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 hustle under non-stop pressure in a fight for survival. Not just for my own future, but in order to support my parents, my sister, and all the people in my community who didn’t have the opportunities my education would create.
I didn’t question the mandate. But I knew something that many of my peers didn’t. As a young student, I had once completed a report on a news article - chosen at random for our weekly assignment, scribbled in my notebook while in the back of the car on the morning drive to school. Just one of many reports and assignments, but the topic stuck with me.
Thanks to that article, I knew that female fertility begins at puberty and peaks as early as our mid-twenties. I learned that this is a biological phenomenon as basic as growing and losing baby teeth.
I learned that the chances of getting pregnant, the chances of having a healthy baby, and that the health of both baby and the mother decline dramatically with each year of delayed motherhood.
Which meant that I knew that that the cost of my academic and career success would be motherhood.
I counted against this clock compulsively; through four years of college and three years of law school. Over and over, I did the math, measuring the shrinking window of my “prime time for motherhood” against the years remaining of academic slavery.
I have a vivid memory of walking out of a law career panel in my senior year of college, in a daze. According to the speakers on that panel: after law school, I would be expected to work at a grueling pace for at least three more years before I could transfer to a “lifestyle” firm and have the time to start and raise a family.
My heart was heavy. Love and a family of my own were the only things I wanted for myself. Everything else was duty; forced obligation. Naively, I had thought I would be free after law school. But now they were saying I would have to serve another three years. By then, I would be twenty-seven years old and firmly into the downhill slope of what was medically considered advanced maternal age.
My chances of having a family were being sacrificed on the altar of education/career, but by my own complicit actions. By the goals I had taken as my own. By the poison pill I had swallowed every day because I believe I had no other choice. No other path.
Like many other women, I limited myself to temporary entanglements and pretended that relationships I’d capped by taking marriage off the table weren’t scarring my soul. I pretended that watching other girls “throw away their futures” on marriage, home, and family didn’t consume me with envy, not contempt.
I spent my young womanhood peering into the future anxiously, hoping against hope that some day, the 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 chase after some invisible, far-off goal.
Accidental Connection
By the time I started my third year of law school, I knew that the legal field was not for me. I had worked at the forefront of alternative education and immigrant community work for over a decade. I had no patience for the pace of the law, always so many steps behind.
Like many other single women today, I thought that more schooling was the answer. I decided to apply to MBA programs. I would be 29-30 years old by the time I graduated and officially began my career. But what did it matter? The death toll for my dreams of marriage and family had already been rung.
Then one day, my car broke down, in the neighborhood of a male friend I’d known for over a decade and always dismissed as the dumb leader of a motley crew of even dumber friends. (There’s a funny story behind this assumption, and I’m happy to report that he is quite smart).
I called him on the off-chance that he might be able to help, and luckily, he was home. He pulled up five minutes later and nonchalantly saved the day, diagnosing my car and arranging to have it towed away to a shop he knew.
Then he turned to me and asked: “What do you want to do now?”
So we hung out.
Three days later, we were still hanging out. A year later, we were married. It’s been sixteen years of hanging out, and he still shows up nonchalantly to save the day whenever I put out the call.
We chose each other.
When we started dating, my husband was a year out of a long relationship. He was loving his freedom and didn’t want to commit to anything serious or long-term. Even though I never believed I could have the freedom of marriage before my family’s financial security was secured, I was spoiled in being used to dating men who wanted to marry me. I didn’t have any reason to change that practice. I wished him well and walked away.
He followed.
In hindsight, I am so glad I refused to settle for anything less than an exclusive, committed, marriage-minded relationship. Again and again, he showed me that he was willing to bend and change in order to keep me in his life. That devotion won over my tired, bruised, and jaded heart.
Rough Edges
I had a lot of rough edges when we got married. But so did my husband. We didn’t just have rough edges, we were rough edges. God had tied together two perfect people to wear each other down.
The first few years of our marriage were spectacularly dramatic. We fought constantly and publicly. I left, I kicked him out of the house, he came back. I left and moved back to my parents’ home, he showed up outside my window one night, they let him in… we were much more exciting than any reality show.
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 as I was about radical generosity and following his calling.
He helped me take care of my parents, especially my mother, whose mobility was limited due to a spinal condition. My father and I had been caring for her together for years, and we were both exhausted. We could not have made it through those years without my husband’s no-nonsense attitude, warm heart, and unmatched culinary skills.
He loved my pets as his own, and we adopted more. He worked diligently 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 us a child to love and raise in love. It gave my parents a son and a grandchild to dote on, and it gave 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 eight years old). It gave him a mob of Korean relatives and church members who were short on stature but big on personality. It gave him a home: a community who prayed for him daily, a kitchen always stocked with his favorites (especially fresh rice and ice cream), and two superfans to cheer him on through every challenge and celebration.
All of It
Early in the pandemic, in June of 2020, our family came down with COVID. My daughter and I recovered after a difficult month, but my husband seemed to be getting worse. When my daughter came to me and told me she had seen Daddy coughing blood and hiding the tissues in the trash can, I confirmed the evidence and dragged him to the doctor on the spot. He was immediately hospitalized. We learned that he had a pre-existing lung condition that had been complicated by COVID. By the time he came home, he was unable to walk, speak, or even laugh without pain.
My husband was bedridden for almost a year, with the doctors telling us that his condition would only get worse. My crunchy-granola Christian homeschooling daughter/wife/mother life morphed overnight into a race to earn enough money to support us. Since I had been taking classes in landscape design, I got a job in landscape construction sales.
Working in outside sales, and the construction industry, was like stepping into a whole new world. 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 learned that you can be immersed in an unforgiving world of money, deadlines, and more money, and be unavoidably inaccessible to the people who love you most - while simultaneously thinking about them non-stop. I finally understood how hard it is to strike any sort of balance between provision, stability, family, and personal happiness.
Through this process of experiencing the world in my husband’s shoes, I began to appreciate the complexity of the bond we had fed and tended together over the years. I saw that the family and community we had grown was a miracle. We hadn’t even known we were building something so beautiful. We had just been taking each day at a time, choosing each other and the people we loved. The memories and gratitude kept me going through the darkest days.
I was given a gift, of having my eyes opened to our blessings big and small. Of finally growing up and realizing that love isn’t just about romantic dates and getting everything I “deserve.” Love is the miracle of metamorphosis through a million moments shared, a thousand offenses forgiven, and endless reasons to be thankful.
Even the 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
While I drove 200+ miles a day across Southern California, meeting clients at their homes to discuss their landscape projects, my brain was replaying over and over what the doctors had told us - that my husband’s health would not improve.
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. They were loving it, and loving each other. You could see it in their eyes, hear it in their smiles behind their masks. (Part of the joy was that most of them had just refinanced their homes at incredibly low rates and were sitting on pile of cash).
After work, I would go home, check in on my husband, then take our daughter to the playground to run off a day spent on Zoom school. I’d sit at the stone benches and finish my estimates for the day, close my computer, then walk loops around the playground while my daughter and her friends played until dark. So I decided to pick up another part-time job, one I could do on my phone while walking my loops.
I called up national matchmaking company, Three Day Rule, and got a job as a matchmaker recruiter. My hours supervising my daughter at the playground were then spent walking and swiping through all the major dating apps. It was an interesting experience for a very married mama with marriage constantly on her mind.
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 by what I heard, and by how accepting singles were of what was, to me, clearly inappropriate and abusive behavior.
Most of the singles had long histories of draining situationships, predatory entanglements, and failed live-in relationships. Previously, I had thought that marriage was hard. All the other married women and mamas I knew also thought their marriages were hard. But our battles ultimately led to unimaginable growth and closeness. They were part of an investment into something unbelievably deep, complex, and solid.
These singles were going through all the trauma without any of the healing and growth. Their pain didn’t lead to skills or experiences that were useful in healthy relationships. Instead, they exacerbated self-defeating ideas and habits that hurt.
I saw so much courage and persistence in the face of grief. But I didn’t see solutions.
Stuck.
I did see many of 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, the same discomfort/distress of a living being unnaturally stunted and denied the freedom to grow.
I’d been very satisfied with my first career before I pivoted. I felt I’d helped a lot of people over the decades I’d worked with students and families. In fact, I’d started to take the privilege for granted. Our fertility difficulties had made me emotionally raw and jealous. I’d lost the ability to be patient with parents who were trying their best, but were unable to see or meet their children’s educational, emotional, and physical needs.
The victims of the Dating APPocalypse made me realize that for every family I had reached, there were countless more who had continued on in a state of crisis - day after day, year after year. Young girls grew up hounded by scarcity mindset and hyper-vigilance, turned into mistresses or worse, when they’d dreamed of being wives. Young men struggled against feelings of powerlessness and uselessness. Without mentors and spaces to equip and empower them, these men grew up deprived of purpose and hope.
It felt like a cosmic joke. The Lord had led me in a big, epic loop right back to my roots. In the end, none of my grand realizations were new or novel. They were simply reflections of the same battle that every Christian is called upon to fight, the race we are called to run. The darkness is not a surprise; it’s the natural result of godlessness. 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 that He brought me through the lessons and to these revelations about myself, our family, and the work at hand - it was a path I could never have designed myself, or even imagined. It wasn’t a cosmic joke. It was a plan so detailed, so comprehensive, so perfect … that it exposed my attempts to control my future as having been the real joke all along.
I was determined to take the things I’d learned from the luxury matchmaking industry and turn them to good account, by helping real people. I worked for low or no compensation with singles 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, curvy women, ethnic minorities, those who had chosen family or community service over chasing wealth.
I discovered that everyone - Christians, non-Christians, rich, or poor - was grappling with the same problems. They were all paralyzed by the same fears, blaming themselves for the same self-perceived flaws, and stunted by the lack of the same basic 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 had faith that things would work out.
He taught me a different lesson instead, by letting me run my rope until I could run no longer. I needed to grow up. I had to learn to be a wise steward, not blindly optimistic and foolishly persistent. I had to give responsibly, not freely to all who expressed need. I had to exercise discernment and discretion, self-restraint and wisdom.
This also happened to be one of the biggest lessons I saw was needed in the dating space. It was not the only time that God brought me through parallel experiences to what singles were encountering in their quests to create marriage and family. Over and over again, I found myself walking parallel lessons on a road God had sent our family to explore.
It’s been an intense six years of training, research, and work. Today, Good Hearts Meet is a 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, counseling, 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 ultimately champions 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 is still capable of doing so, without expensive and invasive medical 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), 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 were 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 day. Many are hungry to profit 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 men, the need for a “helper” was determined by our Creator. For women, the mystery of this joining was the very reason for our Creation. How can we not value and revere that bond, that purpose?
Reviving reverence for the spiritual and practical gifts of marriage and family… that is our purpose here at Good Hearts Meet. If our journey and mission resonate with you, we invite you to come alongside and support our work.