused conversion even more fervently than I (she was Methodist and later became Pagan, even using spells and seeing ghosts).
He didn’t want “one of those feminists” who didn’t want to obey her husband, but she was far more of a feminist than I was.
Phil followed the Catholic teaching on birth control, but no longer wanted to follow the Catholic teaching on premarital sex. Those two things together are a recipe for trouble, as he learned the hard way eventually. (He had to marry his next girlfriend.) This is probably why Persephone called him “an idiot sexually.”
So, just walking around the cafeteria, I felt like everybody knew about the secret marriage and was judging me.
Of course, now that my friends, Phil’s friends, and who knew who, knew about the secret marriage, you could say that we met another important criteria of marriage: common knowledge that we were married.
(There are those who say a marriage isn’t valid unless it’s public–discounting even a legal elopement or Romeo and Juliet’s marriage.)
