Question
I hope you can help, because this is probably the hardest thing I have ever had to deal with in my lifetime. I am a 20-year-old college that is white who is very close to her family. My boyfriend of nine months is a 23-year-old of a race that is different a different part of the world. We met as counselors at a summer Christian camp where we had the wonderful opportunity to counsel together and bring five kids to Christ. He has the qualities that are wonderful I look for in a man.
What is so hard is the known fact that my parents disapprove of this relationship. I have talked to them only once that I was going to discontinue the relationship about it and after seeing their hurt, led them to believe. I actually had the intention of doing so but could not do it, me so happy and been such a wonderful part of my life because he has made. It seems that whichever way I go, I desperately hurt either my boyfriend or my parents. I don’t want to go against either one, but I know I must not keep the relationship a secret forever. I know I know I want to be happy too that I am my parents’ last hope, but. I have tried to picture me and my boyfriend in the future, with my family, but that is hard. If you have some encouragement or words of advice for me, that would be great. Thanks for listening.
Answer
You must do the thing that is right not the thing which pleases your boyfriend or your parents. Family considerations are far from unimportant in deciding what the right thing is, because then your birth family and the young man’s birth family will be related from now on, and hostility between the families will affect him, you, and your children if you marry the young man. Even so, doing the right thing is not the same as doing what makes your parents happy, and you are not their last hope. I hope they haven’t been laying that on you.
Doing the right thing does include considering why your parents disapprove of the relationship, and whether their reasons are sound. Unfortunately, I can’t here help you because you don’t say what your parents’ reasons are. You mention the difference of race between you and your boyfriend — which suggests that their reasons may be based on racial prejudice — but you don’t actually say that they are. In fact, you don’t mention any of their reasons at all.
If your parents do reject the relationship just because they dislike persons of different skin color, then they are being unreasonable. But then their thinking may or may not be sound if(for example) they disapprove of the relationship because they think you’re rushing into it — or because they fear that the cultural gap may be too great to bridge, or because they don’t consider you mature enough to marry, or naughtydate because they know something unfavorable about the young man which you aren’t telling me. I simply haven’t the given information to judge.
One thing that is last. Whatever the right thing is, secrecy couldn’t be part of it. You shouldn’t demand it, and your boyfriend shouldn’t put up with it. Doing things in the dark can bring nothing but sin, dishonesty, misery, and division of counsel. Put an end to the secrecy, not tomorrow, not tonight, but today.
Grace and peace,
Copyright Professor Theophilus. All rights reserved.