Unbreaking: How Giving Up Saved Our Marriage

By Crystal Crawford and Jason Crawford

Jason and Crystal Crawford were trapped in a loveless, hopeless marriage. They each believed that the only path to happiness was to go their separate ways -- until God showed them something even better.

 

This true story chronicles one couple's quick descent from dating into an unhappy marriage, and how God transformed their marriage, turning resentment into love and their pain into joy. You will experience the real, raw emotion of both Jason and Crystal through alternating journal entries that show how the husband's and wife's separate perspectives evolve throughout the first six years of their marriage and beyond. This unique memoir, written by a couple who also minister as relationship coaches, includes a Relationship Guide at the end of the book which provides help and guidance to couples in similar situations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: C. Crawford Writing, LLC
• Release date: Dec 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9798201566784

Crystal Crawford

Crystal Crawford writes YA fantasy and clean romance (and a smattering of other genres) in Florida, where every natural body of water hides something that could eat you, and if they don't get you, the weather might. She lives with her husband, four kids, and her one-eyed cat, who have supported her dream of writing and drinking far too much coffee. Her imagination is her happy place! (But a deserted beach is nice, too.) When she isn’t writing, she enjoys napping, watching shows with her family, or recording secret singing videos in her closet. Though she'd love to spend all day reading, most days you'll find her doing laundry and homeschooling the kids.

Book preview

Unbreaking:

how giving up saved our marriage

by Jason and Crystal Crawford

@2015 Jason and Crystal Crawford

All rights reserved.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to our friends and family who stood by us in our darkest moments. Your love was God in the flesh to us.

We would also like to sincerely thank all the many people who read our story in its various versions and provided such valuable feedback and support.  Thank you all from the bottom of our hearts. 

From Crystal:  To my parents—Thank you for teaching me to seek God, and for trusting me to find my way back to Him when I became lost.  Your belief in me made more difference than you know.  I love you.

Introduction

Has your dating or marriage relationship left you feeling hopeless, trapped or lonely?  Do you feel isolated, unappreciated, unvalued, or unloved? 

So did we.

After 5 years of a loveless, miserable marriage, our entire relationship imploded.  We were certain it was the end...until we learned that God had a better plan. 

This is our story.  It will not be an easy one to read.  It was not an easy one for us to live, either. 

You will read through the darkest depths of our individual despair, through our independent struggles with God, and into our partnership of healing.  We present our story from two alternating perspectives – that of the husband, and that of the wife – and as you read, we hope it will become clear that God was working through each of us separately to bring us to the point that we might serve Him together.

To those of you who have never experienced a broken marriage, we pray that this story might give you a glimpse into what others struggle with, and how God can work in their lives.

For those of you who are currently trapped in the labyrinth of marriage struggle, please know – you are not alone.  We have been there.  We pray that our story might give you hope.  God is never far off, and He is able to do far more with your marriage than you can ever imagine (Ephesians 3:20).  By the grace of God, we not only survived catastrophic relationship failure, but our marriage is stronger now than it ever was before. 

However, we never would have experienced this incredible, victorious healing without some serious help from God and from some very wise, experienced counselors and friends.  For this reason, we have included a second section of the book that contains a summary of the Guiding Principles that set our marriage on the path to healing, and a Relationship Workbook that will explain the foremost principles that guided our relationship transformation, and walk you through some aspects of the process that worked so powerfully for us.  Though every relationship is unique, we have seen these same principles help individuals and couples we have worked with in our life-coaching ministry, and we believe they can do the same for you.

A few words could never express the profundity of our gratitude to our Lord, and the true depth of the amazing healing He has given us.  That can only be done by taking you back through the steps of our journey. 

And so we begin.

Section I –

Beyond Imagining: our marriage story

Ephesians 3:20

Now to Him who is able

to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think,

according to the power that works within us...

His Story – Chapter 1

Iwas angry. I was pissed off. I was hurt.

I only wanted my wife to love me. Forget love, I would have settled for her to treat me at least as well as perfect strangers treated me. I wanted her respect, love, and admiration. No, I needed it.  I would have done just about anything to get even a hint of it.

My wife did not approach me affectionately. She was so much of an introvert that I had to practically have an argument with her to get any reaction from her. If we managed to wake up in silence, leave for the day, then come home and navigate the conversation about what to have for dinner without it becoming an argument...it was considered a great day. The bar was low.

But I wanted more than that! I wanted to believe that there was a glimmer of hope that my wife would actually at some point be attracted to me. I was top of my class. Girls from class wanted to take me out.  They thought I was attractive. They knew I was married, but they wanted to be friends with me. I felt valued because of them.  Why couldn’t my wife see this?

I felt respected by my professors. They wanted to know what I thought. I aced everything I touched. I was picked as a team leader for our national advertising competition. I was accomplished, recognized and it felt good. Even at work, I had customers who would come in and ask specifically for me.  These things felt good.

Then I would go home...and wish I didn’t have to.

It seemed like my wife and I only had sex once every 3 months or so, and even then, it was distant and awkward.  My wife was cold and closed off, even in conversations – all her answers were terse.  When we talked at all, it usually ended in an argument.  I didn’t feel in love.  There wasn’t much romance, and any attempts we made to be romantic felt contrived.  We were in the same room a lot but in our own worlds.  We didn’t spend much time doing anything together, and when we did, it felt forced.  My wife gave me no affirmation or affection.  I felt completely emptied.  My wife should have been the one person who would have my back, but I felt I was completely lacking her support.  She nagged me about everything.  Nothing I did was right.  How would you feel, trapped in a marriage like that?

I was miserable.  Our church gave sermons and Bible classes, and I scoffed inside because it all felt so empty.  Studies this, doctrine that, our vending machine prayers to God just left me feeling more alone because it felt fake.  All those words, but nothing real. Compared to my painful struggles, it felt like church was full of people with no problems. They would never understand. I did not feel God working in my life, and I wanted all of these people to shut up with their fakeness.

The answers I got from them said try harder. I felt like grace and mercy could only be found through perfect obedience, and no matter how hard I tried, I could never be perfect.

So, I was a failure. For 5 years, every day, every minute, and every conversation drained more and more of myself away. The boy who went to college with dreams had fallen so far. Those who knew me now would never guess what I once dreamed of becoming. No one knew the real me. They only saw my imperfections, and to rise above that felt like moving a mountain.  The one person who should have been there, should have had my back, was my wife.  But all she did was amplify the void.  Everywhere I turned, I felt inadequate, alone, unknown, and unlovable. I might as well just be what they saw me as – broken.

I finally didn’t care. I was in so much pain. If I couldn’t be right then I would at least be happy. I thought, if I’m going to suffer in hell, then I might as well make the best of this life and take hell when it comes.

Because this already felt like hell.

It sounds like there is no hope in the story – it’s all bad.  But the truth is, this is only how it began.  How it ends is far different.  The deeper the pain, the greater the glory.

Her Story – Chapter 1

There was no honeymoon .

Not in the literal sense, and not in the sense of a period of happiness.  There was, from the beginning, mostly just pressure and stress.  I was not happy on my wedding day.  Yes, the happiness was there, a bit, but it was crowded out by feelings of doubt, stress, and fear.  I didn’t get to have the wedding I wanted.  In fact, we eloped 3 months before our scheduled wedding date.  He said it was the sensible thing to do, so that he could use my Florida residency to save money on college tuition, and I latched on to that.  That is the reason I told others.  But I didn’t believe it.  In my heart, I believed that the reason was because we had pledged to wait until marriage for sex, and he just didn’t want to wait any more.  You see, he’d been pressuring me – a lot.  And so I agreed to move up the wedding.

Right now, you are thinking this is the beginning of a tragic story, a story of a girl who marries the wrong guy, and ends up living in torment.  And that’s exactly how I felt.  For 5 long years after we married, I woke up every day wondering how I would survive.  I felt as if no one knew me because they saw only the happy face I projected, and not the pain inside.  I couldn’t tell anyone what was going on within my marriage, because all of my friends seemed so happy in theirs, and I knew they wouldn’t understand.  I couldn’t tell my parents, because I didn’t want to disappoint them.  And I couldn’t talk to my husband about how I felt, because any conversation I began ended with him yelling about all the things I was doing wrong.  We slept in the same room, but we barely spoke.  For 5 long years, I was utterly alone.

The pain drove me to a place where I barely recognized myself.  My thoughts obsessed over the what ifs.  What if I had married that other guy, instead? Why didn’t I see the signs, say no, call off the wedding?  I woke up every morning and cried out to God in prayer to rescue me.  At times I wished I could just be hit by a car and end it all, yet I feared that God would not accept me.  And in my darkest moments, I prayed for God to take my husband, so that I could finally be free.  I was in a place of darkness and pain, like nothing I had ever felt before, and I was so desperate to escape that I did things the real me, the younger, hopeful me, would never have imagined doing.  My dreams had been destroyed, and I felt like I had died with them.

But that is not how my story ends.  Stories like ours normally end in divorce, with the only real hope of healing being found on the other side of two lives torn apart.  With all the pain involved, our story should have ended this way, and almost did.  But this story has a different ending because, above all else, it is a story about God, and how he transformed my suffering into joy.

His Story – Chapter 2

The intro to my story is a long and complicated one, the details of which are better saved for another time.  For now, I will just summarize:

My parents divorced when I was three.  My father became the villain in my family, and I found myself desperate for his affirmation, yet condemned for anything I did that reminded my mom of him.  Even my laugh irritated her, because it sounded like his.  I began to believe that I would have to change who I was to ever be good enough.  And that was only the beginning.

I was both sexually and emotionally abused as a child.  I was introduced to porn at age 5, and to alcohol not long after that.  I developed an appetite for naked girls.  On top of that, an adult involved me in sexual acts.  The abuse continued for years, whenever I was around this person.  Some of it felt good, and I liked it, but I knew it was wrong.  I was confused, and felt guilty for liking it.  For a long time, I kept the abuse a secret,