Faith and Marriage: Finding God Without Your Spouse

Spirituality need not be a joint path with exact views, but a journey taken alone while loving and supporting the person you chose to spend your life with.

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My husband and I talked a lot about our future together while we were dating; having kids, working, combining incomes, integrating our families and religion. While we had both left the LDS Church in our youth, there were pieces of that faith which held true for us individually and as a couple, and many that no longer did. There is a strong family dynamic that is taught by the LDS religion and we both felt the importance of that in our relationship. We both had strong ties to our families and looked forward to creating that with our own children as our lives progressed. There were other parts of the religion that neither of us felt were in alignment with our personal beliefs and those beliefs pushed us away from being active in the church. We didn’t believe that being gay was a choice or that it was a valid reason to be disowned by your church and community. We both drank alcohol, I smoked and we chose to have sex outside of marriage, all of which were not accepted behaviors within the LDS church. We had no plans to be active members and during our courtship, I was closer to being an Atheist than a child of God. There were no conversations about death, spirits or miracles. We were young enough to be unscathed by death and miracles were things that happened to other people.

Our marriage matured and so did we. Each year brought new discoveries about one another and most of them were silly, neurotic pet peeves that we had to learn to live with. He hated onions and never picked up his socks. I was a blanket hog and hated being touched while I slept. We learned and laughed and figured out how to make it work together and eventually we threw a couple kids in the mix. Soon after the birth of our first child, my beliefs began to change. Childbirth felt more like a miracle to me than just an anatomical occurrence that could be explained completely by science. The ability to create a human being inside my body, who could eat, breath, love and come out perfect despite all the odds, was astounding. God must have had a hand in that, I thought. I never shared this feeling with my spouse. Not because I was afraid, but because we were busy learning how to care for a newborn and divide responsibilities. There wasn’t time to talk about the spiritual journey I was embarking on.

During this time I began reading about spirituality and investigating my beliefs while also seeking out psychics, who I felt gave me a glimpse into the afterlife and my possible life path. There was a feeling of peace when I left my readings and I had many spiritual experiences that I wanted to share with my husband. While he kindly listened and was supportive, he thought it was a crock. When he finally met with a psychic, after much prodding on my part, he was so sure that there was a way to generalize all the information he received, that he got nothing from it. I was surprised and disappointed at how insignificant this experience was for him. The feelings that inspired me after my readings were lost on him and while he supported my belief, the experience did not resonate with him the way I hoped.

The realization that we were on completely different spiritual paths was highlighted one evening after I had watched an Oprah interview with Rick Warren, the author of The Purpose Driven Life. I shared with my husband how inspired I was and how I felt something in me that was so warm and so powerful, that I knew it was God. I asked him if he believed in a purpose for our lives, I wondered if he, too, believed that every person we crossed paths with was put there for a reason. He said that he did not. He believed that he made his own journey, his own luck and he told me that he was more inclined to believe that there was no God. He didn’t know what happened after death but he believed it was the end of our existence in any form. That we died and rotted in the ground. I was floored. After 13 years together, we had never discussed our beliefs about death or the afterlife. While I felt that there was one person I was meant to be with, he felt that he could have been happy with many different people. He believed that he alone had created his path; I felt that our path had been laid out by God. Initially, this was devastating for me to hear, because I assumed that we had to be on the exact same page or our marriage would never last. There was huge part of me that wanted to convince him, help him see why he could be comforted in knowing that there was something more. I wanted him to be with me, see with me and share my spirituality.

This experience taught me something powerful … my journey is just that, my journey. I married my husband at a time in my life when I had little faith in myself or in humanity. I was young and hurt by situations I had encountered and I never imagined feeling differently. But I do. I have found miracles in birth, death and relationships that have led me to believe in a higher power. What I have also realized is that I can have a fulfilling marriage with my best friend, while also having contrasting views about life and death. While I hold tight to my belief in the afterlife, angels and spirit guides, my husband’s differing beliefs need not sway our love for each other or my faith. At the core of our relationship is a desire to be good parents, honest neighbors, providers, lovers and friends. That has never changed. With age came a beautiful enlightenment that makes finding God synonymous with sharing my life alongside someone who may never find that for himself. Spirituality need not be a joint path with exact views, but a journey taken alone while loving and supporting the person I chose to spend my life with.

A version of this post originally appeared at My Thirty Spot. Reprinted with permission.

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