Trying to Fix What Wasn’t Broken

The first time my would-be wife came to my house, she perused over my bookshelves and said, “I’m a little concerned about all these books on codependency.”

“Oh… They were for a class.” It was a lie.

In the early 1990s, I believed I was broken. I’d been called co-dependent by someone I loved, and the word landed like judgment. I didn’t question it. I swallowed it whole.

I found a copy of Melody Beattie’s Codependent No More and read it like scripture. Underlined passages. Journaled about detachment. Memorized the language of boundaries and “taking responsibility for my own feelings.” I was determined to root out whatever flaw had made me too much—too emotional, too attached, too present, too invested. I thought I was doing the work of healing. Looking back, I think I was just a girl in love with her best friend. And I got jealous. We weren’t allowed to call it love, of course. Not in the church communities we were part of. Not in the late 80’s and early 90’s purity culture where Christian women were supposed to be “sisters” in Christ, but never soulmates. Never lovers. Never more.

So when my longing broke through—when it showed up in my body, in my grief, in my desperate need to feel chosen—I didn’t have language for love. I only had labels. Co-dependent. Inappropriate. Confused. The message was clear: the problem wasn’t the system that refused to recognize queer love. The problem was me.

So I tried to fix myself. I spiritualized detachment. I repented of “emotional enmeshment.” I tried to un-need the person who had become the center of my emotional universe. I took my heartbreak underground and called it maturity. Growth. Surrender.

But here’s what I know now: I wasn’t broken. I was human. I was in love. And I had no roadmap. That longing? That wasn’t pathology. That was connection. That was real. And it was mine.

It has taken me decades to unwind the shame that got tangled up in that first love. Decades to see how easily we pathologize the emotional lives of women. How quickly we label intimacy as unhealthy if it threatens the roles we’re supposed to play. How often queer love gets rewritten as dysfunction—because it doesn't fit the script.

It took me even longer to let God back into that story. For years, I thought God had condemned that part of me. I thought God required me to “die to self,” and I assumed my love—my need—was part of the self that had to die. But that theology was shaped more by patriarchy than gospel. More by fear than grace.

Now, I believe that God is not afraid of longing. God is not scandalized by deep connection. God does not diagnose attachment as sin. The God I know now is the one who weeps outside Lazarus’s tomb. The one who refuses to let go of Peter even after betrayal. The one who breaks bread with Judas. The one who says, “I will not leave you orphaned.” The one who stays.

Sometimes I still grieve what might have been if the world had been safer—if we’d had language, support, or space to name the love we shared. But I no longer see that grief as evidence of dysfunction. I see it as evidence of how deeply I loved, and how much that love shaped me.

If I could go back and speak to that younger version of myself—the one clutching a dog-eared copy of Codependent No More, convinced that she was the problem—I wouldn’t tell her to stop reading. I’d tell her to keep learning. But I’d also tell her: You’re not broken. This was love. And love is not a sin. I'd tell her that she can want closeness without apology. That needing someone doesn’t make her weak. That healthy relationships involve interdependence, not isolation. That queer love is holy. And that God isn’t standing over her with a diagnosis—God is sitting beside her in the dark, saying, “I see you. You are not too much. You are mine.”