Revising Eternity

27 Latter-day Saint Men Reflect on Modern Relationships

Holly Welker

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780252086427, 9780252044359
• eBook ISBN: 9780252053344
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Marriage's central role in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints distinguishes the faith while simultaneously reflecting widespread American beliefs. But what does Latter-day Saint marriage mean for men? Holly Welker presents a collection of essays exploring this question. The essayists provide insight into challenges involving sexuality, physical and emotional illness, addiction, loss of faith, infidelity, sexual orientation, and other topics. Conversational and heartfelt, the writings reveal the varied experiences of Latter-day Saint marriage against the backdrop of a society transformed by everything from economic issues affecting marriage to evolving ideas about gender.

An insightful exploration of the gap between human realities and engrained ideals, Revising Eternity sheds light on how Latter-day Saint men view and experience marriage today.

part i Revised Expectations

Figure 2. Kirsten Andersen Morris and Scott Russell Morris, November 2013, Lubbock, Texas

Kirsten is the process of making a pie while Scott embraces her from the side. He looks at the camera while she is looking down. Both are smiling.

Scott writes, “This picture is the first time Kirsten made caramel apple pie, which has since become a favorite recipe. Besides how happy we look in the picture, it’s one of our favorites because it’s evidence of what we love about our marriage: we support each other in new adventures—whether that’s a new recipe or a new career or a new country—and we just really like hanging out together.”

Transgressors

stephen carter

My six-year-old trots down the stairs of the gymnastics studio and heads toward the snack room. She grabs something carby and brings it to the counter.

“What’s your name?” asks the woman behind the computer.

My daughter tells her; the woman taps a few buttons.

“And what’s your mom’s name?”

“Stephen,” she chirps.

I feel a familiar pang of awkwardness as the woman looks up.

“She means that the snack account is under my name,” I say.

But my daughter has a point.

“By divine design, fathers … are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families,” reads “The Family: A Proclamation to the World.” “Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children.”

This quote has haunted me my entire marriage. And even more since my daughter was born.

A framed copy of the Proclamation on the Family hangs in the living room of many a Mormon household, and it’s frequently quoted in church meetings. So when a male Mormon and a female Mormon get married, there’s no question who should be the provider and who should be the nurturer. The Proclamation explicitly connects these two roles to gender, which it states is “an essential characteristic of our premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.” And the roles should not be taken lightly. People who “fail to fulfill family responsibilities will one day stand accountable before God.”

Early in our marriage, Noelle and I both worked outside the home. Since we didn’t have children to nurture, provide for, or protect, those sentences from the Proclamation didn’t feel relevant. And even after our first child was born, we still seemed to have some wiggle room because Noelle worked writing online college courses from home and could therefore still be our child’s “nurturer.”

But then another child arrived, and soon thereafter we agreed to provide day care for three little nieces. Noelle suddenly had her hands full—and we had a mortgage. So, being the good Proclamation follower I was, I worked three jobs to keep our finances above water.

One of my jobs was being a news reporter (back when you could make money at it), so I was running around Utah Valley attending meetings, chasing down interviews, and turning in three articles a day. My other two jobs were at Utah Valley State College. When I think back on the sheer energy I expended during that time in my early twenties, my head spins. It was simultaneously thrilling and exhausting.

But soon we realized we couldn’t maintain our family on my current earning power. It was time for graduate school.

I researched academic programs with the idea that further education would enhance my providing ability, leaving Noelle free to nurture. But one night, after I told her about a few schools I was considering, Noelle said she would attend graduate school as well.

My first thought was, “What?” But my second thought was, “Of course.”

Noelle, after all, had taken pretty much every AP class in high school (while I was about as middle-of-the-pack as you could get) and had earned some great scholarships at BYU (while all I ever got were Pell Grants). She was perfect grad school material. And, as it turned out, one of the schools that accepted both of us, the University of Alaska–Fairbanks, offered her an assistantship and a scholarship, while I just got waitlisted for an assistantship (though I did get one soon after arriving).

So we moved to Alaska and did the Tetris-like work of arranging our schedules so one of us could be with our two children when the other was gone.

On one hand, it seemed we had most certainly regressed in our adherence to the Proclamation: Noelle was no longer at home being a full-time nurturer, and I wasn’t out being a full-time provider. But on the other hand, there was one part of the Proclamation we could still hide behind: “Fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners.” If pressed, though, we would have to admit that those words are immediately followed by qualifiers: “Disability, death, or other circumstances may necessitate individual adaptation.” Could we interpret that to mean “disability, death, or graduate school”?

We were the personification of “equal partners,” though. Being in the same program, Noelle and I had exactly the same number of classes to attend and exactly the same graduation requirements. So by necessity, we shared the childcare/school load fifty-fifty.

And the extra time I spent with my children had its effect. Recently I found a book of photos from that time that I hadn’t seen in years. Looking through it, I was astonished at how beautiful our children were, how purely their personalities showed through, how endearingly proportioned their bodies were, and how many memories the images called up.

And not just family-vacation-type memories, or even weekend memories, or even putting-the-kids-to-bed memories, but mundane, everyday-life memories, the kind that can only be made when you’re around your kids a lot. Playing in the sandbox on the last day of summer, already in our long-sleeve shirts; trick-or-treating in (literally) zero-degree weather; watching a moose and her calf grazing in our flowerbeds.

After years of this balancing act, Noelle and I earned our master’s degrees and doctorates. Our family then moved from Alaska to its warmer but windier cousin, Wyoming, where we both took jobs as schoolteachers. It worked out well because our children were the right age to attend the elementary school Noelle taught at. She even arranged for our oldest to be placed in her fourth-grade class. Meanwhile, I taught sophomore English to kids who would make twice my salary right out of high school working on the oil rigs—no knowledge of Greek tragedy required.

The Proclamation seemed placated during those two years, since Noelle and our children kept essentially the same schedule, though it rumbled a bit about who should be the primary provider.

Then I landed a job editing a magazine from home. I actually struggled with the decision to take the job. I enjoyed teaching more than I’d expected. I also worried about the stability of a small nonprofit job versus a state-sponsored job. But the magazine seemed like the thing to do.

And I guess it was, because a few months after I took the position, Noelle and I found that we were expecting a baby. It was a surprise. We’d been thinking that two kids were enough, and our youngest was ten. Suddenly we had to wrap our heads around the fact that we’d soon start all over again with the sleep deprivation, projectile pooping, and Sisyphean laundry cycles.

As we considered the impending change, we realized that in many ways, we were perfectly set up for it. I worked from home, so I could be the baby’s main caretaker while Noelle continued to teach. Had I still been a teacher, we would have had to make the difficult decision of losing half our income or hiring someone else to take care of our child.

Though I was nervous about taking on this responsibility, I already had some experience under my belt, not just with my own children but with my eight younger brothers and sisters, many of whom I helped raise. I remembered how much fun it was to watch them grow up—how much I enjoyed their company. And I realized that I was excited to meet this new little soul, too.

But the day Noelle returned to school from maternity leave was the day the Proclamation started banging down my door. I felt like Adam when he realizes not only that he is naked but that God is coming to visit. I had nothing to hide behind—not a single shred of verbiage that I could muster in defense of my new role. Even if I was helping to provide for my family, I had become a full-time nurturer. And it wasn’t just my soul I was worried about, it was my baby’s. Was I starving her in a way I couldn’t see? Was my male spirit simply unequipped to provide her an essential form of nurture?

That tension increased when we moved to Utah for Noelle’s new job at an educational software company. In Wyoming, she was home by four o’clock on a regular basis, and she had summers off. But in Utah she worked all year and usually didn’t get home until much later.

Our ward in Orem had no idea what to make of us. Our home teacher laughed out loud when I told him I was a stay-at-home dad. The women in the ward were simultaneously awed and frightened by Noelle, who, much to our surprise, found that she had a knack for management and started moving up the corporate ladder. Through years of watchfulness, suffering, and practicing, she learned to navigate with authority and grace through a company loaded with male executives (most of whom are bishops and former mission presidents and therefore used to being obeyed, especially by women). She has built a grounded, trustworthy ethos that makes her a natural leader.

Our new setup became a lasting one, and our roles blended together. Despite my day managing the children and maintaining the house, it was a matter of course for me to start my work around six o’clock at night—after getting everyone fed—and push through until two in the morning. And despite a long day at work, Noelle would spend her evenings helping with homework, getting kids ready for bed, and calming the baby in the middle of the night.

About six years after our baby was born, I was sitting in a priesthood meeting where the teacher grew misty-eyed as he held forth about how wonderful mothers are, how their role as nurturer was the most important and fulfilling job in the world, how he could never do it himself. Everyone nodded along, offering their own platitudes.

Their words called up memories of staring at my baby for hours as her eyes explored the room, as she auditioned her voice, as her arms conducted silent orchestras. But also memories of watching the DVD menu of Bear in the Big Blue House repeating over and over again for hours as I held the sleeping baby in my lap—because if I moved, the baby would wake up, and if I turned the sound down, the baby would wake up. (Sartre would have written a very different play about hell had he seen my plight.) They called up memories of the many hours I spent following my little fire sprite down streets, across yards, and through play equipment; watching her patrol the earth—examining skies and pebbles, talking with dogs and the wind, testing gravity and my heart. Memories of waking every morning with the inescapable knowledge that the day was in no way mine, that my will did not matter, that the small things of the earth were in control—and feeling that desolation instantly evaporate at the sight of my daughter’s impish smile. Only to return a few minutes later.

Suddenly, a fire ignited in me.

“You guys have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said. “I’m here to tell you: for the past six years I’ve been the primary caretaker for my daughter, and it has changed me to the core. Nothing in my entire life, not even my mission, has affected me so deeply. To spend endless tracts of inescapable time with my child, day in and day out for years, has been the most joyful, despair-ridden, heart-expanding, soul-sucking experience I’ve ever had. I’ve never felt so utterly alone; I’ve never felt so completely connected. My being is larger and stronger and wiser in ways I never could have imagined when I was just a provider. I’ve been you. I’ve said those same words. And they are empty. If you ever have the chance to become your child’s full-time nurturer, take it. Of course you can do what your wives do! These are your children, too! If you believed all the platitudes you’ve been spewing, you’d be begging for the chance. But instead, you’re hiding behind your role, missing a profound opportunity.”

You could definitely call the silence that followed stunned. But the teacher soon moved on to the next topic, and, as far as I can tell, the incident sank into the morass of ward history like a diaper into a laundry bucket.

When introducing Eve and Adam to the Garden of Eden, God gave them two commandments. First, don’t eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Second, multiply and replenish the earth. But as Mormon theology interprets it, these two commandments were mutually exclusive—Eve and Adam’s procreative mechanisms wouldn’t kick in until after they ate the fruit of the tree. So they could only keep one of the commandments.

Eve finally broke the lower commandment (don’t eat the fruit) in order to obey the higher commandment (bear fruit). It was a choice that came with a lot of consequences. The couple lost their paradise; they wandered in a lone and dreary world; they labored and suffered for their bread and for their children. But it was the only way humanity could ever start progressing.

For making this frightening but generative choice, Mormonism honors Eve.

It seems to me that the role assignment in the Proclamation may be like “don’t eat the fruit.” It’s a useful commandment: it keeps things efficient; it staves off messy decisions; it gives us a role to master. But does it ever impede the expansion of our humanity? Does it ever make us into unproductive soil that rejects good seeds because we consider them outside our role? Does it ever keep us in a naive state, never entering each other’s lone and dreary world—the only place our souls can be built?

Mormon discourse tells us that Eve did not “break” that commandment, she “transgressed” it: she crossed a boundary in order to enter a more expansive, demanding learning space.

Noelle and I have become transgressors, too, and we have found that the world can indeed be lone and dreary. At times we feel forgotten by God, the church, and the ideals of our upbringing. We sometimes wonder how our children may have suffered because of our choices. When things go badly, we guiltily trace the problem’s roots to see if they lead back to our transgression.

These fears can never be resolved. We made a choice. Its consequences—good and bad—will always attend us.

The only comfort we have is the undeniable growth of these seeds within us.

By the Drinking Fountain

eric robeck

I was one of those missionaries who fell head over heels in love with the culture and people I encountered on my mission. Although—or perhaps because?—I had never traveled outside the continental United States and Canada before my Spanish-speaking mission to Southern California, I became deeply enamored with the culture and charm of the Latin communities I was immersed in. I had always been socially awkward and introverted—painfully so—but on my mission I became much more confident, and my newfound personality developed some of the characteristics I admired in the people I met. As my language became more Hispanic, so did I. I didn’t know how much this culture had become part of me until I left it.

After I returned to BYU in the fall of 2000, my social awkwardness and loneliness returned too. I missed the families who had shared their homes and lives with me. I missed their language, food, music, and marvelous sense of humor. I realized that I felt more comfortable in Hispanic culture than in the American college lifestyle surrounding me in Provo, so I signed up for an online LDS pen pal service with a Spanish-speaking group. On Thanksgiving weekend in 2000—ironically, while in California to visit my mission families—I received an email from a young Mormon woman living in Chihuahua, Mexico. Lorey had seen my profile and felt I was oddly familiar, as if we had known each other before. She was surprised to see how much we had in common and was curious to learn more.

What began as a friendship based on shared interests, including a deep love of the gospel, quickly developed into something more, despite limited contact and the border between us. Our relationship initially consisted primarily of emails and the occasional online chat. Before Skype and before I owned a mobile phone, calls were rare. Usually, my calling card ran out of minutes before we finished talking. In those days, packages were ofte...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword: Mormon American Masculinities, Ideal and Actual
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Personal, Contingent, and Incomplete Views on Eternal Marriage
• Part I. Revised Expectations
• Part II. Sex and its Consequences
• Part III. In Sickness and in Health
• Glossary
• Discussion Questions
• Bibliography
• Contributors