Self-reliance
The importance of self-reliance
Self-reliance is not about distrust, or selfishness, or preparing for the worst. It is one of the most loving things you can develop — for yourself, for the people who depend on you, and for any relationship you hope to build.
There is a version of self-reliance that sounds cold — the lone wolf, the person who needs no one, who keeps everyone at arm’s length and mistakes isolation for strength. That is not what we are talking about. That version of self-reliance is its own kind of wound.
What we are talking about is something different: the quiet, grounded capacity to function. To show up. To carry your own weight. To meet the basic demands of adult life without requiring someone else to hold you together. This kind of self-reliance is not the opposite of love or connection — it is what makes genuine love and connection possible.
We have also observed something that has stayed with us: two people can go through remarkably similar hardships and come through them very differently. One person navigates difficulty with a kind of poise — moving through the pain, making decisions with clear eyes, and emerging with relationships intact and dignity preserved. Another person gets through the same difficulty but leaves a trail of collateral damage — fractured relationships, poor decisions made in crisis, wounds that take years to heal. The difference, in our experience, almost always comes down to self-reliance. The person who has built it handles what life throws at them. The person who hasn’t often creates new problems while managing the original one.
Poise under pressure is one of the quieter gifts of self-reliance. And it is one of the most valuable things you can bring to the people around you.
Three kinds of self-reliance
We find it helpful to think about self-reliance in three dimensions, because they reinforce each other and each one matters in its own right.
Financial self-reliance is the ability to provide for yourself and your dependents — to earn an income, manage money, and navigate the practical demands of economic life without being entirely dependent on another person for your survival. This is the most concrete and measurable kind, and for many people it is also the most urgent.
Emotional self-reliance is the ability to regulate your own inner life — to feel your feelings without being consumed by them, to manage anxiety and grief and disappointment without outsourcing the work entirely to someone else. It does not mean never needing support. It means you have enough inner resource that you are not perpetually drowning, waiting for someone to rescue you.
Spiritual self-reliance is perhaps the deepest of the three. It is the ability to draw directly on God — to have your own relationship with Him that sustains and anchors you regardless of what is happening in your external life. Your faith, your sense of identity, your knowledge of who you are and whose you are — these cannot be borrowed from a spouse. They can only be built by you, through your own choices, your own prayers, your own study.
All three are connected. Financial insecurity fuels emotional instability. Emotional instability makes spiritual life difficult to access. And a shallow spiritual foundation leaves a person dependent on external circumstances — including a spouse — to feel okay. When all three are developed, something changes. You become someone who can stand.
The financial dimension
We want to say something honest about finances — not to alarm anyone, but because we have seen too many people we care about caught off guard by a reality they hadn’t prepared for.
Life brings surprises. The death of a spouse, serious illness or disability, job loss, divorce — these things happen to faithful, good people who did everything right. And when they do, the spouse who has no education, no workforce experience, and no understanding of the family’s finances finds himself or herself in an extraordinarily difficult position — not just emotionally, but practically. The options available to a person in that situation are much narrower than they needed to be.
President Thomas S. Monson spoke to this directly when he counseled the women of the Church:
Val
I was a stay-at-home mother for much of my marriage, and I believe in the value and importance of that choice. But I also know, from my own experience, how much financial vulnerability that choice can create — and how that vulnerability can limit your options in ways you don’t fully understand until you need them.
There were seasons in my marriage where the financial reality constrained choices I might otherwise have made. Not because staying was wrong — there were real reasons to stay, and I don’t regret the years I spent raising my children. But the absence of financial independence narrowed what was possible in ways that took years to fully reckon with.
I want to say plainly to women in that position: preparing yourself is not a lack of faith in your marriage. It is wisdom. It is stewardship. You can be fully committed to your family and still build the capacity to stand on your own if you ever need to. I wish someone had said that to me earlier.
What we counsel — and what we counsel our daughters and sons — is simply this: get an education. Develop skills. Maintain some connection to the workforce if you can. Understand your family’s finances. These are not acts of distrust toward your spouse. They are acts of stewardship toward your family — and toward yourself.
A word about culture and doctrine
We want to be careful here, because this is a place where it is easy to misrepresent what the Church actually teaches.
The doctrine is clear: a woman’s most important role is as a wife and mother, just as a man’s most important role is as a husband and father. We believe this, and we honor it. The Church has also been equally clear, in the words of its leaders, that education and preparation matter — that women should develop their talents and be prepared for the eventualities life may bring. These two things are not in conflict. They are both true at the same time.
Where the tension lives is not in the doctrine but in the culture. The cultural pressure that a truly faithful woman will sacrifice education and professional development entirely — and that doing otherwise signals a lack of commitment to her family — is a cultural expectation, not a doctrinal one. And it is one that we believe has caused real and unnecessary harm to women who followed it in good faith and later found themselves without options.
Bruce
I have to be honest — I was guilty of this kind of cultural judgment earlier in my life. I looked at women who pursued education and careers and quietly questioned their priorities. I’m not proud of that. What changed me was watching people I loved navigate impossible situations without the preparation that would have helped them, and eventually going through my own divorce and seeing things from the inside that I had never understood from the outside. The doctrine hasn’t changed. But my understanding of what faithfulness actually looks like has.
A woman who gains an education and develops her capabilities is not hedging against her marriage. She is preparing for life. She is better equipped to contribute financially to her family when that is needed, to help her children with their own education, and to model something important: that capability and devotion to family are not in conflict. She is taking seriously the gifts God gave her.
The emotional dimension
Financial self-reliance matters enormously. But the emotional dimension is, in some ways, more fundamental — because emotional dependence shapes everything, including whether financial self-reliance is even possible.
An emotionally self-reliant person is not someone who never feels pain, never needs support, never leans on anyone. It is someone who has developed enough inner stability that they do not require constant external validation to function. They have the skills to process difficult emotions and navigate challenging situations without immediately needing someone else to make the pain go away or solve the problem for them. They can be alone without it being unbearable.
When this capacity is missing, a marriage bears a weight it was never designed to carry. The emotionally dependent spouse looks to their partner to regulate their inner life — to reassure them, soothe them, manage their anxiety, confirm their worth. When the partner inevitably falls short (and they always will, because no human being can do this job consistently), the result is disappointment, resentment, and sometimes crisis.
Bruce
One of the things I have come to realize through years of reading, study, and working with a counselor is that I had developed patterns of seeking external validation — from my work, from my service, from being needed — that I had mistaken for strength. I was productive. I was capable. I showed up. But underneath that, there was a version of emotional dependence that was quietly doing damage. I needed to be needed. I needed to be seen as competent, as worthy. When I wasn’t, something in me destabilized in ways I didn’t fully understand until much later.
The work of becoming emotionally self-reliant was, for me, inseparable from the work of building a real relationship with God — not a transactional one, not a performance, but an actual relationship in which I could hear, and receive, and rest. That work changed me in ways that nothing else could have.
Healthy emotional self-reliance is not developed in isolation. It is usually built through a combination of honest self-reflection, good therapy, and a deepening spiritual life. If you recognize emotional dependence in yourself — the need for constant reassurance, the inability to tolerate being alone, the pattern of looking to others to confirm your worth, or a sense of being tipped over by life’s events when others seem to stay standing — please do not be ashamed of it. It is very common, it is understandable, and it can be worked on. A good therapist can help enormously.
The spiritual foundation
We have saved this for last not because it is least important but because it is the one that underlies everything else.
Self-esteem — real self-esteem, the stable kind that does not collapse when circumstances are hard — cannot come from a spouse. It cannot come from accomplishments. It cannot come from how other people see you. It comes from knowing who you are and whose you are — and living consistently with that knowledge.
For us, that foundation is God. A personal, living relationship with Him — through which we have come to know that we are seen, that we are valued, and that our worth is not contingent on anything external to that relationship. We recognize that not everyone reading this shares our faith, and we honor that. The principle holds broadly: human beings need a stable internal foundation for their sense of worth, and that foundation cannot be built on another person’s approval or behavior.
What we can tell you from our own experience is that building this foundation changes you. You become more stable. More free. More capable of loving others well — because you are not secretly trying to extract your worth from the relationship.
Bruce & Val
We have both had to do this work. We have both had seasons of life in which we realized, with some difficulty, that we were looking to the wrong sources for our sense of self. And we have both experienced — gradually, through prayer and study and counseling and time — what it feels like to have that foundation shift. To stand on something solid. To know, in a way that does not depend on anyone else’s opinion or behavior, that we are children of God and that He knows us by name.
We cannot give you that. No spouse can give you that. Only He can. But we can tell you it is real, it is available, and it is worth every difficult thing you have to go through to get there.
If you are already in the hard place
Everything we have said so far has been aimed at people who still have time to build — people in marriages, people thinking about marriage, people who can start now and build gradually. But we know that some of you are reading this from a place of sudden exposure. The divorce has already come. The financial stability you counted on is gone. The emotional support you depended on has been removed. You are standing in the aftermath wondering how to begin.
We want to speak to you directly.
First: it is not too late. People have rebuilt from far worse. The path is harder when you are starting from crisis rather than from preparation, but the destination is the same. You are not disqualified from becoming self-reliant because you did not start earlier.
Second: start with the spiritual. Not because the financial does not matter — it matters urgently — but because the spiritual foundation is what will give you the strength to do the rest. Before you can rebuild your finances, you need to be able to get out of bed. Before you can get out of bed, you need to believe that it is worth it. Let that belief come from God.
Third: get practical help. Besides ecclesiastical support and Church resources, there are financial counselors, workforce re-entry programs, legal aid organizations, and nonprofit groups specifically designed to support people who suddenly find themselves the sole provider. You do not have to figure this out alone.
What self-reliance makes possible
We want to close with something that may be the most hopeful thing in this entire post — because self-reliance is not ultimately about protection or survival. It is about what becomes possible when two self-reliant people find each other.
We have observed that in families where one spouse holds all the financial responsibility and the other holds all the domestic responsibility — with a strict division and little overlap — both can end up feeling isolated and alone in their work. The provider carries the weight of the finances alone. The homemaker carries the weight of the household alone. Neither feels fully supported, because the walls between their worlds are too high to see over.
But when two people each bring genuine capability to a marriage — when both understand the finances, both contribute to the home, both have skills and identities that exist independently of their roles — something different becomes possible. They can decide together what the right balance looks like at any given season of life. They can support each other across those roles rather than being isolated within them. And they bring to the marriage not just love but strength — the grounded, practiced strength of people who know they can stand on their own.
What we have experienced in our own marriage is something we can only describe as a self-reliance of the couple — a shared resilience that is greater than either of us individually. When both people have done the work, and there is honesty and openness and love between them, the marriage itself becomes a kind of anchor. Not because either person is dependent on the other, but because two capable people, freely choosing each other every day, build something together that neither could build alone.
This is one of those things Bruce means when he says, I never knew. We didn’t know this was possible. We know it now.
Bruce & Val
We have a phrase between us — drawn from both our childhoods on dairy farms — that has become our shorthand for everything we believe about self-reliance. The cows still have to be milked. Life does not pause for our emotional state. The work is there, waiting, every day. The people who have learned to show up and do it — regardless of what they are feeling — bring something to a marriage that cannot be manufactured. They bring the quiet confidence of someone who knows they can stand.
We hope you will build that. Not because your marriage will fail. Not because you don’t trust your spouse. But because you are a child of God with gifts and capabilities that deserve to be developed — and because the people who love you deserve the fullest, most capable, most grounded version of you that it is possible to become.
The cows still have to be milked. And somehow, in the going out to do it, we find out who we are.
These posts are companion pieces to this one:
Read: The cows still have to be milked → Read: Sometimes you have to sell the farm → Read: Good efforts, wrong target →You are not building this for the worst case. You are building this because you are worth building.