A Brief Tour of My Evangelical Dating Days

A note about the content: this essay discusses an emotionally abusive relationship. If this is something you want to avoid, I suggest skipping the section about the person who lied about having cancer.

Hello, dear readers, and welcome to a new year. For my first post of 2026, I’m coming to you with reflections on developing relational and emotional literacy through the lens of two significant relationships in my young adult life. To remove identifying information, I won’t use names in this essay. Instead, I will refer to these two people as The One Who Lied About Having Cancer and The One I Accidentally Converted to the Evangelical Faith.

I’m using these as a map for what I had to learn as I moved away from my commitments to purity culture in my twenties. The stories I had about love and relationships as a child were structured around a specific gendered norm from my evangelical environment, namely that women are designed to nurture and take care of men. Even after my first wave of feminist awakening in college, I still wrestled with this role. I found myself struggling to perform different versions of what purity culture taught me to embody as a woman—to be nurturing, self-sacrificing, meek, submissive, and so on. While I resisted those norms, I also blamed myself for not knowing how to “fix” the underlying issues or how to accept the dysfunction embedded in these dynamics. I still believed somewhere in my being that if I could just be a better caretaker, the issues would resolve.

Of course, we should all be in relationships where we support and nurture our partners and tend to the needs of the relationship in healthy ways and with clear boundaries. I’m not talking about that kind of caretaking. I am talking about the caretaking that requires or leads to self-abandonment as you privilege making things work over taking care of your own needs. The kind that often leads people to stay in relationships far longer than they should because they have invested so much time, energy, effort, and resources into the relationship. In my experience with evangelical doctrine (which is extensive), these caretaking and nurturing roles are typically inscribed on women’s lives at a very young age and then reinforced over and over in the messages and models held up to us as children and young adults.

In sharing these stories, my aim is to illustrate why these models can be harmful and to give insight on how to grow, heal, and move away from the unhealthy patterns they can perpetuate in our lives.

The One Who Lied About Having Cancer

Before I get to the details, you should know that this story involves some instances of emotional manipulation and abuse, something I share so you can plan how to engage with this content. I feel comfortable talking about this since I have done a lot of work and have enough distance from it, but I want to let readers know that it might be unsettling for people who have been in emotionally abusive relationships.

We dated for eighteen months. When we met, everyone on campus thought he had just come out of remission. We had our first kiss outside the mailroom after he picked up a sling he had ordered from amazon dot com, which I thought was strange. But here he was alive and well, so what did it matter?

When he first told me the story about having cancer in high school, he cried. Later that year, I asked my track teammate (who had gone to the same school at the same time) what it was like for their community when he was diagnosed. She said that no one had known about the cancer, because he had been so private about the diagnosis. We were driving back to campus from a friend’s wedding in Pennsylvania, and I stared out the window letting the visions of wheat and cornfields swim past me as I wrestled with the suspicion growing in my heart.

My Google search history became an archive of questions that I could not ask out loud to anyone.

Does chemotherapy lead to heart surgery?

How can you tell if someone is lying about being sick?

Symptoms of Munchausen’s

Does Munchausen’s only happen by proxy?

Do men lie about sickness because of masculinity?

How do you break up with someone who is dying?

Are they dying?

During this time, I was consumed with college life, waking up at 5 a.m. for track practice, running to classes afterward, working in the writing center. We didn’t spend a lot of time alone together. There were a few nights we spent hanging out in the houses we shared with roommates. On one of these occasions, I came over in track shorts, and something felt immediately off. A few minutes into watching a movie, he asked me to go home and change because he was worried his roommates would think we were doing something scandalous based on what I was wearing. These weren’t even short track shorts, but I acquiesced and came back in baggy pants. Purity culture residue here—my body, and how I covered it up, was a reflection of his morality. The need for control only escalated from here.

One night, a group of us were going to a birthday party downtown, and there was hassle over who would drive with whom. Eventually, everyone was packed into cars and the two of us were alone. I could feel his wrath simmering between the layers of scraped ice and the open interstate. He didn’t speak until he was yelling, throwing the force of his pain into my inability to give him directions and help him park. I have no memory of that dinner except that it was in an old green building and that several people asked if I was well. On the way back, he was even more upset that I had not been in a better mood, and I remember him saying, you made people think I was hurting you. This is when I knew I needed to end the relationship.

I texted him to say we needed to talk. Three bouncing dots, then “I agree. I have something that I need to tell you.” I walked to his student office, each step heavier than the last as my body resisted the interaction. He told me to sit down and before a single syllable had formed in my mouth, he stated in an even tone: “The cancer is back.” I knew. In those four words, I saw the lie that I had known for a long time. All I heard my body saying back to him was a simple apology. I was sorry for all of it.

This is the point in the story where I wish I had ended the relationship immediately, in spite of the Great Return of Mythical Cancer. I knew I was in a bad situation, but I did not yet have the skills to recognize or navigate emotional abuse. I had been taught that relationships require sacrifice, endurance, and relentless commitment—that choosing to date someone meant doing everything in my power to make it work. I did not know how to prioritize my own well-being in circumstances like this. That wasn’t a personal failure; it was the result of formation. Prominent evangelical teachings emphasized women’s responsibility to preserve relationships at nearly any cost. So, I stayed longer than I should have.

You might be wondering how he managed to keep this story about fake cancer alive for years when so many people knew about it? He told all of us that his family forced him to hide having cancer. He told us that none of us could talk about it with them because it was too painful for them to openly discuss. It was a strong narrative. When I did test this a little, he was furious and told me that if I ever brought it up around his family again, it would be the end of our relationship.

After a deeper investigation that included things like looking through his pill collection only to find that he had been ordering empty pill capsules to take in front of us, I confronted him. He denied everything, of course. He told me he would send an image of his shoulder scans from his doctor’s appointment the next day. He sent me a Google search image. Then he forged medical documents and put them in his mailbox. These would have been believable, but I noted that they had not been postmarked.

I called his sister, and said simply, “I need to ask you something… has he ever had cancer.” She hung up and then called me back, apologetic and concerned. In the end, he was right: the next time I talked with his family about his cancer, it ended our relationship.

The One I Accidentally Converted to the Evangelical Faith

A year later, I graduated from college and put a country between me and that life. Living in a very small town in Eastern Washington made dating feel peripheral, but I did want connection and community. I joined a large church in town, which I later learned was deeply Southern Baptist in both structure and doctrine.

I attended weekly services, small groups, and other gatherings, but I never felt a sense of belonging. Instead, I found myself increasingly resistant to what I was encountering. I learned that even churches with hipster names and carefully curated aesthetics could still adhere to rigid teachings about gender and sexuality. Women were barred from leadership, and the church was far from inclusive or affirming. Over the year I spent there, these realities became impossible to ignore. Still, I remained loosely attached as I focused on my thesis.

During this time, I met and fell in love with a man in Alaska while I was home over winter break. It was the exact kind of relationship that all my evangelical friends had warned me about my entire life—built on chemistry and connection and with no sign of Jesus in our discussions. I had been taught my entire life to not engage in relationships built on passion, friendship, connection, and mutual respect. Above all else, I was to find a man who would put Jesus above everything else in his life. But I couldn’t believe that what I was experiencing in this new relationship was wrong or bad. We cared for each other deeply and that meant enough to me to ignore the decades of advice from my religious communities.

Regardless, a few months into the relationship, it became evident to me that I had to confront the dissonance in my life—that this person I was dating was actively being rejected by my community. For example, my closest childhood friend told me that I had to break up with him or else she and I could no longer be friends. Much of this was avoidable because we lived in different states, making it easier for me to keep my worlds a little separate.

Everything came to a sharp breaking point when he visited me in Washington, and I had to confront the reality—the difference between the story I was telling myself about this relationship and the actual nuance of living it. We spent a week together and then I dropped him off at the airport. On the five-hour drive from Seattle back to Pullman, I experienced physical anxiety with an intensity I didn’t know possible. My stomach shrunk inside me, every muscle was tense, and I couldn’t bring myself to even turn on the radio.

I drove myself home in silence and then called him to tell him I needed to take a break from our relationship. I was hoping to find a way to reconcile the relationship with my evangelical world and the views that were already held together in a tenuous web of what I would later call the entryway to my deconstruction. Of course, he did not understand why and how I had arrived at a place so different from the one he embodied. I tried to explain that I couldn’t date him because he wasn’t a Christian, but the arguments I made sounded like a betrayal to me even as they were coming out of my mouth. He made promises to look into converting, and I tried to articulate a truth I did not fully understand at the time—that I needed space to reconsider the structure of my world.

What I knew to be true at the time was that I could no longer live inside the cavernous dissonance that occupied the space between my heart and my belief system. I also knew that confronting the belief system was something I had to do on my own and for myself. And I did. I went into a garden day after day to ask the questions I could no longer leave unanswered. I found a way to move through the searing pain of losing this relationship, but it took me much longer to disentangle the other things.

This was not the moment or season I left the church (you can read about why I left in this other post). But it became a fault line in my life. I knew, in my body, that the love I had experienced was not inherently evil or wrong. I also knew that I could not move through the world with these strict limitations and fear that was placed around the body, around love and connection. I entered a season of unraveling that lasted until I arrived at the end of myself and began to rebuild a life in which I felt truly alive to every good and holy feeling available to humanity.

Nine months after our break, I was back in Alaska and out to dinner with a friend who went to a large church in downtown Anchorage. She told me that she had seen him at her church and that he had recently been baptized. The world dropped away from me when she showed me the pictures from the service, and I realized that he had, in fact, dedicated his life to being a born-again Christian. He had also married someone else that same month. I don’t think I had ever successfully evangelized anyone when I believed that conversion was my mission from on high. I will never not smile when I think about the ridiculousness embedded in this ending. We joked a lot about missionary dating (dating non-believers with the intention to convert them to Jesus), and somehow I had accidentally done it. What once would have felt like a spiritual victory now read to me as a strange epilogue to a story I had already outgrown.

More than a decade removed from these stories, I have never been more grateful for anything than I am for the endings I received in these relationships. We all have to wrestle with ourselves: with our attachment styles, our patterns, the social scripts we’ve been taught to follow for belonging, and so on. I have toiled for many years to build healthy boundaries and develop intimate, meaningful connections. I have learned to love the sound of my feet walking away from the things that were not meant for me. I have built a life and a family for myself on a foundation of love that is not conditioned around values that cause more harm than good.

I want you to know that there is beauty and delight and genuine freedom in this disarming of ourselves, the unraveling. The ferocity it takes to dismantle and rebuild a life is the same tender, untamed force that eventually leads you into a great clearing of your life. There, you discover that it was worth it. It was worth building resilience into your body, it was worth fighting for the freedom you craved. To no longer need to be perfect but to simply be—fully, wondrously alive and present to yourself. Alive and present to whatever lies beneath and above the places you rest your head, the places your feet have carried you. In all of it, we’re still allowed to count it all joy.