Greetings,
I am happily married in a monogamous relationship with the love of my life. She and I were both raised in well functioning monogamous families. I was never morally opposed to polygamy, though I thought (and maybe still do) that monogamy better reflected the relationship of Christ and the Church and was therefore to be preferred.
Presently however I have a situation I am attempting to discern how best to handle and it occurred to me that polygamy might be part of the solution so I wanted to get the perspective of people who are comfortable with polygamy as a concept and practice.
The situation is this:
My wife has a tendency towards insecurity and often feels inadequate and/or like she is holding me back in life. I do my best to encourage her when she feels like this and to reassure her that I chose her because I love her and that she is in no way a burden to me but a blessing. Nevertheless these feelings of her's recur now and then and what words I can say do not seem to asuage her emotional turmoil long term.
Moreover these feelings have on more than one occasion led her to ask me if I would like to leave her. Again, when this comes up I reassure her that I love her, that she is the greatest blessing God has ever bestowed on me, and that I want to share all of my life with her.
However she is so convinced that she is somehow a burden to me that my unwillingness to leave her has caused her contemplate suicide so that I could be "free" to find someone else. Ironically all the while this leaves me feeling inadequate due to my inability to answer her anguish in any way that gives her lasting comfort.
Anyway, the thought occurred to me last night that if and when this issue arrises again I could try addressing this situation in the following manner:
Acknowledge how she feels while reaffirming that I do not view her in this manner but that since she is convinced of it and that since the two options she currently contemplates as resolutions are not ones that would be good by any stretch of the imagination, give her the third option to search and find someone that she would be happy with me marrying that she thinks would fulfil the areas where she thinks she lacks. Not to leave her for the "new girl" but rather to be married to them both.
I am uncertain however if this would actually help resolve the issue.
For additional context: she feels like she is a burden because she thinks she is too needy (she has Crohn's disease and consequently can't eat a wide range of common foods) and that that will prevent me from living the kind of life I want to live (I'd like to be able to live with minimum dependence on money so that I can maximize the ammount of time I serve God by caring for her and others in love rather than serving mammon). I should note that I discovered the desire to live this after I married her because of how much better and more meaningful doing things for her and others directly rather than through the medium of cash seems to be.
She feels like she is inadequate because she has reading comprehension issues that make reading the Bible difficult and/or unenjoyable and consequently rarely reads or discusses Biblical topics with me. On the other hand she continually astounds me in her capacity to percieve needs in others and to go out of her way to help them, so while I may not get to talk with her about God's word as much as I'd like, I get to live it with her much more than I could have ever hoped for.
Other things that might be relevant: she is seeing a therapist and I have fertility issues that prevent us from getting pregnant, though we do plan to adopt when we are able.
