Posted by:
Darth Monson
(
)
Date: December 24, 2012 01:22AM
I'm posting anonymously once again.
Tonight, we met with my wife's long-apostate uncle to talk about our experiences leaving the church. It was a great conversation that led to us talking a lot about my wife's family and, at the end, he brought up a number of things that my wife's TBM parents did in the past, including claiming that my wife may have been conceived out of wedlock.
We know that my in-laws have been less than forthcoming on a number of issues and they have tried to convince us that the uncle is evil (which we know their claims were exaggerated at minimum, if not largely false). We don't have any reason to doubt the uncle, but some of the claims he made about them are shocking, so we are trying to verify this one (if we can) in part to see if the others likely have any credibility.
His claim was that my wife was conceived out of wedlock. Here are the facts that we know for sure: my in-laws were married in a civil ceremony 5 weeks after they met. They had a temple ceremony over a year after they were married civilly, and they claim that they didn't marry in the temple because they wanted family to be able to attend the wedding. They also claim that the rules for temple weddings forbade them from getting married in the temple for a year because they were married civilly. Also of note is that the family was not supportive of the marriage (they claim because my wife's father was not a returned missionary). They both left Rick's College (possibly mid-semester) after my wife was conceived (they say dropped out, but we're suspecting kicked out for honor code violations). They say that their civil ceremony was on a conspicuous date, which makes us wonder if they aren't fibbing about the actual date to take attention away from timing and put it on the day they decided to get married. My wife was born 10.5 months (to the day) after they claim they got married (it was a very small ceremony with only them and their bishop and maybe one or two others present). My wife recently saw her mom look at a picture of herself holding my newborn wife and say, "I was only a baby having a baby." This is a phrase that she's used frequently in the past to refer to young, unwed mothers.
We know that if you have sex out of wedlock, you aren't allowed to get a temple recommend for a year, so we are wondering if a civil marriage has the same restrictions. If it doesn't, my wife will know that they've been lying to her about a number of things and it also helps to give credibility to the other things her uncle said. That will help us determine how much she's able to trust her parents. Thanks.