My exit with my wife took over two painstaking years of pure mental anguish. We were married young and not really prepared for the type of problems that we would face, especially not the stress of leaving the cult. Here is the condensed version:
I had not ever been a strong witness, and after getting married (Sep 1995) I "was my own boss" as head of household, and I was able to miss meetings and service without anyone riding my ass about it. I also lost my good job a month after getting married. The odd jobs and night work that I had to endure, and also starting my own company awhile later led to many missed meetings. My wife was concerned but not outright critical. I think she and the rest of my family just thought it was a phase I was going through. I became involved in JW websites in 1996, just as AJWR and H2o were just getting started. So that was my introduction to "apostate" information. My wife didn't want to hear any of it.
I took the hard approach, which was to comment on every little thing that I saw wrong with the organization. I also did not hesitate to discuss the same things with all of my family members. At the same time witnesses.net was starting to get popular and I always presented an online persona of a loyal JW. My wife saw this as the utmost in hypocrisy and hated that the site was detracting from my attention to her. I gradually became extremely inactive and would only occasionally attend meetings. And when attending we generally did not pay much attention. The comments and jokes during the meeting made it pretty obvious that I thought it was a farce. Luckily my wife loved me a lot and had a pretty good sense of humor. Most of the time she was annoyed but other times she joined in. We also had a baby which meant most of the time we sat in the library by ourselves and could comment openly to ourselves about the meetings.
The lack of love shown to her in the congregations is what finally started turning the tide. Here she was with a baby and trying to be a good JW and the elders and congo members couldn't do much except tell her how evil I was. She was becoming extremely discouraged. We moved congregations to my original congregation where I had grown up (Hackensack Spanish, NJ). This was a suburban congregation with a totally different outlook about service. A huge contrast to our old congregation in Passaic, NJ arguably one of the worst ghettos in the "Garden State", where sisters were getting assaulted while out on service and the people didn't have much except their faith in the new system. Hackensack was totally different. The PO was college-educated and the CTO of Hackensack Medical Center (a large regional hospital) and made very good money. The congregation members were pretty well-off for the most part. Service consisted of riding around in a car for about an hour or two, not working house-to-house.
My wife hated it. She felt it was pointless. Eventually she started sliding into inactivity as well. I think some of the doubts were starting to sink in. She saw the hypocrisy and stupidity demonstrated by almost every JW she knew, especially our parents. We decided to move away from them, and hopefully regain some happiness. During the last two years we had argued non-stop with disastrous results on our mental health. We were exhausted. We had probably brought each other close to nervous breakdowns on multiple occasions. We planned and executed and move to Atlanta almost 900 miles away within a few weeks.
Once here in Atlanta, we decided not to go to a Kingdom Hall right away. Or I should say -- she agreed to it because I was ready to leave it for good. I contacted Ray Franz to get a copy of CoC. He agreed that I could just come by to pick it up. Not like I lived that far from him anyway. So one fine weekend I make the drive over, with wife and baby in tow. I pull up into Ray's driveway and go to his door to get my books. Little did I know he would invite me in for lunch. I told him that my wife (Arlene) was in the truck waiting. "Well let's go get her then!" he replies.
Arlene was somewhat uncomfortable. The JW indoctrination was still present. Ray came out to the car and talked to her for a little while. I guess after she realized that he is a nice guy, she decides to come inside. We had lunch and a great conversation. That was really the beginning of the end for her JW life. Once she started realizing the doctrinal inconsistencies and the lies for herself, she was becoming angrier and angrier all the time. She read CoC. Eventually she didn't want anything to do with the JWs at all. Her mother blamed me and hated me. Threatened to never speak to both of us again. My parents were pretty much indifferent or didn't really do much about it.
For awhile we were a pretty happy couple. It's like we were learning to live again, together. That was over three years ago. Much has happened since then. Unfortunately, it led to the breakup of our marriage. We were really never compatible for each other even though we loved each other so much. We probably never would have gotten married except that we were young JWs in love. I don't regret my life so far but so many mistakes have been made. I advise anyone who is trying to convince their spouse to leave the cult READ Steve Hassan's books. There are so many ways to influence your loved ones that don't involve coercion.
If anyone is interested I can develop this into a much more detailed story for the Personal Experiences forum.
