“Writing Your Own Story: Principles for Thriving in a Mixed Orientation Marriage”
— June 11, 2021—
Speaker 1
Welcome to ‘Writing Your Own Story: Principles for Thriving in a Mixed Orientation Marriage’ with presenters Ty and Danielle Mansfield, Northstar International is wholly independent of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It does not receive funding or direction from the church. The following content should not be interpreted as official statements of church doctrines, beliefs, or practices. Northstar International is not a therapeutic organization. It is a peer-led, lay religious support ministry. Our focus is to support individuals as they seek to align their lives with gospel principles and as disciples of Jesus Christ.
Rosa
I'm so happy to introduce Ty and Danielle. And I have to say, between the two of them, they probably have like thousands of years of school, right? I think so. I think so. Danielle did her undergraduate work in Spanish and Italian, and then earned an MBA from BYU. She worked in the private sector for many years before leaving the workforce eight years ago. Ty is a practicing marriage and family therapist, and an adjunct instructor at BYU. He is a founding member, and past president of Northstar. And he's currently serving as a member of the board. Ty and Danielle have been married for 11 years, and currently live in Spanish Fork with their five much-loved children. So, we're so excited to hear from them. I didn't introduce myself. My name is Rosa, by the way. And I'm so excited to be your host. I'm also on the board of directors for Northstar, so it's a pleasure to serve. If I don't know you, I'm probably going to walk up to as many people as I can just to introduce myself. And I'd love to read you our Northstar mission statement. So, first off, thank you for being here. It warms our hearts to be here and to have this sacred space to help all of us. I know I personally had people helping me, so I personally want to give back as much as I can. Northstar is a faith-affirming resource for Latter Day Saints addressing sexual orientation and gender identity, and who desire to live in harmony with the teachings of Jesus Christ, and the doctrines and values of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Okay. So without any further ado, I'd love to turn it over to Ty and Danielle.
(Applause)
Ty
Is mine working? Testing testing.
Danielle
Okay. I just have to say, I am super nervous. And so, one of the things I am really well known for is being really verbose. I've been called querulous. I talk a lot. And being here in front of you today, I feel a little bit at a loss for words. So, it's kind of funny because Ty, like Rosa said, Ty is a founding member of Northstar. He was one of the original people who started Northstar. And he has presented a ton, not only at the Northstar Conference, but he's presented so many times. Because Ty presents so much, and because he's told parts of our story so much, and I think I've done maybe two little videos, Ty has always just been like, “Oh, we want to hear other voices.” So, I usually don't ever present, I've never presented before at Northstar. I usually just sit in the front row of Ty's presentations and try to correct him. So, this is really different for me, this is a very different experience. So, anyway, Rosa told you a little bit about us. But this session, I'm actually surprised there's a lot of men in this session. This session was geared for spouses of someone who experiences SSA, or some type of gender incongruence, or something like that. And so, I was expecting a slightly different audience. So, I'm a little bit surprised. But we're hoping that what we share today can be helpful for anyone regardless of your situation because principles of truth can be applied to anyone's life. So, I wanted to start off by… And also, what I was going to say is because this is a session designed towards spouses, I am actually the main show here, and then, Ty is going to help me and jump in share some things that may be from research, or things that the theory teaches, and also correct my stories when they're wrong. And so…
Ty
I just have to say really quickly, as we were preparing for this, I was looking at peer reviewed stuff, my dissertation has…
Danielle
I actually asked him, I said, “Help me to think of the principles that we're basing this off of, what are the principles that work in our marriage? What are the things that have helped us to have a happy marriage?” And so this is what he does.
Ty
I started thinking about what the research says, and she's like, “Nobody wants to hear the research.” We’re just going to tell stories.
Danielle
He was like, “Do you want part of the four options survey?” And I was like, “No.” And then he's like, “Okay, so these are the things that…” And he goes through it, and I let him go through it. And I said, “You know what? I don't think the spouses care about that. I think they actually want to hear what a spouse has to say about what it's like to be in a marriage with someone who experiences same sex attraction.” I have to say, I felt a lot of nervousness, and I wanted to back out so many times. I wanted to just back out, I was like, “Who am I? What do I have to say? What can I offer to people that's of any value?” Because, to be honest, I don't think of myself as being in a mixed-orientation marriage. I'm just married, and I'm married to Ty. And so, I just felt a lot of like, “What can I say to people who maybe are struggling, maybe are hoping to get married, whatever the situation may be, what can I say to them that has any value?” And it was actually good, because, as we went through things, I realized, in the very beginning, there were a lot of things that everybody who is in a mixed-orientation marriage confronts. It just happened for me that I didn't have a lot of… I have never had any trauma in relation to our marriage. And so, it looks a little different… I'm like take it away. I'm rambling. But my situation has been a little bit different because I knew I was well aware before we ever married that Ty experienced same-sex attraction. And so, there was no sense of trauma, and learning about this. There was no sense of betrayal or anything like that. And so, there are feelings that some spouses experience that I have never experienced, and I will never experience. So, it's a little bit different of a situation there, but I did have to ask a lot of the same questions and try to understand the situation that every spouse wants to know. So, we'll talk about that a little bit. But I wanted to start a little bit by telling our story. Some people have heard parts of it, but I wanted to tell a little bit about how we met and how I have really felt like the Lord guided us from the very beginning. When I was in my 20s, I was in therapy. And one of my issues was like, “Why am I still not married?” which is such a strange issue. But in all this culture, you totally understand. But one of my issues was, “Why am I still not married?” And I remember talking to my therapist about this. And he said, “I feel like most people can marry any number of people and be very happy, have a very happy marriage. And he said, “But I feel like you may be one of the unique people that has a one and only that you're actually looking for.” And, in marrying Ty, I realized all that was true. This is the man that I was supposed to marry from the very beginning. The Lord knew it, and he orchestrated it all along the way for us to come together. So, I wanted to talk a little bit about our story. So, when I first met Ty, I was probably 19, something like that. And we were at BYU, and I didn't even really meet Ty, I just stalked Ty. I just had a crush on Ty. He was like, “Who, what, I don't even know this person.” And he didn't even know who I was.
Ty
And I didn't know any of this until about 15 years later.
Danielle
Yeah. He didn't know this until we were getting married. I'm like, “My plan finally worked.” So, when we were at BYU way back in the day, which like 25 years ago, I'm a little older than Ty. Ty was a freshman and he sang in BYU Men's Chorus under Mack Wilberg. And we were like huge Mack Wilberg fans, my sister, my best friend and I. Why is someone calling me right now, everybody knows I'm presenting. So, we were huge Mack Wilberg fans, and we were huge BYU Men's Chorus fans, and my brother also sang in the BYU Men's Chorus. So, we were like the groupies. We'd go in the back of the class, and we'd watch rehearsals and things like that. And so, we knew who Ty was because he had… I think you sang two solos your freshman year? He's like two solos, so we knew who he was. And, from the very beginning, I just thought, “That just seems like a really good boy, also he's really hot.” And so, we all three had crushes on him. And we would talk about him, whatever. Well, he actually became friends with my siblings. But, back in the day, I was actually even heavier than I am now, and so, I was just shy, and really self-conscious. And I didn't want to put myself out there. So, I just was like, from a distance, he seems really cool. And we actually orchestrated that he would come sing at my sister's farewell back when we had farewells for her mission. My brothers were like, “We want them to sing this song from the BYU Men's Chorus, we want them to sing Mark Wahlberg's arrangement, and also make sure Ty is one of the guys that you asked to come sing.” And so Ty came and he sang, and I met him, and he got to know my siblings a lot better, and he stayed in touch with my siblings. So, years passed. And you really do see the hand of the Lord in it when you see little details that he had in place. But years have passed since that time. He wrote a book, like, he and my siblings didn't really keep in touch. But he wrote a book called ‘In Quiet Desperation.’ I remember seeing it across the room in Desert Book and being like, “What is that? It's a hot guy with black eyeliner.” And so I went, and I picked up the book, and I was like, “Ty Mansfield, oh, my gosh.” And so my siblings and I talked about, like, who knew that our friend Ty had this experience with same-sex attraction all these years and never had anyone to talk to about it and never… He just basically was closeted. But I knew this story, I read most of the book. I have ADHD, so I'm not finishing any books. I read most of them, and I'm like, “I think I got the gist.” Some of my friends will be like, “I love Ty's new book.” I'm like, “I'm sure it's great.”
Ty
This is an understatement.
Danielle
So, I had an idea of what I was going through. Fast forward several more years, I think it was probably 11 years from the time that I first met Ty, to 2006. I was raging mad over a breakup. I go into Bed Bath & Beyond, right about to start my grad program, and right in front of me is Ty Mansfield. And I'm like, “Hey, are you Ty Mansfield.” And he turns around, I'm like, “I'm a Palmer.” And he's like, “Okay,” and we talked. And it doesn't seem like it's a big deal, but when you live states and states apart, to have that one meeting, he ended up being in the same ward as all my friends in grad school. I never saw him again. I saw him that one time in Bed Bath & Beyond, but it was enough for me to feel comfortable adding him on Facebook, which is actually significant because, back when Facebook came about, who even knew how it worked, right? But I thought, “Okay, here's this kid, I just saw him last year, I'm going to add him. And I'm going to actually say, “Let's catch up,” like we didn't really get to talk.” And so we actually started chatting a little bit on Facebook, mostly like Happy Birthday, blah, blah, blah. But it was significant because, then, when I found myself in this existential crisis of like, “I hate business, and I have my MBA, and I'm really miserable in my job,” I reached out to Ty and I said, “I really think I'm supposed to be a therapist. Can you help me understand how to become a therapist?” And Ty said… It's so funny to know Ty now and look back at the interactions, but he said “Let me just take you to dinner when we're both back in Utah, and I can tell you about it then. I'll take you to dinner for your birthday.” And I was just like, “Okay, let's go to dinne when we're back in Utah. I can wait, whatever.” Didn't you have your wallpaper of your phone as my picture at this time?
Ty
Probably. So her sister, who was a photographer, speaking of stalking…
Danielle
It’s actually my brother.
Ty
It was your brother that took that picture? There was this picture because she's half Samoan, so she has this kind of little bit of this exotic Polynesian look. And anyway, there was one photo, I was kind of scrolling Facebook one day, and I just thought, “She's gorgeous.” And so I saved the picture and saved it as my screensaver because I just thought she was so gorgeous.
Danielle
It was stalker meet stalker.
Ty
And there are many sides to this story. This is her chance to tell her side of the story. I have many chances to tell mine. But I was getting to the end, it was my first semester of my doctoral program, and this was around Thanksgiving time, I think, right? Maybe just before or just after Thanksgiving. I'm like, “We're finishing up a semester, I'm going to be back home in Utah, a date couldn't hurt. Worst case scenario, I don't want to go out again.” But this is a really beautiful picture. So, that was how the…
Danielle
Yeah. So when he came home, I was just like, “I'm going out with a gay guy to talk about therapy.” My mom is not going to proceed to call me five times. So, I'm going to have to keep like… Anyway. So I just thought, “I'm going out with a gay guy, it's the anniversary of my endowment, I need to go the temple. So I'm just going to ask him to come with me to the temple. Let's just get this done. Let's do two things at once, and let's go to the temple together.” So, that was our first date. So, we went to the temple, and then, we just talked and talked in the celestial room. And then, we're like, “You know what? Let's go to lunch now.” So, we went to lunch. We actually had plans to go to dinner that night, but I said “Let's just go to the temple instead and so I can get that over with.” And we went to the temple, then we went to lunch. And we talked and talked at lunch, and he finished off my zucchini because he loves zucchini. And then, when we went back to our cars, he said, “Okay, so I'll pick you up tonight.” And I was like, “We're going out again, I thought this was in place of…” But I was just like…
Ty
She was well over me by this point. 15 years later, she'd moved on.
Danielle
No, I wasn't, but I was just kind of surprised that he was still planning on it. So I was like, “Okay, yeah, sure. I didn't make plans, so come on over, we'll like to do dinner too.” And so, we went to dinner, and we just talked and talked at that dinner. And I remember thinking distinctly the guy that I had… This is kind of pathetic, it was 2009, the guy that I had broken up with in 2006, I was still playing that game of maybe. And I was like, “I wish that I could make this guy more like Ty because Ty is awesome. And I wish that I could teach so and so how to talk like Ty, and how to communicate like Ty because Ty is great but he's gay.” And it was really funny because, then, Ty was only in town for a short amount of time, and then, he asked me out again. And I was like, “This is really weird that he's in town for such a short amount of time and he wants to spend so much time. I'm really honored, that is so kind.” And we still hadn't talked about becoming a therapist.
Ty
Can I share a lead-up to this?
Danielle
Sure.
Ty
So as this was where it felt a little… Again, I'm in Texas in my graduate program, and I had never thought that I would get married. I was kind of in this state where I'm not going to get married. I'm figuring out how to be happy and healthy as a single person. I think I've kind of got that down. And then, all of a sudden, I come across this picture, and something, there was just there was this feeling of just rightness. And it's kind of weird to put it that way because we had not even been on a date yet. But I really kind of felt like, “This is who I'm marrying.” But that feels crazy to tell people so I didn't. But I felt like I was and as I…
Danielle
Do you remember I also like posted something on Facebook? My sister and I had just been talking because my sister knows Ty. And my sister and I had just been talking prior to him ever coming back to go on these dates. And I had said something to her. This was maybe a year before this. I had said to her, “Ty is so great. He's just so handsome.” She's like, “Oh, that's too bad. I wish he could marry someone in our family.” I'm like, “I think he loves the Palmers,” because he did, he loved my family. “I think he loves the Palmers.” And so, I just wrote on his page. I am the last hope you have of ever joining the Palmer family because, like, you can joke like that with gay guys. Right? They don't care.
Ty
So yeah…
Danielle
I don’t even know how I made it work. It was something like, “Happy Birthday PS, I’m your last chance.” Totally kidding.
Ty
She's very witty, as you know. And so there were several times there were these very brief interactions on Facebook. And I just would find myself kind of laughing like two or three days later, just kind of smirking at this thing that she had said. And all kind of very silly, but as I was getting ready to come back to Utah, because I was doing my doctorate in Texas, just for like three weeks was our break between semesters. And I remember kind of praying like, “God, I'm willing to kind of step into this. I will do my part, you have three weeks to do yours” And so, that was really kind of how I was thinking, so I was dating her long before she was dating me, and that's also part of our story.
Danielle
So, I was just really flattered that he was asking me out. And then, he wanted to know if I would go to this dinner party at his friend's house for New Year's Eve, and I said, “Yeah, but you know my friend from grad school, Rachel's, in town, can I bring Rachel?” And he said, “Yeah, if she brings her own date.” And I was like, “We're like that. Okay.” So, I just said, “Okay, Rachel, don't come, we'll get together some other time.” And I was just like really surprised by that. So we go, it was actually at Jeff and Tanya Banyan's house. I go to dinner. And I remember Megan and Prep were there, Jeff and Tanya were there. And I remember people, like, as we introduced ourselves, saying things like, “It's so nice to meet you, I've heard so much about you.” And I'm like, “Why have you heard about me?” That's really weird. And so, he wanted me to come by myself and people have heard about me. This is like… What's going on? And then, we had the awkward, like, glance at each other when it turns midnight and everybody else is kissing. And then, I went home, and I was like, “What in the world is happening?” I'm like, “This is something I am totally not familiar with.” And I just started Googling everything that I could find. I started googling gay Mormon, I googled Ty's name. And I just came up with a lot of different searches. I remember seeing -- this is the stalker in me -- I remember seeing some blog posts that Ty had written. And so, he would like later in our relationship talk about, “Yeah, I wrote a blog post.” I'm like, “I've read it, I know about that one.” But one of the things that was significant at this time, at that night when I was looking through… I've told you this before, but I don't know if you remember. So, I drove home from that dinner, I called my best friend and I was talking to her. And I said to her, “I think Ty's actually trying to date me.” The best friend that was in love with Ty in undergrad. I was like, “I think Ty is trying to date me.” And she was just like, “That’s awesome you win. You won.” She's been married by that time for like 10, 15 years. And I remember crying, and being mad at her, and saying, “That's lame. That's not fair for me to have to marry someone who doesn’t love me.” And that's what I thought. And so, I went home. And I just started reading whatever I could read and find about it online, which is always the source of the greatest information you can find, right? And I came across a website of women, LDS women who had been married to men with SSA, who are divorced, who are bitter, and who are basically talking about, “This is a horrible decision. Let's just create this website to warn people.” And as I looked through it, I felt really distinctly, “This is not my story. These stories are not my story and I don't have to have the same experience that they have had.” And as Ty and I later entered into our relationship, and we discussed things, that kind of became a mantra for us, that our lives are our lives, and we write our own story. It doesn't matter what has happened to anybody else for good or bad, we are in charge, we are the co-creators together of our relationship and our marriage. The only person we really need to answer to is God. And together, we'll figure this out. So, I just wanted to say I think…
Ty
So this is us today. This was 40 pounds of dissertation stress to go.
Danielle
Ty loves this picture. And I'm like, “It doesn't even look like us anymore.”
Ty
It's so old. This is us today with our five littles.
Danielle
Yeah. Those are our creatures that came…
Ty
This one, I have to say, if you're friends with us on Facebook, we have this little overheard at the Mansfield's. We haven't posted this one, but this one said, “We're going to do family. We suck at family home evening, so we're going to start family home evening,” and he said, “I hate family home evening, it's just like church. All you do is cry and talk about how Jesus died.”
Danielle
And we're like, “Yeah, basically. Sorry about that.”
Ty
But we love these little people.
Danielle
Yeah. So these are our humans. As Nick and his wife, was her name's Darla? Okay. As Nick and Darla were presenting, I just got really emotional hearing the story about Nick's mom because I thought, “I am so grateful. I am so grateful for Ty's decision when he didn't know what the Lord had in store for him that he just stayed open, and that he chose to follow the Lord.” And I just started crying there at the table as I thought about my wonderful life with Ty. And our five beautiful children who wouldn't be here were it not for his decision to follow our heavenly Father, and just let him lead him. Okay, so you can skip to the next one. So we identified a couple of principles for thriving that have nothing to do with all the research that Ty… Actually they do, but I've rewarded them. There's a lot that are similar, but I'm like. So, I think this is the first thing that made us strong as a couple is we knew from the very start, this is our story. We are writing our own story, we don't care what anybody else has done. And I feel like comparisons for good, and bad, or maybe not good and bad aren't the correct words, but whether you think that someone's life is going in a positive direction, or something that you like, or in a negative direction, or something you don't like, it doesn't really matter what they're doing, it's none of your business. And so, you don't need to worry about what someone else's life looks like, what someone else's path looks like, you have the power, at any point. Luckily, for us, we were able to do it at the start of our marriage. But, at any point in your relationship, you have the opportunity to pick up the pen and say, “I am the author of this story. And I'm going to write what happens to my life.” You can't choose what other people do, but you can still choose so much. You have so much power over your own story. And if you as a couple can decide to be co-creators together, and make that choice in that commitment to each other, it's amazing what you can create. So, before we were ever engaged, going back a little bit to our story, before we were ever engaged, I had gotten over the concern about… Well, I was open to it suddenly, I was open to actually dating Ty and figuring out where this path would lead. And really, so much of our path is not like what most people would expect because it was very faith-driven. Ty often says that it was just like, “Take the next step,” for him. Take the next step, take the next step. We didn't really know where exactly we were headed, or what was happening, but we just had a lot of faith in what the Lord was teaching us and what the Lord was showing us at that time. And I didn't really understand a lot about same-sex attraction. I didn't know that someone with same-sex attraction could feel attraction to someone of the opposite sex. But I had faith. I felt the Spirit guiding me as we were going through this process. But even, notwithstanding that, I still felt some nervousness and anxiety. And I remember expressing, I think it might have been about… I don't know if it was about moving to Texas, but I was expressing some nervousness to Ty about going down this path. Oh, actually, sorry, jump back a little bit. I had heard a lot of stories about couples, dissolving, ending in divorce, and whatever. And I just thought, what if…? Because crazy thoughts. What if this is a facade? What if this is what he's trying to do, and that he feels like he needs to do as a good member of the church? And what if this is not who he is? What if this all falls apart? And what if I end up like one of these women and I was just duped? I had some major anxiety about that. And I remember taking it to the Lord. I remember praying about it and just feeling, “What if he leaves me, what am I supposed to do?” So ridiculous. We haven't even gotten engaged, I'm like, “What if he leaves me?” So my personality. And I felt this distinct impression, “He is who he says he is, you can trust him.” And that was so much peace for me to be like, “Okay. All right. So, it's not a facade, we still can keep going on this path.” As we moved forward, I think, actually, Ty, that we should have put one point, I'm going to skip to another bullet, another principle. So we actually have, “Cast not away therefore your confidence,” as a bullet point of like a principle of how to live in your marriage. I don't know if you guys are familiar with that. It's a scripture, “Cast not away therefore your confidence,” but what I'm referring to is actually the talk that Elder Holland gave on this. He gave it as a speech or devotional at BYU, I think in 99. So, I was probably there at that time. But again, even after receiving this witness from the Lord, I'm kind of hard-headed, I don't know if you can tell, it's actually funny, I'll say to Ty, “I had this epiphany. I had this revelation about something that's going on in my life,” and he'll be like, “You had that same revelation last year.” And I'm like, “I had it again.” So, I started to feel nervous again, I started to feel nervous, like, I'm taking these big steps, I'm probably going to move to Texas so that we can date and figure things out. And I was expressing my concerns to Ty, and he sent me this speech by Elder Holland, “Cast not away therefore your confidence.” And let me just pull up this quote from it. But, in that, I had felt really solid. And I had felt the Spirit guiding me along this process, but why not freak out, why not freak out for no reason? And so, he sent me this talk, and I read it, and it was exactly what I needed to hear. And I think that this is true for so many things, whether it be marriage, whether it be staying in mixed-orientation marriage, whether it be choosing to follow God, even though you have difficulties and trials and sadness, and you're not sure where your path is going to lead, whether you're wondering if you'll ever have a companion in this life, whatever the situation may be, I feel like this talk is so powerful. Elder Holland says in this talk, “Beware of the temptation to retreat from a good thing. If it was right when you prayed about it, and trusted it, and lived for it, it is right now. Don't give up when the pressure mounts.” He goes on to say, “You can find an apartment, you can win over your mother-in-law, you can sell your Harmonica, and therein find one more mill, it's been done before. Don't give in. Certainly don't give in to that being who is bent on the destruction of your happiness. He wants everyone to be miserable like unto himself. Face your doubts, master your fears, cast not away therefore your confidence. Stay the course and see the beauty of life unfold for you.” That was really important for me, and it went along with the prior… I’m like, “Ty, skip.” It goes on to the previous idea of foundation of faith and trust in God and in your spouse. And obviously, trusting your spouse is earned, not necessarily. We'll talk more about trusting your spouse a little bit later. But, for me to be able to have trust in Ty when I just barely really knew him, I really had to take that to the Lord. So, we started off being guided by the Spirit through the whole thing. He was being guided in his own ways, and I was being guided individually in my own ways. And I knew and I felt the strength of the spirit during that whole process, but it is scary. And you do feel anxiety, and learning to reflect on the experiences that I had. And the spirit that I had felt that was unmistakable and strong was so helpful for me in continuing in the path when things started to look a little bit frightening or not what I thought it was supposed to. Oh, my heck it’s already… Yeah.
Ty
So, just to give a little bit of backdrop to this... So just a little backdrop, because on the same scripture, so going back to November, I really did feel like I was riding the spiritual wave, like it felt so guided. And I did not, again, for a long time, about seven years… Because I went through a period of time where I had a bit of an existential crisis, and dated men, and wasn't sure if I was going to stay in the church, and all that sort of thing. And so, once I really decided that I was back in, I really didn't believe I was going to get married. And so, it was about seven years where I felt like the Lord was teaching me this theme of today's manner today, you'll get tomorrow's manner tomorrow. And Elder Christofferson, his talk by the same title ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ became sort of a guiding mantra. And I felt, literally, like I was living in the desert of West Texas, and this kind of idea of just rely on today's manner. It was something that I was relying on, but again, that wasn't going to include marriage. And then, once this thing started with Danielle that I wasn't really sure where it was going to go, it really was, like, there was this feeling of rightness that I had never felt before. I was just doing one day at a time and kind of trusting in the promise, so to speak. And that one day sort of in the next life this would happen. But, all through this, that kind of talk turned into this idea of ‘cast not away therefore your confidence.’ Even though there was a feeling of rightness, I was still just taking that step into the dark only trusting that the way would still be lit a foot or two ahead, as President Packer had often said. But then, this talk, I read this talk probably once a week. It just became this guiding anthem. And so, at one point, I shared this with her. And this became our mantra, that, as we're moving into this, we're writing our own story. We're relying on today's manner today. And kind of just trusting. Trusting God and trusting that this is going to work out without knowing the end from the beginning. And I'm a planner. I'm not ‘enjoying the journey’ kind of person. If I don't have the next five years planned out, my anxiety goes through the roof. I do not like not knowing, and just sort of trusting in the next step. So this has been a journey for me, but it's paid off.
Danielle
So, there were just so many experiences that we had that set us up from the very beginning to feel really solid in our commitment to each other and our commitment to the Lord, and in just trusting because, we don't often talk about this to people outside of our friends, but our engagement was hell. It was horrible. And we both, at different times thought, “If it hadn't been clear, I would be walking away.” And it was really hard, mostly me, let's be honest. I had a lot of feelings. I wasn't communicating them well. And trying to go through that space of understanding each other and being at peace was super hard for me. So, I was hard on Ty all the time, but I felt like I was in a hard place too. So, I realize now that a lot of it was my not understanding the situation, not trusting fully. But yeah, we had some really hard times, and those spiritual promptings and the other experiences that we had really helped us to stay the course when it was really hard. And I have to say, here's the surprise ending, it’s not really hard anymore. But that first little bit was hard, like trying to understand things. So, we ended up getting engaged. And probably a week before we got married, somebody created a website called danielledontdoit.com.
Ty
I have to show you this because it's a… It was an online open letter to Danielle with a… Oh, how come it's not working? There we go. So somebody had taken one of our engagement photos. This is also when I knew that I was marrying a really remarkable human. This was about a week before I was married. I'd been a lightning rod for a while, and I just thought, “Do I really want to bring somebody into this?” Because she's not asking for this. And so, when this posted, I was out of town. I sent her this link, and I said, “I'm really sorry that you're being brought into this.” And her response was just so beautiful, so faithful. She's like, “They don't know me. They don't know me, they don't care about me. If they really cared about me, they could look me up on BYU alumni. They can write me a letter. This was about them, this is not about me. Moving on.” And it was just really beautiful. And it led to just a really beautiful conversation about what true love is, and just us trusting in each other, and trusting in the Lord. And the twist in the story is that once this website URL expired, we bought it. So now, it sort of, this is her Instagram handle, this has become kind of her mantra “Daniel don't do it.”
Danielle
For those of you who follow me on Instagram, that's why my handle is danielledontdoit. It probably sounds like Danielle don't eat that piece of chocolate, or whatever. That's not what it's about. It was a way of me reclaiming, “Don't tell me what to do. This is my life. I know what I'm doing. The Lord knows what I'm doing. You have no business in this.” And to just be like, “Thank you.” And we turned it into a blog, and because I have ADHD, the blog is now dead, but we do own it.
Ty
It still exists, there's just no post.
Danielle
Yeah, it's like you can go read a post from seven years ago. Okay. But there were a lot of experiences. There were a lot of experiences early on that helped to solidify our faith in the Lord in guiding us and also in each other because we have to have a lot of tough conversations there at the beginning. I might be jumping around. So, let's go back to this principle: Seeing each other in your marriage as a whole, get beyond confining labels. So like I said, I don't ever think of myself as being in a mixed-orientation marriage. There are so many people in our lives now who know nothing about Ty's story. We're just married. That's how I feel, we're just married. I will say, though, that early in our marriage, Sally and Garrett, who are closest friends from Texas, we used to talk about it a lot. And we used to just make little jokes about our gay husbands and stuff like that. But once the joke was over, I never think about my husband as being gay, as experiencing same-sex attraction, or anything like that. I always just think of my husband, Ty, who's a really hard worker, who is a therapist, and all the other things that that I think of as Ty. SSA doesn't even… I don't ever even think of it unless it's brought up, and then, I'm like, “Yeah.” So, Sally doesn't want me to say this, but I’m going to say it. Sally, as we were talking this week, she's staying with us, she said, “You have 99 problems, and being gay is just one of them.” And that's how I feel like it is. There's so much that makes a person, and same-sex attraction, or gender identity issues are glaring in your face until you work through what's bringing those issues out for you. And whether they remain a part of your identity or they don't doesn't matter, but they take their proper place after you've addressed what's going on with that. And then, they're a piece of who you are, they're not who you are, if that makes sense. So, it's kind of funny because, probably not a lot of people have had this conversation before, but when I was single in my 20s, I remember getting together with some girlfriends at one of their houses, and we were just talking about a hypothetical of, “Would you ever marry a gay man?” And we're all like, “No way, who would marry a gay man? You want to be loved.” But what it really comes down to is you're not marrying some title or some label, you're marrying another human. And people, early on, nobody asks, nobody wants my opinion anymore, but early on, people would ask me what's it like to be married to a man with SSA. My response is, “I'm not really sure, but I can tell you what it's like to be married to Ty Mansfield.” Every person is different. And every individual has different things their own bag of crazies, as Sally says. Everybody has stuff that they're dealing with. There's no two people who are exactly alike. And so, Ty may be healthy with his SSA, but how he shows up is different than Garrett, who is healthy with this SSA, or Pret, who is healthy. Everybody's different, so I have no idea what it's like to be married to Pret except for what Megan tells me. It's not a stereotype, people are individuals. And I also have to share this little story. So my parents knew who Ty was from in the 90s. And so, when Ty and I decided to get married, my mom's biggest concern, of course, you can imagine it, was, “Does he know about your consumer debt?” It wasn't about Ty.
Ty
“I don't care if he's gay, does he know about your debt?”
Danielle
“Does he know about your credit card problem?” That was her big concern. So, 99 problems, this is just one of them. And I was just like, “Why are you bringing that up?” And so, we did talk about it before we got married, and he was really… I am in the black only because of Ty, let's be honest.
Ty
I want to say one thing about this too because this is a universal thing. Words matter, paradigms matter, ideas matter. They framed the realities in which we live, and this can be in a number of things. I was listening to a talk several years ago by Sheri Dew, she was sort of talking about that period of her life when she was single and she was called as a State Relief Society President. And she talked about how that was a real challenge, because the way she described it, she's like, “The steak that I lived in was a very married steak. And here I am as a single woman in a very married steak,” And you can probably see where this is going. And that frame of how she saw herself so different affected her ability to serve these women in this world. And she said at some point, I just had this thought, and it was really subtle but it was a very paradigm and a very important shift for her, where she said, “I am a woman and I can do a lot for other women. I have a lot to gift other women.” But when she was caught in this paradigm of single versus married, and that became very defining, it really inhibited how she saw herself and how she served the women that she had stewardship over. And I think, whether it's sexual identity, or it's the way you see your marriage, I don't think of myself even as SSA, or gay, or whatever. I'm a man, and I'm in a marriage that I love, with a woman that I love. I'm not in a mixed-orientation marriage. And so, sometimes, I use those labels only for the utility that they offer in certain conversations, because otherwise, people don't know how to talk about it. And their paradigm, it's like, we all kind of exist in our paradigms and we force each other into our paradigms. So sometimes, there is some utility in some of those words, hence the title of our talk. But I don't think of myself as being in a mixed-orientation marriage, I think of myself as being in a marriage with somebody that I love, and a covenant marriage. A marriage where we're both seeking Christ and growing together.
Danielle
Our next principle: Be your own best self, whole marriages are made up of whole individuals. So I think we probably, maybe the older ones of you have heard of that stupid quote in Jerry Maguire where Renee Zellweger comes in and sees Tom Cruise, or whoever came in the room, I don't know who did what, Tom Cruise comes in. And she says to him, “You complete me,” and I think like…
Ty
“You had me at hello.”
Danielle
Whatever, something like that.
Ty
So romantic.
Danielle
But this idea of completing each other, it's ingrained in our culture of you're looking for that person who is your perfect match. Let me get back to that, it just doesn't make any sense because, when you're looking at someone to complete you, you're going to bring your fractured elf to the picture. And so, really, in order to have a healthy marriage, and I think this is something that… When we got married, I still had a lot of issues, I still do have a lot of issues, and I will have a lot of issues, sorry about it, until I die. I'm constantly working on stuff, new stuff that comes up for me, but I had a fair amount of issues, but at the same time, I was in a healthy enough place that I also had a solid sense of self and felt like I also was very progress-oriented where I wanted to be a better version of myself all the time. I wasn't looking for someone to fix me kind of thing, although maybe the Lord was because he had me marry a therapist. So, even then, even though I was healthy, mostly healthy, we worked out a lot of issues with me being not quite emotionally healthy in our engagement, and I think that was what made it so hard. Our engagement was so hard was because I had all this emotional stuff that I had all these weird expectations that now I look at him I'm like, “Those aren't healthy,” but just like that I thought I should come before his grad work. When he's trying to do his program, I'm like, “Drop everything, pay attention to me,” and just different things like that that I realized now weren't healthy, and he was trying to do the best that he could while also dealing with my emotions and helping me to work through them. I was like basically one of his practices. I was his own practicum for his therapy program. Not really, but kind of. But I remember at one time, and this had been the situation for me in dating lots of different guys that I had dated previously, always feeling like I could bring something to the picture. Like I was a good cook, or I was really funny, or I was great at picking up after them. When I'd go like visit them at their house, I would clean up, and cook, and basically play house, and just add some value to their lives where they were missing something and I could bring in something for them. Ty is actually very clean. He already had his own furniture, his house was fully furnished, it didn't look like a bachelor pad. It was his own furniture, pictures on the wall. Everything's on dishes. He cooked for himself. And I remember at one time just feeling like, “You don't even need me, why am I here? You don't need me.” Why don't you finish this story because I get a little bit muddled with how…
Ty
Well, I said, “I don't need you,” and this is the part of the story that she hates then that I love. Because leading up to this point, I've been living my life. I'm living to be a happy… I'm seeking the Lord to help me to be a happy, healthy, whole single person because marriage is not in the cards. And I felt like I had arrived. And one of the things that was also -- this is a very important part of my story -- is that I had a very strong spiritual experience early on when I was in a very conflicted place that I felt I had sort of a vision, I don't know how to describe it, other than a vision, but it was more of a feeling but where I just felt the Spirit rests on me. And I had this vision of feeling of what celestial love felt like. And I kind of just rested in that for about two hours. And it just made everything that we think of as sexuality, and romance, and everything heterosexual, whatever, all feel very shallow, and very superficial. But just sitting in this feeling, it was very transformative in that I thought like, “Okay, this is what I'm working for.God is this being of love who loves like this, and this is the feeling.” If you've ever read near death experiences where people talk about being in the presence of God, and this energy of love just radiated. And often, the interviewer is like, “Tell me about that.” And they’re like, “Well, love doesn't even begin to describe it.” But the closest word we have is love. And I just rested in that. And so, I thought, “Okay, I'm not getting married, but I want to learn how to love like this.” And somewhere in my graduate program, I was introduced to mindfulness as kind of through meditation, contemplative practices. First through sort of the kind of the mental health frame because that's really where it sort of saturated Western culture, is initially through mental health. And then, now there's a lot of contemplative spiritual practices, and whatnot. But this introduction, like into Eastern thought and Eastern conceptions of love. I thought Eastern conceptions of love are much closer to gospel conceptions of love than our Western fixations on romance and sexuality. And so, I just remember just sort of sitting in this and thinking, “I want to be this love,” and that love is a choice. And as much as there's kind of cute mantras and things in our culture about love is not a choice, the Lord was saying, “love is absolutely a choice. And not only are you choosing it, you're becoming it.” So that process for me was very important. And so, to come into and to feel like… And I still don't have this figured out. But to come into this, I felt like I had come to such a healthy place where my love is a gift for somebody, not that I fall into or that I fall out of, or that I have no choice around. And so, to be with her and to feel like I love this person. I don't need marriage, I don't need a wife, I don't need a romantic relationship, but here's a person that, when I look forward my life, I want to do life with this person. Camille Fronk Olson, if you know that name, it sounds really sexist when a guy says it, but she was telling me the story about how when she was in her early 50s, she got married in her mid-50s, I think, but here she was in her early 50s had never married, and she's like, “I just had this epiphany as I was sitting one morning eating breakfast, and I thought, ‘my life is really good and it would require a really good man to be better than no man at all.’” And she just had this very empowering moment. As she was telling me that. I was still single at the time and I remember thinking like, “That's how I feel.” But a guy can't say it, it just sounds really sexist for a man to say that. But that's how I felt. And so, when it came to Danielle, and we'd been building this relationship and I'm like, “I don't need you to complete me, I don't need you to make me happy, I'm really happy in my life and I feel like my life would be value added with you in it.” And that was kind of the approach. So, when she's like walking through my apartment, and I can see her just deflating, she just… There was this very visible, “You're not impressed.” And so, when she said that to me, “It just seems like you don't need me.” I was like, “I don't. I'm not with you because I need you, I came with you because I want you. I want this and I want to see where this goes.” She did not like that. I was feeling very empowered and like I had kind of arrived in this really beautiful place that she was going to appreciate, and she did not.
Danielle
But I feel like there's been a lot of… I feel like marriage has been very sweet, and also a really schooling experience for me because there's been so many things that I've learned from being married to Ty like that, like, “Okay, so if he doesn't need me, and he just wants me, then I just need to show up as my best self, and what does that mean for me?” And I think that's a lifelong process for all of us to figure out how do we show up as our best selves? What are the things that we need to cast aside? I did some therapy when we lived there in Texas, and I've done therapy when we lived in Utah, but it's just like this idea of, in our relationship, I can only control me. So, regardless of what Ty ever does, we actually have a great marriage, and he's really kind and wonderful, but we fight. And so, regardless of what he does, I need to figure out how to be happy in myself and whole in myself, and that's what I bring to the table. Not looking for, like, you pick up the slack here, or I need you to fill this emotional need because I'm lacking here. So, I think it's really important for everybody to do their own work as we say, like, whatever that work may be, but to do your own work in becoming aware of what's going on with you, and how you can be your best self. And so, I have had to do that, and I still have to do that. One of the things that was actually revelation to me, it shouldn't have been a revelation, but it was, when we got married, I was probably 80 pounds smaller than I am now. But what you don't know is I've been 70 pounds heavier than this when we were married. So I gained like 150 pounds when we got married. But when Ty first met me, I was probably about that same high weight. So, I've dealt with addiction.
Ty
This was back when I was a freshman. And then, when I really saw her again, she had lost all of it.
Danielle
I was in a healthy place around my weight. But I have struggled with food addiction since my earliest memories, like obsessed with food. And last year, I started this program to actually deal with my food addiction. And it was like, revelatory, how different our marriage felt, even though we felt like we had a happy and great marriage before, how different it felt when I was not encumbered by my addiction. And when I was showing up as the best version of myself, and I was like present, and not numbing with -- bread is my favorite -- when I wasn't numbing with food and stuff. It was just really amazing to us. And so, I think that is like a principle that has helped our marriage to be happy. This food addiction thing, I've only really started to tackle it within the past year and a half. But throughout our marriage, we've looked at things that we could do better at as individuals and as a group. And so, I think bringing your best self to the marriage is really important. Let's see, did you want to talk about integration and sexuality?
Ty
One of the things, I want to share this even though this was probably true for everybody, but just more from kind of the SSA spouse perspective. One of the things that I've realized that was part of my own journey, and that I think is really critical, especially as I do a lot of therapy with individuals who are considering marriage. And I really personally believe that, until you really belong to yourself, and really feel like you have a strong sense of self, you really don't have any business like trying to, or you really can't belong to another. And so, we all kind of go through this process of… And I think this is really hard for sexual minorities because we get kind of stuck with a lot of shame, and things like that, in adolescence, and early adulthood, and sometimes even longer. But we're all kind of in this process, from human development… I'm going to get a little sciency and research here for a moment, but this was a very critical piece for me. When I look back and think, “Okay, why was this easy for me when I worked with a lot of people who really struggled? And I think a big part of this is that I had seven years to kind of figure out the messy before I ever entered relationships. And sometimes, when people just start to come to terms with these when they're already messy, or when they're already married, the messy is being sorted through while they're married, and that just makes it really challenging. And so, when you're in adolescence, sexuality and spirituality really kind of have this dualistic, this conflicted, it's a temptation, kind of you're at war with yourself. Sexuality is the thing that you manage rather than being a part of who you are. I teach religious Ed, I teach Eternal family Class at BYU in religious education. And then, we have this unit on chastity and sexual intimacy in marriage. And last semester, I decided to kind of incorporate a bit of this. So, what does it mean, just through a frame of chastity, to really feel like sexuality is good? It's not having sex, it's about this attributional sense of sex is good and it is holy. It's a part of who God has created us to be. Whether we have sex in this life or not, we are sexual beings and we need to honor that rather than feeling like we're constantly at war with our sexuality. And I had a student, and the majority of my students are heterosexual. And this one student who was always at the front of the class, I noticed that the day we were having some of the readings on this, he sat in the back of the class. And came up afterwards and was just shaking. And he just wanted to tell me why he sat at the back of the class. And he's like, “This was really hard for me.” I was like, “Do you want to talk about it?” And he said, “Nope.” And he just wanted me to know. But when I read his reflection that week, he just talked about how painful, nobody in his life had talked about it. So, to even have this talked about in a religion class was so incredibly uncomfortable that it just brought up so much anxiety for him. And I think, “What are we doing to each other? Why do we not have a healthier conversation about this in our culture?” And so, but this idea of just we are sexual beings, and we are good as sexual beings. But this is a normal part of human development too, where this is an adolescent stage where one of the key tasks of adolescent development is identity development, where we start to move from an external reference of self to an internal reference of self. Because, again, for most of our life, who I am is what everybody else tells me that I am. Even our kids, it's like, “You don't get dessert if you don't eat your healthy food,” and they're like, “Why do you hate me?” It's like, “I don't hate you, I love you, but you just don't get dessert if you don't get any…”
Danielle
“Why do you hate me? I wish you were dead.”
Ty
Last night, it was, “I wish you were dead.” And I think a lot of us as adults are not that much more sophisticated, but whatever. But there's the sense in which I really feel like I had time. It wasn't just about a gay man marrying a straight woman and trying to make it work, like, I really had time to figure out who I am and what I wanted. And this was an expression of my faith, not what I should do. And when I started, even dating Danielle, I had like two friends who I talked to about it because I didn't want anybody else's opinion on what I was doing. This was my choice for my life. And even my parents, early on, when I kind of opened up to them, and they're like, “Don't you see marriage? And why don't you see marriage?” I'm like, “I don't even want to talk about it with you. If I get married, I will tell you. And until then, the conversation is off-limits.” So my parents didn't even know that I was dating Danielle until I got engaged because it was really important that this was my decision for me, I didn't want anybody telling me what gender I should be with, or how I should navigate this, and that was very important for me. But really developing that strong sense of self for me, and choosing into this from a very healthy place is part of why this was, I think, relatively easy, other than our engagement. Again, dating was blissful, engagement was hell. It was pretty blissful. Almost immediately, once we got married, and were living together, it just felt really easy. But anyway, I think that really figuring out who you are… What I like to tell my students is that, “Sometimes we think of marriage in terms of math.” A whole is made up of two halves. We say things like that, like our better half. I think, in marriage, it's more like multiplication. Two halves don't make a whole, two halves make a quarter. You have half healthy people, you have about a quarter of a healthy marriage. In marriage, it's multiplication, that really two whole healthy people, as much as you can be, we're all mortal and fallen beings. But as much as you can, the more whole you are as an individual, the more whole of a marriage you're going to have. And I think that has been a very important piece for us because I'm not responsible for her self-care, and she's not responsible for my self-care. I'm not responsible for her healing, and she's not responsible for mine, I am. And she is. And that's the approach that we take. We support each other. So when she says, “I really want to go take a stained glass art class, can you be there with the kids on these nights?” I'm like, “Sure. We'll make that happen,” and she'll do the same thing for me.
Danielle
I actually did the windows for the new temple. I'm just kidding. I did like a manatee.
Ty
She did make a manatee. It was one of the best gifts she's ever given me because I love manatees. Do you want to take that?
Danielle
Yeah. Okay. So, I think the next principle we want to talk about, which everybody else talks about when you talk about marriage, is strong communication. That's next, isn't it? Yeah, so strong communication. Being open, honest, and empathic. And this is hard. Especially when you're first starting to talk about hard things, whether that's at the beginning of your marriage, or you're just easing into it at some point in your marriage, it's hard because you have to be vulnerable and you have to leave yourself open to get hurt. But I think that Ty experiencing SSA really set us up for starting off our marriage, learning how to communicate. One of the things I had to ask him -- you guys are going to think I'm super naive -- but I actually went into this into our marriage, and into engagement, not knowing still what it meant. I was just going off of I love this man and I feel like the Spirit is guiding me. But I don't really know a lot else about how this is going to work. “Are we adopting kids, what happens?” I remember, we were engaged, and I actually had to ask him because I didn't want to figure it out after we were married, I had to ask him, I said, “Do you even like me? Are you actually sexually attracted to me?” And so we had to have that conversation. The answer was, yes. But we had to have that conversation. But you can imagine what a vulnerable place that put me in, that here I was in the situation and I have to ask this guy, like, “What does this even mean? What are we doing here? Are we actually going to be having sex as a married couple? Do you actually like me?” And so, we had a discussion about that before we were married, and that was really great to get such a hard topic as that out of the way. We've had to have hard conversations throughout our marriage, of course, just like as we deal with different things. So, I told you guys, I am a really wonderful person, but I'm also kind of a mess in some ways. And I just have to share, like, I think this really set us up to have really tough conversations, I'm going to tell you something I did that I did in my mind innocently. I already told you I have food addiction, I also have other addictions, like spending money. And, for a time, I sold multi-level marketing products. And when I sold that products, I had a credit card that Ty was aware of that I would buy things with. And this is such an aside, but I'm just going to show you the kinds of levels of conversations we've had to have. But I would spend money on that card for my products, and then, I would resell it, and then I was supposed to make the payments on my card. Well, I eventually maxed it. And I wasn't selling as much as I should. So, I thought, “I'm going to hit it big any day now with my multi-level marketing company.” And so, I got another card, and I maxed that. And I think it was like 14,000, it is a lot of money. Yeah, addiction. So, it's like SSA is the least of concerns that happened in marriage. I just bought anything that I felt like I needed to. And I never told Ty because I didn't want him to be upset. One of Ty's things of safety is safety around money. So, I was obviously violating that. And so, I was going to fix it. Any day now, I'm going to get a job. I'm going to fix it. I just kept rationalizing this to myself in a lot of shame over that I’ve done this. And then, Ty had to have our credit pulled, we do everything in his name. So, he’s not going to pull my credit, right? He pulled my credit. And so, I get like this phone call, “What is this?” And we had to talk about that. And we had to resolve that. And we had to work through that. And he was super compassionate, but that was actually the catalyst for me realizing like, “You have an addiction problem, and it's all over the place, volcanoing everywhere, coming out every which way.” But I really believe that SSA has been a blessing for us because it set us up to have hard conversations and to still love each other. Let me tell you about another hard conversation we had because I feel like this conversation really helped me to understand love. This was early in our marriage. I gained 90 pounds with my first baby. I think I lost 20 after I had the baby. Our babies are close together. They're less than two years, most of them. I lost 20 pounds. And, by the time I started to get on a roll to lose weight, we were pregnant again. And my hormones tell me, “eat everything in sight,” and I usually listen. So, I gained more weight with my second baby. And I remember, I don't even know how it came up, but we had to have a tough conversation about my weight, my health, what I was doing to myself. And you can see it still took me probably five years to really do something about it, to find an answer for me that would work for me. But we had to have a tough conversation about this. And I feel like, in a lot of ways, these tough conversations bring you closer because I felt… So basically, my weight, obviously, was hard for Ty. From a health perspective, from an attraction perspective, I had gained so much weight so quickly, and he was struggling with it. And so, he finally came to me with it, and we had to talk about it. And I felt heartbroken, like, my husband doesn't even love me anymore because I've gained all this weight. But Ty is so good that he helped me to separate it and tease it out. To understand that I am not my weight, I am not my addictions, I'm not the things that I struggle with. And actually, one of the ways that we were able to do it is he's like, “What don't you like about me?” And I was like, “I'll tell you.” And so I made a couple of things that he did that I didn't like, and he's like, “Is that me? Do you still love me?” And I was like, “Yes, I still love you, and no, those aren't you. Those are behaviors you engage in.” And I feel like that really taught us a lot about what is love really. And how he still totally loved me, but he was really concerned about this destructive behavior I was engaged in. And then, for the sake of our own health, I had to manage it. He couldn't be my accountability partner, he couldn't parent me.
Ty
I still try to.
Danielle
Sometimes he does, but I usually remind him, I'm like, “Remember, we do better when you don't.”
Ty
And she's right.
Danielle
I really do. Like, he'll be like, “How did your eating go today?” And I'm like, “Fine, it went fine. You don't need to worry about it.” And I can't tell you how to develop communication skills, I think you just have to jump in and just do it. And just start practicing because, as you do that, you create safety with your partner where you realize they can still love you. They actually care about you, that's why you're having tough conversations. And you can resolve issues when you talk about them, you can't when you don't.
Ty
I'll tell you how to do it. You read the book, ‘Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When the Stakes are High.’
Danielle
He actually is really good about stuff like that. And when he's not good about it, I tell him. I'm like, “You should have said this like this.” And I'm like, well try…
Ty
And then she follows it up with, “I can't believe you're a therapist.”
Danielle
I'm like, “The nice way to say that is here.” Okay.
Ty
“You wouldn't say that to your clients like that.”
Danielle
I actually have said that to him. Oh, I also wanted to talk about strong communication. You have to decide in your marriage what works for you and what doesn't. We're almost out of time, what else do we have to… Okay, we're almost done. Okay. You have to decide what works for you in your marriage. Okay, great. I'm just going to say some things about communication really quickly. I had to set some boundaries for my own safety and for my own feeling okay in the marriage early on. And if these don't work for you, don't worry about it. And if it doesn't work for you, talk to your therapist. Like if there's something that really feels like you could talk to somebody else about it and see what could work for you. But, for me, we talked early on that, when we have sex, we don't fantasize about other people. And we just had to put that out there. There's no fantasizing. For us, that works. For some people, it doesn't. Like I said, personal decision, talk to your therapist.
Ty
Didn't I bring that up to you?
Danielle
What?
Ty
Didn't I offer that?
Danielle
No, I offered… Oh, that we don't fantasize about other people? Yeah, but I would have never thought to fantasize about other people. I was really grateful he brought it up. I was like, “That's a good one. Yes.”
Ty
Because this is the thing, things come up, because you hear -- we're going to go to get into sex territory here for just a second -- but I would hear stories of women who would say really patronizing things, just to the broader culture, like, “Oh, I have to fake an orgasm so he feels like a man,” and that kind of thing. I'm like, “What a patronizing thing to do.” And so, as we're getting married, I'm like, “I want you to promise me something. If we're together, I want it to be us. I don't want you to have to lie about anything, I don't want you to fake anything.” So I was like, “This is my commitment to you,” and for some reason, that one thing was really important to me. But I'm like, “Please don't fake anything. And if we need to talk about things, we can talk about things, but be real with me. I want you to show up real for me. And my promise to you is, if I'm with you, I will be fully with you. And if I can't, I won't be with you. But my commitment to you is that I will be with you.” And so, she was like, “Oh, that's great.” But it was a really important conversation for me to have.
Danielle
That don't fake an orgasm thing, from a female perspective, that was actually really good because I think I probably would have had he not laid that as groundwork for our sexual relationship. And so, if it's not working for me, I have to tell him, I have to communicate, and I have to say, “Do this.” I can tell you some tricks. Just kidding. There are other people who do that, but we had to talk about stuff. And so, we laid a couple of… We don't have like a set of rules for us, but there's a couple of things I identified early on that we had talked about that have really made a difference for us. That was one of them, that we always knew when we're together, we're together. We usually have lights on, looking at each other, we're together. Another thing that was really helpful for me in helping me be at ease, I grew up in a family where my parents fought a lot. They are both amazing people, really struggle to get along. And when we got married, we would fight. And obviously, that's going to bring up something for me seeing it happen so much in my childhood. We didn't fight a lot, but we would fight about things, we do fight about things. And early, early, early on, Ty said to me, “I'm not leaving. If anybody leaves, it's going to be you because I'm not leaving you ever. We're not getting divorced as far as I'm concerned.” And that just made me feel really safe and able to show up in my marriage as myself. I never had to fake anything, I never had to pretend anything because who I was, even when I was raging, and irrational, was okay, because he wasn't leaving me. And then, we could work it out together. I am amazed at the number of people who take it for granted that they're not getting divorced, but they never actually talk about it. And so, if you don't ever talk about it, it's open. You've left the door open. You have to talk about it and decide together that you're 100% committed. And that created so much safety for me to just be myself in our marriage. Like I said, these are just some rules that we made, the fantasized one, we're never getting divorced. There was one more. Oh, rules around SSA men. So obviously, when we first got married, anyone, any spouse who is first dealing with this issue has fear around this because you don't know what it means, you're worried about losing your spouse. And so, for me, even with Ty being in as healthy a place as he was, I kind of just had to say, “I don't want you to be alone with another man with SSA.” And then I also said, “You cannot be alone with a man with SSA unless he's a safe person.” And I designated a few safe people. And then, I think that was basically it. And then, as time went on, I have just grown in my trust and my faith in Ty that I never ask him who he's hanging out with unless I'm just curious. I never put rules. Basically, that rule went away once the trust was established. But I think you have to set up some things that create safety for you. And so, it's important for you to identify; what are you feeling? What do you need? What boundaries do you need to put in place for you to feel safe? And then, obviously your partner makes their own choices, but you need to communicate that to them. Yes.
Rosa
I'm going to repeat that quickly just for everyone at home. So pre-marriage, how did you create safety for each other? That was it, right? Okay.
Danielle
In being able to communicate with each other? Is that what you mean? So, I think that we had a unique situation in that I didn't know I was dating him. And so, on our early days, I talked a lot about stuff that was going on with me, stuff that I had concerns with. I was vulnerable with him from the beginning because I didn't know I shouldn't be, like, I had no reason to not be.
Ty
She didn’t have anything to lose because she didn’t have that.
Danielle
Yeah. So, it's funny because, then, once we were engaged, Ty actually took some of that information and used it against me. Just kidding. But once we were engaged, Ty actually took some of that information, my concerns about sexuality, how other men had treated me, and things like that, and he was very careful, and very cautious because he remembered. But I was really vulnerable from the very beginning, talking to him about my dating history, issues that I had had, my therapist, I even cried on that dinner that first day that we went out, I cried at dinner just talking about my things. And that's when I was just like, “How can I have Ty, or other men be like Ty?” Because I felt like such a connection to him. So, I think part of it was allowing myself to be… You don't have to be totally vulnerable, but allowing yourself to be vulnerable in a relationship. You're actually doing a relationship, and so, allowing yourself to be seen. You don't have to show everything, but allowing yourself to be seen little by little until you do gain full confidence in the other person wanting to love you and care for you. One of the things, like, the mantra of our marriage that Ty says to me anytime I'm bugged, or whatever it is, “I never meant to hurt you.” And it's kind of silly now. But, from the very beginning, he would say, “I'm so sorry, I wasn't trying to hurt you.” And so, setting our marriage up that way, we're not trying to hurt each other, people just do hurt each other. So that we understood, we love each other, we're caring for each other. And I think that from the very beginning it created safety for us. And also, a huge piece of it was just how connected we were to the Lord, and feeling guided, and like is this a safe path for me to take. So I could get engaged without knowing if this man is ever having sex with me, like I could take that path, and then, have the tough conversations when I was actually ready to. I could take those steps because the Lord was guiding me and I felt really confident in the Lord's care for me, if that makes sense.
Ty
Can I just say one thing? There's a part of me that, as a professional, like, looks at everything that we… Please don't, just don't, like, two seasons in a row trip, do not get married that fast, get to know her better. There were a lot of things that I think…
Danielle
We both knew we were getting married after three weeks, we were engaged at seven weeks.
Ty
Yeah, that I think professionally, generally speaking, I wouldn't recommend. And yet, I wouldn't do it any differently because we just felt so right about everything. We were trusting the Lord in that process. And I think there are going to be times when things don't make sense. And generally speaking, I'm like, follow best practices, right? Be wise, be careful, get to know them as much as you can. And when the Spirit speaks, you can trust God, I absolutely believe that God will always follow through when he makes a promise.
Danielle
Yeah. And I think, what I realized -- I said this to Ty last night as we were going over our presentation -- I realized, I designated safe people for Ty that he could hang out with one-on-one. Not that he was trying to hang out with people one on one, but like if you go to lunch with someone, or he didn't have to try to get two guy friends to go. So, this is a safe person. There were like a handful of them. But what I realized as time went on is I don't check up on Ty anymore because Ty is a safe person. And so, I trust Ty, doesn't matter who he's with. And like really, that has to make sense to because he's a therapist, he sees men with SSA constantly. And some of them are probably really attractive and really cool. I don't worry about it because Ty is safe, and that just came with time of like trusting each other, and talking, and being open with each other. And stalking each other's on your find my phone. Just kidding. I'm just kidding about that. I actually do when he's like on his way home. I'm like, “Okay, he's at this exit. I'm about to turn your kids over to your dad.” That's the only time I check where he is. So, the last two, I'll just say what they are. They kind of go without saying, so I won't go into a lot of detail. But the last two are meeting your needs, being responsible for your own needs. One of the things Ty drilled into my head when we were first married is adults ask for what they want. Because I grew up in a marriage that expected mind-reading. Yep. I grew up in a marriage. I grew up with my parents in a marriage where mind reading was kind of expected. Like, “You should have known.” And it just doesn't work like that because, even with our kids, sometimes, they’ll say stuff to us, and we're like, “You have to communicate that, you have to tell us.” So adults ask for what they want. If you want something from your spouse, you have to tell them. And also not relying fully on each other to meet all of our needs. We have lots of friends, and I don't try to… There's actually times when Ty will be like, “Hey, this new Marvel movie is out, do you want to go see it?” And I'm like, “That's for one of your guy friends. Just go plan a date night with some guy friend,” but I say that flippantly because like Marvel movies are not a need, but there are other needs. I need different connection. Women need women and men need men, and I'm not expert in what men need from other men, but I'm an expert in what women need for women. So, I just trust, like, you need your own intimacy, you need your own bonding, you need to be able to talk things out as a man with other men, I need that too, I have tons of female friends that I get that from, and then, I do also have a few guy friends who meet my needs for music. He likes pop, I don't like pop. So, you're a person with so many different facets, and to expect one person to fulfill those needs is just ridiculous. But that's kind of what we're taught in pop culture. And then build a strong support system. I think that goes without saying. For me, I really latched on to other spouses when I was first engaged and getting married. And then, once Garrett and Sally got married, and they moved next to us. Sally and I talked about tons of stuff. And then, also, having friends, and sisters, and cousins in heteronormative marriages was huge for me because then it helped me to see, “Oh, that's not an SSA thing. That's a marriage thing, or that's a man thing, or that's like…” I have friends who have all different issues that they face. And so, if one of those issues comes up for me… It's so easy in a mixed-orientation marriage to scapegoat the SSA and to say, “He is like this because of this,” or, “She is like this because of this.” But usually, it's something else that's going on that's creating that. And maybe it's not even an issue, maybe that's just normal behavior and you're just not used to it because you've never been in marriage before. You've only been in one other marriage, and you're just not familiar. So, having a support system is huge. I think we have two minutes for questions.
Rosa
We probably could do one question. But the good news is that Danielle has offered herself, you can friend her on Facebook, and ask her…
Danielle
Tell me who you are, though. I'm serious. Like, if you friend me on facebook, send me a message that just says like, “Hey, I was at your Northstar presentation,” or whatever it is because in this community, there are people who don't like us, so I don't add people I don't know anymore. So just say, “Hey, this is who I am.” And I'm like, “Okay, great.”
Rosa
We could probably do one question, though. Is there a burning question, any burning question? I will just say this. First off, I'm sure if you're like me, I feel really refreshed. This is great stuff. So great. Some of the comments I wrote down, like powerful statements that we've heard from both of you; I'm the author of my story, which I think is really powerful. Rightness, relying on mana today, sometimes we don't have the answers that we don't have it all figured out. And, being able and that all leads itself to trusting God. And this was something really big. You said, Danielle, “Having the ability to tune out all of the outside power and influence, all of the sheds, and really trust God, and be able,” and that all goes to writing your own story paradigms, the gift of being vulnerable, compassionate communication. So, this was also great. Thank you all so much for being here. And even as I was sitting here listening myself, I was reminded, because sometimes, we come into these breakouts, which, number one; it's amazing that we're all here. It takes tremendous effort to be sitting here and in the seat. I gave myself the invitation and I'll offer it to everyone else, be willing here to maybe let go of what you think you might know about something, or about someone. To be open and willing to be taught because there's so much that can happen throughout this weekend. So, thank you so much for being here. All right, let's get to lunch. Thank you.
(Applause)