I'm sorry for your loss, and I really think you are going through the greiving process. This is why:

"But she is gone now. And now what? How does a guy who just turned 43, and who has eight kids, and who is pretty much as conservative socially and politically as he ever was as a devout Mormon, find a new girl? Many of the girls where I live seem bohemian to the core, many decorated in tattoos and exotic piercings, uninterested in family, coarse in a way, not any trace of innocence left in them, whereas I can't stop pining for the beautiful, almost angelic presence that so overwhelmed me when I met her.

I am not sure at all that Mormonism made me this way. I think I am mostly, if not entirely, like this, by nature. This has been frustrating. When I was a Mormon, it was okay to be out of step with the world, because I was surrounded by others who were all marching out of step with the world, right along with me. But in realizing that Mormonism was a fraud, I didn't go from being out of step with the world, to being in step with it. All I did was find myself out of step with both the world *and* Mormonism. I long to find a woman now, who I would be in step with, and I often think that if I only had that, that would be enough; but I sure haven't found a woman like that, and I am not even sure that she exists."

You know that this isn't true. You know that the "world" isn't so black and white as to be Mormon/Non-Mormon "world."

Give yourself some time.

The language he chooses reveals his attitudes.

The side of me that is an armchair psychologist wants to try and analyze you because your name is BadGirl, not BadWoman.

and a humorous one.

:)

but I think it's just semantics, ah "Girl" "Woman", tomoto, tomato...same diff.

Dude, I went through a divorce after leaving the church a few years ago. I am now remarried to a lovely female. I'm sure a talented good looking guy like yourself will have no problem. Hang in there. You do go through a grieving process, much like a you do, when there is a death. It's a process of eb's and flow's, that gradually works its way out. I have a feeling you are going to be so much happier in the years to come. Good luck.

for a perfect mirror image of himself, a female Tal.
Someone to be perfectly in step with him, and he bemoans the fact that he can't find this.
He's a bit stuck on himself. Part of growing up is being able to form a close committed relationship with another DIFFERENT human being. You won't always be exactly in step with each other, but that's how people LEARN AND GROW.

Sometimes after the fall, even if a wife agrees with the exit, she wants her man to retain the angelic qualities he too had as a Mormon. It goes both ways you see.

I don't know the details of Tal's lifestyle since his exit, but I will say that watching one's husband adopt new behaviors such as drinking and porn can make the exmo woman regret the loss of her religious lifestyle more than the loss of her faith.


For you see, exiting often is a highly spiritual process and has it rewards at the time. But the subsequent fallout can be hard to take. When you lose faith in your spouse, the future seems very blue and recovery is unimaginable.

That there is a definition of "perfection" and that people can be like "angels" here on earth.

It only sets people up for failure and disappointment.

Greetings, Tal and welcome back. I was there at the Exmormon Conference when you and Tracey spoke. I as struck at the time how you looked like a couple one could miniaturize and put on top of a wedding cake. You with your Adonis good-looks and Tracey, a matching angel indeed.

You came back to hear ideas from us, your community in exile so to speak, about this almost unbearable loss. I have a different perspective to offer, some ideas you may not have considered and forgive me in advance if I am blunt.

First of all-- you are baffled at your inability to affect this situation. That is because it is not about you, so nothing you say really matters. It is about Tracey and your perception of her.

You met this "angelic presence" when she was fourteen years old, as I recall, when you were on your mission. You couldn't forget her because was she not the epitome of the virginal ideal young Mormon wife you had been promised as your due upon worthily completing your mission?

I am sure that you also became an iconic figure in her young eyes as you with your priesthood missionary powers lead the authority figures in her life to the baptismal font. Power is an aphrodisiac to women and there you were, a modern Moroni. OF COURSE she fell in love with you, Tal. And when you came back "for her" it was also the stuff of myth, her Prince Charming has arrived, he is awaking the Sleeping Beauty who has been waiting for him (sexually we're talking about), and they lived happily ever after in the True Order of the Melchisedek Priesthood blessed and vested with all the blessings of the Ancient Order.

Are you getting a little sense of the unreality of this?

Tracey never had a chance to individuate. You can pump out eight children without knowing who you are. You can be a terrific mother and busy, busy, busy every moment of every day and feel "happy" because what else is there but these glorious adorable children that you want to be with in the mythical kingdom of Forever lead by your husband, the god of that world. No thinking required, just check off these meetings, buy new lingerie every six months or so, remember dental appointments and accept all callings.

Then one day Prince Charming, who yanked you away from your entire family in a completely different country, comes to you and tells you that the absolute truth which was the foundation that replaced your own individuation is... false. You, the missionary, the stalwart, lead them all astray. At first she tries to find unity with you in being anti-Mormon but the negativity cannot possibly replace the joy you once experienced in blessing your babies and being "kings and priestesses." There is no corresponding throne in the exmormon world.

She is empty inside. No more meetings, no more comparing tips with other mothers at Relief Society, no more certainty about why we are here. Life seems meaningless and there is no place to parade the family on weekends to show what a good job you are doing. There is only one source of reward-- you, Tal.

And you are just going along like nothing happened. You go to work, you come home. And slowly the random dissatisfaction begins to distill on the one person left. You, Tal. This is all your fault. She believed you, she followed you, she trusted you and everything you said was a lie. But are you dealing with emptiness, no? NO! You have your music, an outlet, a job, you have a career and you have FANS. You are famous and she is nothing, just a housewife who bought a stupid line of bullcrap from a handsome selfish bastard. It would be nice to be able to talk to her family, her mum, her sisters, but YOU TOOK HER FAR AWAY FROM EVERYONE SHE LOVED.

This is the anger of the adolescent who must--MUST--break away from parental authority to be free enough to find out who she is. This is what the twenties are for. I don't have to tell you that the church infantalizes women. And you represented that authority as the family priesthood holder.

You married a "girl" as you so aptly put her, a tabula rasa, upon which you could write the fairy tale. She is a mirror of you and the life you projected on her did not require that she ever grow up. And because she had never matured, she was forced into individuation by you leaving Mormonism.

That can't happen with the parent in the picture and that parent is you. She can't become who she was meant to be with you in the picture. Your dominant charistmatic personality, the things that so attracted her in the first place are what repel her now. To survive in the world where mothers have to be complete adults, she MUST find herself.

You grieve the unformed doll, the angelic childlike innocence that she was. You miss the pseudo woman that you created --the person that she became to please you. Everything you wanted. Rent "Lars the Real Girl" and Eddie Murphy's movie "Coming to America." Tracy never got to smoke a cigarette, get drunk or dress like a hooker, not even on Halloween. You miss that blank canvas and the closeness of you with you, female version.

Letting go of this imaginary woman is part of you growing up and becoming your own man. Just as you might laugh about someone crying over there not being a Kolob, the Tracy you invented in your mind never really existed. There is no "angelic presence" waiting for you in the real world.

But there are real women who will fulfill your expectations once you yourself have recovered the real Tal. This yearning for purity and dissatifaction with the people around you is a clue that you need to be focusing on yourself and your paradigm.

The first step would be accepting Tracy's decision that she needs to be away from you at this stage of her life. Respect that. It is hard to let go of a mythological "love" but I am suggesting that there may be some elements of it that were never real.

This is to help you unhook from fantasy and to move forward as strong individual yourself:

This is a specific way to begin, especially for an artist. Buy Julia Cameron's book "The Artist's Way." It is a workbook which helps artists unblock. Do every exercise, especially the morning pages. Get in the habit of ridding yourself of roiling emotions on a daily basis to clear your mind for the business of being the best Tal Bachman that day. These pages are thrown away, so don't hold back. When the notebook is full, burn it and start another. Don't let anyone find it. This is like taking a mental dump- always flush. I promise you that as you write the same incident over and over, the pain will leave and your writing will change. You are using the principle of flooding. You are freeing the person who really counts--you, Tal.

You cannot make a person love you --BUT by being the best individual you can be, the healthiest physically/emotionally/spiritually, you can attract that person or another who can fulfill your new, realistic dream:

A fully grown adult woman who makes you laugh, excites you sexually, and whose mind and body offer a lifetime of devotion and unexpected surprises in personal growth and growth as a couple.



Anagrammy

Isn't Tracy from England?
Didn't Tal go to Argentina on his mission?

"You married a "girl" as you so aptly put her, a tabula rasa"

Ron's history just gets more and more interesting...

;-)

The myth of the perfect woman created by a man:
http://www.theholidayspot.com/valentine/stories/pygmalion_galatea.htm

They never tell you what happens after Galatea bears his children and they all move out.

That's one of the reasons women were so unhappy and unsatisfied before the feminist movement hit. Woman were expected to be these paragons of motherhood and wifehood and weren't allowed to find out who they really were; Who has time to introspect when one is busy ironing, cleaning, cooking, grocery shopping, etc? One day, many woke up and asked, "Is this all there is?!?" They found out that there was more than to living than wife and motherhood. Some of us are lucky and figured this out sooner than later. Would you really want your wife to spent the rest of her life keeping up a facade?

Beautifully explained, Anagrammy.

Astonishing insight, superbly written. You and I could never have a relationship though. It's clear you'd see right through me.

En passant, isn't that the point of struggling to be authentic, to be transparent? LOL!

Anagrammy

Tal's blog. He's made it public, so it can be called up with just a simple search term, so I think it's ok to post it.

http://tbachman.blogspot.com/

So reader beware and take it all with a grain of salt. I'm responding in a state of irritation and might regret posting this at some future date/time.

Obviously there are two sides to every story and we're only getting what one side has chosen to share with us. I don't question whether it's sincere or honest, it reads as sincere and honest. But I sense a lot of grief, denial, stubbornness, and yes, misogyny (unintentional, I presume), going on.

When I started to question the church, and the conservative gender roles and expectations that go with it, my husband felt shocked, disenfranchised, angry, etc. He had been brought up with a patriarchal sense of entitlement and felt betrayed when I started to make decisions, based on my new sense of self, that deviated from his plans for my role in his life. The reality he had constructed for himself was disrupted and he would not accept it.

Because of the patriarchal norms we were both raised with, we were both completely ignorant of the ways in which he was controlling me. As I started to liberate myself from those norms and develop more maturity and personal autonomy, I just couldn't live like that anymore. I couldn't be with that man.

The fact is that I wasn't being treated like a complete person and he wasn't understanding me or taking me seriously even though he sure-as-hell thought he was. He was completely self-absorbed and convinced that he was giving me everything a man could and should. He thought I was crazy, ungrateful and irrational (he told me so).

But, in truth he was not hearing me, and did not appreciate me wholly, and didn't even know me. He had such romanticized, superficial ideas about me and my "loss" of spirituality. He naively bought the "happy faithful, angelic, LDS homemaker" image I projected in virtue of my upbringing, and detected none of the underlying pain and lack of fulfillment even though it should have been obvious. He couldn't understand why I wasn't happy with the life that he wanted.

That image (the innocent, lovely "girl" who completed and fulfilled his existence) was a product of fantasy and patriarchal immaturity on both our parts. As long as he wasn't willing to understand that, he couldn't see me or meet any of my needs. I was just a woman who served a functional role in his life. Despite his "romantic" protestations to the contrary, I was interchangeable with any other reasonably attractive woman who was willing to subordinate herself to his needs and desires and play the role as-defined. It wasn't about me and who I was and my happiness. He gave no indication that he really "got" me at all. He thought he knew and understood me, but he was just seeing what he wanted to in the early years, and freaking out when I grew up and refused to play along later. He viewed me, as a woman, through stereotypes. I wasn't a person. Frankly, I came to loathe him because of it. I left and moved in with my sister three states away.

He spent five years in therapy growing up, learning how to communicate, and understanding the ways in which he was treating me like a means to an end, instead of a legitimate "other" equal in value and entitled to my own happiness in my own way. We reconciled a year into that process after he seemed to finally understand why I couldn't be with him as he was. We have since renegotiated the terms of our relationship and I no longer feel constantly subordinated. Before his "feminist enlightenment", I was a supporting player in a life that revolved around his ideas about what the good life is and what needs matter.

Now I'm an autonomous adult with an equal partner and we negotiate our life together and I get a lot out of our relationship. I'm surprised it has worked out at all, and I give him credit for being willing to put on his big-boy undies and accept that he is not a boy-king who gets to have his way about reality and other people in it.

I feel sorry for men who continue to see and idealize women as they NEVER WERE. It's unfortunate for them, because those ideas will leave them ill-equipped to deal with reality. It's also unfortunate for the women in their lives who get to be objectified in a state of stunted maturity, and treated as pseudo-persons. If you're interested in a "girl," that schtick might fly because she won't know any better. If you're looking for a Woman, good luck, because you've got some growing to do.

That last paragraph is absolute truth.

A woman in her 40s is not going to be some innocent, pure little thing unless there's something very, very wrong with her. To expect otherwise is completely unfair and frankly degrading to the experiences women have in their lives.

Tal, I'm sorry your marriage is ending. I agree with the others that before you venture into a new relationship, you need to come to terms with how and why your marriage has ended. You need to become comfortable with yourself as an individual and also do some serious thinking about where you are in life and your view of women and how you relate to them.

Finding another girl to make more babies when you already have eight children is completely unfair to the children you have. The ideal you're looking for is as stereotyped as it gets, too. You are 43. The description of what you're looking for is likely finding someone the age of (or younger) than some of your own kids, because that's the only way you're going to find someone with that "purity."

That's a bit creepy, sorry.

I'm so very sorry to hear this. Having followed your story since you came to RFM, I felt like someone had punched me in the gut when I went to exmo conference last year, thinking I'd probably get to see your lovely wife, only to find out you were separated. Wish I had great words of wisdom, but I can only give you words of empathy.

Someone on the original thread, I think it was Stray Mutt, made a good post about finding yourself and your own happiness first, sans relationship. I thought that was the best advice, judging from having gone through 16 years of divorce after an 18-year marriage.

And I don't know if it was the same post or another where someone mentioned Mazlow's heirarchy. So many things in my life made sense to me the more I studied Mazlow and relationships are one of them. To most people, relationship/marriage would not be in the bottom tier, or even bottom two tiers of Mazlow's pyramid. I mean, it basically has, what's supposed to be, it's own category right in the middle. But I think it's common for those of us raised from birth in mormonism to have warped the needs chart. Marriage can be as important to the psychological/safety needs as food and shelter. But now, through sheer age and experience, coupled with whole new religious/philosophical/ethical views on life, that category can get kicked back up where it belongs and when we get there, we need it to be more than it ever was when we threw it in the wrong category. And maybe we even want more from it, maybe even need it to get us up the pyramid to Esteem or Self-Actualization stage, unknown territory for many lifelong mormons. When that all gets jumbled, we lose our direction of what we need or want.

I believe both you and Tracy are trying to sort all that out. But you can't do it for each other. Step back and do as people suggested. Make a bucket list, build stronger connections with your kids, focus on your music or whatever it takes to attempt a search for happiness and not a search for a relationship. Then, when the relationship happens, which there's no reason it won't, it's there in it's proper place on your pyramid and it's not in your security rung where it doesn't belong.

not being really seen as individuals by their husbands. And I want to add this: that what made your marriage with Tracy workable for the 15 or 20 years that it worked is that the marriage was most likely very child-centered.

Centering your marriage around your children (and how could it be otherwise with 8 of them!) separates the husband and wife into roles. The woman becomes a Mom "dancing as fast as she can in her children's lives through the evening until they finally consent to go to bed." And the Dad romps with the kids---"rebonding" with them. Gone is any idea of a quiet evening spent with his wife in adult life with his life partner.

To quote a favorite writer of mine on this subject: Unlike today's mom, the mom of the 1950's and before was not married to her child; she was married to her husband. And unlike today's dad, the dad of bygone days was a husband first, a father second, and he was most definitely not his child's buddy (the new ideal of American fatherhood."

Tal, I am guessing this about your marriage because you seem to wishing for more of the same thing: finding "a girl" and having four more kids! This is probably not the most helpful thing you can do for your existing children and what it tells me is that you still want the adoration of an "innocent" instead of the rich give-and-take with an equal and all the possible rich (and bumpy) intimacy taken up by the busyness of lots of kids.

Of course, this is just a thought; I don't know either of you and I may very well be wrong.

Mostly the thought that I really admire Tracey for having the fortitude to be honest about her needs and do something about it. If my mother had had the guts to leave my father I might have had at least one grown-up parent, if not two. Unfortunately, they married too young and had too many kids too fast to make that a viable option. It's sad and it made my life harder in the long run. It's hard to look at my parents these days. Their lives haven't been a complete waste, but they're not happy and everyone who really knows them, knows that.

Perhaps a faulty vision of reality? Sounds like some rewiring needs to be done and a new narrative found. Easier said than done.

Lots of constructive, thought-provoking comments on here. Thanks.

I completely disagree with the "Madonna-Whore" comments. I'm certain Tracy herself would also agree that they do not characterize our marriage.

Adult of God and everyone else who intimated this: Cherishing the qualities of self-respect and innocence does not mean you don't want a true partner, or (WTH?) hate women. It means you want *a partner in self-respect and innocence*.

Some guys like girls who curse like sailors, could beat them at a dirty joke contest any night of the week, who could drink them under the table, who'll watch porn with them, etc.

I'm not judging them; I'm just not like that. I rarely drink, rarely curse, and I believe that pornography would pollute the special bond I would like to have with a life partner.

Tal, glad to read you here again. Many interesting comments to your initial thread, I cannot add anything original. I am sorry for your pain. I just want to send you a big hug.

Tal,

There is a light at the end of the tunnel, and it can contain a soulmate. My ex and I were divorced after a 28 yr marriage and 5 great kids. Much like you, I thought I had a great marriage, only to see it crumble away, powerless to do anything to fix it.

I spent the next 6 years looking for someone, dated some, but like you, found most available women in my age range to have a huge chip on their shoulder. I even tried the e-harmony and match.com route with very little success. I had pretty much decided I could be happy single; I had great kids, a good job, a fantastic hobby. In short, a quite fulfilling life even though I did not have a companion to share it with.

Then, out of the blue, I get a phone call from a woman who I had dated for a couple of years in college. We hadn't spoken or seen each other in 37 years. We met up a couple of days later, and the spark was still there, and 4 months later we were married. The back story on this is long, so I won't belabor it, but it has worked out marvelously so far. We had both changed over that period, but in ways that made each of us more attractive to the other.

I get the sense from your original post that perhaps you are trying too hard. Relax, take a breath, a break, focus on things you like to do, volunteer, join a book club, a photography club, your music, write, etc. There is no time limit on this, it might happen for you in months, it might take years, but you are the one who is responsible for your own happiness, with or without a companion.

Did I ever get down? Yep. Depressed? Yep. Feel like it was hopeless for a mid-50's guy to find someone? Yep. It made it very difficult to pick up my camera and go be creative, but I pushed myself to do it, especially when I was down, because it always brought me out of a funk. The process of creating something artistic always brought me up. I could pat myself on the back, even for a short time, for acheiving some creative success. Eventually, it was photography that allowed my former girlfriend to locate me. She saw my name in an art gallery where I had displayed my work, and asked them for my phone number.

Tal, I have said this before, but life is what happens to us when we aren't looking.

I am sorry you are and your family are going through this. We will be here for all of you, and as the board is 24/7 due to the fact that it covers exmos from all time zones, there's usually someone here.