I can’t speak to mixed-faith marriages in general. I can really only reflect on my own experience.

Marriage is hard enough without trying to navigate raising teenagers with parents who are both LDS. Its even harder in a mixed faith marriage.

Teenagers have a way of sensing the cracks and exploiting them.

It would be nice to have an NHL team here locally, but we’re here temporarily, so no need to bring one here on our account. Interesting point about the role of traffic studies in locating stadia. There were traffic engineering issues with renovating Nassau Coliseum, where the Islanders had historically played in Long Island, so that was ultimately part of what forced the team to move to Brooklyn, to the chagrin of many, if not most, fans. If he did hold a grudge against the profession, that would be the source, rather than Seattle’s failure to bring in a team.

Carole, it’s impressive how successfully you have both navigated the different levels of interest in church and in hockey. This seems like a rare accomplishment, given how (as noted by some commenters) LDS culture and practice tend to make this difficult for both halves of a mixed-faith marriage. You ought to be celebrated for making this work so well, but you probably get quizzical looks, at best, when you explain the details to ward or family members. Thanks for sharing an enlightening and personal post.

Second, Carole, thank you for your post. In my experience, your experience is very, very common for member-nonmember marriages, and I think ward members often do a poor job of respecting boundaries when it comes to nonmember spouses. You see, know, and love a wonderful, loving, and supportive man with whom you share your life. Too often, we see marriages like yours, and all we can see is a poor faithful (or not) sister locked into a hopeless marriage with an unworthy Gentile (so to speak) or (slightly more upbeat but still misguided) an easy missionary opportunity that only needs lots and lots of pressure, hints, coaxing, and even berating to produce fruit.

I have good friends in a situation similar to yours. The husband fully supports the wife attending church and having their children blessed, baptized, and raised in the Church (and he himself has regularly attended), but he has always clearly and consistently stated that he is not interested in joining. Despite that, he’s been pressured many times by various ward members, and the wife was frankly told by another sister that she simply wasn’t praying hard enough or else her husband would have joined long ago.

Unfortunately, our missionary mindset (and depending on how you want to read it, our doctrine) makes us very pushy with people like your husband who support but don’t want to join.

That said, in all of our discussions, we’ve both acknowledged that our feelings about our respective religions and how to incorporate them into how we raise our daughter may change after she is born. So I’m sure this is something we’ll be discussing on an on-going basis over the next 20 years or so.

Instead I took a huge financial bath.

But hockey fandom as religion is an apt analogy. When I showed up for the first game, I realized that I didn’t know the language, the chants, the appropriate times to stand, to sit, to raise my arms, fingers pointing upward, to shout vulgarities at the opposing goalie, etc., etc. There’s a unique society inside that arena, just waiting for an anthropologist to play like Margaret Mead and study them.

As to the rules, just figure out how to stay onside and how not to ice the puck, and everything else is natural. Good luck!

If they married a Cards fan, though, I might make them sleep in separate rooms, just so they know my disapproval.

I think about this sort of thing a lot. Our overall norms and ways of organizing ourselves and seeking (collective vs. individual) goods have shifted dramatically in the last few centuries. It’s a confusing, difficult, complex thing to try and think through. How much is about agency and how much about cultural imprinting? I wholeheartedly support your comment that: ” at the end of the day, we’re all just doing our best and relying on God’s mercy to make up the difference.” I think we all need to have a bit more humility-inspired mercy. That said, whether it’s a result of agency or imprinting, I’m convinced of my own obligations to bracket my gut, or at least take it as one among other data points, as I try to struggle through my accountability and which items are most weighty.

We’re expecting our first child in the next couple of weeks, which raises a super important question: Will we raise our daughter to be a hockey fan? Yes, I really want to. I don’t necessarily feel a strong need for hockey in my own life, but I recognize that it’s added something special and important to my husband’s life, and I’d love to see him pass that on to our daughter. I also love the idea of my daughter and her dad watching hockey together and cheering for the same team – I think that would be a great way for them to build an awesome father-daughter relationship. Of course, she’ll ultimately need to make her own decisions, and maybe she’ll decide she’s not into hockey (and my husband would naturally be more disappointed than I would be if that were the case). But if she shows any interest at all, I think we’ll both really encourage that interest. And I think my husband feels the same way about the idea of raising our daughter in the Mormon faith.