Neomadman, excuse me for being nosey, but your love story sounds very interesting. Have you posted it to the board? Would you like to? Congratulations on your amazing progress!
I've certainly posted it at least in parts. Not sure I could quickly locate a post that gives a lot of details. The essence of it is that my current wife and I dated during my senior year of high school (her junior year). I took her to my senior prom in May of 1969. After that, we stopped dating, not because I didn't want to be with her, but because I was in the process of becoming a JW, and as you know, "worldly" girlfriends were frowned upon. I was baptized 2 months after the prom. I did my JW thing, she went off to college a year later. I ran into her in town once or twice over the next few years when she was home from school, and we were friendly but nothing ever happened.
In 1977, I found her address in Manhattan, and actually went there to "drop in" on her just to see if she would still be interested in me (at that point, I was sufficiently fed up with the way the JWs treated people that I was again considering a "worldly" girlfriend). As I found out later, she had moved to New Jersey only a couple of weeks prior to that, and I never made contact.
A month after that, I met a JW girl, and eventually married her, beginning 23 years in the hell that JWs don't think exists. My ex is a diehard JW, won't listen to anything negative about the org, and sees demons behind every bush. She thinks that witches are following her around all the time to get her to join their coven - because as one of God's "true people" she would be quite a prize. Besides that, she was explosive and violent.
In 1994 we were involved in an auto accident, and both ended up getting massage therapy as part of the treatment for our injuries. Turns out she was getting some, uh, "special attention" from her (male) therapist, if you get my drift. She kept going back to him weekly for 10 months, then tried to claim that he had "molested" her. She even went to the police, who laughed at her - a woman in her 40's who is being "molested" doesn't keep going back. The therapist eventually did end up in jail for giving some of his special attention to a teenage girl who complained the first time. She went to the elders and claimed that the therapist was a witch who had cast spells on her to force her to keep coming, and the elders bought it.
Anyway, in 2000 she heard a talk at the summer convention that made her realize that her activities with the massage therapist could be regarded as porneia, and could be grounds for divorce. We were now in a new congregation, and she went to the new set of elders and confessed that - guess what - it wasn't the spells after all, but she had been a willing participant. These elders also bought the revised story and told her she was free to get a divorce if she wanted. Which she promptly did. I think the real intent was to force me back to the Kingdom Hall (I had become inactive by that time and was gaining a reputation as an apostate - though a lot of the reputation was her doing). But there was no way I was going back. So we divorced, and she took everything she could get in terms of property and money - and she basically got it all, plus lifetime alimony.
A few months after we split, I started wondering about my high school sweetheart whom I had not seen in 30 years. I had seen her name on classmates.com, but never connected with her. But around this same time, my father had died, and some of my relatives gathered at my cousin's house on New Years Day of 2001. My uncle brought a big box of pictures, photos of family from generations back, some I had never heard of. But there was one picture from prom nite. The two of us standing in front of my friend's 1967 Firebird, which I had borrowed to take her to the prom. I looked at it a lot, and thought about it a lot...then I went home and emailed her. And she responded. Turns out she had been widowed a few years earlier. We had dinner together about a month later for the first time I had seen her in over 30 years. And on October 7, 2001, we were married. My (now inactive) JW daughter (the only good thing to come out of my first marriage) stood up for me at the wedding.
So yeah, it really is a happy ending.