Why More Women Are Choosing Not to Marry or Have Children: Healing After High-Control Religion
For many women healing from religious trauma after leaving high-control religion, the question of whether to marry or have children becomes one of the first truly free choices they've ever faced. That was true for me too— and it took years of asking questions I wasn't supposed to ask to even realize it.
It never quite sat right with me.
Not the marriage track. Not the motherhood expectation. Not the way women's bodies were discussed as though they belonged to everyone except the women inside them. Something in me always knew there was a misalignment. There was a quiet friction I couldn't name and wasn't allowed to examine.
So I did what you do in high-control religious environments: I denied it. Because if I truly believed, if I was saved, if God was real and good and sovereign over my life, then I should want these things. Even if I didn't. Even if every time I tried to locate that desire and it wasn't there. The goal wasn't to just want— it was to want to want. To perform enough internal compliance that the gap between what I felt and what I was supposed to feel would eventually close.
But it didn't close.
It wasn't until I started deconstructing, then slowly, carefully reconstructing, that I began to consider something that felt almost dangerous: maybe I had a choice. Maybe the God I actually believed in, the one who knit me together and called it good, would want me to have a choice. That bodily autonomy wasn't rebellion against God but an expression of being made in God's image. That loving my body, honoring what it actually needed and wanted, might itself be an act of love toward the divine.
I'm still sitting with that. But the sitting itself feels like freedom.
This post is an exploration of what it means to choose, really choose, when you've spent years being told the choice was already made for you. It is not a rejection of marriage or motherhood. It is an invitation to examine where your desires actually come from.
What High-Control Religion Teaches Women About Their Bodies and Their Lives
In many evangelical, LDS, and other high-control religious systems, womanhood is a theological category before it is a personal one.
You're not just taught what to do with your life. You're taught that the shape of your life— wife, mother, helper, keeper— is divinely ordained. That submission is sacred. That your body exists in relationship to others: to a future husband, to future children, and God's design for the family.
This isn't framed as expectation, but rather, as calling. “Calling” has been the blanket covering the truth that there is an expectation of women in the church and high-control religious systems. And when you fulfill these expectations and callings, you achieve salvation. You gain heaven.
I was told that your desires, your fears, your limits, and even your questions, are not yours to honor. In fact, they should be hated. Matthew 16:24 was referenced often— “deny yourself”. I was told that a woman's body belongs to her husband, and he is the head of the family. He gets final say. And you as a wife get to honor him. That is your calling as a woman.
In my story, these messages didn't arrive as doctrine. They came from mentors. From older women I trusted, who laughed when I courageously named my fears of being pregnant and giving birth rather than holding those fears and questions with me. They told me that fear wasn't from the Lord, so I needed to let it go. These women told me it was my duty to my husband to have children, whether I wanted to or not. That I would need to have sex with him when he wanted, even if I didn't.
I left those conversations knowing something had been taken from me. I just didn't have the language for it yet.
And the more I heard these things, the less I wanted any of it.
Because this isn’t calling. This is spiritual abuse.
Motherhood, Choice, and What Coercion Destroys
I want to pause here and name something important: this post is not a dismissal of motherhood or the profound significance of childbearing.
In Theology of the Womb, Christy Bauman writes beautifully about women as co-creators with God. That women are the only ones who know, from the inside, what it is to create life. That there is something sacred and irreducible about that capacity, something that deserves to be honored, not minimized.
I fully believe that.
And I also believe that honoring it means allowing women to choose it freely, not because a system demands it, not because a husband expects it, not because the church has decided it is your highest calling. The beauty Christy names is precisely the kind of beauty that coercion seeks to destroy.
For the women who choose motherhood with full agency and desire: that is sacred. For the women who don't: that, too, is sacred, and a legitimate expression of a life made in the image of a God who, I've come to believe, is far more interested in our wholeness than our compliance.
Why More Women Are Reconsidering Marriage and Children After Leaving High-Control Religion
Something is shifting. Across exvangelical and ex-Mormon communities, more women are choosing to delay or forgo marriage and children after leaving high-control religion, not as a trend, but as a reckoning.
What I hear in therapy sounds something like this:
I realized I'd been planning my life around a role, not around myself.
I didn't know I was allowed to not want this.
Some women are discovering queer identities that purity culture spent years suppressing. Some are exhausted, not lazily, but somatically, from years of performing gendered caregiving in the name of faithfulness. Some are healing from religious betrayal so significant that trust in institutions, including the institution of marriage, requires rebuilding from the ground up.
And then there is the financial and physical reality, which deserves to be named plainly. Millennial women cannot afford to have children the way previous generations could. Housing, childcare, healthcare, student debt, the economic floor that might have made family formation feel possible has been pulled out from under an entire generation.
And for many women, especially Black women, the physical risk of pregnancy and childbirth in this country is not abstract. The United States has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the developed world, and Black women die in childbirth at nearly three times the rate of white women. Add to that the erosion of reproductive healthcare access and abortion rights, and the message being sent to women's bodies is not "we value you". It is "we need your output."
When political figures declare the birth rate a moral crisis while doing nothing about the conditions that drove it down, it is worth saying clearly: if you wanted more women to choose motherhood, you might have started by making it survivable.
The women reconsidering marriage and children after leaving high-control religion aren't rejecting love or commitment. They are learning that desire is not the same as danger. That choosing differently is not the same as choosing wrong.
What High-Control Religion Teaches Single Women About Their Worth
There is another wound in this conversation that rarely gets named.
For years as a single woman in the church, I heard some version of the same bewildered kindness: I just don't know why someone as godly and amazing as you is still single. I know it was meant as a compliment and with the best of intentions. But I don't think the people who said it understood what it actually communicated.
If marriage is the spiritual destination, the marker of a life well-lived, then singleness carries an implicit question mark regardless of how faithful or capable or loved you are. What does it mean about you that it hasn't happened yet? The logic of the system turns singleness into a puzzle to be solved, a lack to be explained.
And beneath that, had I stayed in the church, could I have led, mentored, or been taken seriously without a husband? Or would I have remained perpetually waiting in the wings for my day to come?
I'm not waiting anymore. I'm perfectly happy being single. Of course there are moments I'd love a relationship, and someone to do life alongside. But marriage, as I was taught to understand it— situating my entire life around another person's needs, giving up my time, my space, my ability to make spontaneous decisions— sounds like a loss of something I've only recently learned to call mine.
Some will call that selfish. But I'd rather be honest about it than perform a desire I don't have.
Leaving the Church Doesn't Untangle the Conditioning
Here's what many women healing from religious trauma don't expect: leaving the church doesn't automatically free you from what the church taught you to want.
Even if you no longer believe those teachings, their imprint lingers. It lives in the body long after the theology has dissolved. It shows up in guilt that surfaces when you choose yourself. In shame that whispers selfish when you consider a life that doesn't center someone else's needs.
I often hear from clients that even years after leaving high-control religion, they still second-guess themselves when making choices about partnership or parenthood. That internal conflict isn't about indecision. It's the residue of control, the aftermath of a system that decided what you were for before you could decide for yourself.
What If God Doesn't Hate You for This?
For many women healing from religious trauma and spiritual abuse, the hardest part isn't leaving the system. It's leaving the people, the community you once loved and felt loved by, the spaces where you experienced real goodness, real belonging, even alongside the harm. That complexity is part of what makes leaving so disorienting: it wasn't all bad, and you knew it, and the system used that goodness to keep you longer than was safe. It leaves many of us asking, how do I reconcile the good with the bad?
And woven through all of it is the fear that God is disappointed in you for leaving and choosing something else. That the people you hurt by leaving, the relationships that fractured, the community that grieved or judged your exit, that all of it is evidence of something wrong with you rather than the cost of finally choosing yourself.
The version of God you were handed demanded compliance. Punished doubt. Kept score. And if you've spent years trying to want what you were told to want, and failing to make that happen, it can be hard to imagine that the divine might have a different posture toward your life than the one the church modeled.
What we were taught about God's posture toward our choices doesn't disappear just because we've named it as harmful. The fear runs deep. The shame has roots. And simply being told you're allowed to stop hating yourself doesn't make it so. If it did, healing would be much simpler than it is.
But somewhere in the work of deconstruction and reconstruction, many women begin to wonder: what if the God who created me is less interested in my compliance and more interested in knowing the depth of who I am? What if that question is worth sitting with, not to resolve it quickly, but to let it breathe?
You don't have to be there yet. You don't have to feel free to believe it. But perhaps it can be enough for now to know the question can be asked.
The Grief and the Clarity of Leaving the Life You Were Told to Want
But choosing differently from what you were formed to want is not so simple.
There is loss in it. Loss for the version of yourself who believed the script, who planned her whole life around it. Loss for the community that would have celebrated you if you'd stayed.
Another ache that surfaces for many is watching friends get married and have children, when you pour yourself into celebrating others, when your time is assumed to be more expendable because you don't have a husband or kids. This deserves a whole post of its own.
I also grew up hearing that you have children because, well, who else is going to take care of you when you get old? And something about that logic always felt like a prison sentence. Like being wanted for a function rather than for yourself.
At least for me, I'd rather wonder what could have been than regret having children or resenting them. Some people aren't meant to be parents. I don't think I'm one of them. And that’s ok.
If that’s you too, then it might feel scary to say that out loud. It might feel freeing. It might feel like both. And there may even be grief about that. All of that is allowed to exist.
You Are Allowed to Choose Your Own Life
Whether you’re new to this process, or deeply acquainted with the confusion about what you actually want from a relationship, from your body, or from your future, just know that that confusion has a history. It was built into you carefully, over years, by a system that needed you to not ask.
The fullness of life gets to be for you. Not the version handed to you, not the one that required your disappearance and shrinking, but something truer, something that actually fits the shape of who you are. Not promised to arrive without fear or grief or uncertainty. But available. You get to wonder about what that means. That wondering is not a detour from healing. It is the healing.
If this post stirred something in you like grief, recognition, or simply the beginning of a question, therapy can be a space to follow it further. I work with women navigating identity, desire, and deconstruction after high-control religion. If you're curious about what that work might look like, I'd love to hear from you.