The original 'Mormons I Have Known' thread can be found here:

http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1527289

In addition to the people listed in the thread above there was one more from around 1990. As some of you know, I am nevermo but just a relative (hence the name). However I did grow up in one of the many One True Churches which I left in the mid '80s. A few years later I tried going back to that church much like exmos sometimes return to the Mormon church when they haven't really found a new life on the outside.

On this round my wife and I knew a young family about our age, kids about the same age. They were a stunning couple, extremely good looking both of them, and anytime they entered a room it was as though electricity shot through the air and lit up the room. And yet my BS meter would also go off; something just wasn't quite right about these folks. They seemed fake.

After maybe a year the guy's wife got a phone call from her husband's girlfriend. Oops. Apparently his business trips included some extra-curricular activities. As a condition of keeping the marriage, the wife insisted that the guy had to go through the repentance process which in this particular religious tradition was done publicly during a church meeting. During that meeting, when I realized what was happening, I felt for the guy, so I courageously walked up to the front of the sanctuary and sat next to him as an extremely rare show of support.

Then later, in private, at their house IIRC, we find out that this out-of-town girlfriend was just one of many. While travelling, the guy would go with his local business contacts to a bar and pick up a girl using a sob story about how his wife was dying, or didn't understand him, or whatever.

Since the guy had only confessed publicly to the one incident, once this new news broke they had no choice but to leave the church in shame.

Another little tidbit that came out in the private conversation was that the wife had grown up Mormon. As a single, she was having an affair with a married man when he killed himself. She carried enormous secret guilt over that.

During these full, private confession sessions my BS meter was quiet. They seemed like very real, if broken, people for the first time ever.

We ran into them a few months later. After leaving our church they had joined the Mormon church. (And to be clear, we left that church also not long after that.) They were back to seeming fake once again. He announced very proudly that he had been named a deacon in the Mormon church. Little did I know then. In our prior common faith tradition, being a deacon was almost like being a counselor to the bishop. There's not an exact translation to Mormon culture. But age 30 minimum, and only after the key players know you well and trust you much. Ha, fooled me.

As we walked away I was thinking to myself, great, now a whole new set of people get to find out the hard way.

Decades later, my wife is on a business trip. She calls me around dinner time after the conference sessions are over and tells me she has run into the guy at the hotel. He had told her about how the now-grown-up kids were doing, but also that his wife had recently died, and asked her to join him at the bar a little later. I reminded my wife of this guy's MO; my wife had forgotten all about that. There was no meeting at the bar. At least not with MY wife.

Oy! And the beat goes on.

JAR