Student Loans
When
I shared with Kristin that I felt freer after using my first paycheck to pay off the
credit card debt that I had accumulated after we ran out of money in southeast Asia,
she disclosed that she had delinquent student loans and asked me to pay them
off so that she can feel free as well.
Her Satanist father had told her to sign the student loan papers when she was in college, promising to make the loan payments until they were paid off, but stopped making them when she became a Christian. Her student loans had been delinquent for a while, had accrued interest and penatlies, and were already a five-figure sum. She said she had been stressed out about the penalties and interest continuing to accrue, but had had no way to do anything about it. One of Kristin's virtues is her tenacity, without which she wouldn't have survived her father's sexual and spiritual abuses. For a few days, repayment of her student loans was all that she talked about.
It was quite forward of her to ask and then insist that I pay off her delinquent student loans that her father had let her down on, but I attributed that to her seeing me as someone who is caring for her as her father should have cared for her. Eliminating this source of her stress would help her health, but the main reason for heeding her was one that she didn't even know about. Even after her delinquent students loans have been repaid, the record of its delinquency will take seven years to clear from her credit report, which will remain ruined for those seven years. The sooner her student loans and penalties are paid off, the sooner that seven year clock could start. I didn't know where she would be or with whom she would be in seven years, but I wanted her to have the option of returning to USA and having a clean credit record at least seven years from now. So the next few paychecks were used to pay off her student loans.
She thanked me for several days, and then made a bigger request: "Now marry me."
I took it as another way of her saying thank you and brushed it off, but she kept repeating it once in a while. It was flattering to hear a beautiful woman half my age tell me to marry her, but I still brushed it off as her way of expressing gratitude in an endearing way.