Chapter 13: Jules gets a divorce

(The following chapter is taken from the NIV edition of the Book of Jules and will not include scriptural speech.  Cause ain’t nobody got time for that. Not toDAY.)

Have any of you read the Twilight series? (Don’t be ashamed. I read them, too. I even bought all of the books and was pretty embarrassed about it. Luckily, they were all destroyed by water damage and I got to throw them all away without feeling guilty for abandoning books.)

Anyway.

In New Moon, there’s this STUPID section of basically empty pages after Edward (the controlling vampire) leaves Bella (the girl with no personality). These empty pages show that Bella is so distraught from losing her true love (because, duh, clearly 17 year olds BELONG with old blood-sucking men) that her life is empty for the next several months.

Let’s just say that my 2+ year hiatus from blogging was just a similar literary convention to indicate the massive hole in my life after a divorce, instead of admitting the truth: that I got bored with blogging. Again.

In all honesty, though, I have felt weird about not addressing the whole divorce issue here, and it’s caused me to procrastinate. How does one write about the failure of a marriage that’s supposed to be eternal? How does one NOT write about it?

I got married in a Mormon temple, which is the gold standard for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. You spend your whole childhood looking forward to the day you’ll go through the temple, and a temple marriage is essentially the number one goal for Mormons. (The number two goal might be to make sure you have children who all get married in the temple.)

A temple marriage is supposed to last forever–that’s what members of the LDS church will emphasize when talking about the differences between temple marriages and “secular” marriages. Outside of the temples, the marriage language is “til death do you part.” Within the temple, the marriage language is “for time and all eternity.”

So, when your marriage completely implodes three and a half years into all eternity, you feel like a bit of a jackass. Especially if you are the only person out of your immediate family (of 8, I should add) who hasn’t been able to keep it together. And all this after being the LAST person to get married in that family. (Well done, Jules.)

But, here’s the thing. Maybe I don’t mind feeling like a jackass if it means I get out of a bad situation and learn a thing or too. So get ready for the next few chapters: Things Jules Learned From Ending Her Eternal Marriage.