I have been working for weeks without a full day off and in the midst of all that intense stress, as some of you know, the communication issue between the man I love and his first wife came to light and my hoped for future fell apart. So I have had weeks of fixing client problems, coworker problems, dropping everything for friends in need, trying to assure the first wife that I'm not a threat and care deeply about her happiness in my own flawed way, ignoring laundry and basically setting myself up for a meltdown.
Well the meltdown happened this week. Now that tax season is over I had the opportunity to simply fall apart and experience my feelings. Hours of sobbing but laundry is done. I took yesterday off just to cry in peace and today my emotions are still too raw for the office so I took today off, too. Thankfully I work for a wonderful Christian man who understood when I told him I had been barely holding myself together during tax season and I just needed some space to fall apart and grieve for a private loss.
So now the tears are mostly done, the laundry and dishes have been sorted out, and I feel like I need to take stock. I hope you'll forgive m for trying to process out loud here. Some of the women on this forum have been incredibly kind in reaching out privately. I'm pretty much convinced @Joleneakamama is a saint, as she helpfully reminds me my perspective is unique. (Which might be a kind way of calling me a weirdo
) But I think it would be helpful to properly organize my thoughts for feedback from the forum.
Most writing on polygyny by men is heavily focused on theology and textual analysis in order to build a sort of legal case for the righteousness of polygyny. Unfortunately I have zero interest in this. A big part of that is some of theological arguments are already a given in my tradition, and partly because if Abraham, Moses, Jacob, Esau, Solomon, and David are blessed by God then that's pretty much the case closed. The sins these men are guilty of in Scripture is not polygamy, and Scripture is not shy about calling out the sins of great men. God provided for Hagar when Abraham would not, and his casting her out is not portrayed as righteousness.
(I'm currently reading Pete Rambo's Authority, Headship, and Family Structure and enjoying that he's arriving at Orthodox theology via a different route. That Christ was present at Creation, in the Garden, and elsewhere in the Old Testament is pretty foundational in our theology and iconography. The idea of God consisting of multiple persons is also born out in the Torah and by Second Temple Judaic traditions. In fact, later Rabbinic scholars had to somehow explain away Rabbi Akiva's belief in the multiple persons of God as they sought to create clearer distinctions between Judaism and Christianity.)
So my starting point right off the bat is that this is a cultural issue, not a religious issue. Seen through the perspective of my tradition, the instruction for clergy to have "one wife" makes sense in that once ordained to serve a man may no longer enter into marriage. Whatever marriage(s) you have before ordination is all you get. You are not permitted to court or date your flock. Like many things in the New Testament, this is likely a response to an abuse of power among the Pharisees and/or Saduccees. If we look at fundamentalist Mormon communities today who struggle with corruption we can see why that was necessary. David could also been seen as an example of this. His polygamy wasn't a sin, sending Uriah to his death was the sin.
So if the issue is ultimately cultural (my church only prohibited polygamy in order to better align with Greco-Roman culture, which could be seen as a betrayal of it's Bedouin-esque Hebrew roots) then I don't need a theological argument. The cultural difficulty is weighty enough.
Prior to all this upheaval in my life I was planning out a book on the women in the genealogy of Christ. It's a very interesting group of women. With the exception of Mary (who is exceptional in many ways, not just in this), we have no indication that Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, or Bathsheba were in monogamous marriages. For Tamar and Bathsheba we know they were polygamous (Onan was already married to a Canaanite woman and David had many wives). Based on cultural context, it seems unlikely Salmon and Boaz had only one wife. For Salmon there would have been widows, orphans, refugees in need of protection. Boaz's children by Ruth were not considered his own, but that of her first husband, and it seems likely a wealthy man would have had children to continue his own line. While compromising inheritance is mentioned, it sounds more like a legal hassle the other relative just didn't want to bother with rather than a real impediment.
Is there greater righteousness in Eve an Mary being monogamous? Well, it's not like Eve had options. Had Tinder existed in Eden there would have been only one match. For Mary the tradition is that she was a virgin her entire life, Joseph being a much older widower who needed someone to help raise his children. Indeed, early church tradition states she was a virgin serving in the Second Temple, and so there's a possibility that chastity could have been part of the marriage agreement. It would also explain why her pregnancy was such a big deal. While certainly righteousness is an issue, the pregnancy of a bethrothed woman was probably not terribly uncommon or scandalous if the husband claimed the child. We only know the marriage was monogamous because Joseph had children that needed a mother when he wed Mary. If he already had a wife, it doesn't seem like Mary would have been a good choice for a wife for him.
In thinking about these women I kept coming back to the idea about justice for women being important to God. Not in some feminist sense, but that as in Psalm 113 God believes that righteous women deserve family. Especially when they have none of their own. Tamar has no relatives advocating for her with Judah. Rahab has a family, but they are all refugees from the destruction of Jericho, which she helped bring about (awkward Thanksgiving dinner in that house...). Ruth is a widow and refugee with only Naomi, who needs Ruth's support. Bathsheba we know less about, but clearly she was widowed and no family member is mentioned crying out for justice for her and Uriah. By tradition Mary is the only child of elderly parents, and her closest relatives are also elderly. If she was serving in the Temple and her parents died, cutting off any financial support sponsoring her position there, the marriage to Joseph may have been necessary to provide her with a home.
The idea that polygamy fell out of fashion for financial reasons seems suspect. The woman of Proverbs 31 isn't a burden. American pioneers found large families were a source of wealth, eventually. Babies are always expensive, in resources and time, at first, but large multi-generational families are a strength.
So I think Patricia Dixon is right in We Want For Our Sisters What We Want For Ourselves that monogamy became the norm because it allowed for sexual abuse of slaves and prostitution without the commitment of love and care required for a wife. In the Hellenistic world monogamy was legally easier, and as the tribal ties waned it became an important tool for alliances. A single wife wields more influence over a husband, while a man with more than one wife has to consider multiple perspectives in his household. So for a man, polygamy is actually a position of strength because he has the counsel of more than one righteous woman, as well as their labor and love.
A man I dated last year is visiting family overseas, and when he returns he wants to talk about us renewing our relationship. It would be monogamous and I'm honestly not finding the idea appealing. He's a widower, and I actually find myself thinking that if his wife was still living I would find a relationship with him more attractive. As much as he enjoys my company, and can be kind and loving when he chooses to be, I'm not certain he actually likes me as a human being.
In 2021 I met a man who has a genuinely good heart. He was in the process of modifying his ex-father-in-law's home so that he wouldn't have to move into assisted living and could stay in the home he shared with his late wife longer. A genuinely good man who likes me as a person, who I came to love, but has by all appearances not handled things well with his first wife, whom he loves deeply. Right now she will not talk to me, despite my repeated attempts to assure her I am no threat, that I want her marriage to be strong, and that I deeply care about her happiness. it's hard. I have made myself very vulnerable to her, I have limited communication from him at the moment, and it's been less than two months since he talked to her. I don't quite know what to do. I'm going through myriad emotions, trying not to let my imagination run wild, and reminding myself that a good man who genuinely likes you as a human being is worth waiting for.
That's really where I keep landing: that a truly good man who cares about me is worth waiting and sacrificing for. I did sign back up for a dating app and have to offers of dates for this weekend. I have been advised by well-intentioned people to meet these men for coffee. And I know from many years of being single and going on dates that they are serial monogamists and I am just a stop on their journey. The likelihood that these dates lead to a home with protection, comfort, security, and love is very unlikely.
I have been without love for a very long time. My first husband did not provide me with protection, security, or comfort, or even love. I have been on horrible dates. For me the idea of having all the responsibility for one weak man who cannot provide me with what I need is horrible. But getting part of one decent man who can give me what I need (financial support isn't an issue or expectation) seems like a blessing too good to be true.
I told the first wife that seeing him only once a week would be an incredible blessing for me. That she can always have the larger share of him. I'm a starving woman. I don't need a feast. I'm content with scraps. I don't need everything, I just need better.
Marrying this man means excommunication for me. Not banishment, but unable to receive communion. It's a big deal in my church. I will have people in my life who will strongly object if they know, but the people I love best will accept it, so I'm blessed in that. I'm both blessed and cursed by not being very concerned about other's opinions of my life. I tend to hold judgmental people at a distance and hold close people who focus on love, forgiveness, and grace.
But there's not really anything I can do now but pray. I'm helpless in waiting to see how or if this situation resolves. I like being able to take action, but there's no action to take. And while I have other options, none of them feel right. When I pray I just keep hearing that my job is to love her, regardless of how this plays out, regardless of my own pain.
Well the meltdown happened this week. Now that tax season is over I had the opportunity to simply fall apart and experience my feelings. Hours of sobbing but laundry is done. I took yesterday off just to cry in peace and today my emotions are still too raw for the office so I took today off, too. Thankfully I work for a wonderful Christian man who understood when I told him I had been barely holding myself together during tax season and I just needed some space to fall apart and grieve for a private loss.
So now the tears are mostly done, the laundry and dishes have been sorted out, and I feel like I need to take stock. I hope you'll forgive m for trying to process out loud here. Some of the women on this forum have been incredibly kind in reaching out privately. I'm pretty much convinced @Joleneakamama is a saint, as she helpfully reminds me my perspective is unique. (Which might be a kind way of calling me a weirdo
) But I think it would be helpful to properly organize my thoughts for feedback from the forum.Most writing on polygyny by men is heavily focused on theology and textual analysis in order to build a sort of legal case for the righteousness of polygyny. Unfortunately I have zero interest in this. A big part of that is some of theological arguments are already a given in my tradition, and partly because if Abraham, Moses, Jacob, Esau, Solomon, and David are blessed by God then that's pretty much the case closed. The sins these men are guilty of in Scripture is not polygamy, and Scripture is not shy about calling out the sins of great men. God provided for Hagar when Abraham would not, and his casting her out is not portrayed as righteousness.
(I'm currently reading Pete Rambo's Authority, Headship, and Family Structure and enjoying that he's arriving at Orthodox theology via a different route. That Christ was present at Creation, in the Garden, and elsewhere in the Old Testament is pretty foundational in our theology and iconography. The idea of God consisting of multiple persons is also born out in the Torah and by Second Temple Judaic traditions. In fact, later Rabbinic scholars had to somehow explain away Rabbi Akiva's belief in the multiple persons of God as they sought to create clearer distinctions between Judaism and Christianity.)
So my starting point right off the bat is that this is a cultural issue, not a religious issue. Seen through the perspective of my tradition, the instruction for clergy to have "one wife" makes sense in that once ordained to serve a man may no longer enter into marriage. Whatever marriage(s) you have before ordination is all you get. You are not permitted to court or date your flock. Like many things in the New Testament, this is likely a response to an abuse of power among the Pharisees and/or Saduccees. If we look at fundamentalist Mormon communities today who struggle with corruption we can see why that was necessary. David could also been seen as an example of this. His polygamy wasn't a sin, sending Uriah to his death was the sin.
So if the issue is ultimately cultural (my church only prohibited polygamy in order to better align with Greco-Roman culture, which could be seen as a betrayal of it's Bedouin-esque Hebrew roots) then I don't need a theological argument. The cultural difficulty is weighty enough.
Prior to all this upheaval in my life I was planning out a book on the women in the genealogy of Christ. It's a very interesting group of women. With the exception of Mary (who is exceptional in many ways, not just in this), we have no indication that Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, or Bathsheba were in monogamous marriages. For Tamar and Bathsheba we know they were polygamous (Onan was already married to a Canaanite woman and David had many wives). Based on cultural context, it seems unlikely Salmon and Boaz had only one wife. For Salmon there would have been widows, orphans, refugees in need of protection. Boaz's children by Ruth were not considered his own, but that of her first husband, and it seems likely a wealthy man would have had children to continue his own line. While compromising inheritance is mentioned, it sounds more like a legal hassle the other relative just didn't want to bother with rather than a real impediment.
Is there greater righteousness in Eve an Mary being monogamous? Well, it's not like Eve had options. Had Tinder existed in Eden there would have been only one match. For Mary the tradition is that she was a virgin her entire life, Joseph being a much older widower who needed someone to help raise his children. Indeed, early church tradition states she was a virgin serving in the Second Temple, and so there's a possibility that chastity could have been part of the marriage agreement. It would also explain why her pregnancy was such a big deal. While certainly righteousness is an issue, the pregnancy of a bethrothed woman was probably not terribly uncommon or scandalous if the husband claimed the child. We only know the marriage was monogamous because Joseph had children that needed a mother when he wed Mary. If he already had a wife, it doesn't seem like Mary would have been a good choice for a wife for him.
In thinking about these women I kept coming back to the idea about justice for women being important to God. Not in some feminist sense, but that as in Psalm 113 God believes that righteous women deserve family. Especially when they have none of their own. Tamar has no relatives advocating for her with Judah. Rahab has a family, but they are all refugees from the destruction of Jericho, which she helped bring about (awkward Thanksgiving dinner in that house...). Ruth is a widow and refugee with only Naomi, who needs Ruth's support. Bathsheba we know less about, but clearly she was widowed and no family member is mentioned crying out for justice for her and Uriah. By tradition Mary is the only child of elderly parents, and her closest relatives are also elderly. If she was serving in the Temple and her parents died, cutting off any financial support sponsoring her position there, the marriage to Joseph may have been necessary to provide her with a home.
The idea that polygamy fell out of fashion for financial reasons seems suspect. The woman of Proverbs 31 isn't a burden. American pioneers found large families were a source of wealth, eventually. Babies are always expensive, in resources and time, at first, but large multi-generational families are a strength.
So I think Patricia Dixon is right in We Want For Our Sisters What We Want For Ourselves that monogamy became the norm because it allowed for sexual abuse of slaves and prostitution without the commitment of love and care required for a wife. In the Hellenistic world monogamy was legally easier, and as the tribal ties waned it became an important tool for alliances. A single wife wields more influence over a husband, while a man with more than one wife has to consider multiple perspectives in his household. So for a man, polygamy is actually a position of strength because he has the counsel of more than one righteous woman, as well as their labor and love.
A man I dated last year is visiting family overseas, and when he returns he wants to talk about us renewing our relationship. It would be monogamous and I'm honestly not finding the idea appealing. He's a widower, and I actually find myself thinking that if his wife was still living I would find a relationship with him more attractive. As much as he enjoys my company, and can be kind and loving when he chooses to be, I'm not certain he actually likes me as a human being.
In 2021 I met a man who has a genuinely good heart. He was in the process of modifying his ex-father-in-law's home so that he wouldn't have to move into assisted living and could stay in the home he shared with his late wife longer. A genuinely good man who likes me as a person, who I came to love, but has by all appearances not handled things well with his first wife, whom he loves deeply. Right now she will not talk to me, despite my repeated attempts to assure her I am no threat, that I want her marriage to be strong, and that I deeply care about her happiness. it's hard. I have made myself very vulnerable to her, I have limited communication from him at the moment, and it's been less than two months since he talked to her. I don't quite know what to do. I'm going through myriad emotions, trying not to let my imagination run wild, and reminding myself that a good man who genuinely likes you as a human being is worth waiting for.
That's really where I keep landing: that a truly good man who cares about me is worth waiting and sacrificing for. I did sign back up for a dating app and have to offers of dates for this weekend. I have been advised by well-intentioned people to meet these men for coffee. And I know from many years of being single and going on dates that they are serial monogamists and I am just a stop on their journey. The likelihood that these dates lead to a home with protection, comfort, security, and love is very unlikely.
I have been without love for a very long time. My first husband did not provide me with protection, security, or comfort, or even love. I have been on horrible dates. For me the idea of having all the responsibility for one weak man who cannot provide me with what I need is horrible. But getting part of one decent man who can give me what I need (financial support isn't an issue or expectation) seems like a blessing too good to be true.
I told the first wife that seeing him only once a week would be an incredible blessing for me. That she can always have the larger share of him. I'm a starving woman. I don't need a feast. I'm content with scraps. I don't need everything, I just need better.
Marrying this man means excommunication for me. Not banishment, but unable to receive communion. It's a big deal in my church. I will have people in my life who will strongly object if they know, but the people I love best will accept it, so I'm blessed in that. I'm both blessed and cursed by not being very concerned about other's opinions of my life. I tend to hold judgmental people at a distance and hold close people who focus on love, forgiveness, and grace.
But there's not really anything I can do now but pray. I'm helpless in waiting to see how or if this situation resolves. I like being able to take action, but there's no action to take. And while I have other options, none of them feel right. When I pray I just keep hearing that my job is to love her, regardless of how this plays out, regardless of my own pain.
