Navigating different belief systems
My(26m) girlfriend(f25) and I have been together for about 6 years. We’ve been through a lot of life changes together and a big faith transition. We were both raised Mormon and left in our late teenage years. I struggle immensely with organized religion and belief systems because of it. I don’t trust big organizations or faith systems anymore and we both felt like we were lied to our whole lives.
I’m still healing from this and I refuse to buy into any belief systems right now. You could call me an agnostic I guess, but I just want to live my life unbothered and unpersuaded by these things. I’m sure I’d be open to change but not at this moment in time. I am a very logical and practical thinker and I believe in the scientific process.
The problem is my girlfriend has recently gotten into crystals, zodiac signs, tarot readings, energy testing, etc. I’ve thought it’s all bullshit my whole life but she seems to really be taking a liking to all this stuff. I don’t have a problem with it but it’s starting to get in the way of our relationship. She bases every single decision on energy testing and “what her higher self tells her.” For instance, I have a few products for my dog like these puppy wipes and deodorizer sprays. I’ve looked up all the ingredients and made sure they were safe. But she energy tested them and claims that her higher self told her that there’s ingredients that my dog are allergic to. And if they were organic, they’d be ok. I’m expected to just accept that and believe it and get rid of those products that I spent money on and that work just fine.
She does this with everything now. From what she decides to eat for breakfast to if she should take a bath or not, or whatever simple decisions throughout the day she has to make. It’s really starting to bother me. I don’t care that she believes in these things but I don’t like when it affects my decisions and things in my life. To me it feels like she abandoned one extreme religion for another and idk if we’re compatible anymore. I want to make it work, but I think further into the future about having kids and sharing a house together and I refuse to let my kids upbringing, be dictated by this psuedoscientific method of energy testing everything.
For those of you in mixed faith relationships, how do you deal with navigating differences in beliefs? Are we doomed? When she does this with me and asks her higher self for guidance it just gives me flashbacks to having to pray to the Mormon God about every little decision and ask for guidance from the holy spirit while we wait for a spiritual answer in the form of a feeling. I dont believe in it, it doesn’t sit well with me, and I’m lost on what to do. I want to support her but I just can’t take this shit seriously.
Edit: to add, the biggest issue were facing is struggling to communicate about the problem. When I bring up that I don’t believe in these certain things, she takes it personally and says I just don’t trust her. It feels like she just wants me to throw all my judement out the window and trust all her methods without question.
Tldr: my gf and I are struggling to reconcile belief systems. I am a very logical and scientific thinker, while she is more into alternative medicine and sciences. Her beliefs are starting to affect my life and get under my skin, but I love her and would like to make things work. It just feels like we might be doomed.
1 comment
Minister here.
There are some people who use faith as a way of shaping the way they think about the world, and there are others who use it as a way of *replacing* having to think about the world.
When people come out of a particularly-rigidly-structured belief system (such as the one you left), they generally go in one of two ways:
1. They reject anything organized at all, because they see the “structure” as “control”; they may reject organized religion, and instead seek out a more individualized, eclectic, freeform practice, or they may reject spirituality/religion completely, either stepping into agnosticism, or doubling down and going straight to atheism.
2. They attempt to replace the direction in their lives that their *old* belief system gave them, with direction from a *new* belief system. I find that *many* people who step out of Christianity, who find their way into pagan paths of belief, often gravitate to very structured *kinds* of paganism (such as Wicca, for instance).
It looks like of these two not-unusual paths for people having stepped out of a structured faith, one of you has chosen to go one way, and one of you has chosen to go the other.
My inclination is to say that, of the two of you, you are the one who has chosen the healthier path, because religion/faith should not do a person’s thinking *for* him/her; it should provide a framework that allows him/her to think usefully about how to live life. It appears to me that your girlfriend has simply replaced one dogma with another.
And the thing is, if that’s what she needs, if that’s how she wishes to live her life…no one can choose otherwise for her. Either she’ll stick to that, and that will be her path, or she will eventually grow in a different direction. Either way, that’s *her* path to walk and therefore her decision to make.
This is not, in and of itself, a guarantee that the two of you have no future…but it’s certainly not going to make it *easier*.
What you have to do is *accept her for who she chooses to be*, and decide for yourself whether you, as the logical, scientific agnostic, can have the fulfilling relationship that you need to have, with a person who has chosen to be driven by spiritual belief (in whatever form).
If you *can*, then give it a shot; it may work, or it may not.
If you are certain that you need a partner who views the world more similarly to how you do, then this is not that partner; you have neither the right nor the power to change her, so what that means is that for you to be with who you need as a partner, you have to let her go.