Why marry a Mormon

I still think most of my readers are LDS (I really don’t know), so to them the answer may be obvious, but I don’t mind going over it a little.

For one thing, it may have occurred to some readers that the small dating pool is more restricted by the LDS part than the age and single part. This is pretty true, actually, and not only for the obvious reasons. I had a friend who was a little overweight (not badly), and she told me once that every guy she ever dated had slept with other women (they were either converts or had been through less active periods where chastity was not a priority). She felt that having experienced different body types in bed made them more open-minded where they did not feel they needed a Barbie doll to be happy. She could be onto something.

In terms of why someone of a similar faith would be preferable, my initial reason was always that we believe that the family is eternal, and that temple marriages are forever, not “until death do you part”, and I didn’t want to spend my life getting more and more attached to someone and then lose him. That is really important, but there is more to it.

(I do remember from my mission one woman at the gym who was trying to prove us wrong, and one of the things she said was that she could barely stand her husband for life sometimes; she would never want him for eternity. I did not find this to be a compelling argument.)

I was talking to a friend whose father is not a member. Her parents have a good marriage, but there are lots of little conflicts that come up, and she never wanted that for herself. I can things that could be issues. Yes, there would be issues with raising the children, but with even little things like whether to keep alcohol in the house or how to spend Sundays. You can’t expect someone to live according to beliefs they don’t have, but it can make sharing a life uncomfortable.

When I left on my mission, I was a little naïve, because I knew what I was teaching was true, and that anyone could know it was true, so no problem. That turned out to not be the case. It is true, and anyone can know it is true, but some people will not let you get close enough to know that it’s true, and also some people will know that it’s true, or start to know, and still not want it.

I raise that point, because of the next obvious question of getting someone who is not a member and then turning him into one. I don’t feel that “flirt to convert” is a great strategy. Faith is really important, and romantic feelings have a tendency to cloud judgment, and I don’t want to be setting someone up to make promises they don’t understand or are not really prepared to make. Phrasing it that way, it doesn’t really sound like an ideal starting point for marriage, especially if there is conscious manipulation.

I have heard (and I cannot back up these statistics at all), that if you marry someone who is not a member, there is a 1 in 7 chance of them joining, and 3 in 7 of you stopping going. I guess the other three either make it work or get divorced. Anyway, those aren’t great odds.

That being said, if he came into the church some other way, I have no concerns about marrying a convert. It might actually be better. My parents joined after they were already married, and Dad stopped going when I was nine, so we haven’t really had a traditional Mormon upbringing. I have attended Primary and Mutual and everything, yes, but I have never lived in Utah, or even been to Idaho, and I think putting carrots in green Jello is ridiculous and gross.

Really for any marriage decision, I am going to pray about it first, and if it seems right to marry someone who is not a member, or wrong to marry someone who is a member, than I will go with that, but that would also mean that I have been dating someone and either he has proposed or it seems likely that he will, and there is just no reason to expect that any time soon.

In terms of dating someone who is not a member, well, I have, and I would, but again, dating is just not coming up. If I fall in love with someone of a different persuasion, we will simply have to handle that with intelligence and mutual respect. There are just so many complications in even getting to that point with anyone, member or not, though, that I am not really anticipating it.

More on dating complications next time.