Falling Into Life: A Gay Exmormon’s Journey

Chapter Eleven – What’s Love Got to Do with It?

I had the image of an Eternal Marriage_© embedded into my skull before I even knew what love was…

Eternal marriage and being Sealed for All Time and Eternity_© were concepts I knew well before I even knew what being “in love” meant. A Mormon child who has been born and raised in the church has a greater chance of learning every aspect of the temple marriage and temple sealing before they ever understand what love is in the first place. Therefore, not only is it more important than understanding love, but it will frame your concept of “love” for the rest of your life unless you do something drastic to change it.

Most young people when they think of “love” have a *much* different concept of it than I ever did. The concept of “falling in love” was really foreign to me, it was presented more like blinding lust, absolute animal attraction, then marriage, then kids as fast as possible. I believe this was the story I heard in order to cover for the fact that my dad impregnated my mom when she was fourteen. What was confusing was that somehow my parents went from crazy young lovers to conservative prudes.

My family was very republican, and they rarely touched, and even more rarely even uttered the word love. What I knew growing up was that Mormon guys dated for about three months or less before they proposed marriage, and this always occurred the moment they returned from their missions. This was nothing strange, I had no idea that there were people who actually dated for more than six months, let alone years. As far as I knew, you could know everything you needed to know about a woman in a month, and that there was no reason under this sun to devote more than a year to any marital decision.

We were taught to be on the hunt for our E.O., our one and only Eternal One. We even had youth activities built around finding our E.O., it was beyond finding love, it was finding this *special person* who you would spend your eternities with fulfilling your Exaltation_© scheme. Now how the hell can a young, confused kid understand what eternity could possibly mean? Especially a young, confused, gay kid. From the get go, the level of responsibility was ridiculous, and it never really focused on love. It focused on the structure, not on the person or who you would ask to marry you. It was *all* for the structure. You fit *into* the structure. You find love within the structure.

Heavenly Father’s parameters for marriage were clear and unbending, and they would be met. Marriage was an amazing thing as a Mormon, because it would be for eternity. Mormons never have to face the lamenting phrase, “’till death do you part”. I grew up believing that other types of marriages were weak, and ultimately doomed. Those were the 50% that ended in divorce. Thank God I was a chosen one, I had been raised to believe that yes, I truly was a “chosen one” among men. My generation was the last generation before Jesus Christ himself returned to the earth in all his power and glory for the Second Coming. Not long to wait now…

The Mormon Church has this *proclamation*, it was given to the First Presidency by God himself via revelation in September, 1995. It states that the only viable family is one comprised of one man and one woman. Other forms of families do not qualify for God’s worthiness and blessings. Imagine if you will that “The Proclamation on the Family” is a wonderful blueprint, a snapshot almost, a color-by-numbers approach to God’s family-approved love. These are the families that deserve it. These are the families that send out perfect Christmas card photos with matching shirts and annual letters of accomplishment.

My father gave me this Proclamation framed in oak to hang on my wall after he found out I was gay. It always reminded me that I was a sinful misfit, a mistake in God’s eyes, and if I were to ever bail on my eternal marriage obligation I would be damned. That’s how I took it, anyway. Perhaps he never thought of it even one moment, what it meant for me. But I assume he knew exactly what he was doing and that those words would sear my mind like a cattle brand, my own red hot Bar-U-Bar. And endlessly torture me. If I didn’t cop out, if I didn’t give up, I would be valuable to God, I would make this sealing work.

The concept of Mormon Eternal Marriage has changed over time, strangely enough. Before this proclamation, Mormons used to practice polygamy, and current Mormons practice it spiritually to this day (if your wife dies, you can eternally marry another and have two wives “sealed” to you in the hereafter). Joseph Smith Jr., the founder, had himself thirty-two eternal wives. Beg, borrow, and steal, as they say. Enough for him to populate his own world of spirit children, his own planet.

Brigham Young’s eternal bride count topped fifty! What a guy. The more wives you have the higher you get in the Celestial Kingdom, or so taught Joseph Smith. I’m unsure if Brigham Young used Joseph Smith’s pick-up line, though. As it is recorded in the Doctrine and Covenants, a flaming-sword-wielding angel would strike him down if the women didn’t cooperate.

So, the only path for happiness in my mind was to find someone who understood this structure, and to marry them. The structure being the most important part of the entire thing. Other marriages were the lost ones that didn’t get it. Sad were those who didn’t have this gospel, and these sealing ordinances that would allow them to not only be married on this earth, but for all the ages to come. The message was fantastic, the reality is severely lacking. I simply did not understand love, or what it was.

My mother and father were also very clear in their expectations of us. We would all be married in the temple for time and all eternity (after we served missions, and as we launched our dental careers). And because I was sealed to them before I was born, thus being “born in the covenant”, when I was sealed to my wife, we’d all be sealed together, one huge sealed family in God’s Plan. I hoped for such a good match like my parents had, my dad took one look at my Mom’s “brown riders” and fell madly in love right there in the darkness of the movie theater. It was love, eternal love for them. It was *that easy*!

They never discussed the complexities of love with us, not one time, and it was very confusing because my parents were the closest examples I had, and frankly, they had a very stressful existence. But I heard that romantic “brown riders” story repeatedly, and assumed that it was that easy, and that marriage was simply going to be very difficult to manage. One look in a dark theater and WHAMMO!, you were set for eternity. My bride and I would be blessed with an eternal family that had no ending, generation upon generation *all* sealed together, a forever family, albeit very stressful and tear-filled.

It never dawned on me that an eternity of stressful marital relationship would be hell, but hey, maybe it got better after we died? My dad counted on that, he had many discussions with me as I got older explaining that my mom would be relieved of this life’s problems after she died, and it would be so much better. It never dawned on him I guess that we only have this life to make it happy. And even if we do have an afterlife, it is worth living such a horrendous existence simply so we could live in God’s Eternal Plan_©? And how can we be sure it’ll get better after we die? There’s no guarantee, except to hang on to the fleeting hope that it *has* to get better for all your suffering.

Too bad I would grow up to be a big ol’ queer. I would be unable to stop my desire for men thus killing all the hopes and dreams of my entire family. I would be the one who would break our chain of eternally sealed family members. Too bad they couldn’t have tested me for queerness before I grew up. They could have abandoned me and saved themselves and my future wife all this pain. They could have found out I was going to be the odd one out, and stopped telling me then how important marriage was. They could have explained to me that because I was gay, I didn’t deserve it. Because that’s *certainly* what they tell me now!

But I would do my best to follow the plan as outlined for me. As I got older, I was taught that I had “same sex attraction”, which was curable and was most definitely not *gay*. Once you said you were gay, you were lost. Never admit such a thing, only admit that you suffered from, “same-sex attraction” as the prophet called it, or that you are a “complicated heterosexual” if you had to, or perhaps better stated, “a heterosexual with homosexual tendencies”, whatever the fuck *that* means. No, I would definitely get married as I was instructed from the age of three years. I would look just like all the rest, I would act like all the rest, and I would be saved. And somehow Heavenly Father would hear my desperate pleas and I’d be made straight.

Sixteen years after I married for time and all eternity, I would carry that framed Proclamation on the Family out to a trash can on the side of my house and smash it to pieces with a hammer.

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