After mulling over the recent information about LDS Inc.'s polygamy fallout, I think the most disturbing part of it for me is realizing the lack of Joe's respect for his wife or his marriage.

Do you think 'The Church' is good at teaching the importance of respecting each other in marriage?

My experience has been that the message was "do not have sex before marriage", but beyond that I don't remember being taught to honor and respect each other. I think being committed to never doing anything that will undermine a marriage is key to a happy union. Obviously Emma was not respected, and Joe was doing everything he could to undermine his marriage.

No, they don't teach the importance of respecting each other in marriage. If they do preach about it it certainly isn't practiced. LDS men have so much to do in the church for other people that they often don't have time for their own wife and children.

I love my husband to bits but there were many years especially when he was the EQ president or when in the bishopric that he rarely had time for me and the kids. If it came down to doing something for the church or for us he would pick the church. It wasn't that he didn't love us, it was the guilt heaped on him that if he didn't live up to all his callings and covenants he was a bad, bad man.

You know when we were sealed the sealer told us to set aside every Friday as date night, what a flippin' joke, my husband was rarely home of Fridays. And heck when we were young we didn't even have the money to go out, maybe if we were paying 10% of our income to the church we could have.

Thank goodness we are out of the cult. We go out, we hang out at home, we talk, we come first to each other the way it should be. I do keep going back to the fact that we had to leave a church that says it's all about family in order to actually appreciate our family, go figure.

"LDS men have so much to do in the church for other people that they often don't have time for their own wife and children."


Women complain when husband spends too much time at church, but I keep reading story after story of women opposing their husband when he questions the church. So who is pressuring the men to be so devout?

Many women's first devotion is to the church, so they also want the same from their husband.

Well that certainly wasn't the case in my home, I got out first. I always put my family first which is why I was a craptastic mormon.

Has it ever occurred to you that, just like men, women are not a single monolith with a single hive mind? We do not all value the same things. We do not all behave in exactly the same way. One woman is not all women.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/02/2014 11:56AM by dogzilla.

I don't think FreeMan is all that fond of women, judging from his posts.

[No, I'm not talking behind your back, Free; jump in! You sound like you been treated bad and as a result the entire species is suspect.]

:>)

Ya think? LOL

I will call it out every time I see it. This is a recovery board and people are trying to deal with their shit here. One of the least effective ways to recover is the project your own business on to everyone else and cast about to place blame anywhere but on your own behavior. It's very very difficult to take a good hard look at yourself and accept and take responsibility for your behaviors and actions that led to the situation you're griping about now. Once you do, I found, it's so much easier to be kinder and more empathetic toward other people and that is what brings peace of mind.

I am probably wasting my time.

But maybe some day, there will be some person who has an epiphany and finally groks what I've been hammering on and on about all these years and starts taking responsibility for their own part in their own shitshows. And if just one person wakes up and grows up and finally finds that peace within him or herself, then it will be worth all the flaming and being told to fuck off or shut up. (Not that you just did; I hope that was clear.)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/03/2014 09:12AM by dogzilla.

You aren't wasting your time at all. Please call it out when you see it. I don't like to see women or men hating, both sexes can do awful things.

I don't personally think "marriage" merits any "honoring."
My wife and I made a commitment to each other. *That* merits honoring, on a very personal level. We would have made that commitment even if there was no such thing as "marriage," or a legal contract, or anything of the sort. When you confuse a concept and its implementation (the "institution") with what it can and does mean to the individuals who participate in it, you start having real problems.

And like every other such concept, the morg "honor" the institution, not the individual people who use it. They get all legalistic, and ignore that it's a commitment of love between two people (ANY two people mature enough to do so intelligently). They even forget their own checkered past with flaunting the institution, and demand that their current interpretation of it be "honored," even though that's very different from what they used to use the institution for.

In other words, they've missed the point entirely, and just use their convoluted concept to make rules and try to control people. That shouldn't surprise anyone here...:)

Exactly.

After all the fuss the church has made about being so about family- they ignore spouses!

slipped Emma in between teens. I wonder if that was her reward for keeping quiet about them.

I took the celestial marriage Institute class.

Here's one example of an institute program.



http://institute.lds.org/bc/content/institute/materials/english/student-manuals/religion-234-235-eternal-marriage-student-manualeng.pdf

For some reason the class didn't give me a foundation and I have no idea why.
My husband and I were both converts from dysfunctional families and maybe that's why we struggled so badly trying to figure out how to have a healthy relationship.
After the course we were supposed to know everything and it just didn't work that way.

When the ultimate reward ghawd has to offer is for men only, and involves women as items as part of that reward, it's easy to see that mormonism isn't big on romantic love.

It's likely that hardly any woman, as she is kneeling across from her husband in a sealing room, thinks about the fact that if he's worthy, ghawd is going to give him more women to have and to hold, worlds without it.

I'd like to see some mormon fiction where a husband and wife are so deeply in love that he turns down any additional wives so as not to hurt the love of his eternal life. But of course, the counter fiction will come out in which the wife realizes she can't hold up her head at Celestial Oaks Country Club because her husband only has one wife... What's a upwardly mobile goddess supposed to do?

Call me "old school" ! I'm a believer in honoring and trusting the marriage covenant/contract. If both people can work together in some reasonable manner, at least, most of the time, they will raise children that honor and trust them also. It's a lot of doing and taking responsibility.
The more common ground between two people, on the more important matters, the better. Plus, understanding that both people are going to change in a lot of ways over the years and adjust makes a huge difference, especially in the senior years. Marriage needs a lot of willingness to forgive also.
Also, just plain tenacity, commitment and a willingness to never, ever give up, the marriage can and does last. A long marriage will go through a lot of changes as both partners change with age.

Once resentment, bitterness, selfishness takes over one or both partners towards the other, it is a likely sign of a marriage that won't stand the test of time. Those three negative behaviors and attitudes take away a lot of positive attributes that are soon buried.

There is no one manual with all the answers. Each partner figures it out as they go, learning what is needed and what is not working. Taking pride in the marriage commitment goes a long ways.
How did we get to over 50 years of marriage? Simply put: one day at a time.

My observance of the temple sealing ceremony showed the respect was to the Mormon church and Mormon priesthood.

Marriage is a ritual to bring BICs into the flock while under the stewardship of the Mormon priesthood.

Does all marriage deserve respect? Does Mormon marriage deserve respect? It is such an individualized undertaking that is standardized by State and Church. Yet it means so many different things to the participants.

Why talk about the important stuff regarding marriage? Marriage is based on fantasy.

If we wanted to address reality, we would make agreements for all sorts of stuff.


Most divorces are about money. Why don't we require agreements to be made regarding how much money is needed, and how it will be spent, how extravagant will be our lifestyle, etc.

When it is said someone cheated, it is assumed it was sex with someone else. But what about withholding sex? Is there no requirement to offer it? No agreement before marriage about frequency of sex?

How about other forms of cheating, such as gossiping about your spouse? Or putting them first before church, and extended family?

How about agreements regarding where to live, how many children, household responsibilities, etc, etc.

As we can see, we want to enter it blindly and wing it. Just like the church - just have faith.

Who is this "we" you keep referring to?

Stop projecting your experiences on to everyone else. Not everyone stumbles blindly into whatever they're told, just following their dick. Some of us are thoughtful about life-changing decisions. Some of us talk through things in relationships to ensure compatibility or at the very least, the ability to compromise and/or "fight fair."

Ive made agreements like you mentioned in non-marriage relationships. I think people who can't be bothered to think through what a partnership really means are idiots who deserve all the misery they bring on themselves.

I think you are projecting a collection of negative talks and experiences (yours, others) onto the issue of marriage. Your opening remark, "Why talk about the important stuff regarding marriage? Marriage is based on fantasy," is the giveaway, akin to IfICouldHieToKolob's dismissal of marriage as nothing except an artificial social construct.

Marriage involves goals, hopes, priorities, physical desires, friendship, ideals, social standards, personal commitment, vision, morality, integrity, legal obligations, and many other aspects of our humanity.

Including fantasy! But that doesn't mean marriage is some idealized ephemera. Mature, functional people will use their critical and emotional faculties to decide how well another person reasonably conforms to that list of goals, hopes, priorities (etc.) in the above paragraph. Unfortunately, a lot of people take just one, or a few, of them to the exclusion of the others. So once the most highly prized quality (or qualities) aren't so entertaining, the novelty wears off (e.g. physical attraction), and the relationship (and perhaps marriage) seriously deteriorates.

Religious commitment was, and is, very important to my wife and me. But we have many other shared values and interests. In TSCC, religious commitment crowds out a lot of other marriage attributes.

Free Man, you rightly identify a lot of problems that hit marriage, and TSCC marriages especially. But I do think you wrongly over-generalize this to the institution of marriage itself.

Here are some reasons why LDS marriages suck:

- Both parties covenanted to sacrifice everything to the church. At no time did they sacrifice to give everything to the building up of one another or their union. The church comes first.

- The church teaches that a happy marriage is based on devotion to the church. Each partner may think the other should feel loved constantly if they are living TBM lives.

- Men have priesthood and keys. Women have vaginas. This is supposed to answer all other questions about equality.

- Garments aren't sexy. AT ALL.

- Both parties are necessarily a little disconnected from reality and their own sound judgment.

- Both parties think he can save her by a patriarchal stranglehold (I mean grip).

- Both parties may be expecting polygamy to be required at some point in the future.

It feels like I'm just getting started. What a recipe for disaster.

Right!

TSCC has nothing to offer couples. Their marriage advice is to pray, study scriptures, pay tithing and adhere to strict gender roles as defined by them. It's completely empty. Nothing about how to build a healthy adult relationship. Nothing about healthy sexuality.

It seeks to keep couples together via tri-party manipulation.

My wife and I have made it through 46 years of marriage. I think it has survived because we do have respect for each other and deeply care about each other as human beings. This is not

something that was taught in some class but mainly learned by trial and error over time. It definitely was not taught to us in church because we left there about twenty years ago. Some of the

times were not easy and they were a test, but I guess we were both so stubborn to make things work that we just plowed ahead and have maybe figured it out. I say maybe because we both joke that

marriage is a one day at a time thing and any day things could change. Hopefully we will keep at it and make to year 47; there are just eleven months left until we get there. Let me also say

that being best friends for almost fifty years is also a big help. Being really good friends makes it easier to overlook trivial stuff that bugs others.

Like Dinah, I think a lot of requirements for being TBM puts undue stress on marriage. I think the church talks out both sides of it's mouth. On the one hand, the leaders express ideas about the sanctity of marriage and encourage fidelity and commitment. (post Manifesto; tee-hee).

But at the same time, the church requires members to give tons of time, money, etc. (see Dinah's post) I wish I could go back and relive the first 20 years of marriage without being TBM. I really believe the stress of being Mormon is a negative force and not a good way to raise a family.

Thanks Susie and michaelc1945 for your posts. RFM rocks!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/03/2014 10:44AM by antilehinephi.