My temple wedding happened twenty two years ago between fall and winter semesters at BYU. Back then I pretended (mostly to myself) that the temple was great and made sense, but it wasn’t and it didn’t. It was confusing and uncomfortable and awkward, yet I thought the solution was to just go back (over and over and over again) and that somehow repetition would make it all better. 

Recently I watched a youtube video called “My Not So Mormon Wedding” by a woman who left the LDS church years ago, but not before almost getting married to a returned missionary in the temple. This video is a recap of her amazing wedding day to a non-Mormon man years later. Growing up as a little Mormon girl I’d been promised that nothing could compare to a temple wedding in terms of beauty, peace and joy – but my actual experience getting married there was a major letdown. It took me years(!) to be able to say that out loud, and after watching that video I finally feel ready to tackle my sadness and regret over getting married in the temple here on the blog.

I came up with twelve reasons why I didn’t like my temple wedding:

1. The temple was supposed to be the ultimate destination for my Mormon happily ever after, but I secretly wondered how that could possibly have been the peak of my spiritual journey I’d been told it would be. I was married in the smallest sealing room, and in my memory it was dimly lit with only a handful of people watching, most of whom I didn’t know. It felt very anticlimactic.
2. I had no idea how to plan a wedding day or personalize it to what I liked. (I didn’t even know what I liked.) The ceremony itself would be in the temple, so I had no control over that and no idea what to expect. I’d been to a lot of wedding receptions, but only one actual wedding in my life (and just remembered being told it was sad because it wasn’t in the temple). I kind of went along with whatever other people suggested for everything – the location, my dress, what to serve to eat, and what the reception would be like. 
3. It’s awkward that everyone knows you’re about to have sex for the first time that night. What’s normally a private thing between you and another person becomes a public event and everyone shows up to shake your hand and congratulate you on making it to the temple (ie, not having sex until a couple hours later).
4. I was already nervous enough about getting married so young when a female relative stood up and gave strongly worded advice to not postpone having children. She explained that she and her husband waited and then really regretted it because it took them so long to get pregnant. (Later I asked and found out they had their first baby after only three years of marriage when she was 23 years old!)
5. During the ceremony in the temple, the only people wearing temple clothes are the couple getting married. Instead of feeling like the most beautiful person in the room at my wedding, I felt like the dorkiest. Everyone else got to attend wearing nice clothes and not get their hair messed up by a veil right before getting professional photos taken.
6. The temple sealer asked us to look at him instead of each other, because he wanted us to listen carefully to his words and not be distracted. (I forgot literally every single word he’d said within ten minutes anyway.) Afterwards my husband mentioned many times how beautiful the blue eyes of the temple sealer had been (which was true – he had very pretty blue eyes). It felt a little weird though that what my husband remembered most about getting married to me was gazing deeply into the eyes of a very old man in a white suit.
7. I had no idea what the temple sealer was going to say until he was saying it. I was expected to agree to something for eternity that I wasn’t allowed to look over beforehand and didn’t feel comfortable asking the sealer to repeat. It didn’t seem fair that my husband had already been to sealing ceremonies, so he at least knew what to expect. I was going into the whole experience totally blind – not only as the bride, but as the only person in the room with absolutely no idea what to expect.
8. Out of our four parents, only one was able to come to the sealing. The main offense keeping them out was their inability to write a big enough check to the church to catch up on their tithing. I’m mad about this. A mother who worked long overtime hours to pay for her son to serve a two year mission for the church then wasn’t allowed to see him get married because they didn’t think she’d given them enough additional money since he’d been back. My parents were both converts and I wasn’t close to my extended non-Mormon family so there was no point inviting them to travel to an event they couldn’t attend. It wasn’t a family-centered event at all. It was a family dividing event.
9. I didn’t get to have a photographer or any video of myself getting married. Why the sealer thought I would remember what he was saying in such a high stress moment just because I was looking at him is beyond me. Without a recording, I have no idea what happened all those years ago at that altar.
10. I was trying to adjust to my brand new poorly fitting underwear, and picking wedgies in a wedding dress is extremely difficult. It was so distracting.
11. I had to tell my husband my new name and let him act as my god and pull me through the veil to heaven. There was no reciprocity. I didn’t get to learn his name or do anything other than be given to him as his (first) eternal wife. It was a deeply uncomfortable level of inequality from the very beginning.
12. Everything leading up to the wedding felt fast and rushed. We were college students and young, but couldn’t wait and plan a wedding at a more relaxed pace. BYU bishops are very worried about their engaged ward members making it to the temple and know that human biology is always going to win out over self restraint if given enough time. While the internet says the average engagement is 12 – 18 months, I believe I was engaged for about two months. Most wedding venues book months or years in advance, but Mormon weddings generally use a local (bland) church for free and are available with no wait.
    

I used to think it was great that you could get married in the temple and have your reception at a church for free – until it occurred to me that I (and my entire family) had paid ten percent of our incomes (our entire lives) for that opportunity. For the amount paid in tithing I could’ve rented a beautiful place, had the event catered and then gone on a nice honeymoon! (And no family members or friends would have been excluded.) It wasn’t cheaper at all. It’s fine to want to pay tithing – but it’s wrong to pretend that the temple is somehow a less expensive wedding option.

When I watched that “not so Mormon” wedding I was completely enchanted by the non-temple wedding experience that I was always warned was so sad and depressing. It was actually beautiful and romantic and personalized – everything that my own wedding wasn’t. With a dozen other brides getting married the same day as me at the temple, I’d felt more like a product on an assembly line than anything special.

If I could wish something different for the next generation of girls in the church, it would be that they wait on marriage and motherhood until they feel emotionally, financially and physically mature enough to do it (if they ever do), and that they feel fully empowered to have a wedding outside of the temple walls that feels right for them. We’re all different people and deserve our most special days to be as unique as we are.

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(Main image of the Bountiful temple from churchofjesuschrist.org)