Bad Mormon

Marriage appears as a recurring motif throughout Bad Mormon, exemplifying the tension Gay feels between her desires and ambitions, and the roles a Mormon wife and mother is expected to fill. Gay frames her parents’ marriage as the standard by which she initially measures her own success or failure as a Mormon. Throughout the memoir, Gay offers a strong critique of the expectations set for marriage within the Mormon church, arguing that inequality is intrinsic to the Mormon conception of marriage and that living up to such a standard, in reality, requires a subversion of self. She suggests that the ideal Mormon marriage is one in which women “cared and prepared” and men “presided and provided”—an expectation she argues is harmful to women. 

Gay’s description of the temple marriage indicates that inequality is baked into Mormon marriages. She details the rituals involved in the temple marriage ceremony as evidence of her argument:  “when you get married in the temple, the woman reveals her new temple name to her husband when he takes her through the veil, but he does not ever reveal his name to her” (150). Gay asserts that the fact that men are allowed to maintain this sacred secret after marriage, but women are not highlights a spiritual inequality in Mormon marriage. Gay suggests that, as a young woman, she saw marriage as a way to achieve the spiritual growth to which her male peers were entitled: because she knew “there were only enough lifeboats to take half the women and children after all the men were rescued,” she saw Billy as a “life preserver” capable of delivering her to the Celestial Kingdom (153).

Gay’s parents offered a clear example of the expectations for Mormon marriages, in which wives were expected to support their husbands unconditionally, and husbands were expected to lead the family. In her introduction, Gay describes her mother as her father’s “wingman and wife” (9). The specific order of these words suggests that Gay’s mother was her father’s supporter first and his partner second, highlighting the supportive role of women in Mormon marriages. As her father’s job moved the family multiple times, Gay’s mother “fell in line and became his helpmeet,” despite her own desire to put down lasting roots (31). In hindsight, Gay realizes that her mother regularly performed “a solid hour of unpaid labor” so that Gay and her siblings “could enjoy time with the real hero in all of our rewrites: Dad” (31). Gay argues that her mother worked hard to support not only her husband’s career but also his reputation with his children. Gay later recognizes this pattern in her own marriage, resenting the fact that she has to “to do everything, [she has] to be everything and [she has] to give [Billy] all the credit” (170). Ultimately, Gay attributes this tension between the Mormon ideal of marriage and the reality of its inherent gender inequality as the root cause of the downfall of her relationship with her husband.