reddit friends, please work some mentoring and grace (help)
Reddit, I need counsel please because I genuinely feel like I’m going a little nuts trying to figure this out.
I was with my ex partner for 3.5 years. He taught me what healthy, safe, fun love looked like. He was my person. We lived together for 1.5 years and travelled around Asia for 2 months.
Towards the last year of our relationship, I found faith.
A lot changed for me. I started feeling convicted about sex outside marriage, our partying and drinking habits, and generally the way we were living. We were 23/24, right around the age where I think we both knew we were growing out of that lifestyle, but desperately didn’t want to accept it.
Our travels were amazing, but looking back, I think some of the drinking and partying was escapism. We came home and I felt like we hadn’t really made the most of the experience.
I eventually felt convicted to move home. We went from living together and being incredibly close to living 1.5 hours apart.
He actually handled it incredibly well. He respected my decision to become celibate, despite some understandable frustration and a few slip ups. His family is Mormon, although he isn’t practising, and he even handled my initial, very intense phase of discovering the differences between our faiths with a lot of grace.
But over time I became really sad and felt alone.
His faith wasn’t really there yet. He wasn’t actively looking for God. I also started noticing some other differences between us. He has a much simpler, more content way of living, whereas I’m extremely inquisitive, ambitious and growth oriented. It mostly comes out in communication, aspirations and how we approach life.
Eventually, the combination of those differences and being unequally yoked became enough for me to end the relationship.
That was about 3 to 4 months ago.
The complicated part is that we never really stopped being in each other’s lives.
And somehow, the time apart has changed things.
He started going to my church completely independently. He did Alpha. He now serves once a month despite having a very busy work life.
I’ve seen what looks like a genuine seed of faith developing in him.
And somehow I’ve fallen even more in love with him.
There’s something incredibly moving to me about watching someone I love genuinely start seeking God because he wants both. He wants me and he wants God.
I know I have to be careful here. I don’t want to turn his faith journey into evidence that he’s becoming the husband I want him to be. I don’t want to be the person deciding whether someone else’s faith is “enough”.
But I also don’t want to throw away a relationship with someone I genuinely believe could be my future husband because I was too afraid to recognise that God may actually be doing something in his life.
So I’m stuck.
I don’t want to enter a marriage unequally yoked. His Mormon family background and extended family make this something I take seriously. I need to know that his faith is genuinely his, that he understands the Gospel, and that he is choosing to follow Christ independently of me.
At the same time, I don’t expect someone who has only recently started seeking God to suddenly have years of spiritual maturity.
So when do you know?
How do you discern whether someone’s faith is genuinely developing enough to consider reconciliation and eventually marriage?
Is “enough confirmation” even the right way to think about it?
And then there’s the embarrassing part.
Everyone knows we broke up.
Some newer church friends literally saw me cry and say, “I think God is convicting me to end this.”
If we eventually got back together, I worry they’d think I’m a complete clown.
My cousin also knew me before I became a Christian and knows I’ve gone back and forth on relationships before. This feels profoundly different to me, but I can understand why from the outside it might look like I’m doing the same thing again.
I know I can’t make a life decision based on whether other people think I’m foolish.
But how do I actually stand firm in a decision like this when I’ve already told people I believed ending it was what God wanted?
I’d really appreciate perspectives from Christians who have experienced something similar, especially people who were in an unequally yoked relationship where the other person later came to genuine faith.
What would you be watching for in his life before considering reconciliation?
And how would you approach this from here without rushing it, influencing his faith journey, or letting fear of other people’s judgment make the decision for me?