Reading · The Renegotiation: Leaving Certainty Behind

The Renegotiation Diaries

By Lyn Smith Gregory

I grew up watching a marriage I never questioned. My parents’ marriage. It was like all the marriages in my Mormon community. Just the way things are. The same way fish don’t ask what water is; it’s just the shape of reality itself.

I left the Mormon Church at nineteen, long before I stood at any altar. But the marriage I watched, and absorbed, and normalized across every year of my childhood was a patriarchal marriage: the husband as the head of the household, the priesthood holder, the presiding authority in the home. The wife as his helpmeet, his partner, with the lion’s share of responsibility for raising the children and performing the household work.

What I didn’t know was that there were choices in marriage. Or that the marriage structure I observed had been absorbed into my very bones, carried forward long after I stopped believing in the system that prescribed it.

This is the particular damage a high-control religion does, not only to the marriages formed inside it, but to the people who leave. It doesn’t just prescribe the roles. It makes the roles invisible as roles. They become the water you swim in. By the time you finally examine what you actually believe about partnership and equity and who gets to make which decisions, you are looking at assumptions you didn’t know you had.

All I knew when I left at nineteen was that I didn’t want my parents’ marriage. I was terrified of marriage, so I ran from commitments, fearful of losing my hard-won autonomy. I didn’t marry until I was 29, a spinster by Mormon standards, who overwhelmingly marry very young, and only then after testing my fiancé for three years, while looking for signs of controlling behavior to emerge in our relationship.

What I have found, in years of conversations with women who left high-control, patriarchal faiths, is that it is almost always the women who become disenchanted first with the terms of the arrangement. This makes a certain painful sense. They have the most to gain from leaving the old structure. In the Mormon framework, they held the least power: no priesthood authority, no presiding role in the home, no vote in the major decisions that shaped their own lives. The husband decided. The wife supported. God had arranged it this way, and who were any of us to argue with God?

When the belief goes, the arrangement loses its justification. The machinery keeps running, out of habit, out of fear, out of the sheer inertia of an existing marriage, but the engine that powered it is gone. And what you are left with is a woman asking, for the first time, why she is asking permission to spend money she earned. Why she is getting driving directions she didn’t request. Why every major decision seems to flow through one person’s priorities rather than two.

Her husband, meanwhile, may have left the Church right alongside her. He may consider himself fully deconstructed, liberated from the old rules. He simply hasn’t noticed that the power arrangement, the one that benefited him, came along for the ride.

According to a 2025 Pew Research Study, 35% of U.S. adults have switched or left religion since childhood. For those whose marriages were built inside that faith, a renegotiation almost always follows.

Data from the General Social Survey suggests that people who left Mormonism are more than twice as likely to divorce as those who stayed, roughly one in four versus one in ten.

This is not because leaving a high-control religion is bad for marriages. It is because the faith was often the load-bearing wall, and when it comes down, everything has to be rebuilt. The couples who make it through are the ones who rebuild intentionally, together, rather than assuming the old structure will hold with new plumbing.

Dr. Harriet Lerner, the psychologist whose book The Dance of Anger has sold over three million copies, describes marriage as a choreography: a series of repetitive, often unconscious patterns that partners fall into together. Breaking free from destructive patterns requires recognizing your role in the dance and taking responsibility for changing your own steps. In a faith-transition marriage, the choreography was set by the Church. Neither partner invented it. Both performed it, for years, because that was what you did. Changing the steps requires first admitting that the dance was a dance, not destiny.

Lerner’s essential insight for anyone attempting this renegotiation: if one person in a couple genuinely changes their own behavior, it generates significant positive change in the overall dynamic. You cannot change your partner. You can change your steps. And changed steps require a changed partner to respond to.

Here is what I have learned about how to begin this conversation.

Think of these as a sequence. Each step makes the next one possible.

• Start with what is working. Name it specifically. Your love. Your history. The qualities in your partner that you chose and still choose. You are not issuing an indictment. You are renegotiating a contract that was written by an institution you both left. That framing matters.

• Lead with feelings, not accusations. Lerner’s advice here is precise: the difference between “You don’t trust me” and “I feel like I’m not trusted” is the difference between a fight and a conversation. Shifting from accusatory language to “I” statements moves the focus from blame to what can actually be changed. “When you question every purchase I make, I feel treated like a child, not a partner.” That is a sentence a person can respond to. “You treat me like a child” is a sentence that requires a defense.

• Ask for one small change to start. One. The impulse is to lay out the entire accumulated grievance, the years of decisions made without consultation, the unpaid domestic labor, the driving advice, the deferred dreams. Resist it. One change: “I would like us to make financial decisions together rather than separately.” Build from there.

• Acknowledge every positive shift. Specifically, immediately, genuinely. Changed behavior that goes unacknowledged tends to revert. Changed behavior that is met with warmth tends to grow.

• Be patient with resistance. It can feel threatening to relinquish a decision-making role you’ve always held. The goal is not to humiliate, but to build something that actually fits who you both are now.

But the hardest thing I have had to sit with in any renegotiation is not the other person’s resistance. It is my own. Because leaving a high-control religion does not automatically leave you with a fully formed set of beliefs about what you want from partnership. It leaves you with a gap where the old beliefs were, and filling that gap requires knowing yourself in ways you were never encouraged to explore.

What do I actually want? What arrangement actually serves us both? What does equity look like when you build it from scratch rather than inherit it?

The marriages that survive faith transitions, ones that come out stronger rather than hollowed out, are the ones where both people are willing to keep asking those questions together. Not once and arriving. Again and again, each time with slightly more fluency, slightly less fear.

That is exactly what renegotiation means.

We are celebrating 40 years of marriage this year. With a history and an equal partnership I could never have imagined as a child. It’s a possibility for you, too.

Start wherever you are.

Are you renegotiating a marriage or a long-term partnership after leaving a faith or a belief system that defined your roles? What has been hardest? What has surprised you?

You Left the Church. Did the Church Leave Your Marriage?

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