‘The Polygamist’ Took Me to Church
MUSINGS
We Are Built to Forget
I’ve been watching The Polygamist on Netflix (currently on episode seven, it’s really good TV), and there’s a moment that’s been sitting with me since I started.
Jonasi has been gone from his marriage to Joyce for over a year by this point. He’s already falling for someone else. He wanted the divorce. He had checked out long before he ever moved out. And then their 20th wedding anniversary arrives, an occasion he didn’t ask for and definitely didn’t want, until something in him remembers. Not just remembers that he loved her, but remembers it enough to feel it again. The love gets rekindled in real time, on screen, because of an occasion built for remembering.
I sat there thinking: this is so deeply human it’s almost embarrassing.
We don’t “lose love” because it disappears. We lose it because we stop remembering it. The good bits are all still true, it’s just gone quiet under the noise of whatever’s wrong right now. And it takes something, an anniversary, a milestone, a forced pause, to turn the volume back up.
I see this exact pattern even our love for God.
It is so easy to forget what He’s done. Not because we don’t believe it or didn’t live it, but because believing it and remembering it in your body are two different experiences. I’ve sat in church on a random mid-year Thanksgiving Sunday, the kind of service that exists specifically to make you stop and count what’s been good, and been wrecked. Like, on-the-floor, can’t-stop-crying wrecked. Not because anything new happened. Because I remembered.
The goodness didn’t change. My attention did.
And I think this is just… the human condition. We can be such forgetting creatures living lives that move too fast to hold onto gratitude. Which means gratitude, real remembrance, often never happens by accident. It has to be by design. You must create the occasions.
Thinking further, because I don’t think it’s just a faith principle. I think it’s a fundamental relationship principle.
If Jonasi’s relationship needed a forced 20-year milestone to remember why it mattered, that’s actually a warning, not just a redemption arc. Twenty years is a long time to run on forgetting. I found myself wishing that anniversary had come sooner because so much damage had already been done in the forgetting. A year of separation. An entire other relationship forming. All the things that get said and done when you’ve stopped remembering why you started.
So I’m taking this piece of wisdom as a framework, not just a feeling. Once a year is not enough to remember anything that matters. Not your marriage, not your friendships, not your faith. If gratitude and love need occasions to stay alive, then the real work is making more of them, smaller, more frequent, on purpose.
What about you? Where in your life have you needed a forced pause to remember something you’d quietly stopped feeling?
We Are Built to Forget
I’ve been watching The Polygamist on Netflix (currently on episode seven, it’s really good TV), and there’s a moment that’s been sitting with me since I started.
Jonasi has been gone from his marriage to Joyce for over a year by this point. He’s already falling for someone else. He wanted the divorce. He had checked out long before he ever moved out. And then their 20th wedding anniversary arrives, an occasion he didn’t ask for and definitely didn’t want, until something in him remembers. Not just remembers that he loved her, but remembers it enough to feel it again. The love gets rekindled in real time, on screen, because of an occasion built for remembering.
I sat there thinking: this is so deeply human it’s almost embarrassing.
We don’t “lose love” because it disappears. We lose it because we stop remembering it. The good bits are all still true, it’s just gone quiet under the noise of whatever’s wrong right now. And it takes something, an anniversary, a milestone, a forced pause, to turn the volume back up.
I see this exact pattern even our love for God.
It is so easy to forget what He’s done. Not because we don’t believe it or didn’t live it, but because believing it and remembering it in your body are two different experiences. I’ve sat in church on a random mid-year Thanksgiving Sunday, the kind of service that exists specifically to make you stop and count what’s been good, and been wrecked. Like, on-the-floor, can’t-stop-crying wrecked. Not because anything new happened. Because I remembered.
The goodness didn’t change. My attention did.
And I think this is just… the human condition. We can be such forgetting creatures living lives that move too fast to hold onto gratitude. Which means gratitude, real remembrance, often never happens by accident. It has to be by design. You must create the occasions.
Thinking further, because I don’t think it’s just a faith principle. I think it’s a fundamental relationship principle.
If Jonasi’s relationship needed a forced 20-year milestone to remember why it mattered, that’s actually a warning, not just a redemption arc. Twenty years is a long time to run on forgetting. I found myself wishing that anniversary had come sooner because so much damage had already been done in the forgetting. A year of separation. An entire other relationship forming. All the things that get said and done when you’ve stopped remembering why you started.
So I’m taking this piece of wisdom as a framework, not just a feeling. Once a year is not enough to remember anything that matters. Not your marriage, not your friendships, not your faith. If gratitude and love need occasions to stay alive, then the real work is making more of them, smaller, more frequent, on purpose.
What about you? Where in your life have you needed a forced pause to remember something you’d quietly stopped feeling?
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