This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

One of the first dates my wife and I went on before getting married was seeing "Saturday's Warrior." This was in 1975, after the play was already a big deal in Mormon circles.

When we got engaged, everyone told us that we had to see the play because it explained so many things about the nature of eternal love.

Forty years later, I don't recall much about the play except for the pre-existence parts, which basically offered the idea that the two main characters had been soul mates before being born.

Despite having their memory blocked at birth, the couple vowed to find each other in mortal life and seal the deal for eternity.

Being madly in love with my wife at the time, I thought pre-existence dating sounded perfectly plausible. After all, it felt like I had known her forever. Maybe we really had been sweethearts before we came here.

We weren't. I know this because, thanks to extensive recovered memory therapy, I distinctly remember voting for Satan's plan in the pre-existence. That's right.

According to Mormon doctrine, we all lived spiritually before coming to this earth. We were given a choice of supporting Christ's plan of voluntary acceptance or rejection of the gospel, and Satan's plan of being forced to comply.

The difference being that Christ would give all the glory to Heavenly Father, while Satan wanted it for himself.

Being forced to behave in order to make it to the Celestial Kingdom seemed like a good deal at the time. As long as I made it, I didn't care who got the glory — especially if it was someone who already had more glory than he could possibly use.

Note: I have no idea why I'm here instead of already in hell with the third of God's spiritual children who supposedly agreed with Satan. A bureaucratic mix-up, I guess.

Another reason I don't believe my wife and I hooked up in the pre-existence is because she's a woman of discerning tastes and would have been so spiritually.

She would have known to avoid any possible earthly contact with me by having herself born into a whole other country.

Fat lot of good it did her. We were born in different countries, all right, but we bumped into each other in a third country neither of us ever imagined visiting, much less living in.

Then again, maybe it happened because of the veil placed over our minds to force us to operate on faith. Everything that happened before — including a bet I vaguely remember making with a pre-existent Sonny as to the date and time of the Second Coming — is a blank.

You can't have faith if you already know something. So this veil of obscurity between right now and the pre-existence is important.

Think of the veil as a celestial roofie. Heavenly Father doped us while our attention was diverted over the argument between Jesus and Satan. The next thing we know, we're waking up in some delivery room without a clue as to what just happened.

If this sounds really far-fetched or even sacrilegious, I don't care. It fully explains how I was able to get my wife to marry me.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley.