“There is a way to know,” he continued, as Jinger agreed. “Like, there is a confidence you can have.”
But that confidence should not be based in a sense of human control, which creates a “false sense of safety,” Jinger said.
“I think, sadly, we’ve all seen it. There have been so many people who you’ve seen get married and then,” said Jinger, “it just doesn’t work out or that person does end up turning into something that…this spouse didn’t think that they were.”
“I think that can happen around, you know, almost anywhere,” she said. “But at the same time, I think that there can be a safety.”
Jinger’s previous “false sense of safety” primarily came from the rules given to her by Bill Gothard’s system for living.
“We didn’t have it so blatantly like you did,” Jeremy said. “I didn’t know what I was looking for in terms of, like, who she is, but I knew I hadn’t found her.”
He described struggling with being single at one point when he was pastoring a church. “I genuinely just thought…‘I will never find someone who’s willing to marry me,’” he said.
“I wrote down in that season of loneliness characteristics that I was wanting in a wife,” said Jeremy, pointing out that they were good convictions. He wanted a wife who had a willingness to follow God and who had a love for people.
The very next week, Jeremy met Jinger’s sister, Jessa Duggar Seewald, and Jessa’s husband Ben, a meeting Jeremy described as “so cool and providential.”
Jeremy and Jinger agreed that it is important to have standards for a future spouse, but these standards should focus on following and obeying God.
“I didn’t care if she was in my theological vein. I didn’t care if she was from my culture,” said Jeremy. “I [didn’t] care if she thought the same way I thought about everything. I wanted a girl who submitted her life to the Word of God because that’s all I was trying to do is go, ‘I just want to live according to the Word.’”
“And you know what’s really interesting, love, is I found her,” he told Jinger. “That’s very cool. The second thing is, the only restriction given in Scripture to a Christian who wants to get married is in 1 Corinthians 7:39.”
“The requirement is you marry a Christian,” Jeremy said. “But we put on all these like extra like, ‘Oh, it’s got to be this…it’s got to be that.’”
But all the Bible says is, “Hey, marry who you’d like in the Lord. Don’t be unequally yoked,” he pointed out.
Jinger went on to describe how the idea of “guarding her heart” led her to be afraid to talk to boys or be herself around them. She also shared what it was like to be on the TV show and constantly have mothers approach her trying to set her up with their sons.
During that time, Jinger was looking for a man who followed Bill Gothard’s system because she felt safe in that system. Now, she is thankful to God for protecting her by bringing her a husband who was outside of that system.
Jeremy pointed out the “danger” of trusting in a system as opposed to trusting God. He also emphasized the danger of trusting a man who has lived entirely in a Christian bubble and whose faith has not been tested.
“For many of those men, they’d never actually been truly tested,” he said. “Do they really love the Lord? And how do you know?”
“What happened for a lot of those girls was they did marry that person,” said Jeremy. “He turns out to be a monster and now their life is a wreck because they never actually saw, is that man’s faith tested?”
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“I think that’s where we both had fear going into marriage,” he said, “because we’re like, ‘How do I know I’m not just marrying a guy who talks the talk but he doesn’t walk the walk?’”
Even once she was married, Jinger had unrealistic expectations for herself, thinking she needed to be happy all the time so that Jeremy would be pleased with her. He described that as being a “Stepford wife robot.”
What Jeremy actually wanted was for Jinger to be herself and to think for herself. Even now when she’s having a hard time, she at times worries that Jeremy will not be happy with her. “And then,” she said, “you’re like, ‘That’s ridiculous. Like, you can have hard days and that’s fine.’”
“You’re not in competition with anybody,” he told her. “You’re not competing for my heart.”
“I think that it can take years just to realize, no, that’s not how I should be thinking. That’s not what marriage is,” Jinger said. “And I think it’s been a beautiful thing because I’ve relaxed more.”
“The further into marriage we get, the more I realize, ‘Wow, this is so much fun,’” she said. “We get to do life together, and we are each other’s best friends for better, for worse, our hard days, our good days, like we’re doing life together.”
“You have done such a good job reminding me,” said Jinger, that “we’re a team.”
Jeremy returned to the idea that people can check all of the right boxes but have deceptive hearts, saying, “Some of the most manipulative people you know are religious people who know how to play the game and know how to answer everything right.”
