Over the last couple of weeks, I've spent a total of about $60 on YouTube to purchase and binge-watch the entire 5-season series of an HBO original called Big Love. I know I have struggled immensely the last couple of weeks with my own writing “career”, but I've been totally inspired by how well written this series is.
The main character is Bill Henrickson, played by Bill Paxton, a Mormon polygamist with three wives and nine children (three per wife). His first wife Barb was born and raised in the mainstream LDS church. His second wife Nikki was born and raised in a polygamist compound on which her father was the prophet. (Her sect of Mormonism was fundamentalist and separate from the mainstream LDS). Bill’s third wife Margie was raised by an alcoholic single mother who was a non-practicing catholic. Margie was 25 years younger than Bill and didn't become Mormon until after she married Bill (and essentially Barb and Nikki).
In the first four seasons, only Barb is Bill’s legal wife. Then in the last season, they obtained a divorce on paper only so Nikki could be the legal one.
Bill is the owner of a chain of home improvement stores. He then buys into a casino and ultimately runs for state senator. During the election, he hides that he's a polygamist, wins the election, and reveals that he's a polygamist while accepting the nomination. Kind of sneaky!
I've never been Mormon, but I lived in Arizona for exactly nine years. I had a lot of Mormon friends, a lot of ex-Mormon friends, and a little bit of a fascination with the LDS church, even though I do not believe in it. Nowadays, one of my side jobs (which I haven't done in several months ) is to take pictures of the landscaping around LDS churches. Kevin asked me why a fascination if I don't believe in it. I said mostly because of their extreme niceness when you first meet them, their emphasis on having large, loving families (which my first boyfriend Matt and I wanted), and just the sheer number of friends I had as a teenager who were born and raised in it. In my high school on the south side of Phoenix, LDS kids could skip one class period per quarter to go across the street and attend seminary. When I used to visit Arizona back when my side hustles paid a lot better, I often made about $60 per hour on the landscaping jobs because of so many LDS churches in the greater Phoenix area.
I have one funny memory of when I was in high school, and they were going to have a hypnotist in either an assembly or a senior event (don't remember exactly). Several LDS kids were getting religious exemptions from participating in the hypnosis. My mother, a devout Greek Orthodox, also went with me to get a religious exemption from the hypnosis. The school administrator commented to my mother like, “If you have a note from your Bishop, you can submit it, but it's not necessary.” I burst out laughing. In Mormonism, every single church location has a bishop. In the Eastern Orthodox church, there's only one bishop over an entire area including several states. Living in Phoenix, we were actually in the diocese of Denver, whereas the local LDS churches with one bishop each were everywhere. My mom looked confused and said, “The bishop? Why would I ask the bishop????” It was just a funny side memory, because my mom didn't realize the disconnect in the meaning of that title across denominations.
But back to the show Big Love. It took a lot of mental gymnastics to watch that show! A marriage with four people instead of only two really gets convoluted. The three women all slept with Bill and considered themselves married to Bill, even though only one was legal, but they weren't lesbians and didn't sleep with each other. There were never three ways or four ways. They had a schedule for “who gets Bill” when. But the three women all talked to each other and used lingo with each other as if they were married to each other. In their eyes, they were.
Bill grew up on the polygamist compound where his second wife Nikki came from, and his parents were also polygamists. However, he was exiled as a teenager by his father. This is very common in polygamist groups. It's referred to as “polygamy’s lost boys”. It's because in any society/group of people, it's likely to always be roughly half male and half female. Any time you get pregnant, it's literally always a 50/50 chance of having a boy or a girl. So what happens is that polygamists have a ton of kids, and the next generation is roughly half male and half female like the rest of planet earth. But the men are only considered worthy to go to heaven if they have at least three wives. The more the better. This results in teenage boys being seen as competition for the younger girls. The men want to keep taking wives, and as the young people get old enough to marry, the older men don't want the younger men marrying the younger women, so they exile them in very horrible, abusive ways. Most of the time, when you hear about abuses on polygamist compounds, you only hear about the abuses towards girls and women. The lost boys aren't talked about. But they're pretty much a mathematical inevitability. In the show, when Bill was exiled by his father, he went out into the world and made something of himself, joined the mainstream LDS, met Barb, and then after years of marriage to her, he realized he wanted to be a polygamist too, and married Nikki and later Margie.
The show has all viewers asking how they would feel about sharing their spouses. No, I wouldn't want to share Kevin. When I was married to Anna’s father, I wouldn't have wanted to share him either. If I had married Matt, I wouldn't have wanted to share him. But when I was on again/off again with my long-distance boyfriend in Arizona, I suspected he saw someone else, but didn't care. I didn't care, because I knew that it was expected of me to be single, independent, and not need/want a man. But going to see him was still fun. People who knew about it were mad that he was a single parent (even though I was too- make it make sense). People were angry and said I “needed to get her side of the story.” One time I said, if she sends her kids a birthday card with five bucks, I might care about her side of the story. My daughter’s stepmother never cared about my side of the story. I even got yelled at once as if I didn't know how to add one plus two. “Do you realize that if you marry him, YOU WILL HAVE THREE KIDS?” Yes. I know that his two kids plus mine would make three.
With all of this outside influence, I didn't consider him a real relationship and knew I wasn't supposed to want one anyway. So the possibility of him seeing someone else was moot..
Women who grow up and are in polygamist spaces are actually taught that they are supposed to share their husbands as a part of God’s will. I understand being ok with something due to your surroundings, due to my complicated feelings about my long-distance relationship. I was born and raised and still live in a society where polygamy isn't the norm, so of course it makes sense that I wouldn't “want to share my husband”. I wonder how I'd feel about it if I were raised in that world, though. Your surroundings shape your beliefs more than you know!!
At the end of the show, as a senator, Bill initiated legislation to legalize plural marriage. It was an extremely emotional scene. He made a lot of good points.
I do believe that there isn't anything wrong with polygamy and polyamory. Yes, there are good points for making it legal. The problematic part is when you start bringing salvation and God’s will into it. If God really wanted every man to have three wives, then babies would be born at a rate of 75% female and 25% male (at least). And this goes for everything else in life- what's right for some will never be right for “everyone”
That's just the way it is.
In the last two seasons, Bill has become a major asshole. In the first three seasons, he's only a little bit asshole. The ass-holiness grows exponentially when he runs for office. At the end, I believe he redeems himself greatly before he gets shot and killed by one of his many enemies.
I really really admired the writing in this series. It was so good at capturing many elements around a specific topic, and this is what I strive to do when I write.
The epilogue sucked- I wish there could be a season six with just the wives. It could happen. Bill the character and Bill the actor both are dead, but all three main actresses are alive and could pull it off. Eh maybe they will someday.
