You are married to someone whom you don’t love. In your heart of hearts, your most honest moments, you know you are fooling yourself and staying in the relationship in spite of being desperately unhappy. You may even entertain fantasies of being with someone else.
You do not give yourself the option of leaving the marriage out of fear of punishment for breaking eternal covenants and for the social disapproval that is sure to follow. Yet, none of your efforts to improve the relationship have yielded satisfactory results. You may have been trying year months, years, or decades.
The end result is that you feel forever trapped in a relationship. You look forward to spending an eternity with someone you don’t like. Or, believing that God won’t condone a less than perfect love, you look forward to an eternity of a lesser degree of glory without an eternal companion.
For 16 years my ex-wife and I negotiated the pitfalls of our classic MMS. Both of us felt strictly obligated to live out our lives and possibly all eternity in a marriage to someone with whom we were simply incompatible and frankly did not like all that much. Living this way wreaked havoc on our health. We were depressed, stressed out and didn’t take very good care of ourselves. We lived with a chronic tension that never seemed to go away. MMS exacts a high price on our physical and psychological health.
Overcoming MMS, for me, required that I not be the one who asked for the divorce. Luckily, my ex-wife finally came around to it. It was only after I discovered Mormonism to be fraudulent at its core that I saw my MMS for what it was.
