If you are separated
You are welcome here. You join the marriage side rather than the dating pool, and that is not a consolation prize. A marriage in trouble is the thing that side of this site exists for.
What is actually there for you
The marriage side is not a happy-couples club. It is writing about conflict, about money, about what happens when one of you drifts from the faith, and about the stretch where two people are still legally married and no longer sure what they are. It is a room where you can ask, under a name that is not yours, the question you would not ask out loud at church.
If you are separated and hoping, that is who it is for. If you are separated and fairly sure it is over, that is who it is for too.
See the marriage sideWhy not the dating pool
Because separated means still married. Whatever the marriage has become, there is still a spouse, and there are still vows nobody has been released from.
To the married I give this charge (not I, but the Lord): the wife should not separate from her husband (but if she does, she should remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband), and the husband should not divorce his wife.
There is a second reason and it is about the watching world rather than about you. Anything an Adventist dating site does is read as something Adventists think is fine. If our members were dating while married to somebody else, that is what we would be saying, whatever our terms of service claimed.
For we aim at what is honorable not only in the Lord’s sight but also in the sight of man.
What we are not saying
We are not telling you whether your marriage can be saved. We are not telling you whether you would be free to remarry, or on what grounds. Those are questions for you, your pastor and the people who actually know your story, and a website that ruled on them would be overstepping badly.
All we are deciding is which part of one small site you are in. That is a much smaller question than the one you are living with.
And if things change
If your divorce is finalised, the dating side is open to you, with no asterisk and nothing to explain. Divorced is on the list. So is widowed. Moving across is a step you take when you are ready, not a thing you have to argue for.
Scripture quotations are from the ESV. If you think we have this wrong, we would genuinely rather hear it than not: write to [email protected].