Can Your Relationship Survive Your Growth
What happens in relationships as people change
I had a client who grew up a Mormon, married a Mormon, and raised her children in the Faith. Then she had a change of mind, followed by a change of heart and a divorce. It fractured the familial relationships, but it wasn’t as bad as when she decided to remarry a non-believer. The kids stopped answering her calls and returned the presents she sent for their birthdays.
Marriage occupies a central role in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Unlike many Christian traditions that view marriage as lasting only until death, faithful Latter-day Saints believe that marriages performed in LDS temples are “sealed” for eternity.
Mormons believe that the highest level of heaven is associated with eternal family relationships.
Marriage and family are considered part of God’s plan for human progression. Although a civil marriage can be dissolved, especially after counseling and a fair attempt to save it, or in cases of abuse, abandonment, addiction, and infidelity, temple marriage is another matter.
My client walked out on a temple marriage. Officially, people are free to leave, ask for the marriage to be unsealed, and if they remarry, they can be sealed to the new spouse. They can also leave the faith if they want to, and the Church does not teach that they should be shunned. Officially.
However, severe consequences do follow. Many former members describe their departure as being treated almost like a death in the family because relatives believe eternal togetherness may be at risk. Former members lose social support networks and find themselves excluded from community life. Some even lose business partners, clients, and professional connections and opportunities. And there are complications with joint child custody arising from one ex-spouse leaving the faith while the other remains in it.
My client, like many others, had to decide if she could stay physically in, but mentally out, and continue to do whatever other Mormons do, just to preserve her family and social bonds, or if she couldn’t. At first glance, this looks like a cost-benefit analysis of logistics, connections, and structure. But below the surface, a person who no longer holds that religious identity finds themself trapped in a world they don’t belong to, and it sucks.
This kind of pretending felt corrosive to her mental health and balance. Eventually, the pain of pretending became stronger than the pain of taking a chance. She took that chance, and at the time she came to see me, she was feeling the pain of possibly losing her children and grandchildren forever.
She had outgrown her religion and her marriage. From her perspective, she should not be punished for living honestly and authentically.
People rarely stay the same. Everyone changes. The problem is that couples often change at different rates, in different domains, or toward different values. One person starts therapy. One develops a spiritual practice. One becomes healthier, more ambitious, more independent, more social, more reflective, and more emotionally aware. The other may be growing too, but in ways that don’t overlap, and may or may not be compatible. Or they could be stagnating, even getting worse. They could be getting less healthy, more complacent, politically differently aligned, develop substance abuse dependency, become chronically negative, abusive, etc.
Can a relationship survive growth divergence and personal changes? In exploring the question, I found six interesting themes.