How do I know?

As an undergraduate, I studied some philosophy, including epistemology, which I thought was the most useless subject ever. The whole subject revolved around the question “What is Knowledge?” It seems that for a long time, philosophers thought they had it figured out. Knowledge was a justified, true belief. Then, in the 1960s, along comes a guy called Gettier who wrote a 3-page paper blowing this all out of the water by showing that there are examples of justified, true beliefs that are not considered knowledge.

A Gettier problem goes something like this.

Imagine you’re walking down a country road, alongside a field. You see something that looks like a sheep. It’s kind of white and fluffy, it has four legs, and you hear it go “bleat.” You say to yourself, “there is a sheep in that field.” It’s a belief. It’s justified – you’ve got good reasons to believe that what you see is a sheep. It’s true – there is a sheep in that field. The problem is, what you think is a sheep is actually a dog dressed up as a sheep, with a hidden tape recorder (although maybe today it would be an MP3 player – it’s been a number of years since I took this class!) The real sheep is hidden from view, just over a bit of a rise in the field. So, did you really know that there was a sheep in the field? You had a justified, true belief, but since your belief and evidence didn’t refer to the actual object, it’s not knowledge. So what is knowledge? My answer – WHO CARES?! Complete waste of time. Who goes around dressing dogs up as sheep anyway?!

I know that I want to marry Matthew, my lovely fiancé. What does this mean, that I know? It’s probably a bit hard to analyse even in terms of being a justified, true belief. Who can really verify that it’s true except me, and I could be deceiving myself? Anyway, I don’t think it really matters. What might matter a little bit more is how I know that I want to marry Matt.

On Sunday, I received a phone call from a friend who was overseas when Matt and I got engaged. I had emailed her to let her know to happy news, but Sunday was the first time we’d talked about it – she only arrived back in the country last Thursday. She said to me, “I can’t believe you’re engaged! How do you know?!”

It’s a little surprising – she’s actually the first person to have asked that!

When I was young, my mother always told my brother and I that when you meet the right person, you just know. When he got married, my brother said that he’d never believed our mother until he met his wife. When I met Matt… well, I didn’t “just know.”

This worried me for quite awhile. In fact, only three weeks after our first date, I actually broke up with him, because I was convinced it wasn’t going to work out, and I didn’t want to drag things on for too long, because I thought that would only hurt him more. Fortunately, I realised the error of my ways (in part because of the incredibly gracious and caring way he responded to my ending things), and fortunately he gave me a second chance. Of course, now that we’re engaged, I’m fully aware of how much I would have missed out on! But even after this, I still didn’t know.

Less than three months into our relationship, I was feeling completely confused about things. I wasn’t sure I wanted to get married at all, let alone married to Matt. I was concerned about how to balance my career/ministry goals and aspirations with marriage and family. I was wondering if I would be better off remaining single for the sake of the gospel. But it was difficult to think clearly about things. I was about to head off overseas for my third annual European conference adventure. I was trying to write three conference papers, while teaching, marking, working on my PhD and just keeping up with everything else in life. My head was a mess. I was hoping that the time away would give me some space to think, but that was wishful thinking. I was just as busy overseas – conferences, research, sight-seeing… It was exhausting!

While overseas, I spent some time staying with family friends in Walsall. I remember talking to Sheila (a lovely woman a few years older than my mum) about my concerns surrounding career and family. She said that I probably wouldn’t feel that way if I’d met the right person. Strangely enough, her daughter said exactly the same thing as well. Sheila knew I had a boyfriend, but her daughter didn’t. Understandably, this made me even more stressed. Did these conflicted feelings I was having mean that Matt was just not the right one?

When I got back, I still wasn’t sure about things. Seeing Matt again didn’t help either. It was wonderful to see him, and I enjoyed being with him, but I still had doubts. I was actually convinced that I was going to have to break up with him. The complicating factor was that we were going to Melbourne at the end of September (this was mid-August) and I thought that breaking up would make things awkward. Good thing I had a reason to wait – I could have made another terrible mistake!

A couple of weeks after I returned from overseas, I had hot chocolate with a couple of friends, Nicki and Liz. I shared with them about my doubts concerning my relationship with Matt. I can’t remember exactly what they said, but I remember Nicki telling me that she had doubts about marrying her husband almost right up to the wedding day (I hope I’m remembering this right!) It gave me such comfort to know that it was ok to have doubts – that all these feelings I was having were just part of working things out. As I thought about things more, I realised how wrong some of the advice I’d been given was. If I was seriously having concerns about how to combine career and family – because I was passionate about both – of course they weren’t going to disappear just because I met someone and fell in love, particularly as that person was always encouraging me in my academic and intellectual pursuits. In fact, I felt so much reassured by this conversation that I stopped in at Tiffany’s on my way home, just to have a quick peek at engagement rings!

It was at this time that Matt and I had our first fight. Matt had been told by one of his friends that it was important to have at least one fight before getting engaged, so it was good we got it out of the way! It was over something pretty small, but I was a bit upset, and I was concerned about possibly unhelpful relationship precedents. As it turned out, however, we set quite a good relationship precedent – conflict resolution. We managed to sit down and talk things through, sharing how we felt, and what we each had meant by what we’d said, and we both made an effort to understand what the other person was thinking. It’s kind of strange that our first fight was what made me so much more sure of my relationship with Matt, but I guess communication and conflict resolution are important in any relationship.

So that was around mid-August. Since then, I’ve only been becoming more and more sure of my love for Matt and my desire to commit myself fully and eternally to him. I’ve realised that what people really mean (or should really mean) when they say “When you meet the right person, you just know) is “When you realise that you have met the right person, you just know.” I didn’t know as soon as I met Matt – it wasn’t love at first sight – but I do know that he’s the right person. How do I know? Well, to a large extent, I just know. There are innumerable little things that reassure me that we’re doing the right thing, but I’m not sure it’s something that can really be described in words. Just for the record, here are a few key things:

• I love Matt. I want to serve him, and to serve God and others with him.
• Being around Matt makes me happy, and being apart from him makes me sad. It’s like I’m addicted and I can’t go for more than a few days without a fix!
• We really understand each other and appreciate each other’s quirks, like quoting the Princess Bride and other cult classics incessantly. “Turn here!” “Where?” “HERE!”
• Matt can make me feel so special just by holding my hand.
• Matt loves me for who I am, and just as I am.
• I love Matt for who he is, and just as he is.

112 days to go! I can hardly wait!