I left my country to study, but because I was so lonely, I had sex with a girl from the country I’m living in and she became pregnant. For fear of her family and of not knowing the laws of this country, I agreed, “without feeling it,” to marry her because I felt her pressuring me to do so. She wants to go to my country after the baby is born. But what hurts me the most is that I don’t love her. I want the child, and want to have him with me; but for that to happen I have to marry her.
I don’t know what to do. I always wanted to marry for love, not because of feeling I had no choice. Can it be that God wants me to be married without being in love?
Dear Friend,
It’s interesting that your last sentence is about what God would want. Before you had sex with the girl, did you ask yourself, “Would God want me to join myself physically to a girl that I am not married to and that I do not love?”
Friend, the way you tell your story makes you the victim in all of it. You say you originally had sex with the girl because you were lonely, as if being lonely makes it right. You say that you don’t know the laws of the country where you are living, as if you can’t find out what the laws say about your situation. And you lead us to believe they are all pressuring you to do what you don’t want to do, as if you have no power to make your own decision.
Rather than being a victim, however, you are the person responsible for your own actions. Now that you have disregarded God’s principle about not having sex before marriage,(1) you find yourself without any good options. When you first became intimate with the girl, you made a decision that would ultimately bring you to this dilemma. What you chose then has limited your options now. That is the way life works.
Neither of your options will get you what you want, so you must decide which you can live with for the rest of your life. God has ordained marriage to be until one of you dies, so we cannot recommend marriage unless you are willing to faithfully live with this girl for your entire lifetime. It would be no different than the arranged marriages of the Bible, or the arranged marriages of people in some other countries. You can make the decision to learn to love her, showing love with your actions, even before you start to feel it. And you can choose to start your family now, making a commitment for a lifetime, even if you never experience the feelings of love that you are looking for.
Or you can walk away from your child. Many men do it every day. They leave girls scarred for life, and children who grow up wondering what they did wrong to not have a father. Of course, the only right and honest and honorable thing to do would be to support the child financially and to see him as much as possible. Being from another country makes this complicated, but not impossible. This would be your primary financial commitment until the child is an adult, and any girl that you would want to marry in the future would need to agree that you would continue to make the child your first financial priority.
You are not a victim here! The child is the victim. What are you going to do about it that will be right for your child?
I trust you make the right decision,
Linda
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1 1Co 6:9-10; Eph 5:5; Heb 13:4; Rev 21:8; 22:14-15