August 18, 2023 • 30 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, as rising seniors in college, Roane and Eva Hunter decided to get married, thinking it would fix all of their problems. A few years down the road, they realized that that wasn't the case. After going through many struggles, and even a divorce, the couple healed their once-broken relationship, and today they help others do the same.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories. Up next, you're
going to hear from Rome and Eva Hunter. This couple
went through great hardship and even a divorce. Today they
use their experiences to help others heal in their marriages.
Here Arone and Eva sharing their own story of brokenness
(00:31):
and how they restored a marriage that most would have
deemed hopeless.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
I grew up in Macon, Mississippi, which is a small
town which is all of Mississippi, and I lived out
in the country.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
We farmed around.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Four thousand acres and I had two older brothers that
were four and five years older, and it was kind
of like boy heaven growing up in that environment, hunting, fishing,
cows and dogs and horses and tractors.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
There was not a better place to grow up.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
My mom and dad then divorced when I was eight
years old, and that was the first great tragedy or
trauma in my life, and everything changed. I was kind
of turned over to my two older brothers who were
four and five years older. And I always say that
I was raised by wolves, the wolfpack. My two older
(01:34):
brothers and their buddies that were all four and five
years older than me, and so we kind of figured
life out. We had very little parental supervision or direction,
and we grew up not in good ways. Even I met,
(01:55):
we knew each other everybody knows each other in small towns.
Actually started dating when we were fifteen, and that began
our journey together.
Speaker 4 (02:09):
I too, am from a small town in Mississippi, the
same hometown as Rome.
Speaker 5 (02:14):
However I lived in the city, the.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
Big city, the big city.
Speaker 4 (02:19):
I'm the first born of three children. My parents were
very young when they had me. They were just nineteen
years old and then quickly had another child, and so
they were just really, I think, probably in survival mode,
trying to make ends meet. However, I mean, they were
very involved in my life, especially my mother. I had
(02:42):
a lot of accountability and a lot of rules.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
However I had.
Speaker 4 (02:46):
A lot of freedom too. I mean I knew every
crack in the sidewalk. I rode my bike all over town.
Like I said, I had a lot of rules. I
grew up in church. I accepted Jesus when I was
eight years old, but that was just a one time experience.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
Not a lot of growth after.
Speaker 4 (03:03):
That for me and my home, just a lot of intensity.
My dad was an alcoholic. Being a firstborn, I took
on the hero role in the family system. So an overachiever,
overly responsible. I made the family look good because I achieved.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
So Eva grew up with a lot of rules and
I grew up with no rules. And when we met,
you know, she could come to my house and get
a beer out of the refrigerator and like that was
just normal for me growing up, and for her that
was like really really out there, and so I think
that was the attraction for her, that she could get
(03:48):
a beer out of the freedom. So that's why she
liked me. That is not true. That is not true.
I was really shocked by that, quite honestly.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
It was a red.
Speaker 4 (03:58):
Flag, but I did not quite.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Yeah, there were lots of red flags. We were both
very broken growing up in kind of the dysfunction. I
always say, I grew up in the Easter Christian denomination.
We went to church at Easter maybe if nobody was hungover,
and growing up in small town Mississippi, not going to
church was kind of you know, that was different. And
(04:24):
like none of my friends parents were divorced, and so
even that, you know, was something that like it just
felt different. What I developed was just that kind of
a chameleon personality to be able to adapt and fit
in in whatever environment I was in. And then when
even I met, I started going to church with her.
(04:44):
I always say, fifteen year old boys don't love Jesus.
They go to church because there's a girl there. And
so I did start going, and then we started dating,
and we graduated and went to college. That's summer before
going into our freshman year. Kind of the second great
(05:05):
tragedy in my life, and certainly tragedy in our life happened.
Speaker 4 (05:10):
Yes, and it was definitely the second tragedy for me.
Although I did not realize the first tragedy was growing
up in an addictive family system. I did not understand
that it really didn't think it.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
Had affected me.
Speaker 4 (05:22):
And I got pregnant in between my senior year in
high school and my freshman year in college, and we
really thought, well, let's just get married, you know, small
town Mississippi.
Speaker 5 (05:34):
We'll just begin life together.
Speaker 4 (05:37):
Now. However, our parents got involved.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
I mean, I'd already had several buddies that that had happened,
and you just get married and you know, build a
house on the farm, and I'll just farm and we'll
start doing life together. When my mom divorced, she remarried
very quick, probably the ink was not drawn the divorce papers.
(06:04):
Later in life, my brothers and I came up with
our affectionate name for him. We couldn't call him stepfather
because he didn't have a father bone in his body.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
So after this movie came out, we.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Started calling him step Fokker, and so that became our
affectionate name. And then they had my little sister, and
so that became kind of my mother's new little nuclear family.
And I was kind of like, where's Waldo? And he
had a yacht. In the summer, they would go over
(06:37):
to the Bahamas and live on the boat, which I
got to experience that in my teenage years, which that
was a one benefit of growing up with him, but
it didn't outweigh the bad. And so they were in
the Bahamas and I talked to my mother and I
told her that Eva was pregnant, and she basically told
me that she needs to get an abortion, and y'all
(06:59):
don't need to get married at seventeen.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
That's the level of support you get.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
I certainly did not know what to do, and so
I called Eva and told her and she told her
mother what my mother had said, and then that decision
was made pretty.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
Quickly, very quickly.
Speaker 4 (07:18):
Yes, that happened when we were very young, and we
both buried it.
Speaker 5 (07:25):
Between Ron and I, we never talked about it again.
Speaker 4 (07:29):
Now, if there was a conflict between us, it got
very intense, very fast. I think that trauma would just
come out of me with a lot of intensity over
the next seven to ten years in our relationship.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
At twenty years old, we were at Mississippi State in
college and I always say, it's real when a twenty
year old frat boy comes to Jesus and he quits drinking, cussing,
and smoking, Because that's all I knew to do was
to stop those things and then.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Start going to church, and we did.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Eva actually was with me when I accepted Christ, and
it became very real.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
We were just so desperate.
Speaker 5 (08:14):
I mean we were two very hurting young people.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Yeah, going to church, well, certainly we knew we needed
something more than what we had, but there was you know,
we got very little in terms of you know, how
do you actually do a relationship, how do you actually
navigate emotions and all those things.
Speaker 4 (08:32):
Yeah, we were both really emotionally dysregulated totally and we
both so there was a lot of chaos.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
We're dealing with attachment issues, and again we didn't know
any of this at the time. We're just trying to
do life, and so we wound up getting married going
into our senior year in college because you know, marriage
will fix all this, and we just thought that's what
we need to do.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
And you're listening to Ron and Eva Hunter share their
story of brokenness and thinking marriage would somehow fix their problems.
And by the way, that happens every day, and it
doesn't fix the problems. My goodness, trauma on both sides,
brokenness on both sides, Eva an alcoholic parent, and well
the trauma that Roan faced with an early divorce and
(09:24):
then being raised by, as he put it, a pack
of wolves. Boys shouldn't raise boys. It doesn't end well.
When we come back more of the story of Rome
and Eva Hunter here on our American stories. And we're
(10:09):
back with our American stories and with Ron and Eva Hunter.
When we last left off, they were still a bit
lost in their relationship that they decided to get married
anyway because they thought, well, they thought that would fix things.
Let's return to Rome and Eva.
Speaker 4 (10:30):
What I saw in men growing up were men who
were emotionally disengaged. They didn't really connect with their female children.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
And certainly what I saw modeled was just a lot
of detachment.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
We didn't know how to emotionally connect. So we got
married and then moved away.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Lived in the Mobile Fair Hope, Alabama area for five years,
and then I got transferred to Nashville. We were there
for about a year and then ultimately wound up in Atlanta.
And so we're in Atlanta and both of our sons
had been At.
Speaker 4 (11:07):
This point, we had two small children, two sons.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
And we were having a discussion. I didn't think we
were arguing, but Eva asked me, you know, you seem down.
Why are you so down? And I looked at her
and the words came out of my mouth.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
I said, I have a problem with pornography.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
And I literally remember turning around going who said that?
Because there was no way I was ever going to
tell her that. For me, the pornography thing started. And
obviously this was way before the Internet, but my mother's
attitude was boys'll be boys, and we had pornography on
(11:49):
the bedside table, and it hooked me. There were hours
spent just absorbing that stuff into my brain, and when
I came to christ it was one of those things
that like, I sincerely wanted to not do that anymore.
And you know, everybody thinks you get married and that's
(12:11):
going to fix it, and it really doesn't work that way.
And so with marriage came stress and intensity and anxiety,
and so my full blown sexual addiction began to escalate.
When Eve and I moved into these bigger cities, I
was going to strip joints and massage powers and prostitutes,
(12:33):
and each one of the moves it was a geographic
cure because I was like, if I can just get
away from these places, you know, that'll fix it. Well,
each city was bigger and there were more opportunities, and
the geographic cures lasted about a week and a half
in each one of those moves. And then we're in
Atlanta and she asked me the question why are you
(12:56):
so down?
Speaker 3 (12:57):
And the words came out of my mouth.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
And that it was really God because it had to
get out into the light. And so that was the
beginning of everything changing for us. But it was two
years of hell on Earth, Yes, it was.
Speaker 4 (13:15):
It was devastating to me to know that he had
this secret because of what he presented, who he presented
to be to the outside world, to me to We
were in leadership at our church, you know, and at
that time, in nineteen ninety the seven eleven convenience stores
(13:37):
had taken out pornography off their shelves all across the
United States, and that was a huge thing. And he
talked about that and let everybody know, you know, what
a great thing that was, at the same time, never
saying this is an issue for me. It was just
so shocking to me. So I went into my own
(13:59):
green cycle. The first stage is shocked and numbness, and
then a lot of anger, of under anger, was hurt, fear, frustration,
and injustice.
Speaker 5 (14:11):
But I couldn't tap into those deeper feelings.
Speaker 4 (14:13):
I'd never in my whole life really let myself feel
those really vulnerable feelings ever, And I lived in that
angry stage of grief for longer than I could really sustain,
and I got hopeless. When I became hopeless, I thought
(14:34):
a separation would be good for us or for me.
I went to a lawyer in the state of Georgia,
which is the same here in Mississippi.
Speaker 5 (14:42):
There is not a legal separation.
Speaker 4 (14:44):
I wanted to be protected financially because I was a
stay at home mom, and so she said, you know,
the only way you're gonna protect yourself financially is to divorce,
and you can be divorced in.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
Thirty days be protected financially.
Speaker 4 (14:58):
If y'all are able to reconcile, you can always remarry.
And so that sounded like a good solution to me
at the time. Once we did divorce, I was completely
done and at that point really realizing I'm on my
own and I have two small children, and ended up
(15:20):
getting a full time job and beginning to work on myself.
The first thing I did was go to a group
Adult Children of Alcoholics ACOA group, and that was eye
opening for me. It was one of the layers began
to peel off that oh wow, what I had grown
up had affected me and these were all the ways
(15:41):
when they handed me the laundry list of what happens
to a child.
Speaker 5 (15:47):
In my mind at the time, I thought, there's nothing
wrong with me.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
We would go to counseling. During the two years prior
to the divorce, Eva was not really I was engaged
in that process pretty quickly after I admitted to the
pornography and then began to reveal more to Eva. I
very quickly got engaged with a Christian counselor in Atlanta
(16:12):
because I wanted to be better. I wanted to deal
with this. I'd been wanting to deal with it. I
just didn't know how, and so I got engaged with
a Christian counselor. I got involved in a support group ministry.
I was in a therapy group with my counselor because
I wanted to do my work and I wanted to
be better, and we would go to counseling, and the counselor,
(16:34):
you know, we knew I.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
Was the problem.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
I was easy, and then he would kind of shine
that light over on Eva and he would ask about, well,
what about growing up with an alcoholic father? And her
standard reply was I'm fine, we're here because of him.
You need to fix him. And then okay, he'd come
back to me and then he'd shine the light over
there and you know what about the abortion, and she's like,
(16:59):
I'm over that.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
I'm fine, we're here because of him fixing.
Speaker 4 (17:04):
So at that point I did not want any more
couples counseling.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
After the divorce, I was ready.
Speaker 4 (17:12):
To get the help I needed for myself, so I
did a lot of individual counseling along with ACA. I
for the first time saw my own brokenness. I really
didn't think I had anything. I had a lot that
I had brought into the marriage. Over the next year,
(17:33):
I became open to reconciliation with Rome because I could
see it looked different. I brokenness looked different, but there
was a lot of similarities in it too, And even
when we were apart, I saw that he stayed in recovery.
I saw that he stayed in his own therapy. That
gave me hope that he was always going to work
(17:53):
on himself.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
I was engaged in my process because words at that
point are meaningless.
Speaker 4 (17:59):
I got up for a long time with I'll never
be able to trust him again. Well, as I did
my own work, I realized I had been set up
in my family of origin not to trust. So we
began more of a restoration process.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
We were divorced, separated in divorce for a little over
a year, and then we did decide to remarry. We
committed to doing our work in that process.
Speaker 5 (18:28):
We were involved in recovery groups.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
Yeah and in our process.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
It wasn't like we got remarried and everything was rosy.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
We had a lot of work to do.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
We were both involved in support groups and we always
have been and we always will be, and so we
continue to do our work because your marriage is not
easy and you have to be intentional.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
And you've been listening to Rome and Eva Hunter chaer
well quite nakedly, quite boldly, the problems they each brought
into the marriage. It was easy for Eva to blame
her husband Ron, but in the end she realized she
came with a lot of brokenness into this marriage too,
and they ultimately get divorced, reconcile, and find love and
(19:14):
hope again in each other. When we come back more
of this remarkable love story, Ron and Eva Hunter's story,
you're on our American story, and we're back with our
(19:39):
American stories, and with Ron and Eva Hunter's story, let's
pick up where they last left off.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Eva did not cause my sexual addiction, my acting out
so often. You know, guys will justify that in a
lot of different ways, and that's just totally bogus. You know,
I got on the marriage train with all this packed
in my luggage. You know, it's in that zipper compartment
down in there, get it all packed, neat and hidden.
(20:11):
We both got on the marriage train with our stuff.
So she did not cause it and she could not
change it. You know, what I developed was a very
illegitimate coping behavior that went back to early childhood. And
so the illegitimate coping behavior is learned early on. And
so that became my way of escape, my way of numbing,
(20:33):
my way of medicating the anxiety and the stress.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
That I was feeling.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
And even when we say sex addiction, even I both
say we don't really like the term, and the term
that we really prefer is just sexual brokenness, because this
thing takes a lot of different forms, and when you
say addiction, there's almost like it's hopeless. And from an
addiction standpoint, it's very different than drugs and alcohol because
(21:01):
those two things actually alter the chemical composition of your brain.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
And your body.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
And with this you got to begin to understand the
deeper roots. And so Eva could not change that. That
was on me and she could not control it. That's
all in my journey and part of my own recovery
and my growth.
Speaker 4 (21:26):
Somewhere in our forties, we both had the vision I
guess or really the calling that we would give back
on a professional level. In my mind, it was going
to be when we were retired somewhere in our sixties.
And I didn't think it would be as a career,
that this would be life two point zero. It was
(21:47):
just going to be how we did it in our
retirement years. Well, it's certainly God had another plan.
Speaker 3 (21:54):
God in Rome another plan.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
When I was in corporate world, I was very successful,
and I had great jobs and work for big companies
and all of that. But for me, my fulfillment came
in doing what we were doing in our church setting.
Often somebody might go talk to the pastor, and our pastors,
of course knew our story, and then they would like,
(22:21):
you need to go see talk to Ron. You know,
here's his phone number, or you need to talk to Eva.
And I think God did a healing work around a
lot of the shame that I had. It doesn't always
work that way for many people. Not that I don't
have any shame about that, but God spoke to my
heart that he was going to use this for his glory.
(22:44):
And then over time began to like, Okay, what does
it look like to really do this? And kind of
make a living, you know, giving up that safety and
security of a corporate job and launching out and doing
something on your own completely different. And boy, that was
a process and it took just a long time because
(23:04):
you know, you've got kids in college and bills and
houses and mortgages.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
And all of that, all the things.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Yeah, and so we'd begun our graduate work in Atlanta,
and you know, that process was such a journey to
go back to school and even thought that it was
what we were going to do when we retired.
Speaker 4 (23:25):
And after our boys went off to college, we decided
to move back to Mississippi. But while we were still
in Atlanta, we started our master's program at Richmond College
and we're able to transfer to Mississippi College here and
finished at the age of fifty.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
We're actually forty nine. I felt fifty.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
Yeah, yeah, Well I was in a corporate world in
my business career for twenty five plus years in the
corporate salt mines, and one of my goals was to
get out of that before I turned fifty, and I
made it. We started our private practice and we were
forty nine and have.
Speaker 4 (24:09):
Now been in private practice for ten years. We work
a lot with couples in crisis.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
When there's betrayal, the relationship is in crisis, and in
crisis you need a lot of direction. It's great to
have a therapist and ask you how you feel about that,
but when you're in crisis mode, it's kind of like
when the plane loses an engine. If the flight attendant
is just asking everybody how you feel, it's probably not
(24:39):
going to be helpful. And so when the plane's going down,
you want somebody that's kind of giving you direction. And
if you trust this process, there is hope. And we've
seen many marriages not only survive the crisis, but actually
begin to thrive and have the marriage that God intended
from the beginning.
Speaker 4 (25:00):
Rod and I were instrumental in doing an intervention with
my father and he did go to treatment and was
sober from alcohol for gosh, twenty five years, and so
I got to see my parents give back what they
had been given. They were very involved in the AA community,
(25:23):
just becoming really healthy and becoming very well boundaried people.
So I'm very very grateful for recovery and for where
we've been. What happened to us, it changed everything for
us the way we view life, the way we live
life and the way we give back what we've been given.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
It's just been amazing to kind of see what God's
done in the last ten years with all of this,
and how doors have just kept opening, and so much
of the things that are happening really feels surreal. We
really both love of what we do, and it doesn't
always it doesn't really feel like work now, it's kind
(26:05):
of crazy. And so God has certainly added life to
us in so many ways, and our mission is adding
life to others.
Speaker 4 (26:16):
I married a very passive man, and when the truth
came out, which he revealed himself, which is very unusual,
he changed into this man of He didn't have any fear.
Speaker 5 (26:32):
He really was very bold and courageous.
Speaker 4 (26:36):
And for me personally, I had shame to deal with.
Speaker 5 (26:41):
Because I really thought we were the perfect couple.
Speaker 4 (26:44):
We literally had a precious little house in Atlanta with
a white picket fence, literally, and it was so cute
and I really wanted to keep that image. So I
had my own shame that my image is broken. But
ron I saw the change from passivity to a man
(27:07):
of boldness and will come against anything it gets him
into trouble.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
Sometimes she keeps me grounded.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
But I have been speaking out about this and just
for so many years in churches with pastors and in
different settings, because really, this pornography thing is destroying so
many lives. It's one of those things that you can
hide and you can keep secret, and so I am
very outspoken. And I always say, you can't be a
(27:41):
pastor or a church leader and being an alcoholic you
get figured out pretty quick when you're preaching sermons and
you're drunk. Hard to be a crackhead and be a pastor,
people see you scratching and itching. That gets found out
pretty quick. But boy, with this thing, it can go underground.
Speaker 4 (27:58):
We just celebrated our forty wedding anniversary. We don't count
our one year apart. However, we did have to remarry
legally and had new vows, which that meant a lot
to us.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
We call it our marriage sabbatical. Yeah, yeah, but.
Speaker 4 (28:14):
What that feels like is there's just so much freedom.
Speaker 5 (28:18):
We no longer try to present this image.
Speaker 4 (28:21):
We're very open and honest and transparent, and you know,
we still.
Speaker 5 (28:27):
Can get sideways, real fast, real easy. However, we do
recover very fast. To today, there's a huge difference.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Yeah, we always say marriage just in and of itself,
without all this stuff. It's like, you know, God's sense
of humor. He takes a cat and a dog and
he throws him in a dryer and he says, hey, Peter,
ho my wine. Watch this, And then he turns the
dryer on and he says, okay, you too, get along.
That's marriage, right, And so it takes a lot of
(28:58):
intentionality for a marriage to be what God intended it
to be. But certainly, in our journey, we both say
quite often we would not trade anything that we've been
through to be where we are today.
Speaker 3 (29:12):
Not one thing.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Yeah, I mean, it certainly has been a journey, and
it's been hard, it has been easy, it hasn't been painless,
but boy, where we are today it is.
Speaker 5 (29:22):
Good and it has ultimately been for our good.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
And a terrific job on the storytelling and production by
Madison And a special thanks to Ron and Eva Hunter
for sharing their story. What a blessing. When Ron confessed
that he had a problem with pornography, things had to
turn south. It was a divorce, but in the end,
a year later, well, the husband was healing and now
the wife had to look at her own brokenness, an abortion,
(29:49):
an alcoholic father, and her own healing journey begins. The
two reconcile, They get married, and what do they do
with the rest of their lives. They help other married
couple heal their lives and their marriages by all means.
Pick up their book, Sex, God and the Chaos of Betrayal,
The story of Rome and Eva Hunter, the story of marriage,
(30:10):
love and redemption. Here on our American Stories.
And we returned to our American stories. Up next, you're
going to hear from Rome and Eva Hunter. This couple
went through great hardship and even a divorce. Today they
use their experiences to help others heal in their marriages.
Here Arone and Eva sharing their own story of brokenness
(00:31):
and how they restored a marriage that most would have
deemed hopeless.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
I grew up in Macon, Mississippi, which is a small
town which is all of Mississippi, and I lived out
in the country.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
We farmed around.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Four thousand acres and I had two older brothers that
were four and five years older, and it was kind
of like boy heaven growing up in that environment, hunting, fishing,
cows and dogs and horses and tractors.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
There was not a better place to grow up.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
My mom and dad then divorced when I was eight
years old, and that was the first great tragedy or
trauma in my life, and everything changed. I was kind
of turned over to my two older brothers who were
four and five years older. And I always say that
I was raised by wolves, the wolfpack. My two older
(01:34):
brothers and their buddies that were all four and five
years older than me, and so we kind of figured
life out. We had very little parental supervision or direction,
and we grew up not in good ways. Even I met,
(01:55):
we knew each other everybody knows each other in small towns.
Actually started dating when we were fifteen, and that began
our journey together.
Speaker 4 (02:09):
I too, am from a small town in Mississippi, the
same hometown as Rome.
Speaker 5 (02:14):
However I lived in the city, the.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
Big city, the big city.
Speaker 4 (02:19):
I'm the first born of three children. My parents were
very young when they had me. They were just nineteen
years old and then quickly had another child, and so
they were just really, I think, probably in survival mode,
trying to make ends meet. However, I mean, they were
very involved in my life, especially my mother. I had
(02:42):
a lot of accountability and a lot of rules.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
However I had.
Speaker 4 (02:46):
A lot of freedom too. I mean I knew every
crack in the sidewalk. I rode my bike all over town.
Like I said, I had a lot of rules. I
grew up in church. I accepted Jesus when I was
eight years old, but that was just a one time experience.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
Not a lot of growth after.
Speaker 4 (03:03):
That for me and my home, just a lot of intensity.
My dad was an alcoholic. Being a firstborn, I took
on the hero role in the family system. So an overachiever,
overly responsible. I made the family look good because I achieved.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
So Eva grew up with a lot of rules and
I grew up with no rules. And when we met,
you know, she could come to my house and get
a beer out of the refrigerator and like that was
just normal for me growing up, and for her that
was like really really out there, and so I think
that was the attraction for her, that she could get
(03:48):
a beer out of the freedom. So that's why she
liked me. That is not true. That is not true.
I was really shocked by that, quite honestly.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
It was a red.
Speaker 4 (03:58):
Flag, but I did not quite.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Yeah, there were lots of red flags. We were both
very broken growing up in kind of the dysfunction. I
always say, I grew up in the Easter Christian denomination.
We went to church at Easter maybe if nobody was hungover,
and growing up in small town Mississippi, not going to
church was kind of you know, that was different. And
(04:24):
like none of my friends parents were divorced, and so
even that, you know, was something that like it just
felt different. What I developed was just that kind of
a chameleon personality to be able to adapt and fit
in in whatever environment I was in. And then when
even I met, I started going to church with her.
(04:44):
I always say, fifteen year old boys don't love Jesus.
They go to church because there's a girl there. And
so I did start going, and then we started dating,
and we graduated and went to college. That's summer before
going into our freshman year. Kind of the second great
(05:05):
tragedy in my life, and certainly tragedy in our life happened.
Speaker 4 (05:10):
Yes, and it was definitely the second tragedy for me.
Although I did not realize the first tragedy was growing
up in an addictive family system. I did not understand
that it really didn't think it.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
Had affected me.
Speaker 4 (05:22):
And I got pregnant in between my senior year in
high school and my freshman year in college, and we
really thought, well, let's just get married, you know, small
town Mississippi.
Speaker 5 (05:34):
We'll just begin life together.
Speaker 4 (05:37):
Now. However, our parents got involved.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
I mean, I'd already had several buddies that that had happened,
and you just get married and you know, build a
house on the farm, and I'll just farm and we'll
start doing life together. When my mom divorced, she remarried
very quick, probably the ink was not drawn the divorce papers.
(06:04):
Later in life, my brothers and I came up with
our affectionate name for him. We couldn't call him stepfather
because he didn't have a father bone in his body.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
So after this movie came out, we.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Started calling him step Fokker, and so that became our
affectionate name. And then they had my little sister, and
so that became kind of my mother's new little nuclear family.
And I was kind of like, where's Waldo? And he
had a yacht. In the summer, they would go over
(06:37):
to the Bahamas and live on the boat, which I
got to experience that in my teenage years, which that
was a one benefit of growing up with him, but
it didn't outweigh the bad. And so they were in
the Bahamas and I talked to my mother and I
told her that Eva was pregnant, and she basically told
me that she needs to get an abortion, and y'all
(06:59):
don't need to get married at seventeen.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
That's the level of support you get.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
I certainly did not know what to do, and so
I called Eva and told her and she told her
mother what my mother had said, and then that decision
was made pretty.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
Quickly, very quickly.
Speaker 4 (07:18):
Yes, that happened when we were very young, and we
both buried it.
Speaker 5 (07:25):
Between Ron and I, we never talked about it again.
Speaker 4 (07:29):
Now, if there was a conflict between us, it got
very intense, very fast. I think that trauma would just
come out of me with a lot of intensity over
the next seven to ten years in our relationship.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
At twenty years old, we were at Mississippi State in
college and I always say, it's real when a twenty
year old frat boy comes to Jesus and he quits drinking, cussing,
and smoking, Because that's all I knew to do was
to stop those things and then.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Start going to church, and we did.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Eva actually was with me when I accepted Christ, and
it became very real.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
We were just so desperate.
Speaker 5 (08:14):
I mean we were two very hurting young people.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Yeah, going to church, well, certainly we knew we needed
something more than what we had, but there was you know,
we got very little in terms of you know, how
do you actually do a relationship, how do you actually
navigate emotions and all those things.
Speaker 4 (08:32):
Yeah, we were both really emotionally dysregulated totally and we
both so there was a lot of chaos.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
We're dealing with attachment issues, and again we didn't know
any of this at the time. We're just trying to
do life, and so we wound up getting married going
into our senior year in college because you know, marriage
will fix all this, and we just thought that's what
we need to do.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
And you're listening to Ron and Eva Hunter share their
story of brokenness and thinking marriage would somehow fix their problems.
And by the way, that happens every day, and it
doesn't fix the problems. My goodness, trauma on both sides,
brokenness on both sides, Eva an alcoholic parent, and well
the trauma that Roan faced with an early divorce and
(09:24):
then being raised by, as he put it, a pack
of wolves. Boys shouldn't raise boys. It doesn't end well.
When we come back more of the story of Rome
and Eva Hunter here on our American stories. And we're
(10:09):
back with our American stories and with Ron and Eva Hunter.
When we last left off, they were still a bit
lost in their relationship that they decided to get married
anyway because they thought, well, they thought that would fix things.
Let's return to Rome and Eva.
Speaker 4 (10:30):
What I saw in men growing up were men who
were emotionally disengaged. They didn't really connect with their female children.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
And certainly what I saw modeled was just a lot
of detachment.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
We didn't know how to emotionally connect. So we got
married and then moved away.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Lived in the Mobile Fair Hope, Alabama area for five years,
and then I got transferred to Nashville. We were there
for about a year and then ultimately wound up in Atlanta.
And so we're in Atlanta and both of our sons
had been At.
Speaker 4 (11:07):
This point, we had two small children, two sons.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
And we were having a discussion. I didn't think we
were arguing, but Eva asked me, you know, you seem down.
Why are you so down? And I looked at her
and the words came out of my mouth.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
I said, I have a problem with pornography.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
And I literally remember turning around going who said that?
Because there was no way I was ever going to
tell her that. For me, the pornography thing started. And
obviously this was way before the Internet, but my mother's
attitude was boys'll be boys, and we had pornography on
(11:49):
the bedside table, and it hooked me. There were hours
spent just absorbing that stuff into my brain, and when
I came to christ it was one of those things
that like, I sincerely wanted to not do that anymore.
And you know, everybody thinks you get married and that's
(12:11):
going to fix it, and it really doesn't work that way.
And so with marriage came stress and intensity and anxiety,
and so my full blown sexual addiction began to escalate.
When Eve and I moved into these bigger cities, I
was going to strip joints and massage powers and prostitutes,
(12:33):
and each one of the moves it was a geographic
cure because I was like, if I can just get
away from these places, you know, that'll fix it. Well,
each city was bigger and there were more opportunities, and
the geographic cures lasted about a week and a half
in each one of those moves. And then we're in
Atlanta and she asked me the question why are you
(12:56):
so down?
Speaker 3 (12:57):
And the words came out of my mouth.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
And that it was really God because it had to
get out into the light. And so that was the
beginning of everything changing for us. But it was two
years of hell on Earth, Yes, it was.
Speaker 4 (13:15):
It was devastating to me to know that he had
this secret because of what he presented, who he presented
to be to the outside world, to me to We
were in leadership at our church, you know, and at
that time, in nineteen ninety the seven eleven convenience stores
(13:37):
had taken out pornography off their shelves all across the
United States, and that was a huge thing. And he
talked about that and let everybody know, you know, what
a great thing that was, at the same time, never
saying this is an issue for me. It was just
so shocking to me. So I went into my own
(13:59):
green cycle. The first stage is shocked and numbness, and
then a lot of anger, of under anger, was hurt, fear, frustration,
and injustice.
Speaker 5 (14:11):
But I couldn't tap into those deeper feelings.
Speaker 4 (14:13):
I'd never in my whole life really let myself feel
those really vulnerable feelings ever, And I lived in that
angry stage of grief for longer than I could really sustain,
and I got hopeless. When I became hopeless, I thought
(14:34):
a separation would be good for us or for me.
I went to a lawyer in the state of Georgia,
which is the same here in Mississippi.
Speaker 5 (14:42):
There is not a legal separation.
Speaker 4 (14:44):
I wanted to be protected financially because I was a
stay at home mom, and so she said, you know,
the only way you're gonna protect yourself financially is to divorce,
and you can be divorced in.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
Thirty days be protected financially.
Speaker 4 (14:58):
If y'all are able to reconcile, you can always remarry.
And so that sounded like a good solution to me
at the time. Once we did divorce, I was completely
done and at that point really realizing I'm on my
own and I have two small children, and ended up
(15:20):
getting a full time job and beginning to work on myself.
The first thing I did was go to a group
Adult Children of Alcoholics ACOA group, and that was eye
opening for me. It was one of the layers began
to peel off that oh wow, what I had grown
up had affected me and these were all the ways
(15:41):
when they handed me the laundry list of what happens
to a child.
Speaker 5 (15:47):
In my mind at the time, I thought, there's nothing
wrong with me.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
We would go to counseling. During the two years prior
to the divorce, Eva was not really I was engaged
in that process pretty quickly after I admitted to the
pornography and then began to reveal more to Eva. I
very quickly got engaged with a Christian counselor in Atlanta
(16:12):
because I wanted to be better. I wanted to deal
with this. I'd been wanting to deal with it. I
just didn't know how, and so I got engaged with
a Christian counselor. I got involved in a support group ministry.
I was in a therapy group with my counselor because
I wanted to do my work and I wanted to
be better, and we would go to counseling, and the counselor,
(16:34):
you know, we knew I.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
Was the problem.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
I was easy, and then he would kind of shine
that light over on Eva and he would ask about, well,
what about growing up with an alcoholic father? And her
standard reply was I'm fine, we're here because of him.
You need to fix him. And then okay, he'd come
back to me and then he'd shine the light over
there and you know what about the abortion, and she's like,
(16:59):
I'm over that.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
I'm fine, we're here because of him fixing.
Speaker 4 (17:04):
So at that point I did not want any more
couples counseling.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
After the divorce, I was ready.
Speaker 4 (17:12):
To get the help I needed for myself, so I
did a lot of individual counseling along with ACA. I
for the first time saw my own brokenness. I really
didn't think I had anything. I had a lot that
I had brought into the marriage. Over the next year,
(17:33):
I became open to reconciliation with Rome because I could
see it looked different. I brokenness looked different, but there
was a lot of similarities in it too, And even
when we were apart, I saw that he stayed in recovery.
I saw that he stayed in his own therapy. That
gave me hope that he was always going to work
(17:53):
on himself.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
I was engaged in my process because words at that
point are meaningless.
Speaker 4 (17:59):
I got up for a long time with I'll never
be able to trust him again. Well, as I did
my own work, I realized I had been set up
in my family of origin not to trust. So we
began more of a restoration process.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
We were divorced, separated in divorce for a little over
a year, and then we did decide to remarry. We
committed to doing our work in that process.
Speaker 5 (18:28):
We were involved in recovery groups.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
Yeah and in our process.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
It wasn't like we got remarried and everything was rosy.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
We had a lot of work to do.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
We were both involved in support groups and we always
have been and we always will be, and so we
continue to do our work because your marriage is not
easy and you have to be intentional.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
And you've been listening to Rome and Eva Hunter chaer
well quite nakedly, quite boldly, the problems they each brought
into the marriage. It was easy for Eva to blame
her husband Ron, but in the end she realized she
came with a lot of brokenness into this marriage too,
and they ultimately get divorced, reconcile, and find love and
(19:14):
hope again in each other. When we come back more
of this remarkable love story, Ron and Eva Hunter's story,
you're on our American story, and we're back with our
(19:39):
American stories, and with Ron and Eva Hunter's story, let's
pick up where they last left off.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Eva did not cause my sexual addiction, my acting out
so often. You know, guys will justify that in a
lot of different ways, and that's just totally bogus. You know,
I got on the marriage train with all this packed
in my luggage. You know, it's in that zipper compartment
down in there, get it all packed, neat and hidden.
(20:11):
We both got on the marriage train with our stuff.
So she did not cause it and she could not
change it. You know, what I developed was a very
illegitimate coping behavior that went back to early childhood. And
so the illegitimate coping behavior is learned early on. And
so that became my way of escape, my way of numbing,
(20:33):
my way of medicating the anxiety and the stress.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
That I was feeling.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
And even when we say sex addiction, even I both
say we don't really like the term, and the term
that we really prefer is just sexual brokenness, because this
thing takes a lot of different forms, and when you
say addiction, there's almost like it's hopeless. And from an
addiction standpoint, it's very different than drugs and alcohol because
(21:01):
those two things actually alter the chemical composition of your brain.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
And your body.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
And with this you got to begin to understand the
deeper roots. And so Eva could not change that. That
was on me and she could not control it. That's
all in my journey and part of my own recovery
and my growth.
Speaker 4 (21:26):
Somewhere in our forties, we both had the vision I
guess or really the calling that we would give back
on a professional level. In my mind, it was going
to be when we were retired somewhere in our sixties.
And I didn't think it would be as a career,
that this would be life two point zero. It was
(21:47):
just going to be how we did it in our
retirement years. Well, it's certainly God had another plan.
Speaker 3 (21:54):
God in Rome another plan.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
When I was in corporate world, I was very successful,
and I had great jobs and work for big companies
and all of that. But for me, my fulfillment came
in doing what we were doing in our church setting.
Often somebody might go talk to the pastor, and our pastors,
of course knew our story, and then they would like,
(22:21):
you need to go see talk to Ron. You know,
here's his phone number, or you need to talk to Eva.
And I think God did a healing work around a
lot of the shame that I had. It doesn't always
work that way for many people. Not that I don't
have any shame about that, but God spoke to my
heart that he was going to use this for his glory.
(22:44):
And then over time began to like, Okay, what does
it look like to really do this? And kind of
make a living, you know, giving up that safety and
security of a corporate job and launching out and doing
something on your own completely different. And boy, that was
a process and it took just a long time because
(23:04):
you know, you've got kids in college and bills and
houses and mortgages.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
And all of that, all the things.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Yeah, and so we'd begun our graduate work in Atlanta,
and you know, that process was such a journey to
go back to school and even thought that it was
what we were going to do when we retired.
Speaker 4 (23:25):
And after our boys went off to college, we decided
to move back to Mississippi. But while we were still
in Atlanta, we started our master's program at Richmond College
and we're able to transfer to Mississippi College here and
finished at the age of fifty.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
We're actually forty nine. I felt fifty.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
Yeah, yeah, Well I was in a corporate world in
my business career for twenty five plus years in the
corporate salt mines, and one of my goals was to
get out of that before I turned fifty, and I
made it. We started our private practice and we were
forty nine and have.
Speaker 4 (24:09):
Now been in private practice for ten years. We work
a lot with couples in crisis.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
When there's betrayal, the relationship is in crisis, and in
crisis you need a lot of direction. It's great to
have a therapist and ask you how you feel about that,
but when you're in crisis mode, it's kind of like
when the plane loses an engine. If the flight attendant
is just asking everybody how you feel, it's probably not
(24:39):
going to be helpful. And so when the plane's going down,
you want somebody that's kind of giving you direction. And
if you trust this process, there is hope. And we've
seen many marriages not only survive the crisis, but actually
begin to thrive and have the marriage that God intended
from the beginning.
Speaker 4 (25:00):
Rod and I were instrumental in doing an intervention with
my father and he did go to treatment and was
sober from alcohol for gosh, twenty five years, and so
I got to see my parents give back what they
had been given. They were very involved in the AA community,
(25:23):
just becoming really healthy and becoming very well boundaried people.
So I'm very very grateful for recovery and for where
we've been. What happened to us, it changed everything for
us the way we view life, the way we live
life and the way we give back what we've been given.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
It's just been amazing to kind of see what God's
done in the last ten years with all of this,
and how doors have just kept opening, and so much
of the things that are happening really feels surreal. We
really both love of what we do, and it doesn't
always it doesn't really feel like work now, it's kind
(26:05):
of crazy. And so God has certainly added life to
us in so many ways, and our mission is adding
life to others.
Speaker 4 (26:16):
I married a very passive man, and when the truth
came out, which he revealed himself, which is very unusual,
he changed into this man of He didn't have any fear.
Speaker 5 (26:32):
He really was very bold and courageous.
Speaker 4 (26:36):
And for me personally, I had shame to deal with.
Speaker 5 (26:41):
Because I really thought we were the perfect couple.
Speaker 4 (26:44):
We literally had a precious little house in Atlanta with
a white picket fence, literally, and it was so cute
and I really wanted to keep that image. So I
had my own shame that my image is broken. But
ron I saw the change from passivity to a man
(27:07):
of boldness and will come against anything it gets him
into trouble.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
Sometimes she keeps me grounded.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
But I have been speaking out about this and just
for so many years in churches with pastors and in
different settings, because really, this pornography thing is destroying so
many lives. It's one of those things that you can
hide and you can keep secret, and so I am
very outspoken. And I always say, you can't be a
(27:41):
pastor or a church leader and being an alcoholic you
get figured out pretty quick when you're preaching sermons and
you're drunk. Hard to be a crackhead and be a pastor,
people see you scratching and itching. That gets found out
pretty quick. But boy, with this thing, it can go underground.
Speaker 4 (27:58):
We just celebrated our forty wedding anniversary. We don't count
our one year apart. However, we did have to remarry
legally and had new vows, which that meant a lot
to us.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
We call it our marriage sabbatical. Yeah, yeah, but.
Speaker 4 (28:14):
What that feels like is there's just so much freedom.
Speaker 5 (28:18):
We no longer try to present this image.
Speaker 4 (28:21):
We're very open and honest and transparent, and you know,
we still.
Speaker 5 (28:27):
Can get sideways, real fast, real easy. However, we do
recover very fast. To today, there's a huge difference.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Yeah, we always say marriage just in and of itself,
without all this stuff. It's like, you know, God's sense
of humor. He takes a cat and a dog and
he throws him in a dryer and he says, hey, Peter,
ho my wine. Watch this, And then he turns the
dryer on and he says, okay, you too, get along.
That's marriage, right, And so it takes a lot of
(28:58):
intentionality for a marriage to be what God intended it
to be. But certainly, in our journey, we both say
quite often we would not trade anything that we've been
through to be where we are today.
Speaker 3 (29:12):
Not one thing.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Yeah, I mean, it certainly has been a journey, and
it's been hard, it has been easy, it hasn't been painless,
but boy, where we are today it is.
Speaker 5 (29:22):
Good and it has ultimately been for our good.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
And a terrific job on the storytelling and production by
Madison And a special thanks to Ron and Eva Hunter
for sharing their story. What a blessing. When Ron confessed
that he had a problem with pornography, things had to
turn south. It was a divorce, but in the end,
a year later, well, the husband was healing and now
the wife had to look at her own brokenness, an abortion,
(29:49):
an alcoholic father, and her own healing journey begins. The
two reconcile, They get married, and what do they do
with the rest of their lives. They help other married
couple heal their lives and their marriages by all means.
Pick up their book, Sex, God and the Chaos of Betrayal,
The story of Rome and Eva Hunter, the story of marriage,
(30:10):
love and redemption. Here on our American Stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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