Questionable Comment from Brigham Young?

Depends how you define successful.

Seemingly, Brigham didn’t think two were enough though.

I would say context is everything. What year did he say this? What was going on? The cynic can say BY was saying to the women “if you humble yourselves and obey your husbands the Lord will bless your marriages.” Or he may be saying to the men “if you shed your unrighteousness your wives will be more likely to follow your lead.” But I think we need to recognize there was much talk during BY’s years about not marrying for love.

If this was a conversation to throw doubt on whether Brigham Young was a prophet, or inspired, I think the context might matter as you suggest. But I don’t think it matters based on the bounds of my question.

My point in this case is that his statement has become somewhat of a stand-alone belief or cultural value in the various Wards I’ve attended. Therefore, the context isn’t really important to me — what matters is that I believed this for years and after 20 years have reached the conclusion that it’s dangerous advice.

I tend to agree with Cadence on this one. Our history, and comments like these have me wondering if all this emphasis on family is meant to fuel the growth of the church as much as to provide salvation some day.

Yeah, Brother Brigham was overseeing all those colonization projects and sending people to live hard lives in remote desert settlements. My guess is that when you’re trying to build up a civilization in the hinterlands of Arizona or Mexico, you’re going to be spending so much time working that character incompatibilities will have less time to create problems or even be noticeable. Two randomly sampled souls who lived in the 19th century Utah Territory might have had an easier time making a marriage work than if they had been born into our time and place.

And for those of us living in our comfortable modern settings where we have so much time to assert and cultivate our individual characters: imagine who you might be, in spirit or resurrected flesh, 50, 100, 200, 1,000, 1,000,000 years from now. What is exaltation going to do to our differences, traits, temperaments, quirks, etc?

It’s hard enough to put trust in staying as in love at age 80 or even 50 as you are at age 25, or at least in the same way. I don’t doubt that there are plenty of married couples who keep some kind of “romantic” feelings or whatever to their dying days, but both partners in a marriage are going to change a lot over time and the way they feel about each other will unavoidably change too, even if it leads them to say “I love you more than ever.”

The way the human mind fails to comprehend long stretches of time leaves me with no illusions that I really know anything for sure about how our relationships will evolve over eternity. Committing to stay with someone forever in our culture certainly encourages care in choosing, but I also think it leads a lot of people to look for too much and pass up opportunities in which they could not only get along, but be quite happy.

…Therefore, the context isn’t really important to me — what matters is that I believed this for years and after 20 years have reached the conclusion that it’s dangerous advice.

Yes, I have had experiences similar to yours. My comment was more of a reflection of how I wished I had always regarded the quote – with a broader awareness of different interpretations. In general it is best to know the context of any statement that you give credence to, even though we all ultimately choose the aspects that we hold up as important.

Yeah, Brown – especially since the Gospel is not the same as the Church, as we heard in General Conference. :ugeek: