I applaud anyone, male or female, who overcomes shallowness and looks at a person’s deeper qualities, especially in regard dating and marriage. The movie and fashion industry does much to institute shallowness to the point that, in my opinion, it promotes outright discrimination and judgmentalism even as they give lip service to tolerance.
On the other hand, among Jehovah’s Witnesses, there seem to be a preponderance of incompatible marriages. Of course, this may be impossible to quantify and among those mentally in, this would be heavily disputed, but I am convinced based on personal observation that this is indeed the case.
This is mainly due to a type of disguised shallowness. The main qualities that this environment promotes, in order to be of marriageable material, is:
(1) Being a baptized Jehovah’s Witness
(2) Not be marked or under reproof or restrictions
(3) Hours, hours, hours. Meetings, meetings, meetings. Comment frequently. Underline your magazine.
If a man is a ministerial servant or elder, or a woman is a pioneer, they are automatically viewed as a good potential mate. This has been reinforced by the words of Anthony Morris III at the US Branch visit: women should not marry a man who is not at least a ministerial servant. It was implied the marriage is doomed otherwise.
In some cases, the ONLY thing the couple has in couple is their religion and their standing in it. Women might gain status or prominence vicariously through their husbands…if he’s been appointed. If her husband is giving public talks, especially on assemblies, then she can point in pride and say, “That’s my husband.” To herself, she might feel, “He’s important. Therefore, I feel important through him.” Obviously, I can never speak from personal experience as a spouse of an elder, but I project this from being a son and grandson of elders. Lipservice is given to not being position-minded, but, in reality, it often does not often work that way.
There is no other way for a conscientious Witness to gain any sort of prominence. He cannot gain it through non-religious activities, say higher education or putting his full energies into career or other pursuits. Even though such a person might be sincere, they will eventually gain approval within the community that they cannot gain on the outside. This approval is addicting. The withdrawal of approval can hurt greatly.
But what often happens when one spouse learns the truth about the “truth”?
Let’s take the case of a man who learns the truth about the truth. He may look for ways to step back from the organization gradually and eventually fade. Perhaps, he will step down from his position and get few hours, skip an occasional meeting.
If he is an elder or a ministerial servant, this might well be difficult. Even if he is just a rank-and-file publisher, he cannot do this without notice from his spouse. Already, the one thing they had in common, the “zealousness” for organization activities is out the window. The JW mate now feels stress that her mate is not “putting the Kingdom first”. She may grieve at the loss of prominence. And she may be genuinely concerned about his “spiritual” welfare. Here, this man, who she married because of his organizational activities, is not “taking the lead spiritually” for the family. In the Witness mindset, this is the most important quality for husbands and now this most important quality seems to have disappeared. Sometimes it has truly proved to be “tribulation in the flesh” as the Witness mate lashes out at the one attempting to fade.
It goes without saying this is IF he keeps what he knows to himself. The moment he utters the slightest bit of TTATT, he has crossed the Rubicon. In most cases, the spouse rings the aposta-alarm, the elders are called in, and a storm erupts with the kind of fury that can never be undone. Too often, this results in the “spiritual endangerment” card being played and the marriage coming to an abrupt end.
Conversely, the Witness mate is not always the one that ends the marriage. In the course of being the organizer of an Ex-JW meetup group, I encountered those who left their Witness mate, or were in the process of planning to do so. I was merely the organizer of events, and not a trained marriage counselor, therefore it is beyond my scope to try to fix the situation or try to stop them. At most, I can offer what I know about the “truth about the truth” or point them to the work of licensed mental counselor Steven Hassan. Even though these situations were beyond my bounds, it really made me sad, especially because it brought up feelings from having gone through the end of my own marriage.
What drove former Witnesses to leave their mates? Once they came to the conclusion that the organization was not the truth, they realized they’d nothing in common with their spouse anymore. The SOLE basis of their marriage was the religion. It didn’t matter anymore if their husband was an elder or a ministerial servant or how many hours he put in every month.
One young lady I sat down with frankly said to me that the reason she married her husband was because “he looked good on paper”. Once she married him, she quickly found that he wasn’t the person she had expected.
The bottom line is that hours in field service, congregational activities, and a person’s standing in the organization has NOTHING to do with whether or not a person would make a good marriage mate. In fact, these things have to do with whether or not a person has a good heart or true spirituality.
I wish there was a silver bullet solution that would heal these marriages. Unfortunately, the bad advice from the organization has created slews of incompatible marriages for which there is no easy remedy. This might be especially so if the mate in the organization is resistant to marriage counseling.
Optimally, both the husband and the wife would learn the truth about the truth, but this is not often the case. Thankfully, some, who have a mate still in the organization, have been able to weather the storm. Some have helped their mates further down the road, through gradually dropping tidbits and seeds of thought that enabled the waking process. But perhaps it is the case that these couples had more in common in the first place besides loyalty to a religious organization.