I met Emmanuel before he entered the seminary, when he was still trying to figure out what path God wanted him to walk. I didn’t know that falling in love with him meant I would be sharing him with heaven. I also didn’t know that love could feel this much like waiting in the doorway of someone’s life without ever being invited to fully step inside. The truth is, Emmanuel loves me. Everyone can see it. When he comes home from school, there is no space between us, not even air. We do everything lovers do. Secretly: we talk, we laugh, we dream, we touch, we lose track of time. Even my parents know him and have accepted him in their own quiet way.

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But the problem is I am not the only one he is committed to. He is also committed to God. He tells me all the time, “Shirley, you know I love you. But I can’t leave the priesthood.” Yet he won’t let me go either. He doesn’t want to lose me, but he also doesn’t want to choose me. So, I am stuck in the middle, holding on to a man who holds on to God more tightly than he holds on to me.

There are nights I cry quietly because I don’t want to lose him, but I also don’t know how to keep him. He gives me everything except a future. He gives me warmth, attention, affection, everything except certainty. He tells me, “I will always be here for you.”
But he forgets that “always” is not a promise he can keep if he becomes a priest.

My friends tell me to walk away. They tell me that loving a seminarian is loving a man who has already married a destiny. But Emmanuel is my first love. My heart didn’t learn love from anyone else. Leaving him feels like attempting to learn how to walk again after having legs all my life. Sometimes I convince myself that maybe one day he will change his mind, that maybe he will wake up and realize I am worth choosing. Other times I feel foolish, like a girl writing letters to a future that has already rejected her.

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I don’t know what to do. I wish he could tell me it’s over between us and stop being who he is to me. Maybe that would give me closure and help me walk away. Because that’s not happening, I’m holding on to this stubborn, fragile, beautiful hope that one day, love will win. That I won’t end up the girl who loved deeply but lost quietly.

Is there a way I can bring certainty between us? So I know whether it’s going to work or not and model my life toward what can work and not toward a dream.

—Shirley

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