"I'm deconstructing and my spouse is not. What do we do now?"
Here's another toxic cultural thing I absorbed from the Mormon zealotry that I'm letting go of: the idea that if you married in the Church and one of you leaves, it's the end of the world and the only way to resolve it is to get divorced. I don't know when I absorbed this, but I did. And it has done a lot of damage to me over the years.
At the root of this belief is the idea that only the Church can hold your marriage together. Your shared orthodoxy is your marriage, so there is no real or lasting love without it. If the only thing holding a marriage together is religious observance and obligations to the institutional church, that's not much of a marriage. I didn't understand this until I distanced myself from the institutional church and saw my marriage was largely unchanged. My husband and I have an entire shared world together: history, dimensions, shared interests, experiences, and common values that still exist independent of our religious lives. I didn't stop loving him just because I can't get through a sacrament meeting anymore. Those two things are unrelated. There's no reason they should be. He understood that long before I did and has given me the space to figure that out.
I love my husband because of who he is, not because of who he is in or to the Church. That's not how I measure his worth as a person. There's so much more to him than that. That perspective has been life-changing for me. It took stepping away for me to realize that what my happiness looks like in my own marriage was being dictated to me by strangers. And they were very bad at knowing where and how I would find my own happiness. Sometimes, the best thing you can do for your marriage is to remove the casual observers and all the people from the cheap seats who only show up to throw things at you. Don't let people like that decide how happy you get to be
A good marriage is not dependent on shared religious beliefs. A good marriage comes from shared values and respect. Building each other up, cherishing similarities and differences wherever they exist. This isn't impossible. From my perspective, largely because my husband is also my best friend, it isn't even hard.
That's not to say that modifying something that is foundational to a relationship is easy. It has to be done in a spirit of mutual love and respect. No one ever thinks how valuable that love and respect for change is until they find themselves in the position of needing to receive it. I know I never did until I was in that position myself. And as the one who was asking for space and grace, I knew how important it was for the mutual respect I was asking for to start with me.
Through several conversations over a long period of time, I repeatedly made the commitment that I would respect his decision to stay, to be a safe person to him in his desire to believe, and honor this part of who he is. I would not ask him to give up this part of his life. I said that and I had to mean it. If I wanted him to respect my decisions to separate myself from attending church, I needed to respect his decision to stay.
And that's what we did for many years.
When he had responsibilities for his calling, I didn't stop him. When he would go to the temple, I wouldn't complain about it. When he would have meetings to go to, I didn't object. He had the freedom to live his faith without my interference.
I'm not going to sit here and pretend like that was easy for either of us. It was hard. It was work. But we did it because we love each other and we're committed to staying together. To having a relationship that would grow with us through every stage of our lives.
When I found out that the women at church were pestering him, constantly asking him where I was, telling him how much they missed me, making his worship time about my absence, I communicated my frustration with that to the Relief Society president. I accepted that these interactions with the organization I was distancing myself from were going to continue because some of these boundaries were mine to enforce. Not his.
He showed me equal respect for my desire for that distance. He listened to me as I lamented the parts of me that were changing. He didn't always understand, but he tried. He stretched himself to have compassion for what he couldn't understand.
Even when we would have disagreements, there was never a moment where I felt like he was making my struggle about himself. And we had some truly uncomfortable conversations where all I asked him to do was to listen to my perspective. There were times when that was tremendously uncomfortable for him. But he went to that place with me anyway.
He became the cheerleader at my wrestling matches, even when the one I was wrestling with was God. That image to him has always been funny. I let him laugh. It's okay with me that he sees the absurdity in my situation. It helps me to see it too, to laugh at myself. I need that. It keeps me from being overtaken by despair.
Wrestling with God is a holy thing. It's a sacred activity in a sacred space that not everyone is called to. But I am. The person he loves, who pursues holiness and honors the sacred, is still here. It just looks different now. And I view my challenge as making sure that no matter what he chooses to be, that he's a good one. If he's going to be a Mormon, he's going to be a good one. He's going to honor the covenants he made to treat all people with dignity and respect.
Occupying that space with him has given me the space I needed to heal, to find clarity on what consumes without illuminating, to remove those aspects of Mormonism from my life. I have a healthier relationship with my religion now, in large part, because of my husband.
Folks who stay need to do a better job of honoring the callings their family members and loved ones receive to wrestle with God. If you trust God as much as you say you do, that shouldn't be a scary place for you to be.
And for those who truly can't understand why their loved ones would ever choose to wrestle with God, let me provide insight from someone who has been there: there comes a point where there are no other enemies left and it's the only way left to grow.
Accept the calling to be a cheerleader. Be in the front row seats when you're invited to show up. Make sure that person in your life knows that you're there to support them. It doesn't need to be more complicated than that.
It's easy to read 1 Cor. 7:12-17. It's harder to actually do it.
Maybe that's part of what God is teaching you if this is the situation in which you've found yourselves.
At the root of this belief is the idea that only the Church can hold your marriage together. Your shared orthodoxy is your marriage, so there is no real or lasting love without it. If the only thing holding a marriage together is religious observance and obligations to the institutional church, that's not much of a marriage. I didn't understand this until I distanced myself from the institutional church and saw my marriage was largely unchanged. My husband and I have an entire shared world together: history, dimensions, shared interests, experiences, and common values that still exist independent of our religious lives. I didn't stop loving him just because I can't get through a sacrament meeting anymore. Those two things are unrelated. There's no reason they should be. He understood that long before I did and has given me the space to figure that out.
I love my husband because of who he is, not because of who he is in or to the Church. That's not how I measure his worth as a person. There's so much more to him than that. That perspective has been life-changing for me. It took stepping away for me to realize that what my happiness looks like in my own marriage was being dictated to me by strangers. And they were very bad at knowing where and how I would find my own happiness. Sometimes, the best thing you can do for your marriage is to remove the casual observers and all the people from the cheap seats who only show up to throw things at you. Don't let people like that decide how happy you get to be
A good marriage is not dependent on shared religious beliefs. A good marriage comes from shared values and respect. Building each other up, cherishing similarities and differences wherever they exist. This isn't impossible. From my perspective, largely because my husband is also my best friend, it isn't even hard.
That's not to say that modifying something that is foundational to a relationship is easy. It has to be done in a spirit of mutual love and respect. No one ever thinks how valuable that love and respect for change is until they find themselves in the position of needing to receive it. I know I never did until I was in that position myself. And as the one who was asking for space and grace, I knew how important it was for the mutual respect I was asking for to start with me.
Through several conversations over a long period of time, I repeatedly made the commitment that I would respect his decision to stay, to be a safe person to him in his desire to believe, and honor this part of who he is. I would not ask him to give up this part of his life. I said that and I had to mean it. If I wanted him to respect my decisions to separate myself from attending church, I needed to respect his decision to stay.
And that's what we did for many years.
When he had responsibilities for his calling, I didn't stop him. When he would go to the temple, I wouldn't complain about it. When he would have meetings to go to, I didn't object. He had the freedom to live his faith without my interference.
I'm not going to sit here and pretend like that was easy for either of us. It was hard. It was work. But we did it because we love each other and we're committed to staying together. To having a relationship that would grow with us through every stage of our lives.
When I found out that the women at church were pestering him, constantly asking him where I was, telling him how much they missed me, making his worship time about my absence, I communicated my frustration with that to the Relief Society president. I accepted that these interactions with the organization I was distancing myself from were going to continue because some of these boundaries were mine to enforce. Not his.
He showed me equal respect for my desire for that distance. He listened to me as I lamented the parts of me that were changing. He didn't always understand, but he tried. He stretched himself to have compassion for what he couldn't understand.
Even when we would have disagreements, there was never a moment where I felt like he was making my struggle about himself. And we had some truly uncomfortable conversations where all I asked him to do was to listen to my perspective. There were times when that was tremendously uncomfortable for him. But he went to that place with me anyway.
He became the cheerleader at my wrestling matches, even when the one I was wrestling with was God. That image to him has always been funny. I let him laugh. It's okay with me that he sees the absurdity in my situation. It helps me to see it too, to laugh at myself. I need that. It keeps me from being overtaken by despair.
Wrestling with God is a holy thing. It's a sacred activity in a sacred space that not everyone is called to. But I am. The person he loves, who pursues holiness and honors the sacred, is still here. It just looks different now. And I view my challenge as making sure that no matter what he chooses to be, that he's a good one. If he's going to be a Mormon, he's going to be a good one. He's going to honor the covenants he made to treat all people with dignity and respect.
Occupying that space with him has given me the space I needed to heal, to find clarity on what consumes without illuminating, to remove those aspects of Mormonism from my life. I have a healthier relationship with my religion now, in large part, because of my husband.
Folks who stay need to do a better job of honoring the callings their family members and loved ones receive to wrestle with God. If you trust God as much as you say you do, that shouldn't be a scary place for you to be.
And for those who truly can't understand why their loved ones would ever choose to wrestle with God, let me provide insight from someone who has been there: there comes a point where there are no other enemies left and it's the only way left to grow.
Accept the calling to be a cheerleader. Be in the front row seats when you're invited to show up. Make sure that person in your life knows that you're there to support them. It doesn't need to be more complicated than that.
It's easy to read 1 Cor. 7:12-17. It's harder to actually do it.
Maybe that's part of what God is teaching you if this is the situation in which you've found yourselves.
