Looking for Love & Fanning Old Flames

Summer 2010 Issue | Posted by Marge Fenelon in Marriage

In early 2004 Kurt and Julie Carrick, married 20 years, faced a parental nightmare. A stranger at a party drugged their teenaged daughter and raped her. Shortly after the attack, they learned that she had become pregnant.

In the aftermath of this horrific crime, the Carricks and their daughter faced uncertainty and frustration. They learned that multiple men may have participated in the rape, but nothing could be confirmed. Law enforcement agencies seemed in-different and unwilling to go the extra mile to catch the rapist, citing budget constraints as a factor.

As often happens during times of parental grief and stress, the Carricks each reacted quite differently to their daughter’s tragedy. The only way Julie, a Catholic recording artist, felt she could cope was to surrender everything to God. She increased her commitment to prayer, Mass, and Eucharistic adoration. She didn’t know what else to do.

But Kurt was too hurt to turn to God just yet.

“I was angry,” he recalls. “I was working for the state Department of Public Safety and thought that there must be something I could do, something more they could do. I was told that they couldn’t do anything because they were understaffed and underfunded. I simply melted down.”

Click Here for Trouble

As he drifted further away from his wife, instead of turning to his faith for support, Kurt turned to the Internet. A few innocent clicks combined with idle curiosity led him to a classmates reunion site. There, he found a familiar name. It was his old high school girlfriend, “Diane” (not her real name). He clicked, initiated contact, and soon found that his old flame was eager to invite him back into her life.

It turned out that Diane, too, was unhappy in her marriage. Kurt found it easier to communicate with Diane than with Julie about the things that troubled him. Diane was positive, open, and accepting. She listened without judging or demanding anything from him. Kurt preferred to live in the safe “perfection” of his cyber world relationship instead of facing the reality of his daughter’s victimization, his declining marriage, and his unhappy home.

“Those classmate sites seem so innocent,” says Julie, “but they’re not. They take you back to a very emotional time, back to your first crush, your first love. On these sites, all of a sudden real life starts to appear demanding and the flashbacks seem like a much more fun place to be than the place in which you actually live.”

A Common Weakness

Julie and Kurt’s subsequent research showed that extramarital affairs are common among long lost loves who reconnect on the Internet, and many of those who engage in affairs end up leaving their spouses for their old flames.

Leaving his spouse was exactly what Kurt had in mind. With an unhappy “real life” and a “cyber life” that seemed full of promise, he figured his best option was to get out. He thought that he was in love with his high school sweetheart, not Julie. With the thrill of their new relationship spurring them on, Kurt and Diane decided to leave their spouses and form a new life together.

They chose November 15, 2004, as the date to tell their spouses the news.

Looking back, Kurt realizes that he was engaged in spiritual warfare.

“I was under severe, severe attack,” Kurt said. “Satan was tweaking my psyche, using my job and the things going on at the house. He played on my pride.”

Praying Along, Playing Along

Though Julie was devastated to learn of her husband’s extramarital relationship and his intention to leave, she did not give up on their marriage.

The Carricks had always actively lived their Catholic faith, and trouble in their marriage didn’t keep them away; they continued their Catholic ministries even after their daughter’s rape and Kurt’s an-nouncement of his plans to leave Julie. Julie prayed their troubles would be resolved, while Kurt prayed that his new relationship could somehow become a part of God’s will for him.

For three months, they lived in limbo. Each morning, Julie would wake up and ask Kurt whether this was the day he would change his mind and recommit to their marriage. Each day Kurt said “No.”

Julie’s physical health suffered under the emotional stress of trying to keep her marriage together. She lost her appetite and dropped a considerable amount of weight. Determined not to give up, though, she committed to rising at 5:00 am for private prayer with Kurt — Scripture reading and all 20 decades of the Rosary. Still attempting to convince himself that God’s will was for him to leave his marriage, Kurt played along.

The Carricks had matching Bibles that they kept at their bedsides. Their morning prayer routine included Julie opening her Bible to a random spot and the two of them reading the passage together.

“I started calling it Julie’s Magic Bible,” Kurt says. “The topics that popped up always seemed to be about marriage.”

He figured Julie must somehow have been stacking the deck, intentionally choosing the topics in order to try to win Kurt back. So one morning he took a turn at opening the Bible.

“It was a passage from Proverbs about adulterous men, and there was a part in it that asked, ‘Why do you sleep with this dog of a woman?” It says, “This loose woman leads to death,” Kurt recalls.

Decision Day

Still, though, Kurt was determined to pursue his affair. Finally, he decided he wanted out of marital “limbo.” On the morning of January 9, 2005, he walked down the hall to the closet in which his luggage was stored. This was the day, he decided, that he would leave Julie and join Diane forever.

But Julie’s approach on this day was different. At 5’6” she had dwindled to a mere 112 pounds. She was physically weak, but mentally strong that day.

“The Tribunal will laugh us out the door if I even bring up the idea that we’re eligible for annulment because we do have a sacrament,” she told her husband. “I will be married to you forever, but I can’t stop you from what you’re planning on doing. You need to pack your stuff and leave because I can’t take this day-to-day pain. But as you leave, you need to understand that we are still married and that I will pray for you until God can touch your heart in such a way that you can see our marriage for what it truly is.”

Although Kurt felt some pangs of guilt, he was also relieved to finally be making a decision. He continued down the hall, toward his suitcase.

It was then that he heard a woman’s voice. At first he thought it was Julie calling after him from the bedroom. But Julie hadn’t said a word.

The voice said, “Kurt, where are you going? Look around you. This is your home. This is your family. Where are you going?” Today, they are both convinced that it was the Blessed Mother calling out to Kurt.

“It was like somebody had flipped a light switch in my head and I saw what it was I was doing,” Kurt explains. “I was moving away from where I was supposed to be, where the Lord wanted me to be, and where Mother Mary required me to be. Suddenly I knew that with all the passion in my heart. I had to go back into that room and ask my wife to take me back and work on fixing things that she didn’t understand I had broken.”

It wasn’t easy. Reconciliation between Kurt and Julie was a slow and arduous process. Some days they were overcome with joy at the new discoveries they were making about one another, but other days they were overwhelmed with tears, as new obstacles presented themselves.

It Takes Two

Julie came to realize that, though she wasn’t the one who had an affair, her pride had caused her to overlook some critical problems in her marriage. Early on, though she had sensed the growing distance in her marriage, she ignored it. She rationalized that, as long as she was devoting her time to their four growing children and her music ministry, she was doing something good for God, and God would bless and support her efforts.

“I cut back on ministry dates to be there for our kids, but felt really distanced from Kurt and couldn’t change things for him,” she recalls. “I didn’t want to admit there could be problems in my marriage. I didn’t know how to bring Kurt around at that point and had given up trying. I slipped into just praying after suggesting counseling and other options. … We were both being very self-centered. My side looked nice because I was in public ministry and I was doing all these great things. But I wasn’t doing what I had to at home,” she says.

A New Life Together

After the turning point on the day Kurt decided not to pack his suitcase, it was two years before he and Julie felt they had regained the level of trust they had at the beginning of their marriage. Getting there required hefty doses of humility and forgiveness.

Eventually, though, they rekindled their courtship and began dating again. They redecorated their house together and made it a home they both would enjoy. They worked at honest communication and an authentic and fervent prayer life as a couple.

“It has renewed our relationship,” says Kurt. “What was once boring became exciting. We’re more aware of each other’s thoughts and needs. The fireworks are brighter.”

Combining his own musical talents with Julie’s, Kurt quit his job in 2005 and joined Carrick Ministries (CarrickMinistries.com). Today the Carricks work together giving concerts, putting on parish missions, and hosting retreats where they share their testimony with married couples. They have also put together a workshop for married couples and a Rosary CD. It is their hope that their story of struggle and triumph can offer hope to others in troubled marriages.

“There’s that old saying that what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger,” Julie says today. “Our marriage was strengthened to the point that we could handle the bigger things that would come along.” C

— Marge Fenelon writes form

Cudahy, Wisconsin.

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