Mixed-Faith Marriage: The LDS Couple’s Survival Guide
One of you believes. One of you doesn’t — or doesn’t anymore, or isn’t sure. And you both want to stay married. This guide is for you. I’m Daniel A. Burgess, LMFT, a licensed marriage and family therapist who works with mixed-faith LDS couples every week — and who has lived both sides of this line personally after forty-plus years in the Church.
First: your marriage is not doomed
The panic is usually worse than the problem. When belief changes in a Latter-day Saint marriage, both partners tend to reach for catastrophic conclusions — the believer fears the eternal family is dissolving; the questioner fears they must choose between integrity and their spouse. Neither is true. Mixed-faith marriages fail for the same reasons any marriage fails: contempt, pressure campaigns, secrecy, and conversations that never get had well. Couples who replace those with respect, curiosity, and negotiated agreements not only survive — many report their marriage got more honest than it ever was when belief was assumed.
The five conversations every mixed-faith LDS couple has to have
1. The disclosure conversation
How the news lands shapes everything after it. If you’re the one whose faith changed: your spouse gets to have feelings about this, and their grief is not an attack on your integrity. If you’re the believing spouse: your partner likely rehearsed telling you for months, terrified of losing you. Start there — with what it cost each of you — before you argue about what it means.
2. The kids conversation
Baptism, primary, seminary, missions — these decisions now need two signatures. The couples who do this well decide together what they’ll say, present a united front, and refuse to recruit the children to either side. I’ve written about my own family’s version of this in My Son Is Not Baptized and That Is Okay.
3. The practical-life conversation
Tithing, garments, coffee in the house, Sunday mornings, temple weddings for future children, in-laws who want answers. None of these are really about money or clothing — they’re about respect and belonging. Negotiate them explicitly, one at a time, and revisit them; a fair agreement in year one may need updating in year three.
4. The intimacy conversation
This is the one almost nobody warns you about. Faith transition frequently detonates a couple’s sexual equilibrium — old rules feel gone for one partner and sacred to the other, desire shifts, and long-buried purity-culture shame surfaces on both sides. Handled with care, this becomes an opportunity to build a sexual relationship you actually chose. Ignored, it becomes the quiet reason mixed-faith marriages drift apart. This intersection — faith, marriage, and sexuality — is the specific center of my practice; see sexless marriage counseling and purity culture recovery.
5. The identity conversation
You married a person, not a testimony — and they married more than yours. Both of you are renegotiating identity: the believer asking what their covenants mean beside a partner who left, the leaver asking who they are without the framework. The marriages that thrive treat this as parallel growth rather than betrayal. It helps to hear how others walked it — I’ve shared parts of my own path in Because I Loved Her, I Left Her and Marrying Outside of Faith.
What makes mixed-faith marriages work: the research-backed short list
- No conversion projects. The moment either partner treats the other’s position as a problem to fix, trust erodes. Curiosity in, persuasion out.
- Grieve separately, decide together. Each of you needs support that isn’t your spouse — but decisions about kids, money, and Sundays stay inside the marriage, not with your mother, your bishop, or your ex-Mormon forum.
- Protect the friendship. Date nights where the Church is off-limits as a topic. Shared meaning doesn’t require shared theology — it requires shared life.
- Name the fear under the fight. “You’re breaking up our eternal family” and “you don’t respect my mind” are both, underneath, “I’m afraid I’m losing you.” Say that sentence instead.
- Get skilled help early, not last. Most couples wait until resentment has calcified. A few sessions during the acute phase prevents years of repair later.
When to bring in a professional — and what kind
If you’re stuck in loops, if contempt has entered the conversations, if intimacy has collapsed, or if either of you is carrying depression or trauma through this transition — that’s the moment. Be careful who you choose: a counselor with a faithful agenda will subtly treat the questioner as the problem, and one with a secular agenda will do the same to the believer. You want someone whose only agenda is the marriage. That neutrality is the entire premise of my faith transition counseling — therapy for couples in California and Utah, and coaching for couples anywhere in the world. It starts with a free 15-minute consultation.
Go deeper
- My Spouse Left the LDS Church — Now What? — for the believing partner in the first raw months.
- How to Tell Your Kids (and the Ward) About a Faith Transition — scripts, timing, and boundaries.
- Protecting Intimacy When One of You Stops Believing — the conversation nobody else is having.
- Marrying Outside of Faith and My Son Is Not Baptized and That Is Okay — from the archive.