I should never have married, but my Sydney church left me few options

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Teacher Steph Lentz made headlines in 2021 when she went public about being lawfully sacked for being gay by a Sydney Christian school. Before coming out she spent many years as a deeply devoted member of the Sydney Anglican Church and married her equally devout husband in 2014.

On the morning of my wedding day, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling rose in my mum’s spare room, following its concentric circles of colour and ornate moulding. I’d awoken early to the hubbub of bridesmaids and hairdressers arriving, a flurry of buttoned blouses and freshly washed locks. I claimed this quiet moment for myself, conscious that as soon as I emerged into the living room a gaggle of beautifiers would make a big fuss and the momentum of the day would only build from there.

Steph Lentz on her wedding day.Credit: Sheer Image Photography

Once I was up and had consumed my first coffee, I settled in to have my makeup done, The Sound of Music playing on the TV in the background – it’s still my favourite film of all time and, on that day, I was grateful to have something familiar folded into events that felt overwhelming and strange. If Fraulein Maria can do it, so can I.

My wedding dress hung on the back of my mum’s bedroom door. I delayed for as long as possible the moment when I stepped out of my Qantas pyjama pants and into the chiffon skirt.

I watched in the full-length mirror as my mum laced me into the bodice. I’d had the dress handmade out of vintage cream fabrics bought on sale at Tessuti. When I look at my wedding photos I don’t recognise the woman wearing it. For years, I’d dreamed of marriage in the abstract because of the esteemed position it had in my Christian worldview – and because it was the norm in society outside the church, too. But my abiding memory of that day, April 19, 2014, is of gritting my teeth. It felt like what it was: a turning point from which I couldn’t come back.

I clung to my mum as we rode together in the car to the church. I clutched her arm as my bridesmaids arranged my veil and the minister walked inside to ask the congregation to stand for the processional. I held fast to her as the music played – a song I’d written for Ben about God’s priority in our relationship – and the girls, including Laura and my sister Emilie, walked down the aisle one by one. I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to feel, so I guess I thought my low-key anxiety and nebulous uncertainty were … appropriate?

Teacher Steph Lentz was sacked by her Christian school after she came out as gay.Credit: Kate Geraghty

Though I didn’t know it until Emilie told me later that day, my dad was up the back of the church, watching the procession and vows, then leaving during the final song. My relationship with him was and remains complicated, but I am glad he made an appearance.

When the moment arrived, I turned to my mum and saw we were both clenching our jaws, close to tears. Were hers happy tears? Was she emotional because I was the first cab off the rank?

Or was it because she’d got married in this very church decades earlier? Was she scared for me, considering how her own marriage had panned out? I didn’t know and still don’t. I squeezed her hand, and off we went towards the altar.

Perhaps knowing the trajectory of my life you’re reading this and asking: Why on Earth did you go through with it? Hadn’t enough reasonable doubt been cast on Ben’s and my compatibility to make me stop and think before jumping into something as serious as a marriage?

The cover of Steph Lentz’s memoir.

The monitum that marriage celebrants must read out when they officiate at weddings includes the statement that marriage is, according to Australian law, an exclusive union “voluntarily entered into for life”. I entered into my marriage voluntarily. Nobody forced me to marry Ben, or even to get married at all. Despite this, as I went through with it, I had a deep-seated intuition that despite marriage’s ubiquity it wasn’t right for me. I’ve agonised over the question of why I got married. Was I really so stubborn? Did I possess so little self-awareness? Was my imagination about what life could be so limited that this was what I chose?

I’ve reflected that there were the stock-standard reasons that many people get hitched – marriage would make life easier, financially and socially, and bring a measure of security and legal protection. A double-income household is almost non-negotiable, given the cost of living in Sydney today, and in local communities married couples tend to keep lock-step in life stages, sustaining friendships on the basis of shared routines as they birth and raise children.

But there were other, mostly religious, reasons, starting with purity culture. Ben and I had been together for a few laps around the sun when we got married. The only things we hadn’t done – living and sleeping together – lay beyond the boundary line of marriage. Purity culture’s emphasis on God’s requirement of premarital virginity (and fear of the consequences of failure) propelled us into marriage. We were not alone. Countless young men and women (sometimes barely out of high school) with little relational or sexual experience enter lifelong commitments that are said to reflect in microcosm the divine love of Christ for the church. In my view, this is a huge calling, its seriousness way beyond the ken of such youngsters. Purity culture accelerates relationships between horny kids who’ve been taught to avoid all things sexual until their wedding night, with little consideration as to whether this ideal is realistic or healthy.

As someone who spiritualised everything, I bought into what our church taught us regarding the falseness of the Hollywood fairytale, but I over-corrected, expecting love to be hard. I even became suspicious when things were too good or easy. I anticipated suffering and conflict and interpreted their presence as a sign that my relationship was honouring God. I believed that the watching world needed pictures of marriages like Ben’s and mine, to show what God’s love is like. By becoming “one flesh”, we were mirroring Divine Love. Our marriage would not be about us, primarily; rather, it would be about how we reflected the love God has for the church. As we exchanged our vows – words borrowed from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (seventeenth century) – we were joining a great cloud of witnesses who had taken their places, two by two, in this historic tradition called marriage.

My religion had also taught me to undervalue self-knowledge. Instead, we lauded “self-forgetfulness”. (Side note: when it came to selecting the songs we sang at church, the ministers vetoed those with too much of a focus on “me” – my love for God, my gratitude, my intention to live for him – in preference of songs that made statements about him.) Self-forgetfulness helps to explain why, rather than interrogating my instincts and intuitions (including those relating to my attraction to women), I ignored them and condemned myself for possessing sinful inklings. I lived a “fake it ’til you make it” sort of life in the direction of the desires I knew I was meant to have: for marriage to a Christian man, and children.

It didn’t help that I hadn’t seriously considered what other path my life might take. Other than married mothers and missionaries, I had few models for what women could do with their lives. The church didn’t encourage mind-broadening experiences – like travelling or even reading alternative theological perspectives – because they might lead one astray.

In fact, the more I’ve analysed my formation in the church, and the more I’ve read about marriage and about Sydney Anglicanism, the more confident I am that the fault wasn’t all mine. Behind the decision I made to get married stood an institution and a politics that, in a very real sense, left me with few other choices. Operating beneath the personal reasons why I married Ben, there was a network of power relations that set me up perfectly to assume I was heterosexual and that marriage was the best option for me.

Extracted from In/Out by Steph Lentz, published by ABC Books.

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