Brainwash be gone. A podcast for women who've left a high control, high demand religion. In every episode, we deconstruct one specific rule you were taught so you can let go of the harmful conditioning and live an amazing life on your own terms. Today we'll be talking about:

“Marriage is forever”

If you're thinking, oh, well I'm very happily married, or I'm currently single, this episode isn't for me. Wait. Because it is very much for you still. We are going to, in this episode.

No matter what your marital status, take a look at your assumptions about making promises and breaking promises, and we're gonna talk about how being rigid about promises can actually open you up to manipulation and abuse in all kinds of contexts, not just promises about marriage. And if you listen through to the whole episode, you'll leave with some real food for thought about.

What making a promise means to you and in what situations you plan to let yourself later change your mind after you make an agreement. And also it can help you be a better non-judgmental support person for friends or family who might discuss marriage difficulties with you. 

So as we're diving in, I wanna talk first about what is the actual motive. For this rule of marriage is forever, and I know we've got people listening here from different high control, high demand religions. Like we've got some former LDS, recovering Catholics, previous Jehovah's Witnesses, ex evangelicals, and each group has a slightly different.

Take on this rule for Catholics it means till death do part, you can't get divorced ever. For LDS, it means for infinity is my understanding. Including in the afterlife, you're still gonna be together with this person potentially. And for evangelicals there's a little bit more variety in what the interpretation is.

But a lot of times the churches just really push staying in a marriage, even at great personal cost to the people involved. And when church authorities explain, okay, well what's the reason for this rule? There's a lot of overlap about what they may say this is God's spiritual law. This is an unbreakable covenant that you've made with God.

You made a vow and you can't break that. Or even they might play on your love for your children and say, for the good of your children, you need to stay in this situation, or staying in this marriage, even though it's very hard, is what's gonna make you holy. I know I once. Sat through a Catholic wedding in which the priest gave a very lengthy sermon that was entirely about how marriage is not designed to make you happy.

It's designed to cause suffering that makes you into a saint. I was just like, whoa, buddy, you're not even married. What a perspective. It was a very interesting explanation for why this rule exists. And what did your church say about this?

Have you heard other reasoning for this rule? Where is your training on this particular topic? It can be interesting to think about, the entire premise of this podcast is really that it helps us break the power of these rigid. Rules that we were trained with when we just, instead of accepting, as children or even as adults, when things are repeated and repeated and repeated and they're unquestionable, we just take it as truth and we don't think about it critically.

And if we do start to think about it critically, a lot of times there's pushback about that and our lack of faith. So. Part of the very important process about coming out of that paradigm and deciding that you are a person with authority and choice over your life is that. You start to make your own decisions, and it can be super helpful to just look straight at some of these things you've been taught and really think about it critically.

Does this make sense? [00:04:00] What parts of this do I wanna keep? What parts of this do I think are just crap? I'm not gonna further this anymore. What beliefs or ways of being are gonna replace this? This belief, if I decide it doesn't work for me anymore, and I never wanna tell you what to think,

it just feels so important to me to share thoughts about how I've critically analyzed a bunch of these things, and it can be really a sounding board for you. As you're making your own decisions, but I never wanna tell you what to do. We've all been there. Let's just stop with that. You're the authority over your life and you get to make your own decisions.

Anyway. So those are some of the reasons that the churches will say that the rule exists,

but it would be very naive of us to just accept that that is their true motivation in good faith. I'm not saying there's nobody in the church who, you know, there are probably people who in good faith, and you may have been one of them, I was probably one of them believed like, this is the word of God, or , we have to do it because of this, [00:05:00] but.

If we do not look at other potential motives, it would just be, it's not a full analysis. We're not having our eyes open if we allow people to tell us, oh, it's because of this, and we don't think about. Hmm. Are there other reasons that this rule could have been put in place? Whether by the people that we're currently learning from, or even the original founders, at some point or hundreds of years ago, they put this rule in place and they had other unstated motives for that.

So some of the possible unstated motives that come to mind for me, when I think about this is that, there's probably a lot of ease of church administration if you have just a bright line rule and you're not gonna handle any nuance of the messiness of humanity and relationships and things like that, you just go, Nope, we like, we won't entertain divorce at all.

And there's also the motive of, since men were in charge in the religion. They would not have wanted women to be able to leave them if they were you know, they're bad husbands, or even if they're [00:06:00] abusive, it's like there's a motive to not allow your free labor and childbearing forced by this religious construct to support you for free in all the things and do what you say.

They wouldn't want that person to necessarily be able to walk away from that. And so I could see that motivation for sure. And I think there's probably, in some groups, especially just clergy's discomfort, I think in some groups, especially Catholics where the priests are allegedly celibate and, not married, that they would just have fundamental discomfort with mediating marital disputes.

Like, I just don't wanna get involved in that. I don't know what that's all about. And potentially even a motivation for financial care of children back in the day when all economic resources and possibilities were in the hands of men that, in order for a society to care for children,

they would probably wanna minimize men being able to walk away from children that they have. And so just say like you can't [00:07:00] leave your family. Although you may have also seen that sometimes there are more exceptions for certain people in the church for these rules than other people. I'm just saying, you know?

So anyway. And maybe you can think of other unstated motives too, you know, what do you think could be other reasons that potentially your particular group may have decided? That this was a rule that they were gonna heavily enforce. And then I think we have to think about, okay, what's the impact of having a rule like that when a group makes a choice to have a very hard line rule about something like you can't get out of a marriage?

What are the impacts that this has on people? I know for me personally, it's had a huge impact. I stayed in a marriage for 15 years before I finally got a divorce, even though I was literally already thinking about it. On my honeymoon, like should I get an annulment for this? I think I've made a horrible mistake here.

And I will say too, these rules can have such a hold over [00:08:00] us. , Even though I did finally get divorced, , I had left the church years earlier and I still stayed married. I was just so afraid to get a divorce. And then the day that I. Was actually gonna drive over my petition for a divorce and file it at the courthouse.

I had this sudden irrational fear that came over me that I was going to like die in a car wreck before I could make it to the courthouse because my brain was just completely like there's no reality in which you get a divorce and continue to live on as a person. But you know, spoiler alert here, I am very happily divorced for several years and I've had a wonderful life and it was the best decision I ever made.

But it is crazy the impact that it has on us to cause, you know, to, to keep our behavior in a, in line with the rule. I know. Um, other impacts, you know, it can cause people to stay in abusive situations. It can cause people to stay in relationships that maybe they aren't abusive, but they just have run their course.

You know, life can be long. People can grow. [00:09:00] They can get to know themselves better. They can realize, hey, I got married very young and I selected a certain. Pattern of relationship that was modeled after a toxic dynamic in my own family. And guess what? I don't wanna do that anymore. I'm not gonna further this, like I'm gonna end this line.

You know? I need to leave this situation. We both need to just do our own thing and not be together forever. It can also even cause psychological blocks where, you know, couples who are currently married might be in denial about problems they have in the relationship, or unwilling to try to work those out.

You know, scared of going to therapy because it's like. If you know that it's a foregone conclusion that no matter how bad this is, you can never get out of it, it makes you not even wanna look. You know, like we're just gonna keep the cover on that and we're not gonna try to solve anything because we just can't go there.

And so there's this eerie. Level of denial over everything that I see so often, and I felt that myself. I know I actually feel embarrassed sometimes when I think about [00:10:00] all of the people that I was like, oh, I'm in such an amazing marriage, like compulsively. I would just say this to people randomly because I just, it was such a hard, I was just coping so hard, like this has to be true because I cannot escape this situation.

You know? There's no way out for me. So other impacts, it causes children to grow up in home environments that are not healthy in lots of different ways of not healthiness. And you know, that can be a lot worse than growing up in a family with one parent. It's like having a toxic dynamic and believing that that's normal.

They will then have generational trauma and repeat that. And it teaches us that we can't trust our own instincts. Like I. Viscerally feel like I want to leave this situation, but I can't follow that. It teaches us our happiness doesn't matter, and by extension that we don't matter.

Our needs don't matter. There's nothing we can do to protect ourselves or make our own choices. So those are all really, really negative impacts that happen, because of keeping a [00:11:00] rule like marriage is forever.

So I wanna also get into sort of the logical critical analysis side of this rule. One of the things that was super healing for me was actually attending law school and becoming a lawyer because I started to look at. The world in a very analytical way, and specifically contract law made me think about marriage a lot.

Oddly enough, I'm gonna bring this together. You're gonna see where I'm going with this. Just hold, just stick with me for a minute here. In the law, a contract is an agreement between two different people or companies or whatever, parties and each side. Says that they will do something. So it's like, well, I'm going to do this and then you're going to do this.

And we have both entered into this agreement because we're both gonna do our part. And contract law also talks about all of the ways that that agreement can be not valid. Like if one person lies to the other person about the agreement or they withhold important [00:12:00] information, or they don't follow through on their side of things, the agreement doesn't continue on.

You know, it's like it's not valid because of that. And it's really interesting to think of the parallels between. Contracts and marriage, which historically was and is a legal contract actually. But if you think of it in a different context, like, okay, let's say that you were going to buy a house and the person you're gonna buy the house from says.

You know, you really just can't tour this house ahead of time, unfortunately, because your very touring of the house is going to ruin your experience of living in this house completely. You have to trust us. It has to be like you buy the house and then your first step into the house is like, I already own this house.

And yes, you're gonna be paying this amount per month for 30 years to buy. This house is a big commitment, but we promise. That it's an idyllic and beautiful house and a safe location with five bedrooms. So you can have a beautiful family. Lots of natural light, clean, fresh. It's great. [00:13:00] Trust me, bro. It's great.

You know what I mean? So you sign the contract and then they take you to the house and it turns out to be like a moldy trailer in a dangerous spot, like in a floodplain, like on the edge of a river or something. It would be crazy for the person who sold you that house to then turn around and say.

You promised you were gonna pay that amount for 30 years. You know, you're, you're in, like, it's immoral of you to break your promise, even though I totally broke mine, or even though I totally fraudulently. Told you a bunch of non-truths or things that you had no way to know that they weren't true to induce you to make this agreement, and then I'm gonna hold you to it.

Or like the one, the other person is not really trying to resolve the situations in your marriage or they're just harming you. What? And you're just expected to keep going. Like, that's not how agreements work. I'm sorry. The lawyer in me get super riled up about that. That's why I made this the first episode.

Anyway,

when we look at agreements and the morality of [00:14:00] agreements. It's interesting that that can be manipulated against us, where it's like, I can't believe you would break your promise. And it's like, I can't believe you would tell me all this untrue stuff about what it's like to be with men and keep me from any useful information about how to select a healthy partner.

Keep me from any information about my own needs in a relationship, my own compatibility, you know, factors like my own sexuality. All of this will be in the dark and then, you know. It's just, this is a crazy premise. That's a crazy premise. Oh my goodness. Anyway, some other logical fallacies that we see in there are things like a false dichotomy,

you know, a false dichotomy is when they say, well, it's either this or that. It's all or nothing. You know? There's either you're married for life or all of infinity, and it's success. Or you're not, and it's a total disaster downfall of society and you're going to hell, it's like, wow.

Guess what? I think there are some potential variations in between those two [00:15:00] steps, right? But it forces you into it's either this or this, which is fundamentally just not logically true. And there's what's called an appeal to authority, which is a logical fallacy where they say, well, God commands this.

And that's both like the proof and the statement. So it's kind of like, well, where does that come from? Well, it comes from our interpretation of this document that we also produced as our guiding document. You're kinda like, alright, well that sounds pretty circular to me, you know? Anyway. And we also see certain types of hypocrisy, inconsistencies, selective application where maybe some people will be permitted something like an annulment or certain leaders, or when the man decides, it's like it may be handled differently.

Wow. Somehow they're pulling out things about forgiveness and stuff like that, and you being a bad wife or whatever, and it's like, I don't know about that. That's just, uh, pretty self-serving in some ways. So we've talked about a lot of the issues with this [00:16:00] whole construct of marriage is forever. Now let's talk about some possible alternative viewpoints.

You know, if you are like, yeah, I can see some problems with that. What's my perspective moving forward? What, how am I gonna make my choices? You know, some possible ways you could look at it. Some ways that I look at it are, promising something. Does not automatically sign me up for life. I do allow myself to grow and change, make different decisions once I have more information and more life experience.

I mean, if I didn't adjust my viewpoints and my actions based on the experience I've gained since I was just barely an adult until now as a middle aged woman in my forties with a lot more wisdom, like that would be dumb. Why would I gain all this life experience and then not use it to change my viewpoints in any way, of course I would.

I also, I just won't allow myself to be manipulated into doing something to benefit someone who's taking advantage of me, who's not reciprocating in the relationship. Like what? Never again, [00:17:00] you know, like I'm never gonna do a one-sided thing again. And I would never again, allow myself to feel like I have to sacrifice everything about who I am in order to make someone else happy.

Each of us have a life and we're living it. And I think it's important that we. Personally decide where that goes. I also think if a rule causes more harm than good, even if it's sort of like under the guise of divine, then does it really make sense for a group to follow it if it's causing all this harm?

So, I mean, marriage is forever can sound super romantic. I do value relationships and deep relationships and want to have a life partner that I can rely on, but not at all costs. And I believe that marriage specifically is a construct where there's ongoing consent.

It's not lifelong coercion. You're stuck. It's like if we consent to this and one of us withdraws our consent, it's no longer happening the end. Of course each person [00:18:00] needs to have their own authority about what they're gonna do with their life and their body and their, you know, their whole being.

So. Anyway, don't take my word for it. What do you think? What makes sense for you and your life moving forward? Have you ever felt coerced to make some kind of promise? Have you ever had a promise held against you somehow? Do you plan to allow yourself to change your mind? Do you ever allow yourself to change your mind?

Is that something that you might do in the future? And what do you think the benefits of incorporating your learning and life experience? Into your judgment will be moving forward.

Do you believe in our mission here at Brainwash be gone? Then please leave us a review on your podcast app. It helps other women find us so we can keep on busting more sisters out. 

Topics: Religious trauma, spiritual abuse, deconstruction, exmormon, exmo, exvangelical, recovering catholic, excatholic, former jehovah's witness, women's empowerment, feminism, leaving religion, self-worth, high demand religions, high control groups, high control religion, cult, cult recovery, brainwashed, high demand religion, spiritual trauma, church abuse