Joe Darger

Joe, Alina, Vicki, And Valerie Darger live a normal suburban life in a large home in Salt Lake County with over twenty of their twenty-four children. Joe, Alina, and Vicki were married on the same day twenty-one years ago. Valerie, Vicki’s twin sister, joined the family in 2000.

Spirituality

Love Times Three

Our True Story of a Polygamous Marriage

Talking Points

This is the family that inspired HBO’s TV series Big Love, the story of Bill Henrickson and his three wives. While there have been several popular accounts of women leaving polygamy, Love Times Three is the first account of what its like to live in a polygamous marriage in a positive light and from Fundamentalist Mormons who are not a part of the FLDS, the Warren Jeffs fundamentalist branch that received a lot of scrutiny in Texas. This book has the power to change the conversation about this lifestyle choice. The three wives have been doing publicity in support of polygamy or to provide another voice for many years and have appeared on Oprah, Larry King Live, and People.

Description

For decades, Utah’s polygamous families have sought to remain out of sight and out of mind. Men in particular risk prosecution and economic blacklisting when their multiple marriages become known. But now, Joe, Alina, Vickie and Valerie Darger will open up their lives in this personal book-length account of their lives. An attractive, suburban family that look like your average American, they live in the suburbs of Salt Lake City with twenty of their children.

While the public has watched with fascination four seasons of Big Love, as well as the new reality show “Sister Wives” of TLC, the Dargers are anxious to illuminate why contemporary men and women are choosing this lifestyle, and hoping to move the conversation about the plural lifestyle away from Warren Jeffs and the controversy of child brides to more mainstream polygamists, who do not follow a prophet, and willingly enter into plural marriage as adults.

In Love Times Three, we’ll learn of their childhoods in polygamous families, their decisions to enter into this lifestyle themselves, as well as how Joe courted both Alina and Vicki at the same time and even married them on the same day. Several years later, Valerie, Vicki’s twin sister, joined the family. They will explain how their relationships developed, the sister wife relationship, a chapter from Joe on what it means to love three women at one time, their weekly schedule (which wives work, who watches the children, who buys food for a household of over twenty!), and ultimately why they think laws that criminalize polygamy should change.

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