Let’s talk about the big news that dropped last week. No, not another Ukraine story. Not the invasion of Speaker Pelosi’s San Francisco home by a deranged conspiracy nut. No, much worse. It’s the divorce of Tom Brady and Gisele. Alas, they seemed like such a nice couple. After reviewing this modern-day tragedy, this Shakespearean parting of two media figures, this real-life fourth-quarter marital comeback that fell a few yards short, we’ll shine a little light on Mormon divorce.
Perhaps you haven’t been following the story, which is understandable because Tom and Gisele managed to keep their divorce negotiations largely out of the public eye. It was clear the last few months that there was some friction in the relationship. There were reliable rumors a few weeks ago that the two had lawyered up. Then on Friday news broke that they had filed a mutually agreed-upon settlement with a Florida court and that the agreement was accepted and filed. Done and over. Stories: “Tom Brady speaks about divorce from Gisele Bundchen for the first time.” Tom is quoted as follows: “Obviously the good news is that it’s a very amicable situation, and I’m really focused on two things — taking care of my family and certainly my children. And secondly doing the best job I can to win football games.”
You probably think that if Tom had been a little less focused on winning football games and a little more focused on his family and maybe his wife that things wouldn’t have come to this. He actually retired from football (wife cheers) during the off-season, then after forty days reversed course and un-retired (wife jeers). His football season with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers has thus far been thoroughly mediocre, so it’s a real headscratcher to figure out what his un-retirement got him except a few more bumps and bruises, and a divorce. Well, he’s reportedly getting $15 million for his quarterbacking services this year, but he’s also foregoing $37.5 million, the yearly pay he will reportedly get from Fox in his next gig as a football commentator. So it’s not money that drew him back to football.
It’s only fair to get Gisele’s side of the story. “Gisele Bundchen reveals decision behind Tom Brady split after finalizing divorce.” She says: “The decision to end a marriage is never easy but we have grown apart …” Reading between the lines, I detect a message that runs like this: “He had to choose between me and football, and he chose football.” And, I suppose, she just decided she couldn’t handle one more year of watching him get smushed five or six times a game by 300-pound defenders. Of course, one never knows in these matters. Maybe they just got tired of each other. Maybe after forty days at home with the wife and kids, Tom just decided that he’d rather hang with his teammates and play football. Maybe after yet another avacado and kale TB12 smoothie for breakfast, Gisele just decided she’d rather add some bacon and eggs to her morning menu. Whatever. Best wishes to both parties.
Mormon Divorce
Tom and Gisele aren’t the only couple to split up, of course. Even within the Church, divorce seems more common these days. Personally, I have seen several LDS couples who have untied the knot as empty nesters or with the kids well along as teenagers. Couples you would not have thought would split up. That seems to be the Mormon approach to divorce: stick it out for as long as possible for the benefit of the kids, keep up appearances for as long as possible, then finally hit the divorce button. Mormon divorce just seems to be a much more common thing that it was ten or fifteen years ago.
Admittedly, my view of things is fairly limited, a fairly small sample. Readers can weigh in with their own view, what they have seen and possibly what they have experienced. At the same time, it’s worth noting that LDS culture and LDS leadership have come around to dealing with divorce more as just one of those things that might happen in a marriage rather than a sin or something we just don’t talk about. In General Conference last month, Elder Soares, in his talk titled “In Partnership with the Lord,” said some nice things about being a single-parent. He didn’t spell out exactly what led to the man and woman he referred to in his talk being single parents, but it could have been divorce. I’m sure LDS listeners who are divorced and living as single-parents heard it that way and were encouraged.
So here are a few things you might discuss in the comments.
- Have you seen more Mormon divorces the last ten years or so than in earlier years? Has LDS marriage become a little less eternal and a little more like everyone else’s version of marriage?
- Any other celebrity divorces that made you think, “Oh, that’s too bad, they seemed like such a nice couple.”
- Any LDS talks you have heard locally or in General Conference that struck you as helping LDS divorced persons feel welcome in the church, or more welcome than they used to feel? Any talks that seemed like a step backwards?
Wheat & Tares 
Anecdotally I have a few Mormon friends who have got divorced within 2-3 years of getting married. The first one surprised me, but after a few more quick divorces hit, I have gotten used to it. The interesting ones to me now are the ones where one of the couple has taken a step back from the Church, and the other spouse demands a divorce in response (seen it happen a few times now).
As I see it, Mormons are usually a generation or so behind the rest of the US in most trends (such as family size, age of marriage, etc). It really just seems that Mormons have finally caught up with regular Americans on divorce.
I’m more aware of divorces because my friend group is in the late30s/early40s range. It seemed like the model used to be divorce young (like my parents) or wait until the kids are out of the house (like my grandparents). I do think I’m seeing more divorce with teens. Again, the old model seemed to be dad cheated or walked out. The marriages I’m more familiar with have mom calling it quits to find herself/cheating, while dad is still at least outwardly present and involved. The bishop’s wife left him and moved out of state, leaving their high-school child behind. That was a shocker. His term was up before the divorce was finalized, so there wasn’t a retaliatory release.
I haven’t tracked celebrity marriages.
Whether a celebrity marriage or a marriage in your ward. Smart to keep it between yourselves, mediate, and then that’s it. No one wins in court but the lawyers! I had friends in my ward who divorced, and it wasn’t public until one of them went to get their TR and told the Stake President, btw, X and I are divorced. You do not have to talk to church leadership unless you want a cancellation of sealing. As recent as 30 years ago, this was unlikely to happen unless one or both parties were excommunicated. Men could (can still) be sealed to any number of women, but a divorced woman was often “stuck” with the sealing. In recent years, they have decided a cancellation of sealing was possible, without impacting the status of one or both parties, and they are more inclined to do it if one or both parties wish to remarry. So progress, if you don’t worry about who your kids are sealed to (if you take this stuff literally). Still I find this “polygamy on paper” stuff to be really annoying, and when it’s put on full display with the GAs, even more disgusting. I was trying to find some statistic on LDS divorce, and the most recent thing was 2000 that said only 5% of Temple marriages end in divorce? That seems low to me. Another study said that based on religions, Atheists had the lowest divorce rates at 21%. I missed the standards night that said that atheism was the key to a good marriage. A lot of studies say that the supposed national divorce rate of 50% is too high. I will ask my internationally famous Labor Economist husband where the best sources for these kinds of statistics would be. Stay tuned.
Mormon marriages are NOT any healthier than non-Mormon marriages. But there are religious and cultural pressures within Mormonism to keep marriages together. So statistically we might look like we are better off but are we? And as one stigma after another is knocked down within our community, you’ll see more LDS divorces.
Having a gay kid carries less stigma. Having a kid return home early from a mission carries less stigma. Getting married outside of the temple carries less stigma. Ditching the garments and drinking coffee carries less stigma. And yes, divorce among Mormons now carries less stigma. And since we are like everyone else, you’re going to see the number of cases you know about go up.
Speaking anecdotally, I have indeed noticed more divorces in my own social circle among LDS friends and family, including my wife’s cousins (she has over 50 first cousins with almost all of whom we have contact at least three times a year) and my own family. I have a brother who is twice divorced and a sister who is once divorced. In almost all cases of divorce among personal contacts, there doesn’t appear to be infidelity involved. In fact, the cases of infidelity that I know of, the couples have decided to stay together (of course, I don’t know if they’ll last, but they have so far). Among the divorcees I know, they had simply grown apart and had become mutually incompatible. Also, in all the cases of divorce, Mormon family and friends seem to understand that divorce was a better option for the couple than staying together. This was something that was difficult for my mom to accept in the case of my sister getting a divorce. But she has over time come to accept that my sister is indeed happier in her life by getting the divorce instead of remaining married to a man with whom she had just not been happy for years, and during which marriage she had experienced severe depression.
So yeah, I think that Mormon marriages are indeed just a little more like everyone else’s marriages and that Mormons themselves are growing to acknowledge this. And I don’t hear so many Mormons as I used to touting that Mormons have some sort of secret to marriage success (namely, temple marriage) that the “world” doesn’t. Every Mormon I know also knows another Mormon who got a divorce. In the past, I think that more Mormons felt forced to stay in unhappy marriages and that the culture and leadership insisted on it. Today, it seems to be less the case.
I’ve also observed that divorces are occurring more frequently among LDS couples, and that’s not entirely a bad thing; nowadays people are more empowered to end relationships that are toxic, abusive, exploitative, unhealthy or merely unproductive. In my ward, for example, I know of at least one “covid divorce” when the couple realized that being couped up together in quarantine brought out the worst in each other. This was one of the most stable, active families (he was in the bishopric at the time) with school-age kids, that by all appearances was living happily, and nobody saw the divorce coming.
Like HokieKate, I’m in the late 30s/early 40s age cohort and I’m aware of the divorces among the friends I went to college with, so its a bit disappointing to see the people I knew back when they started dating and went to their weddings have their relationships fall apart. But I suppose people evolve and change, sometimes in different directions. I also have several old LDS college friends (both male and female) who, despite being brilliant, attractive and sociable people, have never been married. And I know a few others from that group who later came out as gay, and have since parted ways with the Church, and as far as I can tell, are living their best lives now. Whatever the outcome, I hope they all find happiness and fulfillment.
My parents (boomer) were unhappy together, but stuck it out because they considered it virtuous to be miserable. After they retired and us kids moved out, they lived practically separate lives, slept in separate bedrooms and didn’t talk to each other for days at a time. When holidays or visits from grandkids forced them to interact, they would constantly argue and take passive-aggressive jabs at each other. This lifestyle continued until my dad passed away a few years ago. Since then, I’ve never seen my mom so happy, independent and emotionally healthy. I often wonder how their lives would have turned out if they would have been more honest about their relationship earlier on, and perhaps split up, and if that might have made for a better upbringing for me and my siblings.
My baseline assumption or prior is that Mormon/LDS social patterns in the U.S. will parallel but lag the general population. That makes me want to know the general population trends. A quick check (no footnotes or scholarly references) yields this:
>” The divorce rate in America in 2019 and 2020 was significantly lower than in 2009 and 2010. Despite a slight increase in 2010-11, the overall divorce rate has fallen throughout the last decade.”
but
>”So-called gray divorce rates, amongst adults aged 50+, the national divorce rate has roughly doubled since 1990. For those aged 65+, it has actually tripled, from 2 in 1,000 married persons to 6 in 1,000. This indicates people over 50 are more likely to get divorced now than ever before.”
There’s this notion that everyone experiences three marriages which may or may not include the same spouse. I think late 30s/early 40s is about the time many of us enter phase 2 (it was for my marriage) which explains increased divorces I am seeing as well in my LDS social circles.
I think we also need to consider the historic opportunity cost of divorce. For most of the developed world, women have had options post-divorce to be financially independent for some time now. Not necessarily so for Mormon women, who may have stayed married to avoid living in a two-bedroom apartment with 4-kids trying to decide to either finish that college degree to get a minimum wage job. Now that more Mormon women have completed college and have work experience, perhaps they are no longer as afraid of supporting themselves. Or as others have noted, we just lag 1-2 generations behind “the world” in this and other regards.
I still know many folks that think divorce is a bad word. But I think a lot of folks are now comfortable with the notion that marriages work until they don’t, those involved are not a fault for failing, and that moving on can be the healthies alternative.
I was at a regional conference where Gordon B. Hinckley spoke. It was a few years ago ( 🙂 )
President Hinckley talked about divorce. He said sometimes he’d look out his apartment window at young, newlywed couples taking pictures, and he’d think to himself, “I wonder how many of those marriages will last?”
I believe he mentioned that the rate of lds temple marriages that ended in divorce was similar to other marriages.
Maybe because of the celebrity divorce opener, the tone here is like divorce is OK and accepted and life goes on. I don’t want to pass by without comment that in my experience and observation in the Church outside of celebrity status (anecdotal, to be sure), divorce seems to work out ok for most men in the mid- and long-term, but be really awful for most women. Maybe or even likely better than the alternative, but still awful. Everything sexist about the church and the culture seems to come down double on the heads of divorced women.
I can speak to divorce in the Mormon world:
Last year, the day after our 34th anniversary, my husband learned that I was a non-believer (still participating in church), and in the second he understood reality, that was the end of our marriage. We divorced ASAP so he could find his new eternal companion, one that was younger, thinner, physically fit (he likes to hike), and would happily join him in his quest to become a serial senior missionary after retirement. Fast forward to last weekend, he civilly married a woman (because she’s sealed to a husband who has passed away) who he’s known for about two months. The only box she ticked was active in church/willing to serve missions.
Regarding sealing cancellation, my ex wanted me to approve of anybody he considered marrying because we would be “sister wives” in heaven. As soon as the divorce was final, I contacted the bishop to start the process. It was emotionally unsafe for me to have him thinking he had any stewardship over me. The sealing was canceled in a matter of weeks—long before he’d even met his now-wife. So maybe the church is making cancellations easier, or maybe I won the game of Bishop roulette?
I had stayed married for so long because I always felt he was the more righteous spouse, and I felt guilt and shame for thinking the church could be wrong. I had secretly considered divorce several times over the years, and felt guilt and shame for that as well. Meanwhile, from his perspective, all was well in the Zion of our relationship. My faith shift made it impossible for him to ignore the fact that the marriage was not as wonderful as he’d thought, and he could not reconcile the dissonance. Fight-or-flight and he chose flight.
I am still dealing with the aftermath of 34 years in a high-demand marriage coupled with a high-demand church. At the least I have shed the guilt and shame. Healing is on-linear but the trend is upward.
Christiankimball brings up a good point. Another thing I’ve noticed (though very anecdotally) among LDS divorces moreso than others, is that the ex-wife usually ends up with very unfavorable terms concerning child support, alimony, division of assets and other monetary negotiables, while assuming the lions share of custody and visitation time. So dad makes off with most of the money, free to continue his career and pursure his next relationship, while mom ends of having to do most of the work of raising the kids while struggling to put her own life back together. In such cases, the ex-husband often becomes the most manipulative, selfish, nasty version of himself and tries to throw sand in the gears of the divorce process at every turn, just because he can, and bullies the ex-wife into accepting much less than she deserves. I wonder if there are cultural components at work that make such outcomes more likely among LDS couples, such as patriarchy, victim blaming, women who lack education/earning power/independence, or other things. Again, this is anecdotal, but I have seen several such cases in recent years that follow this same pattern that I’m not ready to dismiss them as coincidental.
Is it any wonder that divorce is on the rise among members of the Church? No reasonable person would think so.
The irrefutable fact is that most younger members of the Church have adopted the characteristics of the world that are not healthy for marriages. Sadly, even a few older members have done so.
Far too many use Facebook, Instagram, and other so-called social networking sites to look up old flames. If not a a flame, they use these sites to carry on with new coworkers. These emotionally intimate relationships soon turn into illicit physical affairs. Hardly good for a marriage, to say the least.
In addition, the younger members have embraced Netflix and Amazon Prime to watch shows that are so sexually explicit that any even a Nun passing by on the street would go into instant cardiac arrest. This irrefutably harms marriages by creating false ideas of what intimacy should be—thus leading to divorce.
The sad fact is that too many members have joined the world in giving their marriages a lower priority than they give to social media, streaming movies, and violent video games. Unless that changes, the divorce rates will continue to skyrocket.
christiankimball, I have read that most divorces are initiated by women, which seems odd if divorce is really awful for women. But I don’t know any reliable statistics.
Jack Hughes, I have read that there is a sentiment floating around that men do pretty poorly in divorce settlements in comparison to women. I don’t know any reliable statistics, though.
It is good if the stigma of divorce is easing. Life goes on, right?
ji, maybe divorce really is awful for women (which I believe), but it is still not as awful as being in a marriage with a more awful man.
ji: I was going to say what TL said. Often the alternative for women is domestic violence, emotional abuse, and lack of support (other than financial–which may be tightly controlled), so they go from this to no longer being abused, but not having any means to support themselves and being mostly forced to raise their kids without support. The best thing women can do to avoid this is to have their own successful career. That’s just simply the only way to guarantee their financial solvency.
This seems to me to be part of a demographic challenge that the Church seems to be ignoring. It has already hit the point where more than half the adults in the Church are single, whether divorced, never married, or widowed. The leaders had to have seen this coming, but they still focus on the nuclear family, even knowing that the percentage of families in that situation continues to shrink.
Where is the institutional support for more than half the adults in the Church? It seems to be invisible, regardless of how a person got there. Especially in the case of divorce, they seem to not have noticed that when you lose the mother, you have probably lost the children too.
I’m older than dirt, but I have noticed that the healthiest marriages among my associates are couples who are both college grads or in highly skilled vocations. I feel there is something to being a confident, contributing adult before embarking on a marital relationship.
If I am correct, the best thing we can do for our children and grandchildren, regardless of gender, is make sure they have reached that stage before they get married.
I filed for divorce after less than 5 years of marriage, which surprised me as much as anyone. I was raised to be miserable and stay married, so that was what I was going to do. I had some eye-opening experiences, including raw honesty from both my mother and my mother-in-law about their marriages. Both of our parents were in marriages where the husbands thought things were perfectly fine and the wives were battling despair and hanging on for the sake of their kids. I saw the same dynamics in my marriage. I gave my XH about a year and a half to agree things needed to change, and when he shrugged and said no, I got out.
The first several years were VERY difficult, but then things got good. I love being divorced. Sometimes I’m lonely, but it’s always less angst than being in a bad marriage. My XH is a better ex-husband than he was as a husband and our relationship improved. We co-parent without conflict (took a couple years to get there).
I agree that LDS women used to experience economic pressure to stay in a bad marriage. As education and work experience becomes more common among women, this pressure lessens and it’s easier to see how you can survive and thrive after a divorce. Most of my divorced friends have full custody of the children (as do I). It seems most have good extended-family support. Many of my sons’ friends have divorced parents, so ‘dad weekend’ and ‘mom weekend’ are pretty common arrangements and my kids don’t feel any stigma (I’ve asked). It works.
I read a book called “The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap,” by Stephanie Coontz. One chapter talked about divorce, and pointed out that while divorce used to be much less common, death was a lot more common. Many families in the idyllic early-American days were blended families, step families and second families because either mom or dad died and the surviving spouse remarried. It would be interesting to see a statistical comparison – how many people in the 1700s stayed married to the same person for 30+ years? And how many people nowadays stay married to the same person for 30+ years? Did death end as many marriages in the past as divorce does today?
JCS: Nice to see you back. You always remind me that I wish we had more options than a thumbs up / thumbs down when reacting to posts. An “eye roll” option would be nice.
My professional life gives me a view into several different family law offices outside the Jello Belt. The statistic that interests me is the divorce rate in the last two years with Covid. It’s been so nuts that attorneys are working around the clock, turning people away, huge bonuses to associates/paralegals to just-keep-working (and not quit), and of course raising hourly rates. I keep thinking it’s got to stop, that they’ll run out of people in need of a divorce and it will slow down. Not so far.
It would be interesting to know if this is true in the Jello Belt as well.
I think for decades it has been fairly well established that the divorce rate among civilly married LDS couples matched the national average. I do recall the church claiming at various times that the divorce rate among temple married LDS couples was lower than the national average. I don’t have any sources to reference and could be wrong. I haven’t heard the church make that assertion for many years which tells me there may not be a meaningful difference between the two populations.
Honestly, it strikes me as being odd the church doesn’t devote more resources to marriage and family counseling services given we practically hang our entire religious hat on the nuclear family being at the center of everything that is God-like and necessary for exaltation. (And we structure our entire church organization on the family unit, which excludes half our members from playing more important roles in our week-to-week church operations.) I’m sure some struggling couples who seek counseling from their bishop are referred to good therapists, but I’ve seen more disasters come out of the bishops office with bishops I have served with shaming spouses and telling couples to read more scriptures together and pray more together…which solves nothing. How can a bishop, for example, provide any helpful counsel if there is a serious discontinuity around differences in each spouse’s sex drives (and that often includes women having a more robust drive than their husbands), or when emotional abuse is present in the home, which in our history has been too often dismissed by our male bishops.
I was deeply bothered when I learned the details of Kip Harris’ suicide, a senior administrator at BYU-Idaho, who killed himself because he had an extended affair. I listened to his son talk about this over at MormonStories earlier this year. It’s not the affair, not the tawdry details that interested me. It’s the fact that brother Harris and his wife were having serious marital problems for years, and if I recall correctly, he/they didn’t seek help because he knew it would get back to the BYU-I president (nothing is kept confidential in our church environments) and he would lose everything, his job, his calling, maybe even his family. Divorce wasn’t an option for the same reasons. It’s the first time I realized how institutionally dysfunctional we are as a church when it comes to the way we view marriage unhappiness and the problems it creates. I have a friend who has been a bishop and in a stake presidency and he disclosed to me once there hadn’t been intimacy of any kind in his marriage for a decade and how little communication there is between he and his wife, and how dead he feels his marriage is. When I asked why he doesn’t either seek divorce or pursue marriage counseling he said in my callings you really can’t do that. The cost of our purity culture is that it sustains pain and suffering because it punishes honesty. While my non-Mormon friends don’t wear their marriage problems on their sleeves, I have noticed over the years they are more open about it when they are going through hard times. I have to believe our culture of religious perfection incentivizes so much masking, which only makes marriage problems worse.
My wife and I have been married for more than a quarter century. I’m long on our marriage, but it’s not been easy at times. One of my adult daughters disclosed to us once, after a particularly stressful period that lasted a few years, that she was worried we wouldn’t stay together based on how impatient and sharp we were with each another. That was a reality check and led to a moment of honesty and a pivot my wife and I both committed to make. Both my wife and I have taught our daughters from an early age to seek as much education as they can and to acquire marketable skills with the assumption they will need to support themselves as adults. We are counter culture in that way and my daughters and my wife and I have been criticized by others in our wards for not placing enough emphasis on their preparing to be young brides, or for putting education before marriage. My daughters could have married young if they wanted to pursue it, but I feel like they are clear-eyed about life and are very happy for having put their educations first. They want to marry and have families, but Mr. Right has yet to come along. I’m glad they work and live with purpose, and when they do marry I feel good knowing they will be in strong positions to give everything to their marriages, and be able to walk away if there is a catastrophic and unrecoverable failure. Today most homes require both spouses to work, and that my enable divorce when the marriage is failing, where in the past wives were more financially dependent on their husbands. But paradoxical to our church culture, it may help marriages succeed when they may otherwise have failed if both spouses are at parity in education and in earning potential.
And a second thumbs up for BigSky’s comment.
It seems like the older I get (I am 60), the more effort and expense I see being put into the act of GETTING married, with not much attention given to what comes after. Today, engagement/wedding rings cost a fortune (one of my sons got engaged last month, and the ring they chose cost almost $4,000). Wedding receptions and all that goes with them are commonly elaborate affairs. Even getting engaged in Mormon culture is a major production, to be shared on social media with many thumbs up. Why not do things like this: (1) instead of spending thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours on these things I’ve mentioned, spend money and time on premarital counseling– we all have issues and what a great time to explore them individually and together. Also, instead of having such big celebrations of the act of getting married, make that one low-key, and then celebrate benchmarks like for 10 years of marriage, 15, 20? Those can be more worthy of celebration. Lastly, I tire of ancient, barely-functional temple sealers–out-of-touch with reality–giving lengthy, cringey, eye-rolly “advice” to couples being sealed. It is embarrassing and unnecessary.
Faith Over Fear, good thoughts!
I’ve heard, and it is consistent with my observations, that there are three periods that see more divorce:
-Shortly after marriage (just realizing you made a mistake)
-In the late 30’s / 40’s (midlife crisis / change)
-When kids have left the home (people stick things out to make things easy on kids)
I have seen more divorce in the last few years than I had before, but I think that’s because I turned 40 so I’m in one of those zones. I also saw quite a few divorces come out of Covid, which seemed to be a pressure cooker for some relationships. And there is certainly some correlation between faith transitions and divorce; it is not necessarily that mixed-faith marriages can’t survive, but some people seem to find that the only thing they have in common was Church and so when that is gone, the relationship suffers. (This is the case even without a super judgmental spouse, although that is common too).
I do not see the kind of stigma with divorce now that I saw growing up. I see a lot of compassion. Occasionally I’ll hear someone speculate about why so-and-so got divorced, and I quickly shut that down because I know that almost no one knows the full story except for the people involved.
Divorce is financially ruinous for women – tons of stats on that. Even for middle-class families it is a huge lifestyle change because two homes are more expensive than one. I know some women who literally can’t afford to get divorced. I have to wonder if rising affluence in some populations (particularly celebrities) correlates with higher divorce rates.
I mean, in my case the fact that we’re temple married means I’m staying in my marriage… but not for the reason you’d think.
My own parents got divorced, my mother left the church, my father remarried… and they are STILL sealed together on the eyes of the church. So that makes me feel that a divorce would just be a big waste of everyone’s time and money. I can divorce my husband until I’m blue in the face, I still have to spend eternity with him (as a silent, invisible plural wife. Yay!)
‘But God won’t require anyone to be miserable in the Celestial Kingdom!’ you say. Well, when you hear the #2 prophet-seer-revelator literally LAUGHING about women’s concerns re: eternal polygamy, it kind of makes me wonder.
FaithOverFear: Hear, hear on the ridiculous expense and spectacle that weddings have become! It’s now a “right” for brides in particular to feel like a princess on their “special day” to the point that tens of thousands of dollars are spent–on AVERAGE and often more–for every wedding. It is madness. How is this in any way setting up the marriage for success? Instead of funding a one-time party, why not put a downpayment on a house??
It’s irrelevant to that, although as I posted a few years ago, there is a correlation between female narcissism and divorce (it was an interesting study, and of course, male narcissism is not correlative because women are still on average more financially dependent on a husband than a husband is on a wife–this was a celebrity study which is why female narcissism was easier to find). That post was before the rise of influencers and Instagram/TikTok that make so many women (and some men) wannabe pseudo-celebrities. /endrant
There’s gotta be a happy medium between massive blow-out weddings and what you get in the temple. Weird pseudo-Masonic robes over your nice dress, a 10- minute ceremony that doesn’t include the word ‘love,’ and if you’re a convert there’s a very good chance that none of your family members are there. Maybe this makes me a narcissist, but I wouldn’t have minded feeling like a princess for a LITTLE bit…