by Kathryn Vercillo

Created on: March 22, 2009   Last Updated: March 28, 2009

My Spiritual Journey and My Relationship

When I discovered that my boyfriend had been lying to me about his religious background, a schism was created that I thought we would never overcome. As our relationship began to fall apart around us, I found myself spending more and more time in my yoga classes in order to keep breathing and to stay sane. This led to an interest in Eastern religion, an interest not even remotely shared by my boyfriend. Strangely enough, it was the fact that we took entirely different spiritual paths at this time that ultimately allowed us to come back to one another and to resume our relationship with newfound strength.

I am one of those twenty-first century young adults who was raised without religion in the home. My father was raised Catholic, my mother was raised Jewish and other than the celebrations of Christmas with one grandmother and Channukah with the other, we never discussed any sort of God in the home. As a result, I have a natural curiosity for religion but no real understanding of most faiths. This came up in conversation with my boyfriend more than once during the first few years that we were together and he would listen with seeming interest. I'd ask curious questions about his religious upbringing and he'd vaguely mention that they went to church as kids and then he would change the subject.

As relationships go on, we begin to notice those things that just aren't quite right. We ignore them for awhile and then eventually they blow up on us. That is what happened with the case of religion. The blow-up came when my boyfriend revealed that he had grown up inside of a cloistered Christian religion, one which had seriously impacted his belief system and ultimately shattered his ability to trust any sort of religious faith. In bits and pieces, he revealed a past littered with almost cult-like allegiance to a certain way of thinking. And as I became increasingly aware of his inability to detach from the guilt-inducing beliefs of his childhood, I began to realize that the differences between us were many.

Neither of us handled it very well when these differences began to reveal themselves to the light. The short version is that one or both of us panicked and we ended up splitting up even though neither of us really wanted to. We didn't know how to reconcile our differences. When we broke up, I felt as though my world had come to a halt. I didn't feel like I could breathe. I didn't know if I would ever breathe again. And that

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