My first marriage prospect was my high school sweetheart. We never kissed the whole eight months we were dating—from homecoming through prom of my senior year. But our relationship got messy when we began making out after college. We almost had sex once and did almost everything else. But in the end, we decided to be “just friends”—no longer with benefits.

Next, came my technically-undiagnosed-but-likely-alcoholic college boyfriend. At the age of nineteen, he was my first kiss, but only after we broke up during our sophomore year. Apparently, I wasn’t who he thought I was. I wondered what he meant our last two years of undergrad as we went on road trips together over spring break and on backpacking trips during the summer even though we were no longer dating. We were in the same major, had the same friends, and participated in all the same extracurriculars. Being with him all the time without being with him was torture for me—especially during our junior year when he traded me in for Jocelyn 2.0, a freshman who also had red hair and freckles.

After college, I spent a few months dating a recovering cocaine addict, and after him, I embarked on what I now not-so-fondly refer to as “Lil’ Jocelyn’s Path to Destruction”—a string of flings I had while living and working abroad, featuring a Kenyan singer, a Cambodian hip-hop dancer, an Australian rugby player, and two American roommates who lived in a former crack house.

What can I say? I was a little bit of an international lover.

The last stop on my implosive tour was a Canadian social worker. He kissed me on a rooftop overlooking the city of Phnom Penh. At twilight. During a light drizzle. With fireworks going off in the background. I was delusionally sure after only two dates that this was it—we were going to get married—until, out of money, I moved back home to Baltimore and found out via email that he hooked up with one of my best friends, a Burmese socialite from Los Angeles.

Essentially, what I learned from my tumultuous interactions with the opposite sex in the first few years of my young adulthood was that I was messed up and unwanted. I was too organized. Too controlling. Too good. Too emotional. Too driven. I also wasn’t fun. Wasn’t spontaneous. Wasn’t edgy. Wasn’t dangerous. Wasn’t sexy. Too much yet not enough—a loyal friend at best, a drunken make-out at worst. And I felt bad about myself.

Which was not at all what I had planned.

My whole life, I secretly wanted nothing more than to get married. Don’t misunderstand. I was NOT a damsel in distress, nor was I eagerly awaiting Prince Charming. I was a tomboy. At seven, I traded in dreams of a future in tap, ballet, and jazz for fantasies of becoming the next Mia Hamm. My clique in elementary school had an unspoken pact to never be interested in hair or make-up or fashion and to never, EVER—even while performing in the talent show or looking our best for picture day—wear a dress or a skirt. It was OK to like boys but only if they recognized how smart and powerful we were. They, at least, had to see us as equals if they weren’t evolved enough to accept the truth that we were better than they were.

Despite my innate tendencies toward feminism, I grew up in a conservative Christian culture where marriage is the highest form of relationship between two people. Of course, it’s better not to be married, so your whole life can be devoted to God and spreading his message of eternal life to all heathen souls currently headed for damnation. But if, for whatever carnal, fleshly reasons, you are not called to a life of singledom during your tenure on Earth, marriage—as ordained by God for procreation—is the righteous alternative. And it is in marriage that Christians are supposed to understand the relationship between Christ and his church. As described in Ephesians 5, the husband, naturally, is the stand in for the Savior—charged to love his wife “as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” in a brutal death by crucifixion to cleanse the church (wife) from its (her) sin and “to present her to himself…without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.”

Oh, to be loved so unconditionally! Because if I ever did get married, based solely on my family’s track record with the institution, I was certain that I—not my husband—was going to be the one in need of such boundless sacrificial love. He—like Christ—would have the pressure to be perfect while I—like the church—could be excused for messing up.

Growing up, my family held an important position in our church. My dad was an elected elder and my mom sang on the worship team and led the confirmation program for the Junior High Youth. My maternal grandmother was my kindergarten Sunday School teacher and a matriarch of Holy Nativity Lutheran Church in Arbutus, Maryland. When we weren’t at our private Christian school or at our secular places of work, my entire family—dad, mom, and little brother—was at church. Between Sunday services, mid-week Bible studies, and youth group, the sanctuary was my second home.

However, despite practically every member of my immediate and extended families being actively involved in a Christian parish, when I was ten, my parents divorced, which was a strict “no-no” according to the Bible. While there were other divorcees, stepparents with stepchildren, and blended families in our congregation, we were the only ones who started out whole, then divided, and still tried to praise God together under one roof.

The only proof I have that my parents, at one point, may have had a decent marriage is a single black and white miniature photograph taken and printed at what I assume was a photo booth. I have no idea where the other three photos that should have come on the long, thin strip of the traditional four shots are or what these additional angles and poses would reveal about their relationship before my brother was born. But in the one picture in the tiny gold frame my dad gave me while I was in high school, I’m sitting between my dad with his giant beard and thick 90s glasses and my mom with her poufy permed hair with bangs. I, at the age of three or four, am happier than I’ve ever seen myself before.

I have no idea how my parents felt about each other at the moment of that shot, but it appears there was, in fact, a time when, if there were problems, I was blissfully unaware. I wish I had been able to capture this moment in my memory instead of experiencing it through a photograph much later. Then I would remember a time in my family life when there wasn’t something wrong.

One of my earliest memories is of me in my hot pink Pocahontas nightgown standing at the top of the cream-carpeted steps of our white brick, black shuttered cul-de-sac suburban home, yelling down to my parents in the kitchen as loudly as I could,

“STOP FIGHTING! STOP FIGHTING! WE’RE TRYING TO SLEEP!”

My brother was seated a step below me in his red zip-up toddler onesie. I think I was about seven, which would make him around two. He was crying and I was crying, and though I don’t remember for sure, I’m confident this wasn’t a one-time occurrence but something that happened all the time. That’s the family memory I have of us all together.

Three years later, when I was in fifth grade, I came home one afternoon to my first and only “family meeting.” While my parents told me it was OK to feel sad or angry that they were splitting up, the only emotion I felt was overwhelming relief. All the fighting and screaming and crying would finally be over. Maybe now, we all might experience some peace.

While the exact reasons for my parents’ split remain shrouded in mystery, I can’t recall a time when they weren’t arguing. The only person I could think of to blame was my mom. My mom is beautiful. She’s thin and peppy with innocent brown eyes and long, straight brunette hair. In high school, she was head cheerleader and as head cheerleaders stereotypically are, was also a member of the homecoming court. In addition to her physical beauty, my mom is also kind, loving, and fiercely loyal. Naturally, as soon as my parent’s divorce became public, she became the object of every single man’s affection at our church. My mom, if anyone, was the ideal modern Christian woman, and after a decade of mostly unhappy years of marriage to my father, she was back on the market. And yet, despite all her virtues, which every other living, breathing Man of God noticed, my mom couldn’t make my dad, her husband, love her—at least not enough for him to want to stay married to her.

Although most of our fellow congregants overlooked my parents’ major sin, it never made sense to me. If God does “hate divorce” like he declares in Malachi, then why was my parents’ split OK? Based on everything I had been taught, it couldn’t be. My religion teachers from pre-school through college frequently reminded me that according to the latest national statistics of the 2000s, children of divorce were an ever-increasing X% more likely than our peers with happily married parents to one day get divorced ourselves. My romantic dreams were over before they even had a chance to start! Not only were my own parents divorced, but there was a systemic history of divorce seemingly locked inside my DNA on both sides of the gene pool. My paternal grandparents each married and divorced twice, and my maternal cousins average a grim 40% chance of making a marriage relationship work.

Although I read my Bible and prayed and participated in every Sunday School, confirmation, and youth group activity growing up, my parents’ divorce was still a blemish, a failure in my understanding of what it meant to have a godly family. So, despite being a young Christian woman who wanted nothing more than to do good and to live right and who practiced her faith as earnestly as she could, when it came to finding a mate, I was doomed, which only made me even more determined to correct generations of my family’s wrongs by getting—and staying—married myself.

Even though my parents had screwed their lives up, marrying a good man who was loyal and who loved me and whom I knew I could be loyal to and also loved would afford me the opportunity to experience the family life I had always wanted. Almost as soon as my parents announced their divorce, I realized that it would be up to me to find a kind and loving man to marry if I was ever going to experience the unconditional love that all the church readings and songs promised me.

And so, I resolved to find redemption in the act, the sacrament, the condition of marriage itself, which I believed—for better or for worse—would be my life’s salvation.

In high school and college, I not only participated in, but also led, young women’s Bible studies on equally archaic looking and sounding texts like Lady in Waiting, which were supposed to teach me how to be a woman of God—most notably by saving myself (a.k.a. my vagina) for marriage. Like a good godly girl, I made a list of everything I wanted in my future husband and then dutifully stuck it in the front cover of my Bible, where I would see it often and be reminded of what was supposed to come. At sixteen, I made my dad drive me to the Christian bookstore by our house to buy my own True Love Waits purity ring, pledging to God and to my future husband that I would do everything I could to remain physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually pure until the blessed night of my wedding, whenever that would be.

However, as an uncloseted feminist looking for a husband amid a patriarchy, it would be an extreme understatement to say that by the time I began looking in earnest, I didn’t have much luck. There didn’t seem to be a place for a driven, independent woman like myself in my church. Naturally strong-willed, I was loud and outspoken about the gender injustices I felt were implicit in my religion. Yet, at the same time, I did my best to grow into the idealized Proverbs 31 Woman and to inhabit the inner “unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit” (1 Peter 3:4), which my faith taught was the essence of worthwhile womanhood. Why was it, then, that I never seemed to be respectful, dutiful, or submissive enough for any young man to be interested in me? And if my mom—in her tangible Christian perfection—couldn’t convince a man to stick with and love her no matter what, what chance did I have with all my obvious imperfections?

Although I was barely into my twenties, two years after I had graduated with a church work degree from a small Christian liberal arts university where “a ring by spring” and MRS degrees weren’t jokes but more of standards, I was fully convinced that I already had surpassed my prime age of marriageability. My anxiety about my perpetual singleness was only made worse as I watched seemingly everyone I knew—friends, acquaintances, and classmates—change their Facebook relationship statuses from “In a relationship” to “Engaged” to “Married” while I found myself—as usual—utterly and devastatingly alone. Since it hadn’t happened for me yet, it obviously wasn’t going to.

I remember calling one of my guy friends from college—whom I had always secretly hoped I would one day marry despite being his female confidant for all the problems he consistently seemed to be having with a slew of other girls—absolutely inconsolable, asking over and over again through thick, ugly sobs, “What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with me? I want to get married. I want to get married!”

Shortly after that, Patrick came along.

To be honest, Patrick had always sort of been there. He just wasn’t on my radar as a potential soul mate, yet. We first met when I was sixteen, spending the summer in driver’s ed. Although I wasn’t initially physically attracted to him, I could tell from the moment I met him—based on his politely shy “good guy” demeanor—that unlike the more traditionally “hot” guys at my high school and even my church, this was a teenage boy worth my interest. My suspicions were confirmed a few days later when he noticed that I missed a class and asked where I was.

Our moms had both enrolled us in “A E-Z Driving School” most likely because—due to the intentional typo—it was the first one listed in the phone book. For two weeks, we gathered in the basement of a retired veteran named Leslie—a large, square, elderly man, self-conscious about having been given what our generation perceived as a girl’s name.

Patrick and I quickly became friends. We learned during our short daily breaks that we both went to private religious schools—his Redeemer Classical Christian, mine Baltimore Lutheran. Furthermore, we both played soccer and even both liked Five Iron Frenzy, a Christian ska band. On the last day of the course, Patrick casually asked how we could keep in touch, and I equally as casually—at least I hoped—gave him my phone number and then spent the next few weeks with my cell phone eagerly attached to my hand, waiting to hear from the first guy I’d ever given my number to.

Except Patrick never called.

A year passed, I graduated high school, and when I was seventeen, I moved across the country from Maryland to Southern California for college. I never heard from Patrick until the spring of my sophomore year—right after I was dumped by the undiagnosed alcoholic—when he found me through a mutual friend on a new social networking site called Facebook, which people our age had started using to keep in touch. I was planning on spending the summer abroad, backpacking through East Africa as part of a mission trip my university offered, but I let Patrick know I’d be back home in Maryland for about two weeks—one before and one after my trip.

By then, Patrick’s fashion had improved from sports shorts and t-shirts to a more preppy look, consisting of branded polo t-shirts and khaki pants, which was the typical post-private school look of young adults in our area who had spent their whole lives wearing uniforms. Fully liberating myself from my East Coast upbringing, I traded in my popped collars, pearls, and Birkenstocks for a trendier boho wardrobe, consisting of homemade tie-dye, V-neck t-shirts and any and every colorful print pattern I could find.

During a series of hangouts, which, at the time, neither of us was sure whether they were officially dates, we got coffee. We ate ice cream. We saw Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in theaters. And when the summer was through, I went back to college in California. Patrick and I stayed in touch periodically after I finished my undergraduate degree and began to further travel the world. He read my blogs while I was teaching in India, writing for an online social justice travel magazine in Kenya, and serving as a resident correspondent for a nonprofit in Cambodia. Once my stint in Southeast Asia was over and I was finally coming home for good, I was the one who reached out to Patrick, simply looking to spend time with people who shared my interests and who were still in Baltimore. We made plans, and after our initial reunion, I, once again, left it up to Patrick whether to call me or not. A few days later, he called to ask me out on a date to the National Aquarium.

As soon as I saw Patrick coming up my mom’s front walk in his new hipster look—horizontal striped sweater, tight jeans, Wayfarer sunglasses, and the gray Levi’s version of Chucks—I thought that whatever it was we were doing had some potential. My mom predicted that “Maybe Patrick will be the one…” right before he was about to take me on our first official date. I responded that I never, EVER—under any circumstances—wanted to marry the guy I met in driver’s ed. However, three weeks and several movie-watching, card-playing, and fort-building dates later, Patrick and I told each other, “I love you.” And three months after that, Patrick proposed.

As part of our dating ritual, each month we exchanged one of our favorite books for the other person to read. It was a way for us to further get to know each other—to let writing, a significant part of both of our lives, say what we couldn’t. The book he gave me that day was called Love Stories, and inside the glued pages was a cut-out of a heart that contained my engagement ring. As I opened the cover to find the ring, Patrick got down on one knee and promised me that this was the first in the “lifetime of love stories” we’d write together.

When I realized my now-husband was the physical embodiment of everything that I had been looking for and that he not only was willing, but wanted, to join his life with mine forever, I considered it to be the single greatest thing that would ever happen to me. Here was a man who truly loved me—who, despite his initial shyness, had always loved me as I would later come to find out—and all I had ever wanted was to be loved.

Better yet, Patrick—a normal, handsome guy—proved to everyone else (but mostly to me) that I was indeed worthy and deserving of being loved. I wasn’t the screw-up I was made out to be by everyone else. I was cherished. I was adored. I was the object of the best man I had ever known’s affection, and he chose me—ME!—out of all the other women in the entire world to eternally love.

For once, I could foresee a future the way I had always imagined it: By marrying Patrick, I could finally live on my own like a real adult instead of constantly vagabonding between my parents’ and friends’ houses. By marrying Patrick, I could go to grad school to become a writer without having to worry about how I would support myself. By marrying Patrick, I could have a permanent travel companion with whom I could start my life over at any time, in any place we wanted in the world. By marrying Patrick, I could finally—FINALLY!!!—have sex without the fears of disease, unwanted pregnancy, or worst of all, guilt. By marrying Patrick, I would be gaining his devout and blameless Christian parents, who had stayed successfully married for thirty plus years, and who, combined with their total of nine siblings, had only a 20% rate of divorce. Essentially, by marrying Patrick, every dream I ever had for my life could finally come true.

Or so I thought.

Next Chapter: Chapter 1: June