i am increasingly convinced that the wedding industry is having a statistically significant impact on young women leaving the mormon church. has anyone looked into this?
>mormons tell girls their most important roles throughout their entire life are wife and mother. extremely patriarchal, told in every way except in plain speech that they are expected to erase their personhood in favor of performing a strict role
>american culture says that the wedding day is about The BRIDE. it's HER day.
>mormon girls are not told about the strictures of a temple wedding until endowment because secret secret.
>mormon girls spend their whole lives dreaming about their american weddings with their wedding dresses and decorations and loving vows and a day about me me me me me me. perhaps the ONLY day that they truly expect might be in some way about them. the day they get to be star of the show
>wedding industry puffs these american girls dreams of their wedding up to extremes
>forced out of wedding dress on wedding day by a random bishop they've never met in their life because it's debatably not modest or white enough (even though it was made by a mormon dress shop) who also says your name wrong. you're not allowed to speak, and especially if you're in a larger city or a busy day, your wedding ceremony feels more like being processed at the DMV than a celebration of your love and commitment to each other. factory pace 15 minute wedding
>bishop follows you to the reception and loudly tells everyone that you and your new husband are the least important part of the ceremony because actually the holiness of the mormon temple church is what's really been proven today. better not get distracted by young love when really it's the Mormon Church That Matters
at least these are the throughlines i've noticed. i've never watched a woman's "I left the Mormon Church" video that didn't mention her wedding and how much it sucked absolute shit the whole time.
@tater-tot-pot-dish almost forgot to tag lmfao
thank you for explaining further! that makes a lot of sense.
totally <3. i also realized i kind of sketched this out but didn't fully explain. i don't think the heart of it is the opulence or extravagance; more that it's about the specialness of the day and the focus.
mormons think they're normal perfectly average christians until endowment because people who aren't endowed aren't allowed in the temple even if they're a mormon child in a mormon family. (to the point that exmormon youtubers and social media personalities regularly get comments from mormon youths saying that they're lying about the temple and endowment and all of it). + endowment takes place after high school graduation and the expectation is to marry YOUNG. so these girls are generally 18-22 (up to 24 if she both went to college and on mission), brand new to a church that runs on social pressure and expectation, and trained for their whole lives to obey and trust authority without question while ignoring their own feelings and misgivings. the consumerist american values and ideas of the wedding are in full play, including ideas that are WAY more powerful for mormon girls. it being the bride's day is supercharged in importance when the bride knows she will never get another day.
i think in the mormon girls' consciousness, she always knows she's going to be second fiddle. or fourth or fifth. she'll never hold the priesthood or be a leader to her family or community and even in the afterlife, she's beholden on her husband to call her forth by a secret name into paradise. and he can choose not to. but this day is supposed to be the day where she gets to be her own person and honored for her necessity to the whole process even if she's in a support role. where she gets to be recognized and honored for the role she's committed to.
and then. she likely can't wear her wedding dress and will be forced to buy another one in the mormon church giftshop that also sells the secret underwear. even if she does get to wear her dress, she has to put the shit quality mass manufactured one-size-fits-all temple garments on over it to feel ugly and undifferentiable during the ceremony. and her wedding ceremony is conducted in a factory style and it's exactly the same as the other girls that have gone ahead of her. to the point the bishops regularly get their names wrong. and then they don't get to exchange vows. and then they literally aren't allowed to have any kind of wedding celebration disconnected from the church so they can't hold a reception without a bishop in attendance to spend the whole time denigrating the importance of her relationship with her husband and telling all the non-mormons that the most special part of the day is over and they weren't allowed in because they're not holy enough and this reception is just a stupid meaningless party. telling everyone that the only part of the day that the bride had any say over and the only part where she's meant to be special means nothing and is nothing. the part that matters is the part where she doesn't.
during what is supposed to be her special day, she probably never feels more reduced to being an interchangeable hole whose purpose is producing flesh children and spirit babies. any other girl could have been standing there with your husband and it wouldn't have made a single difference. and this is the day your whole life has been leading to.
like, it's the young ages and the recent surprise of what the church actually is and the unbelievable sexism to their liturgy and how it's all mutually exclusive to an american wedding culture that mormon girls are primed to invest in. like these girls talk about picking out baby names and starting wedding scrapbooks at like 8. they're all trained by their religion to be the girl in class that is the most obsessed with getting married and having babies and then, right before what they've been dreaming of for their entire life finally happens, all of those dreams are crushed into dust and replaced with something i think every american would call a very bad wedding.
like. when you think about how a non-mormon girl who started her wedding scrapbooks at age 8 would react to the priest at her wedding getting her name wrong, to not being able to wear her dress, to not being able to choose her venue or have her different religion family members and loved ones in attendance, to have the same guy who got your name wrong in the ceremony follow you to the reception and continue to shit on your relationship in order to remind everyone that the Church is Most Important? she'd murder that priest and burn the fucking building down with everyone in it, laughing while people fled. and then she'd have a re-do and no one would be surprised. the mormon girls seem to leave the church about it, which is basically burning their whole lives down with how enmeshed the mormon church demands you be.
they train these girls to look forward to their wedding as the most important day of their lives and then their church structure actively manufactures the worst, most depersonalized and disrespectful weddings i could ever imagine. and then girls who've been dreaming about their weddings forever go "actually fuck this and fuck you."
Hmm, I hadn’t previously considered that the impulse that causes bridezilla (“This is MY princess day”) does have a positive face.
the other thing is that from a lot of testimonies of exmormon women ive listened to and read, many of them cite the endowment ceremony the day before/of their wedding as a genuinely traumatic event that first caused cracks in their testimonies. older women who had the old ceremony were even more effected—being told to preserve your virtue your whole life before being shoved naked under a strange poncho and touched inappropriately, the very strange and scary cultish aspects, the fact that you're regularly reminded that you're just your husband's property and cant actually talk to heavenly father, the movie and its bizarre revelations, all the while everyone around you (including your future spouse, who's usually already been through this bc he's done his mission first) is acting like this is the greatest thing ever and you want to escape but you cant because all your loved ones are there and if you dont do this, you cant get married—many say they came out of the ceremony to go bawl in private, being unsure of their choice for the first time, only to be told by fiance and relatives that it's ok, sure it's a LITTLE weird, but it's not that bad and by returning regularly to the temple You'll Get It eventually.
so i think all of this added to the wedding disappointment and the church doubling down on its patriarchal aspects while giving meager concessions, the excommunication of mormon feminists, the killing of youth group activities such as young women and of the relief society.... definitely contributes to the disillusionment of women in the church and their supposed revered role in it
When I read the first part before the explanation, my thought was “That doesn’t make any sense; Mormon wedding receptions are boring and cheap, everyone knows that,” but the explanation brings it all together.
I was shocked at the difference in my closest Mormon friend after high school. She wanted to go to a non-Mormon college across the country, but her parents would only pay for BYU. Within years she was married and having babies. I finally had to step away from the friendship when her first baby almost killed her — in the “you can’t do this again because this will happen again” way — and she rushed to get pregnant again. I couldn’t watch it anymore and she wasn’t the same person I had been friends with anyway. She was more like a shell shaped like my friend. I hope she’s okay.
Every single aspect of the mormon religion is designed to dismiss, humiliate and control women and it starts as soon as you're born. All of the weird cultural things of mormon areas (example, weird baby name spellings, abnormally young marriages, so many many other things) all come back to weirder and worse elements of the mormon religion and its cruel, cult theology. It's another destructive evangelical sect of Christianity designed to destroy women but use their bodies.
