Quote:
Originally Posted by blessD
Do you know of anyone in Dallas whose marriage was manipulated, arranged, controlled? This practice had devastating effects on lives everywhere. Did Dallas have a hands off policy of the leaders regarding personal choices like marriage partners. Were the young people allowed to date, make their own choices, and be engaged? I get the picture there was a leading elder in Dallas that took a more authoritative approach and could have been part orchestrator of my Dallas inquisition. Was there anyone that could and would balance him and stop him if he overstepped his boundaries of authority?
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Unfortunately, I must confess that while there were not clear occurrences of such, there was in inference, and gossip about trouble in certain marriages that happened “outside of fellowship.” I have suspicions of marriages that were of the “get married or quit dating” variety. At least one of those has failed miserably. I also got my wife (eventually) because that happened to her when she first started meeting with the church. Despite her clear feeling that the ultimate result was best, she still rightfully considers the actual interference to have been far beyond the authority of the elder who did this. I have actually spoken to this in another place (maybe on the BARM). It is clear that the LC has no great track record in certain areas. It is not some “divorce free zone” and even the marriages that started within the LC are not immune and now would seem to bear no better track record than Christianity in general or even the country in general.
The problem with examples of truly arranged marriages from my perspective is that the actual involvement of the elders or other leadership in making it happen, putting two people together, etc., was not something that was heralded. If you inquired, virtually all said something about getting the “blessing” of the brothers. That does not reveal any further involvement, even if it happened. My experience is that they mostly just weren’t involved. Don has said in a previous thread that George Whittington was fairly involved in counseling in many cases. And he has mentioned his own experiences. Having been in a family that was relatively sound, I had no reason to know one way or the other about the existence of any counseling or its lack. Besides a little pre-marriage counseling from George, we moved to Irving not long after we married and he moved to West Texas. We could have used some of that a few years later.
Irving was another story. We were languishing. (And I must admit that our problems could not be simplified down to LC problems.) If you weren’t buried in the LSM operations in your off time, or eventually out knocking on doors, you might as well have been a stranger. As I said before, “know no man in the flesh” meant that only spiritual talk was acceptable. In that environment, who do you turn to? They don’t want to hear about your marital problems — or at least that was the perception given. (Don has since told me in private that staying in Dallas would not have been much of a help during the 80s.)
For us, the answer was a Bible church. 21 years ago this month. Life has not been wonderful at all times, but there are real people with real issues that care for you — all of you. We began to find the help we needed there. We weren’t “cured” overnight. But the process is moving upward.
My story is that for the most part, the most consistent problem with the LC in terms of marriage issues, family issues, etc., are concerned was that the LC mostly stayed out of things. They had no teaching, no counseling. So healthy families tended to be healthy because they had found the way(s) to be so. And unhealthy families were left to fend for themselves. Unfortunately, more pray-reading, and going to more meetings was not the answer. In this way, the LC must be seen as complicit, but the extent of that complicity is not easily determined.
Then come the direct instances of meddling. Your story is, unfortunately, not the only one. Being worn down by person after person is a horrible experience. I can’t say that happened to me, but my wife can say that there are a couple of brothers that were mentioned to her as possibilities that she simply said no to. That was the end of it. I’m sure that whoever it was that talked to her was simply playing go-between. It is true that marriage in the LC environment of the 70s (and probably mostly since then) was a strange thing. But my testimony is that while we were in that somewhat oppressive environment where dating was strong discouraged, my wife and I began to consider that it was about time to begin to think about marriage and we eventually caught each other’s eye. It did take an elder as go-between, but no one told us what to do. I’m sure that it would have played out differently if the “brothers” had different ideas. But evidently they didn’t. Of course, in typical LC fashion, having been requested to keep our courtship out of the eyes of the LC “public,” we married quite quickly, which is probably one of the biggest problems that we ever had to overcome in all these years. We did not have a more normal courtship, followed by an engagement and then marriage. We were thrust together too quickly and much of that “get to know each other” time got skipped. To me, that was one of the more problematic issues with getting from being single to being married. It was not necessarily arranged, but the way it transpired meant that it was sociologically, psychologically, and emotionally somewhere between normal and arranged, with much leaning toward the arranged. From our first date to marriage was less than 2 months. Her parents (who despised the LC) were really scared at first. Then they realized that I was not some “hallelujah brother” that couldn’t support their daughter. That helped. Leaving the LC 8 years later helped even more.
Someone has mentioned some particular elder that seemed to relish putting himself into things. I know of one in the mid-70s that did that in at least one case (with respect to my now-wife). But he moved away by around 76 or so and left in the Max R purge. Another that could have been like that was someone who I was never fully clear was an elder or just a “leading brother.” I think Don has cleared up for me that he was actually an elder. He did several rash things that I am aware of. I do not know about getting involved in breaking up couples, but I could believe it. He went on to get run off from another locality, at least partly for money issues. (I was aware of a questionable money practice of his when he was in Dallas.) I had a couple of run ins with him and I almost punched him once. Funny thing is that he was the “go between” for me and my wife. That was before the run-ins.