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by document » Mon Jun 12, 2017 3:16 pm
My co-parent and I both agree that we would probably still be married if we had remained active LDS. I've thought about this a lot over the years since my separation and divorce, and here are my insights as to why:
First, when we were fully active LDS we had one massive commonality between us: Mormonism. We had common friends, activities, beliefs, and goals that were consistently in our life. We even had a common subject that we talked about, the church, the programs, and the membership. That was our commonality.
Second, when we were fully active LDS we were constantly working in the church when we should have been addressing significant issues in the relationship. Our date nights were spent at the temple, not in conversation. We had activities or committees every single day and half our Sundays were spent at church. Monday nights we implemented family home evening as best we could and we strove to be good home/visiting teachers.
Third, we had the continual end-goal of eternal marriage. When we left the church and our concept of the after-life shifted significantly, suddenly "temporal marriage" sounded a lot more important to us than "eternal marriage". We couldn't put off the problems because we realized that this life was pretty much it, so we best make the best out of it.
Basically, when we left the church I sat across from this woman whom I had survived with for the last ten years. When the commonality of culture, the constant activity, and the after-life goal was gone, we were able to look at each other. We didn't recognize each other, we were just two strangers who now had one thing we did well together, work hard. We could juggle fifty things at once and do it with a cool head.
Anyway, with so much work out of the way and children becoming so much more independent (they do that), we started trying to work together to rebuild our marriage. But here is the thing: we had massive personality conflicts and no common interests. We tried for a long time to get something back, but we were too far gone. Our lives wrapped around a single thing: Mormonism (our temple marriage). We were married for the sake of being married. In fact, we both admitted to ourselves that we were married in the first place for the sake of getting married. That was a very hard confession when we came to that fact.
I think Spencer Kimball had it right in many cases, any two active Mormons who are completely dedicated to the gospel can make a marriage work. But that is only because you are so busy being fully active, being overwhelmed with children, and having Mormonism in common, that the insanity of that thought will keep two people together. But only because they can't think about their relationship, they are merely surviving.