Seafest weekend, Seattle. King County Courthouse. 4 signatures on a document.
She was elated. I was 23 years old, and I was both sick and furious.
That is not how a wedding is supposed to feel. I knew it then. I just did not yet have language for what had happened to me — or the honesty to admit that I had let it happen at all.
That honesty took years. It took a woman I had never met writing about her own marriage in an essay I almost did not finish reading.
The Article That Broke My Narrative
I was newly divorced, back on the dating apps, meeting women who had left the faith or were questioning it. Some of them were angry — not just sad or confused, but genuinely bitter. They talked about being pressured into marriages they did not want. About the church, their families, their bishops conspiring to walk them down an aisle toward someone they already knew was wrong.
I listened and felt something close to contempt.
Nobody forced you at gunpoint, I thought. And more than once, I said it out loud.
Then I read a piece on Exponent II — a publication written by and for Mormon women — in which the author described her decision to marry at 21. Not as romantic certainty. As a calculation. Indefinite celibacy on one side. A marriage she was not sure about on the other. She chose the marriage because the system had made desire a crisis and offered exactly one exit. What struck me was not the decision. It was her description of how hard it would have been to back out once that ball got rolling — the momentum of expectation, family, community, and spiritual obligation that builds around an engagement until the path out feels more costly than the path forward.
For the first time, I felt sorry for one of these women. Genuinely sorry. Her marriage had not been her choice in any meaningful sense of that word. And the moment I felt that — the moment my contempt gave way to something like recognition — my own story came back to me in a way I had not allowed it to before.
I had not been watching someone else's pattern. I had been looking at mine.
How You Get to a Courthouse Furious
I came home from a 2-year mission to Taiwan at 21 with essentially no experience of adult romantic life. A woman I had known through the church there had since moved to the United States for graduate school. She reached out. We talked. She came to Boston for spring break.
Near the end of that visit she made me an offer. If we were not heading toward marriage, she wanted me to be her first. No commitment implied — she was clear about that. And for a man who had spent 2 years without any physical closeness with a woman, it did not take long to say yes.
What happened next was that the framework we had both been shaped by converted a simple adult decision into a crisis with a predetermined resolution.
The guilt arrived before I had even processed what had happened. I confessed to my bishop and carried that weight back into a life that was already close to breaking. When I realized the confession might get me released from a church calling I had been begging to be released from for months, I felt something unexpected: relief. The system had loaded me so heavily that the prospect of ecclesiastical consequence felt like rescue.
She visited again. I knew we were not right for each other. I said so clearly. She protested, insisted I reconsider before she would get back on the plane, and I left things open enough to get her home. She then transferred to a school in Boston. With mixed emotions I helped her get established, believing we had a mutual understanding — that while the relationship was enjoyable, it was not going to last. That understanding, in fact, had been the very basis for how things had started between us.
When I tried to end it directly and firmly, she threw herself to the ground and wailed as though her existence could not continue without me. The woman who had made that first offer — clear-eyed, her own agency, her own choice — was gone. In her place was someone whose entire sense of worth had collapsed. She had grown up inside 2 traditions simultaneously, Chinese and LDS, that pointed at exactly the same belief: a woman's value was inseparable from her purity. Both told her that what had happened between us had permanently diminished her. Her terror was real. It was just pointed at the wrong thing.
When the semester ended and I headed to Seattle for an internship, she followed me and moved in. When my parents found out, the pressure arrived from every direction at once. I was bringing dishonor to the family. If I had any sense of morality and decency I would marry her and make her an honest woman. My bishop in Boston wrote to my bishop in Seattle inquiring about my spiritual compliance. My girlfriend pressed for an engagement. And my own sense of obligation did its own quiet, relentless work — because I had been raised in a context where your own needs came last, where service to God and family and community was the measure of your worth, and where wanting something different made you selfish rather than sane.
Nobody asked me what I wanted. Not one person in that entire apparatus stopped to consider that the groom's actual desires might matter to the success of the marriage they were so determined to produce.
My parents flew to Seattle during SeaFest weekend. We went to King County Courthouse. 4 signatures.
She was elated. I was furious. Within months even my parents acknowledged it had been inadvisable. The marriage lasted from August through the following June. The divorce took nearly a year and a half to finalize.
What the Gun Actually Was
No one forced me at gunpoint. That is still true.
What happened instead was that every person and institution I was accountable to defined the same thing: a responsible man takes care of the consequences of his actions. A good person does not walk away from someone he has hurt. A man with any decency makes this right.
Every path out was framed as moral failure. Leaving meant I was selfish. Leaving meant I used a woman and walked away. The argument was never that I should want this marriage. The argument was that wanting out proved I was not the person I claimed to be.
That is not a gun. It is something more effective. It is a definition. They defined what a good man does in this situation, and then they waited to see what kind of man I was going to be.
I was 23. I went to the courthouse.
What Marriage Actually Is
Marriage is not a solution to a desire problem. And it is not restitution for one.
It is not damage control for a violation of the law of chastity, not a debt to be settled, not what you do to prove you are a good person when the alternative is being told you are a bad one. A marriage that requires one person to erase their own needs to justify entering it is not a foundation. It is a sacrifice. And sacrifices do not become partnerships over time. They become resentments.
Marriage — the real thing — is 2 people choosing each other freely, from genuine desire, from real knowledge of who the other person actually is. Not fleeing something. Not resolving something. Building something.
That question — do I actually want this, with this person — was never asked of me at 23. I would like to think it matters.
Years later, in a relationship with someone I genuinely cared about, I found out exactly how much it matters. We had kept everything well within the lines. Nothing that would have required a bishop conversation. We were doing it right. And when she pressed for a commitment my instinct — before I had even formed a conscious thought — was: why? I haven't done anything wrong.
That sentence tells you everything about what marriages entered as obligation do to a person over time. My nervous system had learned to associate commitment with consequence, with having done something that required resolution. So a completely reasonable question about our future landed like a verdict I had not yet earned. That is what marriage-as-restitution does. It does not just produce bad marriages. It corrupts the category.
The Warning for Us Mid-Lifers
The operating system does not get uninstalled when your marriage ends. It does not go away when you discover you married for the wrong reasons, when you find yourself in a faith transition, or when you simply move to a new ward and try to start fresh. It is still running. My own nervous system fired the old signal in a relationship where I had done everything right, with someone I genuinely wanted to be with. That is how deep the wiring goes.
Not long ago someone posted in a Facebook group for midlife singles that they had been single for 3 years since their divorce and were beginning to wonder if something was wrong with them. 3 years. And already the doubt — the quiet suggestion that the timeline itself is evidence of a defect.
That is the operating system talking. The expectation of rapid remarriage is structural, not incidental. The message, delivered consistently enough to become background noise, is that being unmarried at midlife is a problem to be solved. Which means people who are finally trying to choose freely are doing it while a voice in the back of their head counts the months and wonders what is taking so long.
I know people with multiple marriages who are still in that pattern right now. Not because they are foolish, but because the belief underneath has never been examined. Marriage as solution. Marriage as proof you are a responsible adult. Marriage as the thing that finally makes you whole. The cycle does not break on its own. It breaks when someone decides to look at the operating system instead of just running it again.
A woman I know said it better than I have managed to in all these words. After her divorce she found herself involved with someone and got pregnant. I asked about her second marriage. She looked at me with something between patience and disbelief and said: he was not a person I should have married. I didn't. I did not want to compound one mistake with another one. 🤯
I have thought about that sentence ever since. Because what she understood — and what the system actively discourages — is that a mistake does not obligate you to a lifetime of misery as its penance. That isn't repentance or growth. One difficult situation does not justify manufacturing a worse one. And yet that is precisely the logic the system runs on. Fix the mistake with a marriage. Which creates a bigger mistake. Which some people spend years working their way out of before they finally understand what she understood in that moment: you do not have to keep paying for one wrong turn with every mile that follows.
You are allowed to want marriage. You are allowed to want it badly. But you deserve to want it for the right reasons. And so does the person you would be asking.
The courthouse in Seattle gave me a document. It did not give me a marriage. Those are not the same thing. And until we understand the difference, we will keep confusing one for the other — and wondering, in the wreckage, how we got here again.
Christopher Roberts is a contributing writer at Unchaperoned Life, a community for midlife singles navigating relationships, identity, and intimacy after years inside high-demand religious cultures.