Answer

Can My Former Spouse’s Choices Cost Me My Eternal Blessings?

Your former spouse may have broken covenants, left the Church, been unfaithful, struggled with addiction, or simply decided to go. Now you are holding questions about eternity that feel like they should have been someone else’s to answer. Grieving a marriage and worrying about your standing before God at the same time is a great deal to carry.

No. Another person’s choices can change your life profoundly. They cannot take from you the blessings God promises through your own faithfulness. Heavenly Father holds each of His children accountable for their own agency, and yours is the only agency you will answer for.

Eternal Truths

Agency makes your choices genuinely yours, and only yours. Lehi taught Jacob, who had already suffered because of trouble inside his own family, that through Jesus Christ we are “free to choose liberty and eternal life” (2 Nephi 2:26-27). If your choices are truly your own, so were your former spouse’s. You are not spiritually accountable for a decision another person freely made.

The promise of eternal family runs through covenant faithfulness, not marital status. The Family: A Proclamation to the World places eternal family relationships inside God’s covenant plan. Elder Neil L. Andersen, quoting President Dallin H. Oaks in “Eternal Marriage Is an Eternal Journey”, taught that singleness, childlessness, death and divorce postpone promised blessings, that those frustrations are only temporary, and that in the eternities no blessing will be denied those who keep the commandments.

What Can Make This Confusing?

Marriages are rarely explained by one decision or one person, and grief tends to go wrong in one of two directions. Some people take on all of it and call that humility. Others refuse to look at any of it and call that self-respect. You may need to repent of real things and, at the same time, put down blame that was never yours. Where there was abuse, betrayal or abandonment, the second is usually the harder work.

What Research Shows

Research on divorced adults has found that hope, supportive relationships, spiritual coping through faith, and constructive meaning-making are associated with growth after a marriage ends. That cannot tell you anything about what happens to a sealing. It does suggest that faith is not only a comfort here. For many people it is part of how the rebuilding actually happens.

Questions to Think About

• What is honestly mine to change?
• What responsibility have I picked up that belongs to someone else’s agency?
• Where do I need repentance and self-compassion at the same time?

What You Can Do

Make two lists this week: what is yours to address, and what belongs to another person’s choices. Anything that will not sort into one column or the other, take to your bishop or a counsellor rather than turning it over alone at night. The essay behind this Answer deals with what happens to a temple sealing after a divorce.

Jesus Christ can help you repent where you need to, heal where you were wounded, and keep walking toward every blessing God has promised you.