I never meant to stop being a Jehovah’s Witness. If you would have asked me in my mid-twenties where I hoped my life would go, I probably would have said something like, “studying at Gilead and dedicating my life to being a missionary alongside my husband.” And I would have meant it. But things turned out differently. It turns out that my husband, my spiritual head and the one who inspired me to want to be a missionary, would also be the one who helped me leave the organization.
Meet Me at the Altar
My story growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness is similar to many other women in the organization. I was raised as a Witness in an average JW family. By the time I was 20 years old, I was engaged to marry another Jehovah’s Witness, and he himself was just 19. We had dated for only three months. I justified this quick engagement to outsiders by saying that we had grown up together and had known each other for many years. While this was strictly true – we had been in the same congregation for several years – we had never really hung out in the same circles and had only really spent any time together at all for a month or two before we started dating. I suppose that might’ve been part of the appeal. Growing up in a small town – with an even smaller JW community – the options for dating are limited. Thus, I chose one of the few people who I had not known closely since I was in elementary school.
From a JW perspective, my husband was a passable marriage candidate. He was a “Regular Pioneer” (at the time, this meant dedicating 70 hours per month to preaching) but hadn’t really been doing it long enough to have proven himself. His zeal for god, though, ranked only moderately on my potential spouse wish list. My top criteria included: 1) someone who paid the tiniest bit of attention to me, and 2) someone who liked the same music I did.
After that, as long as the person was “in good standing” in the congregation, that probably would have been good enough for me. Having deemed him adequate, I was determined to push my life forward towards the primary goal for almost all JW women: being a wife.
I wish I had looked a little more closely. He had not yet moved out from his parent’s house. He was unambitious and avoidant. He was financially illiterate and irresponsible. He was unwilling to complete the simplest household responsibilities like cooking or cleaning.
Now, I want to be clear: my intention is not to vilify my husband. In fact, I feel that in many ways I was lucky. He did not struggle with addiction, he was not abusive, and he was not a total misogynist – as is so often the case with JWs. To the contrary, my intent is to demonstrate how ill-equipped I was to enter marriage and how greatly I had failed to evaluate my life partner. Instead, I jumped at the first opportunity for a sense of control and autonomy. For his part, he was generally kind and respectful… we just had little in common outside of a few bands we both enjoyed. Most critically, both of us lacked the skills needed to maintain a healthy relationship. We were just. so. young.
Shortly after we got married, he asked me to join him in pioneering. As a dutiful wife, I complied, while secretly terrified of how we would manage to pay our bills while only working part-time. However, after about a year of scraping by, both financially and spiritually, our roles had reversed. I had become the one who wanted to spend the rest of our lives in service to Jehovah, while he was losing motivation.
This is my toxic trait: I cannot do anything halfway. I decided that if we were going to sacrifice careers, financial security, and any degree of normalcy, then we might as well go all in. Let’s become missionaries!
The Beginning of the End
My husband agreed with this plan for a while and we even applied to become missionaries, but it quickly became evident that a life of sacrifice for the Lord did not suit my husband. He was not achieving the minimum 70-hour preaching commitment, instead preferring to do, well… anything else. Rather than be forcibly removed as a pioneer, he decided to step down and get a full-time job. This helped our lives become more comfortable, but then he also started becoming irregular at meeting attendance. I found this humiliating. I was supposed to have a life of missionary service and instead I was making excuses for why my spiritual head was “sick” and couldn’t make it to the meeting… again. Exhausted from trying to please both my increasingly depressed husband and be an ideal JW, I stopped pioneering as well. However, my faith had not wavered. I still truly believed the JW life was the best way of living, and I felt a great deal of guilt that I was no longer pioneering.
Around this time, my husband received an opportunity to transfer his job to another city. ‘This is it’, we told each other, ‘The opportunity for a fresh start’! We committed to each other that in a new city and a new congregation, we would reinvigorate our dedication to God and the JW lifestyle. We would attend every meeting, go in service every weekend. Maybe I might even start pioneering again after we got settled.
Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before
You know that phrase, ‘wherever you go, there you are’? It’s true. Within a few weeks of our move, my husband started finding reasons not to go to meetings or go out preaching. And I was not interested in making excuses for him, so I stopped attending meetings as well. With my goal of missionary service now out of reach, I started to wonder where my life was going. I didn’t have something to go all in on. I couldn’t have one foot in the JW camp and one in the “worldly” life we were building. I quickly grew disillusioned and resentful of my husband, but I was not mature enough to tell him how I was feeling. So, I did the only thing that a reasonable JW woman would do to end a marriage: I cheated on him.
Affairs are our way out, am I right ladies? The story goes something like this: ‘I got married too young to someone I barely knew and quickly realized it was a huge mistake. My husband was unmotivated, uncaring, unable to take care of himself let alone support a family, and so on. It was obvious that neither of us was happy, so I had an affair’.
My internal narrative in my own version of this story was, “If I just tell him I no longer want to be in this marriage, he won’t let me leave. He’ll want to try to work it out and I am way past that point. If I tell him I cheated, he will know it’s definitely finished.”
As many of you reading this will know, there is no easy way to end a marriage and there is absolutely no easy way to stop being a Jehovah’s Witness. My ex-husband was a gift in that he helped me do both.
A New Light
Today, over ten years later, I have no regrets about ending my marriage, but I am also grateful to have been in it. Without his complacency and depression from being forced into a box he simply didn’t fit into, I likely would have continued “all-in” striving to become exemplary enough to be selected as a missionary.
I could have married ‘that’ brother, I could have been ‘that’ wife. I could have traded the humiliation I felt over my incapable husband for the damning shame of living with a “stronger” spiritual head, who would have highlighted my not-enoughness in a way that I would never break free from. A spiritual head with a submissive wife who doesn’t know who she is and is too afraid to find out.
Even if things might have taken me down a slightly less zealous path, I likely never would’ve had the courage – or even the critical thinking – to leave the organization. At the time, I truly left just because it was the path of least resistance. I still fully believed the doctrine and wanted to do the “right” thing.
It wasn’t until I had been outside the organization for some time that I slowly began to change my opinion. I met “worldly” people who were happy, kind, and unselfish – the opposite of what JWs had told me about untrustworthy outsiders. I saw how people of other religions were equally sincere in their faith but were able to embrace others’ differences. I watched people able to discuss opposing beliefs or lifestyles with open minds and hearts. I saw how my friends could love me unconditionally even if they didn’t always agree with every decision I made. All of this was so different to what I was used to: the JWs unable to accept any way of thinking or living other than their own. Removed from an environment full of judgment, public and whispered shaming, pressure to conform, I felt… lighter.
I was no longer being told that I didn’t deserve God’s kindness, that I was sinful, and that I needed to anticipate God’s day of judgment, which could come at any moment. I realized that a constant sense of anxiety and fear was not, and should not be, normal. I slowly came to feel a sense of agency that was foreign to me, a new freedom. I came to see myself in a different light: an imperfect human, yes, but someone who deserved love and acceptance, someone who could decide for themselves right and wrong, someone worthy. And I knew with absolutely certainty that I would never return to my life as a Jehovah’s Witness.