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Date: January 06, 2018 06:24AM
U of U is friendly to non-Mormons It tries hard NOT to be BYU, but it may not be ideal if you try to stick with your marriage if family is nearby. If you call it quites on the marriage, it doesn't matter.
I agree with others who have said to play the game until your degree is posted. Once that has happened, all bets are off. Go to a non-LDS marriage counselor. If it doesn't work, cut ties legally and go your own way. If there are no children in the picture yet, try to keep it that way, and don't take your wife's word for it when she says she is taking care of contraception.
Some have suggested that an LDS counselor will rat you out to your bishop. If you're going through official channels through the church to obtain counseling, such may be the case. If you contract a counselor privately, unless you give him or her consent in writing to disclose information to your bishop or to anyone else, he or she may not do so. As a HIPAA violation, such would be grounds for a whopping law suit from you and grounds for the counselor to lose his or her license. I still recommend seeing someone who is not LDS if anyone at all, as the experience of most people who have sought counseling from an LDS practitioner is that the counselor cannot leave his or her ingrained beliefs out of the counseling process; it would be a waste of your time and money. The idea that any LDS counselor is going to share information with your bishop, however, is ludicrous, and could be highly lucrative for you if he or she did so. Still, I would neither waste my time on it nor risk my degree on the outside chance that the person was acquainted with your bishop and was unprofessional enough to disseminate information.
I married somewhat early, too. I had just turned 23 and my wife was 19. Looking back, it was a roll of the dice with odds heavily stacked against us. I lucked out because my wife was more mature than I and gave me room to act like a bachelor and a college kid for a few years. She worked her butt off with teaching full-time, attending law school full-time, and making our tiny apartment a comfortable place where my colleagues would want to come for study nights. We would study until all hours of the night while she studied her own material and prepared materials for her teaching job. Then she would clean up after us when everyone finally went home. (I cringe in embarrassment years after the fact when I recall her cleaning up the messes that my study mates and I made.) She says now that it was well worth it because she didn't have to worry about where I was.
One reason I think my marriage survived through the medical school and residency years is that my wife, too, was in school. Her knowledge didn't cease to grow after high school or three years of college or whenever it is that many future doctors' wives end their formal education. She had bachelor's of science degrees in math and English, a master's in educational psychology, and, the same year I graduated from medical school, she completed her doctorate of jurisprudence. She was accepted into several medical schools, but her parents talked her into law school because they didn't think she was healthy enough to complete medical school. Her final year of law school, she had a major cystic fibrosis episode, along with a perforated ileum, and barely survived. She would not have made it through medical school, as things turned out. Law school was the better alternative.
my wife attended BYU on a student-athlete scholarship, but she was never LDS. She didn't grow up with the mindset that the Earth is merely six thousand years old, or with any of the other ridiculous dogma so many of us who were born into the LDS church grew up taking for granted. She was someone I was not going to mentally outgrow as my education continued and my knowledge grew.
Had i married any of the little Molly Mormons my mom picked out for me, such would not have been the case, and we would have grown apart until one or both of us faced reality and ended the marriage. God only knows how many children's lives might have been affected. Thank goodness the woman I did marry was smart enough to recognize that in today's world, we have the power to control when children join our families, in the vast majority of all cases, if we use approach contraception with the same careful attention that we give to the most important things in our lives.
As well-matched as we were, it was all we could manage during those hectic years just to deal with each other, her career, and our respective educations, and at the end of my medical school education and her law school education, her illness. A baby would have been the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back that was our marriage.Then, following medical school, a physician has the lovely internship/residency experience, which often makes medical school appear retroactively like a walk in the park.
Only you and she can know if this marriage can be saved (Is that monthly featured still in "Lady's Home Journal"? My mom used to read it aloud to my dad every month. My dad's response was usually, "Who would want to save that marriage?") or if it is with one worth saving. I don't know how much of yourselves the two of you have invested in it, but if your opting out of the LDS church is a deal-breaker for her, and if several sessions with a neutral counselor fail to show her that the sum of your marriage is more that the covenants you made to the church across the altar in an LDS temple, you might be wise to cut your losses and to end the marriage before your medical education becomes a tangible asset to be adjucated in the property division settlement of your divorce. (Different states view the asset status of educations differently. She might be savvy enough to know this and to file in a state where the ruling would be favorable to her. You might be wise to do the research yourself in your break between undergrad and medical school studies and to do the filing yourself in a state where the property division laws would be advantageous to you.
If you don't yet have children and have few assets, the property division should be relatively straightforward. Let her have whatever "stuff" she wants as long as she asks for no spousal support. Split any cash you have down the middle. (As a medical school student, you will be in no position to take on a part-time job just to fund spousal support.). You don't want to have to take out more loans than you would otherwise need to incur just for providing spousal support for an able-bodied woman. The sooner you make this official, the less equity she has in your medical education. If you file before you set foot in your medical school, she has no claim on any equity in it whatsoever.
I may be reading her all wrong. She may come around and be willing to hear everything you have to say about the church, and may be willing either to leave with you or to maintain a marriage and relationship without having the church be a centerpiece. I'd be highly surprised if such were the case, though. The kindest think would be to cut all strings while you're both still young and no children are involved.
As others have stated, keep a low profile, even showing up at church once in awhile and giving the occasional obligatory prayer. Then, diploma and transcript in hand, make your move. Be prepared to file well before your first day of medical school.
This all sounds so calculated, but if you do not look out for yourself, no one else is likely to do so. It's not far-fetched to think that she may already be consulting with a bishop who may have knowledge about such things in regard to how to go about getting as much from you as possible when the inevitable split occurs. All their discussions would be moot if you were to end things before children are in the picture and before any significant assets are in the picture.