The other Mormon guy I loved
Well, it’s time to tell the story of how I began studying Mormonism. Like any story worth telling, this one begins with a guy meeting a girl.
Recall what I said in my former essay, “Memoirs of a former evangelical anti-Mormon“:
September, 1998. I was a 16-year-old girl starting my junior year at a new high school and had finally talked my parents into purchasing a computer that could access the Internet, something that would change my life forever. One of the first people I ran into at the Yahoo! chat rooms was an 18-year-old freshman attending Brigham Young University who was very eager to share his faith with me. At that point in my life, I was attending an evangelical Presbyterian church which I loved. I had participated in a mission trip to Mexico over the summer and was about as “on fire for Christ” as a teenage girl can be: promise ring, WWJD bracelet, bumper sticker on my guitar case that said “REAL MEN LOVE JESUS,” and Supertones CDs. I had heard a few negative things about Latter-day Saints from various sources, but overall, my attitude towards Mormons was unwritten and as pure as the driven snow, kind of like Lindsay Lohan when she was in The Parent Trap.1
The name of the young man was Neil, and after a few weeks of talking in chat rooms an attraction developed between us. Before you go thinking that I was pathetic for having an online relationship, please remember that I’m 6’0″ and I’ve only ever dated taller guys. There weren’t any potential boyfriends in my youth group or high school, so I had not dated very much or had a lot of relationships. Neil and I got along well, he was taller than me and good-looking in real life, but shy and a little asocial, and he insisted Mormons were Christian. I was not sure how we would ever work out the distance between us (or the two years I would be waiting when he went on a mission), but all I knew at the time was I enjoyed his friendship. I looked forward to logging in and talking to him every day, and after a while we talked on the phone.
It was inevitable that Neil began trying to share his faith with me, but I initially did not understand his interest in converting me. If we were both Christians, why did he need to convert me? Apart from that, I was perfectly satisfied with the church I was going to, and it’s kind of hard to convert someone who feels that her own religion is answering her life’s needs. Neil was persistent though, so grudgingly I ordered a copy of the Book of Mormon and said I would try to read it (but no promises). I talked with friends at school who were LDS and agreed to visit the LDS ward with them.
I also told my youth leaders at Sumner Presbyterian Church about the relationship, and they were not at all happy to hear of it. They urged me not to fall in love with a Mormon. Word got around and several members loaned me evangelical counter-cult books. My aunt would later give me Is the Mormon My Brother by James White for my seventeenth birthday.
Once I began reading anti-Mormon books and Web sites and became convinced that Mormons weren’t Christians, I went on the offensive and began trying to convert Neil out of Mormonism. We both began posting on the Answering Mormonism discussion board and got exposed to LDS apologetics. In chat we would get into angry, high-strung fights over what a certain Bible verse meant or whether or not Brigham Young had taught the Adam-God doctrine, or whatever I was attacking him with for that day. We would always reconcile, but there was tension between us. We both said and argued a lot of things that would sound so silly now.
I eventually came to the realization that our relationship was going nowhere. I asked Neil one day if he would ever marry a non-member, and he said not a chance. And I said something like, “Well, then I guess we’re just kidding ourselves.” And that was the end. It hurt to let him go, but I didn’t want his hope for the future to be dependent on my conversion.
We remained friends afterward, though there was plenty of tension, sadness and teen angst between us. I don’t remember how long our relationship lasted; I was not keeping a journal at that time. He left for a mission in southern California in the summer of 1999, and truth be told, I was a little glad to see him go. I had many other things going on in my journey with Mormonism, and I needed room to think.
By fall of 1999 I had begun keeping a journal, and I went to Utah for the October General Conference that year.2 On October 3, 1999, I wrote in my journal:
[Neil] has been writing to me. I’m starting to miss him. He still says he loves me. I sometimes wonder, but try not to.
Later, when I began attending BYU and Neil returned from his mission, we met in person and eventually even took Roger Keller’s Religion C 353 class, “American Christianity and the Rise of the LDS Church” together. I always regarded Neil as a friend, but the romance between us was over by then. We still talk to this day.
I don’t consider my relationship with Neil to have been a waste, though I made plenty of mistakes and would do things differently if I could do it all over again. He was the first guy I really loved. Without him I don’t think I ever would have become fascinated with Mormonism like I did, and I never would have attended BYU and met my own husband. Without Neil there never would have been a Paul, and my romance with him helped me avoid similar mistakes on my romance with Paul. I’m indebted to him for that.
Just for the record, the only Latter-day Saint guys I ever had romantic relationships with were Neil and Paul. I went on casual dates with several others, but we always understood we were friends and never even held hands.
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