I thought I would never get to experience marriage or have a family.
Like many other women of the modern generation, I grew up believing that I had to constantly hustle under non-stop pressure in order to survive. Not just for myself, but in order to support my parents, my sister, and all the people in my community who didn’t have the same opportunities for education and entry into privileged worlds (or so I believed).
Unlike most other women, however, I was haunted by one key piece of knowledge. Thanks to a random
“weekly news article report” assignment in elementary school - completed in the back of the car on the morning drive to school - I knew that female fertility peaks as early as our mid-twenties, and that the chances of getting pregnant and having a healthy baby (and a healthy delivery) decline dramatically with each subsequent year.
I counted against that clock compulsively through four years of college and three years of law school. I measured the diminishing years of my ability to have a family against the years remaining of academic slavery. Over and over, I did the math. I remember walking out of a legal career panel with a heavy heart, after learning that it would take at least three years of grueling work to be able to transfer to a “lifestyle” law firm and actually have a life. My personal fulfillment would have to wait another three years. By then, I would be well into what was medically considered advanced maternal age.
I pretended to myself that relationships I’d capped by never intending them to end in marriage weren’t scarring my soul. I tried to pretend that watching other girls “throw away their futures” on committed relationships didn’t consume me with envy.
I spent my young womanhood peering into the future anxiously, hoping against hope that some day, the suffocating pressure would let up enough for me to taste a little of the same luxury I saw so many others enjoying with no apparent guilt or shame. The luxury of loving someone, and of being loved in return. Of putting happiness first, not the duty to endlessly earn towards some invisible, far-off goal.
Accidental Connection
By the end of my second year of law school, I knew that the legal field was not for me. I had discovered that I didn’t like attorneys, judges, or courthouses. I even hated the outfits. As I finished out my last year, my plan was to graduate and go directly to business school for a JD-MBA (yes, without the savings of a dual program, but it was better than nothing.)
Then one day, my car broke down. I was near the house of a guy I’d known for over a decade but always thought was dumb (there’s a funny story behind that, and I’m happy to report that he is very, very smart). We weren’t close friends, but I called him anyway. He pulled up fifteen minutes later and nonchalantly saved the day.
Three days later, we were still hanging out. Fast forward sixteen years, and he still shows up nonchalantly to save the day ever since.
We chose each other.
When we started dating, my husband was a year out of a very long relationship. He didn’t feel like committing to anything long-term. Even though I never believed I could have the freedom of marriage before my family’s financial security was secured, I was used to dating men who wanted to marry me. It was an unfair standard, but in hindsight, I’m glad for it. My refusal to date my husband if we weren’t seriously dating for marriage led to our marriage a year later.
While preparing for our wedding, we missed the memo that men have to be careful not to lock their knees during the wedding ceremony. We had just completed the ceremony and taken our first bows as a married couple when he fainted, keeling over like a tree, bringing me down with him because we were holding hands. I like to think I looked like a princess, my the train of my dress spread beautifully around me as I sat on the floor of the altar beside my unconscious prince.
The church full of kids and adults - who’d known me my entire life - joked that hubs had realized too late what he had done.
Rough Edges
Our church members knew I was a handful. But so was my husband. The first few years of our marriage were spectacularly dramatic. We fought constantly and publicly. I left, I kicked him out, he came back, I went to my parents’, he showed up, they let him in… we were way more thrilling than any reality show.
We didn’t just have rough edges, we were rough edges. God had tied together two perfect people to wear each other down. Despite our wild disagreements, we had in common a seriously skewed value system that placed mission-minded goals above typical worldly desires. My husband was the first person I’d ever met outside of our family who was as crazy and irresponsible about helping people and following his calling as I was.
He helped me take care of my parents, who had been going through health crises for the past several years. He loved my pets as his own, and we adopted more. He worked his rear end off to provide us with a home, and threw himself into fatherhood with all the passion of a man who deeply craved family.
Marriage didn’t just give me a husband. Our partnership gave me the luxury of taking care of my parents when they needed help. It gave me a child to love and raise in love. It gave my parents a grandchild to dote on, and my daughter grandparents who surround her with love and patience. It gave me a community of friends and neighbors through our shared experiences in parenting and growing family.
Marriage gave my husband a set of bonus parents (his parents passed away when he was a child). It gave him a petite pack of Korean relatives and a never-ending stream of Christian homeschooling parents to watch his language around. It gave him a home, a family, and two superfans who cheer him on through every challenge and obstacle.
All of It
Early in the pandemic, in June of 2020, our family caught COVID and my husband was hospitalized due to complications of a pre-existing lung condition. He came home bedridden and unable to walk, speak, or even laugh without pain. By the grace of God, I got a job the day after he came home from the hospital. My idyllic daughter/wife/mother life morphed rapidly into a race to make money.
Working in the construction industry was a wake-up call to how unforgiving the world of business can be. I finally understood why it was so hard for my husband to text me back about picking up milk (really, it’s not just a trope) when he was swamped with clients, logistics, and putting out fires.
I finally understood that you can be out there, immersed in a busy world of money, deadlines, and more money… and be completely inaccessible to the people who love you most, but be constantly thinking about them. How hard it was to strike any sort of balance between provision, stability, family, and personal happiness. And through this process of experiencing the world in my husband’s shoes, I began to deeply appreciate the complexity of the bond we had fed together over the year. Of the family we had grown and supported, and our community. The memories and gratitude that kept me going when I thought I would fall over in my tracks.
I was given a gift - the gift of appreciating the precious gifts I’d already been given, but taken for granted. Of finally growing up and realizing it’s not just about romantic dates. It’s not even about being your best self. It’s the miracle of metamorphosis through joining together: a million moments shared, a thousand offenses forgiven, endless prayers of gratitude.
And even hours spent passionately arguing and being terrible to each other. I never thought I’d someday look back at those moments as romantic, but now I treasure every one.
Having Not
I don’t know how you spent the first year of the pandemic. I spent it driving two hundred miles a day and chatting to married couples outside of their homes while inside, my brain kept repeating what the doctors had told us: that my husband wouldn’t live past the year.
Every visit, every home, every couple I talked and laughed with, was a reminder of how precious the gift of marriage was. Even in dark times - like a global pandemic - these couples created together and built together. They communicated, worked in partnership, and got things done. And they were loving it, and each other. You could see it in their eyes, hear it in their smiles behind their masks.
After work, I would go home, check in on my husband, and then take our daughter to the playground to run off a day spent on Zoom school. I would finish my estimates for the day, send them in, and then walk loops around the playground for exercise. I like to multi-task, so I decided to pick up a part-time job that I could do as I walked and my daughter played on the playground with her pandemic group of masked friends.
I picked up the phone, called a national matchmaking company, and was hired as a matchmaker recruiter. After that, my hours walking around the playground were spent swiping through all the major dating apps. It was a very interesting place for a very married mama to be.
Soon, I was doing intake interviews and vetting eligible singles across the country. This was my first introduction to the horror stories of the Dating APPocalypse. I was shocked - both by what I was hearing, and by how accepting the singles had become of inappropriate behavior. It seemed that everyone had a long history of draining situationships, predatory entanglements, and failed live-in relationships.
I had thought marriage was hard. But our battles led to unimaginable growth and closeness. These singles were going through all the trauma without any of the healing. None of the pain they were putting themselves through led to skills or experiences that were useful in healthy relationships. Instead, they exacerbated self-defeating ideas and habits that hurt. More than anything, I saw courage in the face of pain and grief. But I didn’t see solutions.
Stuck.
What I saw were the same root issues that had affected the families I’d helped, as an academic career counselor specializing in at-risk youth in minority communities. The same lack of access to information and support. The same barriers to access and the natural discomfort/distress of a living thing denied the freedom to grow.
Until this realization, I had been pretty satisfied with my first career. I thought that I had helped a lot of people. So many, in fact, that I had started to grow a little callous about the work. Our fertility difficulties had made me so emotionally raw and jealous, that I lost the ability to exercise sympathy and patience for parents who were trying their best, but couldn’t see that their children’s fundamental needs weren’t being met.
Meeting the victims of the Dating APPocalypse made me realize that for every family I had reached, there were countless more who had simply continued on in a state of crisis. Day of day, year after year. Young girls grew up hounded by scarcity mindset and hyper-vigilance, turned into mistresses when they’d dreamed of being wives. Young men struggled against feelings of powerlessness and uselessness. Without being plugged into the people and spaces that would empower them, they were deprived of purpose and growth.
The Lord had led me in a big loop, right back to my roots. None of it is new or novel. It’s all part of the same battle that every Christian is called upon to fight. We shine a light on living by God’s truth and design for our lives, for His purpose, so that others may know Him and know Peace.
But the way He brought me through and to these revelations, for myself, for our family, and for the work… was a path I never could have designed for myself. Or even imagined.
I began to work pro bono with singles that no matchmaker would touch. Not wealthy matchmaking clients and their perfect-on-paper potential matches, but regular people like me: Christians, people with average incomes, ethnic minorities, people who had chosen family or community service over chasing wealth.
I discovered that everyone - Christians, non-Christians, rich, or poor - was having the same problems. They were all worrying about the same things, blaming themselves for the same reasons, and missing the same truths and skills.
They were all victims of the same traps.
Here We Are.
I drove my husband to distraction with my financial recklessness as I self-funded workshops, support groups, and one-on-one sessions. I trusted that God had brought me face-to-face with this mission for a reason, so I gave endlessly and thought things would work out.
The lesson He taught me instead - by letting me run my rope until I could run no longer - was that I needed to grow up and learn to be a wise steward, not blindly optimistic and foolishly persistent. This also happened to be one of the biggest lessons I saw reflected in the dating space. It was not the only lesson that God brought me through as a parallel to what singles were experiencing in their quests to create marriage and family.
Six years later, Good Hearts Meet is a research and educational non-profit (filing in process), with two main areas of focus:
1) Triage. Help adult singles adopt healthy dating and relationship practices that lead to marriage and family. Resources include workshops and referrals to adjacent service providers (mental health, nutritionists, physical health, and spiritual leaders).
2) Prevention. Equipping teens and young adults with individual, social, and financial perspectives so they can plan for marriage and future with as much care and prayer as they are taught to plan for the lifelong pursuit of money. The core goal is to create an interactive curriculum that helps the younger generation understand the impacts of their current choices.
Freedom
Good Hearts Meet is ultimately about freedom and choice. The freedom to exercise our choices while we still have choices.
The freedom to choose a spouse while you still have a healthy pool of potential partners.
The freedom to bear children while your body can still do so, without expensive and invasive scientific procedures.
The freedom of raising your children while you are still healthy and active in body and mind.
The freedom of living as God Created us (as husband and wife, being fruitful), not as isolated targets for consumption.
Onward.
Six years ago, I felt like a lone voice calling in the wild. Singles were drowning in their own struggles, and married couples were too far from the problem. Online dating norms are too dysfunctional for married couples to even imagine. I would describe the awful things that people were putting up with, and the reaction would be as if I was describing war in a far-off country.
Today, there are more people stepping into this space every week. Many are hungry to take a turn at profiting from a demographic that has proven to have a high tolerance for bad behavior. Most claim to have the power to provide an easy fix.
But there is no outside “solution” to the Dating APPocalypse. The answer was built into our hearts and our biological design, by hand and breath of our Creator. For women, the mystery of this joining was the very reason for our Creation. For men, our Creator identified the need for a “helper” almost immediately. How can we not value and revere that bond, that purpose?
Reviving appreciation and gratitude for the gifts of marriage and family is our purpose here at Good Hearts Meet. If our journey and mission resonates with you, please come alongside and support our work.