“What does she see in him?”

Some Thoughts On How the Church Impacts Men

This is my reference on this post. Please read the above article before continuing on. I'll try to use it as a prompt but I'll also throw in a lot of my own experiences.

The first couple of paragraphs deal with ties. I can tell you that I also hate ties. I despise them. After my mission, I vowed to at least not wear a suit again, except for certain occasions, like marriage and job interviews. I've kept to that. I did wear ties to church as it was expected of me, but I didn't like it. I view it as a silly throwback to an earlier time and serving no real purpose. However, I'm also a bit of a conformist, or at least I don't want to draw attention to myself, so I wore them. In the bigger scheme of things, I think that is one of the ways the church impacts men. It makes us do things that we wouldn't do otherwise. Now that isn't always bad. Quite often, our lives are filled with things that we would rather not do. However, in the example of ties, No, We really don't need to do this.

And then there are the ideas like that a woman should only marry a return missionary; and someone faithful (meaning a super-active mormon boy; not regarding infidelity).

When I returned home from my mission, I had some goals in mind. I was going to date. I was going to date often and I was going to be a fun date. I didn't want to start dating right away because a mission does "significant ****ing" with the mind. I wanted to acclimate to being a normal human again. (Of course, this should have been some red flag to me hearing this from returned missionaries, Being a missionary means you aren't normal. I should have processed that differently than I did. I suffered from a deep depression my first half of my mission and used the second half to climb out of it.) I can't say that it was too long before I started dating, but my first dates didn't work out too well. You see, that whole "date an RM" that women receive while growing up affects them quite strongly. (I know, this is supposed to be how it affects men.) These women want to date and find a husband and they are surrounded by competition. That makes some women take more chances than they should, be more aggressive than they should. Don't get me wrong, I had a good deal of confidence that I was a good person and worth the chance a woman would take on going out with me. However, if it didn't work out, that aggression started coming out.

Later on, after contemplation on my life and how the church affected me, I had the natural question if these women had really cared about me or cared more about my status as an RM. I even had to ask that from my wife. In some marriages, the marriage wasn't to each other, but to their status and potential. If one of the spouses decides to leave the church, that expectation is broken and the marriage doesn't survive. I've seen a lot of marriages of my friends and acquaintences fall apart as they question the church and life goals change. There is a human toll here. It might not be strictly taught by the church as doctrine, but the church fosters a particular culture and doesn't explicitly tell the membership "RMs don't make the best husbands. They are humans and aren't any better or worse than any other man."  Of course they wouldn't teach that. The prospect of a beautiful woman waiting for you or motivating you to go on a mission in the first place makes many of the boys go on missions for other than their own desires. If you take that expectation away, the missionary force would drop. It played large in my motivation to go (out of gratitude for the woman I was dating and the expectation that I would be a better person for it and she deserved the best person I could be.) When I wanted to leave my mission after the halfway point because my mission had depressed me to the point where I literally couldn't function, I stayed partially because if I wasn't an RM, the women of my culture wouldn't want to date me. Yeah, this really, really affected me negatively.

BTW, my realization of this is fairly recent. Women have expressed to me some of their thoughts on this and I did ask my wife about it. She told me how pervasive the "marry an RM" in Utah was. I didn't get any of that being male of course, I just experienced the "Go on a mission" mantra. Since I was living in Michigan growing up, most datable partners weren't LDS so I don't know how strongly "RM preference" was taught in Young Women's. I did get an appreciation for the strength of this with some of my dates. The first woman I dated upon my return was overtly sexual and I felt she was always trying to trap me into a much deeper relationship than what I wanted. She physically threatened another woman I dated. When I broke up with her, she was still making her presence known and I soon referred to her as "my stalker". Looking back, I'm sure she was trying to hold on to an RM that was very relationship oriented to the point where she became a bit obsessive. At least, that is how I view that situation now.

And there is also the line “Worthy priesthood holder”, that is used so often by teary-eyed stay-at-home moms.  It is certainly a pride-inducing and man-shaming concept (Because every guy who ever did anything less that perfection feels guilt when women say that), that puts a wedge between mixed-faith couples with absolutely no need.

I'm not a perfectionist by any means. Tracy had known from the get go that I had issues that were deeper down. For example, I didn't talk about my mission. I didn't want to let on, other than it wasn't a great experience for me, just how badly I fared. I put all that guilt on me. I'm shy, or rather, I felt no need to talk to people about religion if they didn't initiate the contact. I suffered through home teaching when I mustered the bravery to do it. I didn't feel any particular inspiration when giving blessings. I had to turn down a few church callings because I knew I couldn't do it. This brought me a huge amount of guilt. I seemed to be in a church that I was constantly in conflict with. That brought more guilt. I really didn't care much about the institution's opinion of me. I did care about my wife's opinion and I know I was being taught to be a good husband; I needed to be a good priesthood holder. It seems I never was. That's not a great thing to carry around with you.

...to be continued.