JESS, WAS YOUR MARRIAGE ARRANGED?

The woman in the video smiles nervously. With one hand in her lap and the other clinging to her new husband, fingers wrapped around his, she watches her wedding guests with a quiet frown. Occasionally she leans in toward him, catching his eye for reassurance. She looks happy, but wary, as if she’s worried about something going wrong, somebody saying the wrong thing, somebody misbehaving. She sips champagne tentatively, as first her father, then her husband, deliver long speeches, quoting Scripture and both raising a toast to Jesus. She paints on a shaky smile as the best man, her new brother-in-law, wearing his wife’s scarlet hat and dragging on a cigarette, wishes the happy couple a “let’s face it, FERTILE marriage”.

Her brother-in-law isn’t a member of the covenant community that she and her husband met in.

Half the room explodes into laughter. The other half smile politely.

She bites her lip, and quietly eats her strawberry cheesecake.

Watching my wedding video stirs up a melting pot of emotions. Hilarity, nostalgia, wistfulness (was I ever that tiny?). Sadness over the people who are no longer here – my Dad, my sister-in-law. But seeing it now, thirty-three years later, I am also shocked and furious. My daughter, aged twenty-six has a similar reaction as she watches the video with me.

“What the hell mum? Who are those people? I don’t even recognise you or Dad. You’re like…some kind of Stepford Wife. It’s like one of those… no offense…. cult documentaries.”

It is true. The woman in the video is nothing like the woman I am today, not just because she’s a UK size 10. And yet, it is me. I’ve written in another blog about pseudo personality (see BATH WATER, DOG TURDS AND MADONNA), and my wedding video is a visual example of this. It’s crystal clear to my daughter that I wasn’t just your average nervous bride. But as I observe the woman in the video I’m immediately drawn back into that world – a place where I had very little choice and very little freedom. A place where my ambitions and dreams were squashed into a tiny box labelled “God’s Will For My Life”, my horizons limited to the peripheries of the covenant community I had been recruited into. A place where coercion was normalised and felt like free will, and where courtship and marriage were…..what’s the right phrase here?..... Strongly Managed? Heavily Pastored? Supported With Compliance?

Dare I use the word Arranged?

Don’t get me wrong. I have absolutely no regrets that I married Peter. We have had a rollercoaster life together, a life that has been fun, hilarious, passionate, adventurous, turbulent and never dull. He is the only person who truly accepts and loves me as I am, who most importantly, always wants what is best for me, even if it’s not what is best for him. He makes me brave. Saying that, it’s been…. how shall I put this?.... a bit of a bumpy ride. We’re from completely opposite backgrounds and cultures. We have opposing priorities and preferences, and our energy is completely different. We have fought over almost every decision (where to live, how to educate our children, where to go on holiday, how to deal with other family members, how to prioritise finances etc etc). Our relationship has been stormy and I confess, I have wanted to give up on it at times, even when Peter has refused to contemplate that as an option. Another sign of how we do things differently (he’s a fighter, I’m a flighter). Eventually, after many years together, we sought proper professional help. Since then, things have steadily become less turbulent, but we continue to work very hard on ourselves and on keeping our relationship in a healthy place. But, safe to say it has been challenging, and we fully appreciate why some people decide to call it quits on staying together.

I’m sure that I’m describing most long-term relationships, right? Nothing new here. So, if my marriage has been kind of normal and worked out ok, and I describe myself as “happily married” after so long, why do I claim it was arranged? What am I complaining about?

Believe me, I didn’t come up with this concept on my own. In fact, the thought had never crossed my mind until recently. I always knew the way that Peter and I met was very weird, and our start in life was unusual to say the least, but also, we fell in love and married for love. How was our relationship any different from a couple meeting in an AmDram society or at College or at the local pub quiz night? Our son met his girlfriend speed dating. How was our situation more extreme than theirs? I never contemplated there was any “arranging” involved in how Peter and I got together.

Until a conversation with a Police Officer in 2020.

PC Jones (not her real name) was interested in my background in covenant community, and my relationship with a known paedophile, Jamie Treadwell (now on the sex offenders register in the US). My connection was that I’d been a colleague and friend of Jamie’s in the community and I’d called the UK police myself to pass on information to help with their timeline on him. PC Jones had been fascinated to know about the workings of the community from my perspective, and I’d told her in detail how I had been recruited into it, met my husband in it and lived for twenty years as a member before leaving. I’d explained I hadn’t been physically or sexually abused by anyone, but that I had felt coerced and manipulated, which after an hour of talking, led her to ask two questions that sent me reeling:

Jess, were you groomed?

Jess, was your marriage arranged?

I am pretty sure my first response was to laugh, but then I realised she was serious. I knew she had her professional safe-guarding hat on, but why had everything I’d said so far led her to ask me those two specific things? Arranged marriages don’t happen in UK Christian contexts do they? Not in little old harmless covenant communities where everyone is lovely. Besides, I loved Pete when I married him and I still love him today. Nobody forced us down that aisle. I didn’t know how to answer her. I hesitated. Eventually I said: “I don’t think so.” But the question made me go over the events leading to our marriage and made me start writing and talking about it with my counsellor, who is also trained in religious trauma and cult recovery.

THE RULES

To figure this conundrum out I had to start with what I remembered about the teaching and culture in our covenant community at the time we got married in 1989, and look back over official documents (Courtship and The Arrangement of Marriage in The Sword of The Spirit | PDF (scribd.com) – quoted below in italics.

· Recreational dating as it was called, was deemed to be unbiblical; no dating was tolerated unless the couple were intentionally exploring marriage. Spending one-to-one time with the opposite sex was considered to be a distraction from growing in Christian character.

· Dating was allowed once both parties had been “discerned for marriage”. This meant having prayed at length over whether God was calling you to consider being celibate for life or married. We were taught that we should not automatically assume we should be married, but the alternative was a formalised life-long commitment to simplicity, service and refraining from any sexual activity by joining the celibate Brotherhood or Sisterhood.

· If men decided they were “discerned for marriage”, with guidance from their pastoral leaders, they were encouraged to write a list of all the women in community that they were interested in dating. This was known as entering the “Acquaintance” stage. They had to decide based on a sound judgement that the person would be a suitable partner in leading a family. They were taught that this decision should not be based on romantic attraction or on an ability to “have fun” together. Commitment to the cult was a priority when looking for a potential spouse because it would lead to a better marriage.

· The men would ask out as many women as they wanted on their list. It was not unusual for a man to date women in the same household and men and women could go on several dates with as many people as they liked. Eventually the men had to narrow it down to one woman, in conversation with their pastoral leader. This stage two, was known as “Relationship”, which the man invited the woman into. The man was taught that he should be the leader in the process….taking initiative to move things forward and make the final decision where needed, although the woman was free to withdraw at any time.

· Women had to remain passive. If a woman was attracted to a man in the community she was not free to ask them out or speak to them directly about her feelings. She was expected to bury emotions and any sexual desire.

· Once in the “relationship stage” the couple were tasked with finding out as much about each other as they possibly could. This was not a time to heat up the relationship on a romantic level. They had to discuss values and beliefs around the big topics of finances, children, sex, family etc etc. If they were still compatible and usually (but not always) if they fell in love they would get engaged.

· Once engaged they were encouraged to get married as soon as possible. Of course, pre-marital sex was out of the question as was all physical contact that produced any form of sexual arousal. This included prolonged kissing (beyond a goodnight “peck”), petting, extended embracing and physical contact beyond holding hands.

· Every part of mine and Peter’s courtship was managed by our pastoral leaders (when we went on dates, how frequently, what we discussed, how affectionate we were with each other etc…). Our main pastoral leader was a celibate man who to our knowledge had never been in a long-term relationship and had made vows of celibacy for life. The teaching said: Though final decision about who to marry rests with the person himself (authors note: no mention of the woman here) the inexperience, impulsiveness, attraction and fear that often characterise people seeking a marriage partner lead normally to some lack of objectivity. In other words, it was considered that a man in his late thirties, who had lived as a celibate since his early twenties, was deemed to be an expert on relationships, sex and marriage despite his apparent lack of experience or qualification to advise on these matters.

· In practise, women were often sent to other communities around the world for gap years or to “serve”. They would sometimes live with families as the nanny/home-help/maid without payment and often would end up dating men abroad. Sometimes women did meet men that they fell in love with and married happily. Other times women would go so far as to get engaged to men without having feelings for them, and then called the engagements off. It was an unspoken understanding among the women that if you were sent abroad that a strong possible outcome would be that you’d come home engaged.

MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE OF THIS SYSTEM

Before I was recruited at fourteen, I never dreamed of getting married in my future, let alone having children. I was ambitious to have a career as a musician, travel the world, experience romances and fun and adventure. I dreamt of being in the spotlight, of having notoriety in my field, of enjoying every day doing the thing I loved most – making music. I was passionate and valued my freedom above all other things. But from the age of fourteen I had been coerced into believing that my innate dreams and desires were broken and would lead me into sin, that seeking fame was selfish and vain, that I was, in fact, inherently selfish and vain. I didn’t feel trusted, so I didn’t trust myself.

From the age of sixteen until I got married there were at least seven men who approached my parents or pastoral leader to ask permission to date me. All of them were older than me and I was expected to feel flattered. I was consulted every time and refused them all, even though one of them still stalked me for several months, followed me and pushed notes under my front door. There were also several lifelong celibate Brotherhood men who romantically pursued me both subtly and overtly, giving me gifts, writing me letters, holding my hand in secret, professing they loved me, telling me secrets, taking me on “non-dates”. This behaviour was always initiated by them and the strict teaching on segregation did not apply to these celibate men. I was blamed for enticing and distracting them when I raised questions about their behaviour or expressed discomfort. I mostly kept quiet, however, and didn’t voice any objection, thinking it was my fault for being attractive and apparently “flirtatious”. Looking back this was a subtler version of the modern day “dick pic” culture of sexually harassing women who are obviously “asking for it" because…well, they’re female. I should clarify that I always dressed modestly, avoided any tight clothing or low necklines as per the teaching. I’ve since discovered that many women have been on the receiving end of attention and harassment from celibate brothers in this way, some of them leading to decimation of character, shunning and actual sexual abuse. The leaders always favoured the brothers’ version of events, covered up their criminal activities and moved them on if necessary. The girls were gas lit, shamed, blamed and silenced. Some of these girls were still children when the sexual abuse started.

I was “discerned for marriage” around the age of 24. I went through a process called “praying through my state in life”, on my own. I don’t recall talking about it very much. I made my decision and told my pastoral leaders (a celibate man and a single woman) who agreed marriage was the right choice for me. I had a meeting with them to decide how to proceed and when I asked about going abroad, I was told they didn’t think that was “from the Lord”. I don’t recall how any specific potential partners were mentioned, whether the leaders said them first or if I did, but I remember leaving that meeting with two names to consider. One of those names was Peter’s. I was told I should pray about the two men in question, without thinking about my feelings, and ask God to make it clear who I was potentially most compatible with and therefore open to dating. I was strongly encouraged not to think about my feelings for either man, just to look at how committed they were to the cult, and chiefly, to seriously take into account that they were both Anglican (I was Catholic). These were deemed to be the two most important issues at stake. After I prayed for two weeks and told them I was interested in Peter because I knew him better, I was informed he was “quite interested in me” and to expect a phone call.

I was not given any other possible option for my future. I was not asked if there was anything else that I wanted for my life. I was not encouraged to think broadly or consider any alternative other than one of being married in the London Community to a male member of the London Community. I was not asked if I had strong feelings for anyone else, (which I actually did, and had for about 10 years) inside the community or outside. I inherently believed I had been prepared for that moment, that God was calling me to it, that God willed it, that God required it of me, and that my long-held, selfish feelings for someone I’d been told was unavailable were broken and wrong. I inherently believed that an alternative choice (travel, career etc…) would mean leaving the Community, which equalled to a lesser call, a lesser life, even the risk of a loss of faith. I was absolutely convinced, because I had been groomed for this moment, that making any other choice was equal to disobedience to God himself. When I went to that meeting I had been successfully groomed into a young woman who was pliable and easily convinced that my sole purpose in life was to be a wife and mother in the London branch of the cult.

NORMALISED COERCION

Let me be emphatically clear here: in the twenty years I spent in community it was very rare that anyone gave me a strongly directive instruction regarding my life’s decisions. Nobody told me outright to do anything. In fact the opposite – they would usually tell me I was free to choose, and encouraged me to pray and fast. Interestingly they never encouraged me to seek advice outside the community. The coercion was far more subtle, far more manipulative than that. It was normalised coercion.

· It was done through spoken prayers over me, sometimes by one person, sometimes by a number, laying their hands on me and speaking phrases that were filled with loaded insinuation: For example -

Lord help Jessica to see where she is resisting your will for her. Lord help Jessica to see how loved and accepted she is by You and that repentance will give her freedom and joy. Lord we know how much Jessica desires humility and faithfulness to You and to the call on her life to community.

· It was done through the constant repetition of songs filled with phrases that stripped me of my sense of self: For example -

My life’s not my own.

What more can I do to be pleasing to you?

God alone, God alone.

More of You and less of Me.

· It was done through one-to-one conversations that began with phrases like:

I’m just speaking the truth in love.

I’m just being a good sister/brother and holding you accountable, which is what you’ve agreed to right?

· It was done through dualistic (black and white) preaching that resulted in an over emphasis on spiritualising every aspect of my life.

· It was done through the example of others, the group culture, the narrative fed to us by leaders, the isolation from the wider world and the hours of “should”- laden teaching that was repeated to us weekly and delivered in a hypnotic, almost soporific tone by men who were smiley and gentle in their delivery, after we had enjoyed the euphoric spiritual experience of sung worship.

I did not need to be told outright I had to marry one of the two men mentioned in that meeting. I had already undergone a decade of brainwashing and grooming and the whole of my life (where I lived, what I studied, how I dressed, how I spoke, what I thought, how I spent my free time, what I did when I graduated, what I thought about myself) had been “arranged” by community leaders for years, because by twenty-four the way I prioritised my decisions was absolutely concrete-dipped, set in stone, and encased in granite.

Covenant Community (sometimes dressed up and disguised as God Himself), always came first.

I’m terrified to admit that as I read through all that toxic teaching for this article, I still, even now, have nano-seconds of thinking “hmm yes I can see why that makes sense”.

ARRANGED MATCH OR LOVE MATCH?

The good news is that me and Peter fell in love very quickly. He asked me on a date and after 3 or 4 pub lunches together he asked me to “enter into a relationship” with him. If he’d ask me to marry him that day I would have said “yes”. Turns out I couldn’t switch off my feelings once they kicked in. We courted for six months, got engaged and were married six months later, almost a year to the day of our first date. Peter considers that he had far more options and control over his life than I did. While he acknowledges that from my perspective our marriage was arranged, from his it wasn’t. He was 19 when he was recruited, had more autonomy and self-confidence and was lucky to be born with a penis, which was a bonus in community. He also felt early on that we were meant to be together, a thing he used to explain as “God told me”, but now finds better explanation in the realm of psychology and neuroscience. He broke protocol and only had my name on his list while also making it very clear to all his housemates to stay away from me before he had asked me out.

However, I have concluded that for me, our marriage was arranged.

WAS IT WRONG?

There is nothing wrong with marriage and family. Those things have been fulfilling, wonderful parts of my life, and I do not regret them for a second. But, my freedom, my choice, was taken away from me. The Community teaching on courtship etc… was not a simple, innocent dating policy, akin to a fundamentalist dating agency or Christian version of Tinder. It was a system that had (has) misogyny at its very core. It was a system that made women like me feel like possessions, like business tender, like meat. That moved us around, quietly and sometimes overtly bullied us, took away our voices, shamed us if we complained, bombarded us with loaded language that blurred the lines between God and power- hungry men. It was a system that made us numb to what was happening to us and normalised coercion. Just because we fell in love and are still married doesn’t mean that system wasn’t toxic on many levels. Other people, married in covenant communities all over the world have not been as lucky as Peter and I. There are accounts from women tricked into marrying closeted gay men, abusive men, unfaithful men and violent men; many women’s lives were turned into decades of raising and sometimes home schooling children, (not a choice that I want to criticise here, except to say that it sometimes robbed them of confidence, or left them with no assets or independent means, no experience in the work place and if their marriages turned sour, no easy means of getting away from harmful situations. Not to mention the mental anguish some found themselves in); a number of couples in arranged community marriages across the world have divorced. The cult loves to boast about how much it supports family life successfully but turns a blind eye to the hundreds of decimated lives it has left in its wake other than shaking its proverbial head and sighing “mistakes were made” or “things are different now.” It doesn’t like to acknowledge it has some responsibility for the divorces, mental breakdowns, suicides, child abuse, sexual harassments, overdoses, trauma from conversion therapy etc etc. Not to mention the loss of meaningful and healthy spirituality.

It is irrelevant that Peter and I are still together or that we wouldn’t want to be married to anyone else. Even though now after thirty-three years we are the strongest we have ever been, this is no thanks to the warped teaching that was groomed into us when we were young. That teaching, and that spiritual abuse has actually caused us most of the difficulties and challenges in our married life. We’ve had to unpack it slowly and carefully both together and separately. So yes, we have a “successful marriage” (whatever that is) but it’s no credit to being in covenant community for twenty years. Thanks for reading.

Jess