Confessions Of A ‘Good Church Girl’: Like Tina Campbell I Did Everything ‘Right’ — So Why Did I Still End Up Divorced? [Op-Ed]

The news about Teddy Campbell filing for divorce from Tina Campbell lands with a kind of cultural déjà vu. After a very public reconciliation following his affair, their story had been held up as proof that faith, forgiveness, and doing things in a Christ-like way could still lead to restoration.

For a lot of Black millennial church girls, that narrative feels familiar. It’s the same The same one I followed.

To be a church girl and not feel “God made this person just for me” when I got married should have been my flag. A small part of 24-year-old me knew that. My intuition was there. It was just quiet. I had not yet learned that it was safe to trust myself over the voices that surrounded me.

I was a good church girl. I did what I was supposed to do, stayed out of trouble, and finished school. I got married and had my children within that marriage. I followed the blueprint I had been handed for as long as I could remember. Still, my marriage ended. That reality forced me to sit with something many Black millennial church girls are now confronting: doing everything “right” does not guarantee forever.

Marriage had always been framed as the natural progression of adulthood. It was not necessarily spoken as pressure, but it existed as expectation. Graduate, get a job, get married, and build a family. Those milestones existed as markers of stability, maturity, and faithfulness. I followed that path.

I got engaged less than a year after graduating from college. I had only lived alone for 10 months before transitioning into marriage. At the time, that felt normal. It felt like momentum. It felt like progress. Looking back, I realize I had barely met myself before I married someone else.

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