Pearls 2: Michael, Shoshanna, et al

[Coconut Flan]

Continued from here:

 

[hoipolloi]

Looks like Eric's teenaged son is helping with the audition. He's been fixing up some utility vehicles & a go-kart Shoshanna has. 

 

[BeautifulSquirrelhood]

On 12/22/2023 at 5:48 PM, hoipolloi said:

Looks like Eric's teenaged son is helping with the audition. He's been fixing up some utility vehicles & a go-kart Shoshanna has. 

 

Definitely spotted him in one of her Christmas morning photos so it seems a pretty safe bet they’re a couple.

[JermajestyDuggar]

11 minutes ago, BeautifulSquirrelhood said:

Definitely spotted him in one of her Christmas morning photos so it seems a pretty safe bet they’re a couple.

Yes and she just said another family spent Christmas with them. Not that he’s her boyfriend. She’s not publicizing this at all. I bet she won’t say a word until they are engaged and 2 months out from the wedding. Then she will gush over him in long walks of text about how perfect he is for her blah blah blah. 

[BeautifulSquirrelhood]

16 minutes ago, JermajestyDuggar said:

Yes and she just said another family spent Christmas with them. Not that he’s her boyfriend. She’s not publicizing this at all. I bet she won’t say a word until they are engaged and 2 months out from the wedding. Then she will gush over him in long walks of text about how perfect he is for her blah blah blah. 

100 percent!

[TrueRebel1]

21 hours ago, JermajestyDuggar said:

Yes and she just said another family spent Christmas with them. Not that he’s her boyfriend. She’s not publicizing this at all. I bet she won’t say a word until they are engaged and 2 months out from the wedding. Then she will gush over him in long walks of text about how perfect he is for her blah blah blah. 

I wonder if she will have another "biblical" marriage, or a legal marriage? 

 

I've often wondered if her legal marriage to James a few years ago was the beginning of the end. I wonder if James was becoming more financially savy with the sucess of their Plexus business, and if in the process he deconverted from the "biblical" marriage concept that Papa Pearl and Shoshanna had insisted on. Maybe Shoshanna, still in adoration of Papa, never was on board with a legal marriage but agreed as a "helpmeet" wife should. 

[JermajestyDuggar]

23 minutes ago, TrueRebel1 said:

I wonder if she will have another "biblical" marriage, or a legal marriage? 

 

I've often wondered if her legal marriage to James a few years ago was the beginning of the end. I wonder if James was becoming more financially savy with the sucess of their Plexus business, and if in the process he deconverted from the "biblical" marriage concept that Papa Pearl and Shoshanna had insisted on. Maybe Shoshanna, still in adoration of Papa, never was on board with a legal marriage but agreed as a "helpmeet" wife should. 

I always saw it like a vow renewal. Sometimes people will do a vow renewal because there are a lot of problems in the relationship. And they think a renewal will fix it. 

[Alisamer]

1 hour ago, TrueRebel1 said:

I wonder if she will have another "biblical" marriage, or a legal marriage? 

 

I've often wondered if her legal marriage to James a few years ago was the beginning of the end. I wonder if James was becoming more financially savy with the sucess of their Plexus business, and if in the process he deconverted from the "biblical" marriage concept that Papa Pearl and Shoshanna had insisted on. Maybe Shoshanna, still in adoration of Papa, never was on board with a legal marriage but agreed as a "helpmeet" wife should. 

I got the impression that their accountants, upon finding out all these years later that they weren't ACTUALLY, LEGALLY married, strongly suggested that they go get the paperwork taken care of. Immediately. Right now, while the accountants go change their pants and call up their attorneys to make sure they aren't going to be on the hook for any shenanigans that might have come up due to them lying about being married all these years. 

I could, however, see Shoshanna doing the original sort of "just the two of them and God" kind of "biblical marriage" again. Because I think that is just "we said some stuff to God to make it OK for us to have sex before we were actually married" in the first place. 

[hoipolloi]

4 hours ago, Alisamer said:

Right now, while the accountants go change their pants and call up their attorneys to make sure they aren't going to be on the hook for any shenanigans that might have come up due to them lying about being married all these years. 

Yes, guessing that was a major factor in Shoshanna & James getting married legally the 3rd time. It sounded like they had been calling themselves legally married for years & had filed taxes, etc. on that basis without their CPA or attorney knowing the truth.

The latest NGJ magazine is interesting because both Mike & Debi are doing some backpedaling on their previous dogmas. 

Mike now says: 

Quote

Neither the husband nor the wife has the right to physically, emotionally, or spiritually dominate the other. A spouse who intimidates or manipulates their ‘less significant’ other into subjection is a merciless, selfish bully, expressing the opposite of love.

And Debi says this:

Quote

When I first wrote Created to Be His Help Meet we didn’t see many manipulative, controlling men, especially secretly violent ones. I wrote to wives admonishing them to be in subjection because that was what was lacking in the church at that time. Nowadays the pendulum has swung to the other side.

Quite a difference from their years of supporting abusive Christian men in the name of Jesus while telling the victims of their abuse to suck it up and shut up. Predictably, Debi goes on to blame pornography. 

Will either one of them ever acknowledge their two children's divorces?

[Cults-r-us]

5 hours ago, Alisamer said:

I got the impression that their accountants, upon finding out all these years later that they weren't ACTUALLY, LEGALLY married, strongly suggested that they go get the paperwork taken care of. Immediately. Right now, while the accountants go change their pants and call up their attorneys to make sure they aren't going to be on the hook for any shenanigans that might have come up due to them lying about being married all these years. 

Couldn't they claim common law marriage, or was that too after the fact for their accountants?

 

[Fallgirl30]

Is there a chance that Michael urged them to get married because he could see down the road that Shoshanna might need a legal leg to stand on to protect the marital assets from being taken because he could see the union eventually breaking up?

[Coconut Flan]

1 hour ago, Cults-r-us said:

Couldn't they claim common law marriage, or was that too after the fact for their accountants?

Very few states recognize common law marriage.

[noseybutt]

I call bullshit on Debi. Absolutely they did see violent men. 

Thankful she has changed her teaching but she is a whitewashing history and then some. 

 

[Giraffe]

1 hour ago, noseybutt said:

I call bullshit on Debi. Absolutely they did see violent men. 

Thankful she has changed her teaching but she is a whitewashing history and then some. 

 

Michael himself is a violent man. Just the account of the days following his wedding proce that. 

[AmazonGrace]

What a way to say you were wrong, without admitting you were wrong.

Hey, Debi, if there were no violent men before you told them to have their wives submit to a biblical marriage, then it strongly suggests that it's all your fault that there are violent men now.

Edited December 27, 2023 by AmazonGrace

[noseybutt]

9 hours ago, Giraffe said:

Michael himself is a violent man. Just the account of the days following his wedding proce that. 

Exactly. 

Violence is baked in to their marriage and child rearing theology.

 

[Howl]

Well, once everyone's spirit is broken (THE major tenet of Michael Pearl's patriarchal approach to child rearing and marriage) no need to actually be violent. 

[noseybutt]

15 minutes ago, Howl said:

Well, once everyone's spirit is broken (THE major tenet of Michael Pearl's patriarchal approach to child rearing and marriage) no need to actually be violent. 

Oh but it was violent getting there.

[Alisamer]

10 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

What a way to say you were wrong, without admitting you were wrong.

Hey, Debi, if there were no violent men before you told them to have their wives submit to a biblical marriage, then it strongly suggests that it's all your fault that there are violent men now.

Gee, imagine! A generation of men raised in the patriarchy (their book came out in 1994, after all) being beaten for the slightest little thing in the name of "training" and taught that women should be submissive helpmeets turned out to be violent men as adults! Who would've thought? 

13 minutes ago, noseybutt said:

Oh but it was violent getting there.

Yeah their whole thing is violence. Tempt a kid deliberately so you have an excuse to hit them. Hit them for doing perfectly normal childhood things. Never miss a chance to hit the child, lest they stray from Godliness, because if you don't hit them they'll turn out to be awful hell-bound people. And all the time tell them you're hitting them because you love them. 

And now they are trying to act surprised that teaching children that violence is done because of love leads to adults who are violent toward people they love?

[Columbia]

12 hours ago, noseybutt said:

I call bullshit on Debi. Absolutely they did see violent men. 

Thankful she has changed her teaching but she is a whitewashing history and then some. 

 

They're still selling Created to be His Help Meet (in multiple languages.) So no, they haven't really changed anything.

[hoipolloi]

4 hours ago, Columbia said:

They're still selling Created to be His Help Meet (in multiple languages.) So no, they haven't really changed anything.

Created to be his Punching Bag Help Meet has apparently been revised and updated:

Quote

 

Created to Be His Help Meet, first published 10 years ago, has sold over 500,000 copies in 12 languages. I am amazed, reading the testimonies of woman in England, India, Saudi Arabia, China, Australia, and many other countries, as they share how their marriages have been saved and enriched through these biblical truths.

Over the years I have learned from these many women, and, responding to their cries for help, have added TWO NEW CHAPTERS and other small revisions to address their needs. One of the new chapters is called, Servant or Servitude? There is a difference. One is godly, the other devilish. Did we fail to make that distinction clear enough the first time around? Some have indicated such. So we tackled the subject head on.

 

Would be interesting to see the so-called updates but don't want to pay a cent to NGJ.

[noseybutt]

1 hour ago, hoipolloi said:

Created to be his Punching Bag Help Meet has apparently been revised and updated:

Would be interesting to see the so-called updates but don't want to pay a cent to NGJ.

Lipstick on a pig

[slp]

I had that book. There’s a story of a violent marriage IN THE BOOK!!!  I believe the lady’s name was “Sunny”. 

[Giraffe]

29 minutes ago, slp said:

I had that book. There’s a story of a violent marriage IN THE BOOK!!!  I believe the lady’s name was “Sunny”. 

Yeah, and I'm sure even now Debi would never describe her marriage as violent. 

[TrueRebel1]

After almost a week of radio silence from Shoshanna, she posted a story. Her hair is dishevelled and she's wearing a paper bracelet that could be a hospital bracelet. She cryptically says she's alive and okay, and that a lot had been happening in her life, and that not everything can be shared. She says she's been with a friend and helping them out. "I can't give you any details, and sometimes things are private and they're not always mine."