Long Day Factory
The next part of "Between You and Me"
There was a time in my life where I thought that women only brought pain into my life. It’s very embarrassing to say, it really is, but just hear me out. Sometimes logical conclusions we make from our experiences are surprisingly illogical. Sometimes the narratives we make about our lives are powerfully convincing and yet are so very false.
When I was a kid, I didn’t dream about becoming a movie star or playing professional football — I dreamt and prayed to God that I would be a godly husband. I spent nights of my childhood fantasizing about coming home from the Long Day Factory, hanging my top hat on the coat rack and kissing my wife who was waiting for me at the door.
And then I entered the public school system. I realized quickly that I wasn’t a dashing savant who would marry his high school sweetheart. I was more like a dork who wore giant glasses, a brown polo, and had long greasy hair. So my identity — the things I built my measure of success on — was in shambles. It’s looking like at the ripe age of 13 I have not only forfeited my dream of becoming a godly husband, but it was something that was beyond my control.
I became vain. Not a vanity that drives people to dress better, but the kind of vanity that drives people to dress worse, to take less care of themselves, to show up with your head and shoulders down.
And all at once I drew a thick line between the unjust black and white of the world: “There are people who are attractive, and people who are not. The attractive people get what they want from the world. They achieve success, they get married. People who aren’t attractive, don’t.”
Don’t so many of us find ourselves in this way of thinking?
Yet despite this, I fought against all odds. I thought to myself that even if I didn’t find myself attractive or desirable, I can trick women into finding me attractive.
A cursory glance of the world and a precise assessment of your average couples yields compelling results: if you aren’t attractive physically, you can win them over if you’re funny.
What a relief! At least I can be funny.
But then look, here’s my best friend from high school. Unfortunately, he’s tall, he’s good looking, and worst of all — he’s funny.
Oh, he’s dating the girl I liked.
Oh, he’s dating the other girl I liked.
Oh, wow, uh… he did it a third time.
At this point I’m a sophomore in high school. I had a journal where I wrote in all caps how much I hated myself.
It’s so clear — my dreams are never going to happen because I’m short, I’m not good looking, and I’m not really that funny.
I’m fighting an uphill battle I can’t win.
There’s a kid somewhere inside me in all of this who is gently saying something like:
“Hey God, why did you make me look like this? I’ve tried so hard to work within the limitations you’ve given me! I tried being funny! In fact, I think girls do think I’m funny now, but they are still rejecting me. Why do you make some people defective? Why did you make me one of them? In this world of winners and losers, you chose to make me like this.”
In college, I had fully determined that no matter what my perception of myself was, I was going to live by a very simple rule: “no outstanding crushes.”
I would ask out every girl I was interested in. I’m more mature now, I know that it has to be impossible that all the girls think I’m ugly!
Oh how the rejection flowed! Liberally! I found myself absorbing rejections every two to three weeks. I would walk into college dorms every day, rip my shirt off, flex in the mirror, and say with consistent confident certainty, “Guys, I found my wife today!”
I wish that was how bad it got. I really do. Somebody stop this train.
But then she graced me with her terrifying awe. To my surprise, she accepted the date (I basically cornered her into going). She waltzed through the world, effortlessly gliding in circles with her roller skates.
I asked her on a second date, she said no.
Ouch. But you know me, I’m the suffering artist here. I’m the melancholy lover of this grand narrative of life. I rise above the odds. I love when there’s no love coming back.
I asked her out again, she politely declined.
My thoughts were flooded again with her floral visage. Does the romantic back down? Does the man whose convictions so blanket his heart let the mild perturbance of life’s foxes kill the vineyard of our love?
No! Certainly not.
I courageously asked her out again—over text.
“No. Certainly not.”
I had an inkling at this point that something in me was terribly broken. Like something stretching back through my soul, through my greasy hair in 7th grade, through my pacifier as an infant, through my mother, through my father, through my grandfather, through my ancestors, through Jesus, through King David, through Adam and Eve was twitching and straining against me at that very moment and cosmically calling my utmost attention…
But then…
Oh, but then…
She arrived! The chosen one! … The promised wife! Not only the fulfillment of my childhood dreams, but my present and future ones.
Needless to say, I spent my whole life waiting for someone like her to show up. And she came to know quickly the full force of that sentiment. In my mind, she was more of a drug than a person. In a mysterious collage of events, she became a proof to me.
She proved to me that I really wasn’t ugly, that all of those pages of notebooks that I wrote about myself were all just a deception.
She proved to me that God cares, that He sees those who are suffering and provides them with good things. Maybe I wasn’t accursed after all to be a loser!
And most importantly, and through all of it, she proved to me finally that I was lovable. The weight of that being proven was worth the weight of all of life itself.
I figured out how to rig the system so I could spend the whole summer between junior and senior year of college living in her parents’ backyard in a camper, working for her brother and father’s oil rig business. It was hard work fracking in the 12 hour days of Pennsylvania summer, but the smallest of prices to pay for her. I never complained once about anything. My dreams were unraveling right before my eyes. As I drove around the property, cutting around the grass-shrouded oil pumps and wiping grease onto my blackened jeans, my mind became utterly consumed with our wedding, with our eventual union. I became lovesick. For the first time in my life, my heart felt a deep physical pain when I thought of someone. I remember thinking that it was impossible to love someone any more than I did then.
Words cannot describe the ecstasy of this situation. I felt as though I fell through the world into a completely different dimension, like my entire worldview of being unlovable was merely a nightmare, and she was my great awakening.
So what happens when she leaves?
Heartbreak did not happen. It was more like hatred. It was contempt. It really wasn’t even her I was mad at, it was me.
No, it wasn’t me, it was God.
If God chooses to give children dreams without guaranteeing their fulfillment, what perversion of a reality do we then find ourselves in?
Anger happened. A bitter disdain for life and beauty and meaning happened.
And now we arrive at the conclusion that women only bring pain into my life.
Eventually, through the help of wiser old guys, I figured out that there were two versions of reality I had to choose between.
1) I am correct. Women hate me, and my dreams will never become a reality. There is sufficient cause and a sound, logical argument to be made for becoming increasingly pessimistic and depressed about my lot in life and the nature of reality.
2) I am wrong.
And I decided that I would rather be wrong than for number 1 to be true. It took the humbling of that breakup to get to a point where I would even consider I was wrong, but here I am.
I found myself sitting across from two counselors, a grandmother and a grandfather. She kept pulling up pictures of her 3-year-old grandson eating watermelon. I have to admit, it really helped grease the wheels and it helped me view them both with enough goodwill to tell them that… well… I hated women.
They had me go through agreements I made with myself; things that I had told myself about myself and about the nature of reality. It was surprisingly clinical. I thought our 3-day session was going to be super emotional and like all the anger and bitterness of my childhood would come flooding out through healing tears, but it wasn’t that way. It looked like me coming into agreement with a Father, like signing a paper that allows the surgeon to perform surgery whilst acknowledging the risks. It looked like shredding old legal documents and signing new ones.
For example,
— “I break agreement with the lie that I am ugly and will never find a wife — she will not be there for me, and God will not help me find her.”
— I replace this agreement, based on the Finished Work of Christ on the cross, that “I trust God to bring loving, life-giving people into my life. My wife is one of these people. I trust in His timing.”
See? It’s not that complicated. I just had to agree with grandma that I’m not going to believe that lie anymore and we made sure there was something robust from God to replace it. And here’s the other crazy thing. It worked. I just don’t really think that women are out to get me anymore. I view myself as reasonably handsome. I don’t really think about the insecurities I had in my childhood. And her? The chosen one? Well, it just didn’t work out! No worries! Aren’t breakups and love lost the most normal things in the world? Don’t these songs about last Christmas have billions of streams? Feel the levity of that?
And you can do it too. I didn’t get that new belief about myself from a textbook. Hell, I didn’t even get it from the Bible. I gave the lie to God and asked Him for a new belief. See how simply relational that is? It’s a conversation from a father to his daughter where he lifts her whole tiny face up with his two gentle hands, presses his forehead up against her and says sternly, “You are beautiful!”
He will answer you too. Give it a shot. Get a couple people together who want to sign some new legal documents and just take it seriously. The lies are more powerful and deceptive than you’d think, and so is the incredible conquering of them through the Truth, Christ crucified. We’ll be waiting for you on the other side, when you get tired of the worldview you have, when the pain of carrying your deception hurts more than the identity you get from it.
So, in an attempt to put my happily-ever-after on this chapter, I’ll say this:
She was the kind of girl that was amazingly talented, relationally genius, and angelic in her innocence. Even now, I have no use or even the remotest desire to cut her down in any way. She is honestly just a great person, and an awesome member of society. She’s going to be a teacher, God bless her. World knows America needs some more good teachers!
But we have only scratched the surface. God is still hiding, waiting to be found in the heavenly game of hide-and-seek. And as much as I’d like to pretend I’m writing this from a distanced, grey-beard stroking voice, that counseling session was last week.
I have so much I am learning, so rapidly. So many agreements were broken in those holy moments — so much forgiveness. A dam is bursting in my heart as you read these words on the holy ground of my life. Again, this whole thing is not about sharing the right answers; it’s about sharing what God is showing me in narrative form, so thank you for your patience.
Tune in next time where I write about something a little more ethereal, more heavenly. Literally. I told God how I want my mansion to look in heaven, and I kind of want to tell somebody about it, so I’ll see you next month!
Welcome to Between You and Me. It’s called that because I ask that we keep this between us two. A lot of these things are quite personal, y’know? Wouldn’t want these things floating around on the internet where Christians can whip my words with the Bible, would we?
But it’s also called Between You and Me because there is a lot between me and God. There’s a lot between God and me and all of us, isn’t there? This book is an attempt to name those things so they can be healed. One chapter at a time.
Waylon Woody is a writer and minister living in West Milford, NJ.
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