Our LDS culture heavily emphasizes appearances. That raises the bar for how clean is company-worthy clean. That’s a high bar for me–I have 6 kids, including a baby–not to mention the expense of a company-ready meal on our strained budget.

I could try to get over myself and give the gift of authenticity and serve a new convert lukewarm ramen in a messy house–hey, that could even be fun, with the right people–except for the larger issue: so many LDS people, especially husbands, wrestle with sex addiction. The numbers are pretty high.

My husband’s one of them. His 12-step recovery is spiritual chemotherapy and missing meetings is not optional. Pretty much all our time is devoted either to church things (Mutual, Primary activities, Scout) or to recovery, which is at least a part-time job. Between the two we have hardly any evenings at home as a family.

It’s exhausting to pretend to be normal all night for a stranger’s sake and I don’t have the bandwidth to do it. Getting close to other women, especially single ones, is not compatible with my marriage’s boundaries. If that disappoints lonely sister converts, I assure you, I’m disappointed too.

I wish I were the exception to the rule, but the LDS counselors and bishops I’ve spoken with lead me to believe my family’s situation is all too common. And it would go pretty far to explain an apparently mystifying new insularity surrounding LDS families.

The same is true in our homes. Excluding people because of swearing, word of wisdom violations (unless the person is impaired and may then pose a danger to life, limb or property) and many other problems is more likely to offend than teach. Yet, unfortunately, Mormons often have the reputation of being inhospitable to strangers who practice these things.

Given that, why should we be inhospitable to including someone when they pose no physical impact whatsoever? Are we really afraid that we can’t teach our children or make clear the teachings because some inactive and former members who are still called Mormons don’t follow them?

This is a late post, but hopefully it helps. It seems your husband is the one who should be offended, being told he wasn’t an adequate husband.

The adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman empire blended it with the structures that had previously used worship of Roman gods and emperors to unify conquered nations into a super tribe, a model developed when the city state of Rome conqueted or otherwise absorbed the other tribal states of the Italian peninsula, including Etruscans, Italians and Latins.

Mormons have been noted for our emphasis on Old Testament characteristics, such as patriarchal families (emphasized by polygamy) and the intentional linking through ancestors and the affiliation with the twelve tribes in patriarchal blessings. Mormons have been classified as almost an ethnicity, in spite of the diversity of our ancestral ethnicities. It is an extended family in the way we will sacrifice for each other even if we disagree over politics and many other subjects. As recognized in Orson Scott Card’s The Folk of the Fringe and other post-apocalypse science fiction, Mormonism is a survivor.

Self-identification matters, too. Bryce Harper actively identifies himself as Mormon, as does Brandon Flowers. So even though both of them admit to being less than squeaky clean (and who am I to judge?), at least in the past, I’m proud to claim them. But I would feel weirdly clingy extending the same affinity to Roy Halladay, who hasn’t once identified himself with Mormonism in anything I’ve ever read.

First, as a rule we would expect that the more characteristics two people share, the greater the likelihood that they will be friends. Friends would be disproportionately likely to live near each other, be similar in age, interests, education, etc. So what I know about these particular women (all female, all single, all recent Mormon converts, all live near each other) makes them more likely to become friends with each other than with a random people they see on the street.

Second, friendship is also driven by necessity, so people who are shopping for friends at the same time, as these women appear to have been, would be more likely to make a match. I probably met half of my law school friends in the first 30 days I was there, in part because after I had a certain number of friends I had less need to meet more.