Hello all, although this is not my first post here, this topic was the main reason I joined here, so I can get different views on this. My native language is not english, so I might make a blunder or two. Please bear with me, my story will be long.
As you can guess, I am a JW, and currently still am one, this is my 10th year. It all started with me meeting a very nice open minded girl, who was a JW. Yes, indeed she was open minded - back then. Seeing her model and seeing truth in their teachings, I was overjoyed to find out the Truth, and a beautiful wife at the same time. Well, as time went on, ugly things started to rear their heads. It started with a distinct feel that something is not quite right, but I couldn't put my finger on it, all went smoothly and logically. Then I started to realize, that this religion was no ordinary church, that they have about all control over just about everything I do. This has started to eat me in time, and planted heavy doubts. My wife on the other hand went in the completely opposite direction: from being an open minded God believing person, she started to tighten her grip with the organisation, and following strictly every word of it. Now as you can imagine this started to put a huge strain on our marriage. You have to understand, that I was never really open about my doubts, because I knew that she would just run to the elders and confess - which happened anyway a couple of times. So the strain wasn't directly because of the contrast in beliefs - no, the strain built up inside me, and I began to loose more and more control over myself, lashing out at her for almost no reason. She truly did her part too, now reading some documentations about JWs and mental illness I realize she has all the simptoms of the strain herself too, but she deals with it as the WT tells her to deal: by doing even more service.
So all this lead to the inevitable end, she started having true physical disease symptoms that no doctors could identify (I read about this being common for JWs too). So little by little she came to the conclusion, that our fights (verbal fights, mind you) were the cause of her extreme tension, which causes physical illness. It might have something to do with it, but clearly that's not the whole picture. So after "careful" review of the WT materials she came to the conclusion that she has the right to leave me, because the Bible allows one to leave the spouse (without remarrying) in case of extreme threat to her health. The elders were clearly against this notion, the committee found me not guilty of domestic violence, yet arguing they can't see what's inside her mind, they couldn't rule out her choice as being against the Scriptures. So all they did was mark her privately, she couldn't have any specific privileges, so as not to show her as a role model. However noone except the elders and us knows about this restriction (which I believe was lifted since then). With me finding myself suddenly alone, I started to gain the courage to do what was inside my heart, but was forbidden: really put the WT to test. I stopped going to the meetings and preaching, and started little by little to read outside information.
This happened more than half a year ago. Now she claims to have recovered from her physical illness, and want to try again with me. I questioned her motives, and she says it's not only because Jehovah wants her to do this, but she would really like that things go right with us. I talked to her about just a couple of things I learned that have ample official documentation, like the WT-UN association and that things were actually much worse a couple of hundred years ago. She seems nice, joins the conversation and all. I ask her if I get disfellowshipped, how will she react to me. She says it will be hard, but she will still be my friend, but she won't talk a lot about spiritual things. All in all it seems almost like her former open minded self.
This until today - I received an email from her saying that she can only accept such sort of discussion once in a month, and that is assuming we talk positively about the society for the rest of the month, and from now on she will categorically stop any discussions of this sort. I really don't understand her, it seems to me deep in her heart she wants to be with me, but her faith in the Society won't let us have a normal relation. My dilemma is, that I want to be with her too, just not this zombie, but the open person I once met. I do not truly care of her beliefs, I am not offended by them, but the lack of open communication is what bothers me. To tell you the truth, I'm kind of afraid of being alone - not in the sense of living alone, but getting old without anyone there beside you. You have to understand that we live in a fairly small town, and when I joined JW I practically cut all other connections - I have absolutely no friends, even aquaintances only a few. I am not getting younger, and the hope for me getting remarried are as slim as WT admitting they were wrong in something.