As you can see, Jane and I will be posting our individual thoughts on a consolidated topic. Here is my response to her chosen topic of the day. This Bingley loves his Jane.
There is truth, and there is untruth. But when making decisions that affect the rest of your life (and your children’s, if you have any like I do), you are willing to put truth aside for the “greater good.” We see it every day – the couple who stays together just long enough for the kids to get out of high school and then they sprint for the divorce attorneys. Or, we see the couple who stays together because we are taught in every General Conference, in most Stake Conferences and in many ward talks, that you must never divorce because temple marriages are sacred things. We hear in right-wing radio about the sanctity of marriage. We hear it everywhere.
But the truth is, temple marriages are not created to lock people into a lifetime of misery. THAT is fact.
Here is my philosophy in a nutshell. First you have to accept that we have a Creator, a God who knows us intimately because he created our souls, and we then got to work helping with Creation. Second, since we’re all Mormon here (or soon to be, if you contact your friendly neighborhood missionaries) we’ll look at the Book of Mormon (a book we consider to be the word of God, and thus truth). In 2 Nephi 2:25, it says,
“Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy.”
This is “men” in the plural sense – all human beings, male and female. If you scoot forward to verse 27, it says,
“Wherefore, men are free according to the flesh; and all things are given them which are expedient unto man. And they are free to choose liberty and eternal life, through the great Mediator of all men, or to choose captivity and death, according to the captivity and power of the devil.”
These verses are interesting. We are here to live, to be righteous and to have joy. We are not here to be miserable. We are also free – not slaves. All things are given to us – not all things except divorce. We seem to have two choices in life – liberty and eternal life, or captivity and death. These are apt descriptions when you are comparing whether you will be happy in marriage or trapped for a lifetime. Do you really think our all-knowing God created temples and delivered unto us the Gospel so that we can approach His judgment-seat alongside a spouse we despise? Is that eternal life?
These are uncomfortable truths. The vastly-superior first choice is to use all available tools (“all things” yet again) to make our marriages work. However, it is not our lot in life to suffer. Christ suffered FOR us. If you have sinned against your spouse and the spouse will never forgive you, it’s not your job to be beaten with their rod of words every day until you die. If you have each sinned by forsaking your sacred responsibilities to each other, and there is a gulf that cannot be broached, then why remain with that person? The Proclamation to the Family talks about the “sacred powers of procreation” – sex. If there is no sex, and both spouses are miserable about it but refuse to go there, then why on earth are you lying to yourself to convince yourself that you are simply destined to be unhappy?
We lie to ourselves for a few reasons – the truth can be uncomfortable; the results of truth can be more uncomfortable; and we have preconceived notions about the permanence of marriage. Some people don’t want to address the truth – that there is a failed marriage. They may be non-confrontational or any number of other things. In my opinion, though, the second reason is the most prevalent – if you admit the truth, you either need to work your rear end off in conjunction with equal effort from your spouse, or you need to get out. Misery will not get you closer to the Celestial Kingdom – this is the third point. We are told to make our marriages work – misery is not working. You have to be hand-in-hand with your spouse, equal efforts from both, to fix a damaged/broken marriage. You can’t achieve eternal perfection wasting your life away despising your life and your other half.
These are the realities I faced as a man spending 7 years in a temple marriage that was falling apart almost from the outset, and then spending 5 years contemplating divorce. I didn’t act because of a combination of all three points above. I had children, and used them as the greatest reason to continue lying to myself. I was unhappy, and never felt that my spouse would put in anywhere near the effort I did to make things work. Frankly, my spouse felt the same. The only consistent feeling was five dangerous little letters: alone. That was truth I accepted, but the truth I denied was the actions required to fix it or get out.
One thing worth mentioning – while I prayed with varying amounts of consistency, I was also untruthful in my prayers until right at the end. There is such a thing as lying by omission, and I always prayed for blessings, and help with particular challenges at work or school, but I always left my marital questions really out of it. Right toward the end of my marriage, when I started praying for ways to get out (and then praying that he would give me the heart of the woman of my dreams), when I opened up about the unthinkable, I feel like God embraced me more fully with His love. The moral and truth of the story is: He wants to hear from us regardless of our perceived appropriateness of our thoughts. Tell him what you want, what you need. He will help you get to your goal.
In this manner do truths and untruths determine our courses of action and the direction of our lives. It wasn’t until I admitted the truth to myself and my God that I was able to make a meaningful change in my situation.
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