A TBM friend has had and continues to have a life worse than the characters on the TV show Shameless. When he was a child him and his siblings were given to a local high level church leader who gave these kids to his wife to raise without asking her first. Not much love and affection growing up. After his mission he meet a girl who when she learned his adopted family was "rich" suddenly was having a baby. He married her out of guilt and was EXed from his believed church.

His wife proceeded to pop out the typical number of little Mormons that takes two hands to count them all. His wife would not work, do house work or even cook for their ever growing family. So he worked 60 plus hours a week trying to support the family and then came home to cook and clean. At different times when they had no food to eat he would go to their Bishop and beg for food but was always turned down because his adopted father was rich and a high ranking local LDS Leader. When his adopted father died and he received nothing from the estate his wife left him for her female lover. He meet the love of his life on one of those LDS dating sites and married a woman with four kids and no child support. His children starting having children of their own and moved in with him and his new wife and her kids.

Now one of their daughters has accused him of rape. He has been arrested and looking at jail time until after he is retired. Their current Bishop is refusing to help the family because he is looking at jail time and all his money is going to pay for lawyers trying to prove he is not guilty. The daughter hates him.

My TBM friend will not give up hope that someday his life will be better and he will be accepted by the leadership for all his suffering. The leadership has never allowed him to be rebaptised. He has been waiting over 25 years to rejoin the Saints.

What fun he is experiencing trying to be a TBM with a blended family, lesbian ex wife and now looking forward to prison.

Is your life worse? Does being TBM help or hurt?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/16/2017 09:54PM by themaster.

Note to self: No LDS dating sites.

My life is much better since I stopped trying to make Mormonism work. It's just so bad, and Mormons won't support you when the chips are down for indoctrination reasons. It's like being a member of the Soviet communist party. Devoted members wonder how the hell they wound up in the gulag.

Personally, if I were still hung ho for the church, I'd prefer some major suffering just to snap me out of it.

I commend him for his struggles and hardships. That truly is empowering.

If the church is not willing to help or practice what they preach, that is awfully hypocritical, low, and it reveals a lot about their characters.

First step to take: get rid of the horrible church people. They have nothing he needs and he should not subject himself to any of it. It's not healthy.

Your friend's story has some similarity with my wife's and her family, including adult children from a previous marriage to an RM. It's a mess, and I wouldn't even know where to begin.

Suffice it to say, my wife's life is much better with me, a nevermo, than it ever was with her RM-ex and her TBM in-laws. She frequently tells me that she has shared more love, joy, and support with me in four years that she had during the entire 28 years of her first marriage.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/17/2017 12:01PM by GregS.

until I left. It has gotten a lot better since. I've told my story plenty of times on here.

After my failed gay/straight marriage, I'm with the guy I wanted to marry at age 20, for 12 years now, longer than my "marriage" lasted. Finances are back to where they were before it all fell apart. I'm one of the few who worked for my boss who still has a job and got another one. The LDS women who worked there are all looking for other jobs now. My ex and I are best friends, etc., etc.

I did 'everything' right, well as humanly possible. I still have people, after all these years, tell me they can't believe this all happened to ME. Especially my siblings and my parents.

I'd be insane to try to go back and try that life again.

I had some awful things happen to me in my life. I guess the physical and mental abuse was the worst. But I was able to escape that, and get on with my life. My children have had a nice life, with the normal hard work required, and the normal ups and downs of dating and football injuries, etc.

I can honestly say that, other than the abuse, Mormonism was the worst thing in our life--for my children and for me.

The cult was what we argued about.
The cult didn't allow for any mistakes.
The cult didn't accept individuality or humor.
The cult demanded the limited free time we had.
The cult tried to take over my role as parent.
The cult tried to teach my children to hate non cult-members.
The cult lied to my children

The cult taught my children to be afraid of the Second Coming, afraid of God punishing them, afraid of being alone for eternity, afraid of asking questions.

The cult tried to take away two years of my children's lives--those two years needed to continue to seamlessly work and put themselves through college.

When my children took classes other than seminary, and when they didn't go on missions, the cult members shunned them, and tried to make them unhappy.

Luckily, my children and I resigned, and put a stop to the Mormon harassment. No one likes being maligned, having others try to spread lies about them, being told that the world is "lone and dreary", and the world is going to end in the year 2000, or whenever. It's pretty depressing to be told that the best Heaven you can ever hope for is the Mormon version, in which you might be a ministering angel, of someone on earth is baptized for you, or at the very highest level, you might be the polygamist wife of some hate-filled cult member.

When we got rid of Mormonism, we got rid of 90% of the hopelessness in our lives. All that despair is unnecessary!

If anyone ever asks you to do anything for them then you should feel free to ask them what you get out of it. If they can't have a decent conversation about that to your satisfaction then red-flag them and establish good boundaries. Why this man got walked all over was because he didn't have a real chance to say "no" to the abuses in his life. For starts, if a spouse will not work to do their part for a family through whatever respectful win-win agreement that the parties make then the other spouse ought to get out and go find someone else to spend their life with.