The Secret Lives of Option-Less Wives

*Where would you go*

I talk about all of the ideas related to Secret Lives of Mormon Wives in much finer detail in this week’s episode of The Culture Study Podcast, where Sara Petersen and I answer *your* questions about the show — you can find it here. As with previous podcast/newsletter collabs on ACOTAR and America’s Sweethearts, the podcast episode and this edition of the newsletter can stand alone — but they’re even better together.

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Reality television is raw documentary footage edited to become melodrama, complete with one-dimensional heroes and villains and clearly telegraphed narrative stakes. In so doing, the characters’ real-life decisions (at least as represented on the show) become a framework on which larger ideological tensions can play out.

In Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, we have characters who grapple with a fundamental tension at the heart of so much contemporary Christianity: how to reconcile the directive that you must never, ever come close to thinking about (let alone acting on) sexual urges, particularly as a young woman…..until you get married, at which point you should become a vessel through which your husband’s wildest fantasies should flow. Sex is ruinous but sex is beautiful; sex is abject but sex offers glory to God; don’t even think of sex but then, suddenly, have it constantly.

The tension between these two poles leads to a lot of confusion and sadness, particularly after marriage — but it can also lead to a lot of teen pregnancy and shotgun weddings. The church attempts to deny or abolish teen sexual desire (masturbation is sinful) while also funneling it into the “solution” of young marriage and, shortly thereafter, parenthood (which, for many LDS women, either becomes their first full-time job or quickly supplants other work they do outside the home for pay). Ambivalence, curiosity, and ambition get funneled into the creation and maintenance of family.

The specifics of the postwar U.S. economy made it possible for millions of white middle-class families to maintain a middle-class lifestyle on one income — but today, even in lower cost of living areas, that’s no longer the case, particularly if your family keeps, well, growing. So how do you get a part-time job with flexible hours that you can mostly do from your home? An MLM! And blogging and influencing — particularly the way these women do it, with massive brand endorsement deals — is just an MLM on a bigger scale. Instead of appealing to your connections through the church, you’re appealing to the whole of the internet — and the internet is endlessly curious about Mormons.

Which leads us to the other central tension of the show: between Mormonism as culture versus belief in (and adherence to) the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Of the eight characters on the show, only three are regular churchgoers. But all of these women are culturally Mormon: with one exception, they all grew up in a culture infused by LDS beliefs; they either converted to or grew up in families that attended the LDS church; they were previously married to fellow LDS members and associate almost entirely with other people who are culturally Mormon.

Even the characters who are not “good” Mormons — who haven’t gone to church in years — still understand themselves as Mormon. Why don’t they just actually quit the church if they don’t believe in or practice its teachings? Because they don’t want to actually be expelled from the status quo — and because they understand their identity “as Mormon” is part of what creates the narrative frisson at the heart of their popularity as influencers.

Some of these women drink or did in the past. Others had sex before marriage. Most are divorced. If they weren’t Mormon, none of that would be worthy of a reality television show. But put those actions against the backdrop of Mormonism and they become “bad,” dangerous, transgressive — or at least enough of each of those things to make them interesting to the broad audience of internet and streaming consumers.

But these Mormon wives are also, crucially, still “good.” At least on camera, none of them interrogate the teachings of the church, save to note that some are “a little chauvinistic.” When Whitney talks with her mom about whether she should accept a brand deal with a sex toy company, noting how unprepared she was for her wedding night, she places the blame for that experience squarely on her mom — not on the larger structures of the church and its discourse around sex. Nearly everyone has been divorced, but divorce itself is understood as a temporary interlude before getting married again (and having more children). And of course: they’re all thin, botoxed, with beachy waves and extensions and middling dance skills. When people say they can’t tell them apart, well, yes: that’s the point.

Much of the chatter I’ve seen about the show has centered on perceived hypocrisy: that they won’t drink coffee, for example, because their bodies are supposed to be treated as temples, but will get high on nitrous while getting botox. To me, those sorts of behaviors are just evidence of governing principles that have ceased to make sense. If you don’t actually believe them, it’s easy to find loopholes yet cling to the beliefs that allow you to maintain your membership within a cultural group.

That’s what I see when I watch the women in this show, even “good girl” Whitney: the most patriarchal and oppressive governing principles of the LDS church no longer make sense for them or their lives; still, they’re unwilling to let go of the association or the power and status that accompany it.

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Vigdis Hjorth’s Will and Testament is a book about sexual abuse and inheritance in contemporary Norway. It’s also a book about what women will tolerate when they have very little power. Halfway through the book the narrator describes a family story related to her by her partner:

Lars told me about his unhappy grandmother who lived on Fagernes in the 1960s. Granny Borghild had toiled from morning till night for years, Granny Borghild had cooked the food and done the laundry and cleaned the house for years, until one afternoon Granny Borghild said to her husband, who was sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper, Lars was there and heard it himself: No, I can’t do this any longer. I’m leaving.

But where will you go, Borghild, her husband said and made himself comfortable on the couch.

The passage sits alone, a narrative interlude on its own page. It’s a gut punch. It also puts a fine point on something I’ve been thinking about for most of my adult life: the way people stay in situations that oppress them because another way of living feels unimaginable. Where would you go, how would you live, how would you ever manage all the things I manage, how would you survive.

The terror of that unknowable reality keeps people in marriages that are physically abusive but also ones that are just low grade miserable. It mires people in jobs that scrape away all sense of self. It isolates people in high-control religions; it keeps people in codependent relationships with friends and family; it strands people in towns where every space feels suffocating. They stay, because again: where would you go.

Those who’ve left and suffered are held up as examples of what would happen to you: you’d be miserable, and poor, and everyone would hate you, and you’d have no family, and your kids would resent you and your parents would disown you. Sometimes people who leave do end up this way. But more often that’s just the story people still in the situation tell to ward others from following the same path.

The divorce rate in the United States has ticked slightly upward over the last two years after years of decline. You could attribute that to the popularity of divorce memoirs, or you could recall that the height of the pandemic made divorce, and the economic and social precarity associated with it, terrifying. Precarity keeps you in bad situations. As it lifts, so too can the feeling of no options.

But I want to distinguish between options and choices. Some people stay in shitty situations because they are legitimately scared of bodily harm to themselves or their loved ones. And some people stay because they are scared of losing status. Economic status, cultural status, societal status, religious status: a bourgeois person with a perfect family in a good home in good standing with an organization whose values you call your own. They’d rather maintain that status in low-grade misery than leave it behind. People stay in situations and relationships that aren’t illegal, per se, but nonetheless degrade them. They’re terrified of losing the modicum of power and privilege they do have. That’s not a lack of options. That’s a choice.

And it’s a choice that bourgeois American women in unsatisfying “blue” marriages keep making. As I wrote back in 2021, bourgeois women are conditioned to understand relationships as labor — and problems within marriage as fixable through hard work. If you just read enough books, if you just implement the Fair Play system, if you just go to couples counseling, then your unbalanced or unsatisfying relationship will fix itself…but hard work won’t fix the reality of a marriage (or partnership) whose boundaries are still circumscribed by a society in which women are inherently less valuable than men.

It won’t change the wage gap. It won’t provide affordable childcare that makes it make sense for a woman in a hetero marriage to go back to work after becoming a parent. It won’t fill the gaps in a mother’s resume, or backfill her social security, or change the value of her personhood as she ages past 40. As Tracy Clark-Flory smartly points out, “so much hetero dating advice for women ultimately reads as instructions for personally navigating patriarchy.” So much of the marriage advice, too.

In Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, what advice would Jen get from her family or her bishop if she told them about her husband’s emotional abuse and manipulation? It wouldn’t be to leave. Her defense of his actions sounds like what others have told her is the actual root of the problem: he just cares too much. When Taylor refuses to marry Dakota after she becomes pregnant, she’s not shunned, but she’s shamed — and made to understand that all of her problems would be solved if she just got married. No one says it explicitly, but the fundamental tension in these women’s relationships is that the woman has more financial and societal power in a culture in which men are supposed to be the unquestioned head of the household. The solution, seemingly accepted by all parties, is shame, abuse, and discipline.

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When I was reporting a feature on the women who’d left the FLDS — a polygamous sect that broke off from the official Mormon church in the early 20th century — many told me just how hard it was to try and build a life when you find yourself in your early 30s and have no resume, no high school diploma, and no work history. Many of them had been married off as young teenagers; their education barely went past sixth grade. There were so many holes, they said, that they didn’t even know what they didn’t know.

We now understand this practice, which runs rampant in high-control patriarchal religions, as educational abuse. Take away the skills to survive on your own, and you take away the ability to leave — or at least make it far less accessible.

I want to be very clear that the FLDS is not the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and the institution of marriage, writ large, is not a form of educational abuse. But I find myself returning to all the ways patriarchal society and its veneration of marriage can blinker straight women to different ways of organizing life, and work, and partnership. Sometimes the threat is personal ruin, but oftentimes it expands to family as well, and the refrain that keeping an unhappy and inequitable family intact “for the kids” is always preferable to its rearrangement.

Patriarchal control thrives on a lack of legible options. No amount of personal rage can combat but where would you go. Knowing someone who did things differently — who chose to partner differently, to do family differently, to negotiate the limitations of the world differently — is helpful, but knowing many people who’ve done it is even more so.

So today, I’d love to hear from people who found their way from a situation of fear, dissatisfaction, unhappiness, or control…..to one that felt like the opposite. What made a different way of living feel possible? How did you manage the fear? The rejection? The loss of proximity to power or acceptance within the status quo? How did you forge a safety net to replace what you left behind? Your story doesn’t have to be a fairytale. It just has to make a way of life imaginable. ●

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