And somehow it became another lesson in control, belonging and finally refusing to shrink myself. When I first met my husband 15 years ago, I was going through my Saturn return. If you’re into astrology, you’ll know the reputation. Saturn takes roughly 29.5 years to orbit the Sun and return to roughly the same place it occupied when you were born.
Your first Saturn return usually happens somewhere around 27–30. It’s often associated with upheaval. Responsibility. Endings. Rebuilding. Basically Saturn turning up, looking at the life you’ve built and going: Yeah nah. We’re fucking this up. Mine was brutal.
In late 2010, I was held up at gunpoint at work. Afterward, police accused me of being involved in organising the robbery. I lost my job. Bought a 12-week-old puppy because emotionally I was absolutely fucked. Then, around my 27th birthday, I broke up with my boyfriend of eight years.
We owned a house together. He later moved in with a guy we’d had a threesome with. Cute. I had to buy him out of the mortgage with Mum’s help, keep the puppy he left behind, start a new job in Wellington and suddenly work out what being single actually meant.
For the first time in my adult life, I was properly on my own. Saturn had essentially picked up the life I’d built after high school and shaken the fuck out of it. And then three months later, after a few failed dates that went nowhere, I met my husband. On Grindr.
Obviously. Then I met him I was working at the Levi’s store in Wellington. Yes. The same Levi’s store I’d previously been caught stealing from. Different story. My future husband was working out at the airport. We had different days off, so one Friday at about 4pm he came into town, met me at work and took me out.
We clicked immediately. He stayed the night. And I remember thinking he was way too straight for me. Apparently not. Because he came back. And kept coming back. I did nearly kill him with poppers during one of our early hookups by accidentally pouring the fucking stuff up his nose.
Romance. Fifteen years later, we’re still here. Our marriage is strong. We genuinely like each other. We’ve built a relationship that makes sense to us rather than one designed around what other people think a marriage should look like. But there has always been another presence sitting quietly in the background of our relationship.
Something he grew up with. Something I married into without really understanding what I was marrying into. My husband grew up in the religious movement commonly known as the Two by Twos . And over the years, from my perspective, I came to describe it much more simply. A cult.
I just didn’t understand that when I first joined the family. Welcome to the family The first time we flew to Auckland so I could meet my future in-laws, my husband gave me a warning. “Just so you know, my parents don’t swear, they don’t have a TV, and when you’re around them, try to behave.” Me.
Behave. That should have been our first problem. But off we went. And initially? They were lovely. Friendly. Welcoming. Lots of laughing. Lots of positive energy. Then I started noticing things. No TV. No radio. No music. Very little connection to popular culture. Very little discussion about what was happening in the wider world.
Conversation was usually about people within their community. Who was doing what. Who had gone where. Who had seen whom. Nothing particularly malicious. Just an entire social universe that seemed to orbit itself. I often had absolutely nothing to contribute. I didn’t know these people.
I didn’t know the stories. I didn’t understand the references. And the things I wanted to talk about? Pop culture. Current events. Ideas. Sex. Business. What was happening in the world. Those topics rarely went anywhere. I started noticing rules too. Rules about what you wore.
How you behaved. What counted as worldly. What was appropriate. What wasn’t. From where I was standing, it often felt like outside influences were treated with suspicion while life within the group was treated as normal. And if most of the people around you believe roughly the same things, your definition of “normal” gets created inside that bubble.
That fascinated me. It also made me uncomfortable. Sometimes the language people used felt outdated. Sometimes conversations could feel naive. Sometimes I heard comments I considered homophobic or racist. And after a while I began doing what I had always been very good at doing.
I adapted. I watched what I said. I watched how I behaved. I tried to fit in. Wolfie knew that game extremely fucking well. The butterfly bedroom The first time we stayed at their house, my husband and I slept in his old bedroom. Two single beds. Matching butterfly headboards.
🤮 We slept like that every time we visited. Even after we were married. Two husbands. Two single beds. Butterflies watching over us like some heterosexual guardian angels. Years passed. Then, after Covid, my in-laws renovated. We went up to visit. Partly because they were family.
Partly because I was taking them around some of my furniture suppliers in Auckland so they could buy things at wholesale. One day we were sitting in the lounge talking about furniture placement. The front bedroom came up. My mother-in-law said something like: “We can push the single beds together.
They clip together at the base and make a double.” Excuse me? For around ten fucking years we had been sleeping in separate beds. Apparently the entire time they could become a double. “For when couples come to stay.” Her words. That told me almost everything I needed to know about where I sat.
They didn’t throw me out. They didn’t refuse to have me around. They tolerated me. But when I entered their world, it was their rules. And for a very long time, I accepted that. Because keeping the peace seemed easier. They were my husband’s parents. What was I supposed to do?
Walk through the front door screaming FUCK YOUR BUTTERFLY BEDS ? Actually, current Woulf might. Wolfie didn’t. So I adapted. I filtered myself. I behaved. I tried not to make anyone uncomfortable. Funny side note: Those two single beds did eventually become useful.
There was one trip where we hooked up with some local guy from Grindr. Two beds. Three men. Plenty of room to rotate. So thanks, butterflies. You finally contributed something to the marriage. “Without you in it.” Then came the family photo. There was a reunion in New Zealand.
A lot of the family were together for the first time in years. My husband and I were sleeping in a tent on the lawn because the house was packed. On the third day, everyone was inside waiting for lunch. My mother-in-law asked me to write down the different combinations of people she wanted for family photos later that day.
Sure. I grabbed a pen. Waited. And then she said: “The first photo I want is one of the entire family, without you in it.” In front of everyone. I remember the room reacting before I did. Even my very religious sister-in-law looked horrified. She tried to laugh it off.
It wasn’t funny. I left. Went back to the tent. Booked a flight home. That day. I’m not in any of the photographs. Looking back, that moment wasn’t really about a photograph. It exposed the entire dynamic. For years I had been trying to make myself acceptable to people who, at least from my perspective, never fully regarded me as belonging there.
And instead of questioning why they were treating me like an outsider, I kept asking what I needed to change. That pattern followed me for years. Relationships. Work. Family. Business. Trying to become easier for other people to accept. Trying to earn belonging. Wolfie behaviour.
Woulf Ryder doesn’t ask that question anymore. So what actually are the Two by Twos? the two by twos The group my husband grew up in is commonly called the Two by Twos . When I use the word cult , I’m describing how the environment has felt to me based on my own experience around it.
I’m not presenting “cult” as some legal or official classification. The movement comes from Christian roots but, in my experience, is considerably more conservative than mainstream Christianity. They don’t generally worship in conventional church buildings.
Meetings are often held in members’ homes. There is a strong emphasis on modesty, separation from worldly influences and a very particular way of living. Growing up, my husband’s family didn’t have a television. Mainstream entertainment was treated cautiously.
Dress could be conservative. Women traditionally wore skirts and often styled their hair in a particular way. Men generally wore trousers and button-up shirts. No hoodies. No singlets. Although, like most communities, younger generations appear to be changing some of that.
The strange thing from my perspective was how ordinary everything could look from outside. Friendly people. Smiling. Laughing. Chatting. Then you would spend enough time inside that world and begin noticing how much was actually governed by expectations. I rarely had genuinely deep conversations with my in-laws.
They welcomed me into the house. They fed me. They laughed with me. But emotionally, there always seemed to be a distance. And at larger gatherings I sometimes felt that distance much more aggressively. Older relatives glaring. People clearly uncomfortable with me. The gay husband.
The outsider. I learned to ignore it. Or at least pretend I did. Hills Have Eyes bullshit In 2024 we flew to Australia for a family wedding. At one point we ended up smuggling alcohol back to the cars and drinking in the bushes because alcohol wasn’t allowed at the gathering, despite there being a bar nearby.
And I remember thinking: This is some Hills Have Eyes bullshit. Because by then, I wasn’t looking at each weird experience individually anymore. I was seeing the system. One rule. Then another. Then another. One expectation. Another expectation. A culture of conformity.
A world my husband hadn’t chosen. He had simply been born into it. And because I loved him, I’d spent years navigating it too. I married him. And with him came the system. Then I started seeing more When you search the Two by Twos today, you can find substantial reporting about the movement.
That includes serious allegations involving sexual abuse and other forms of abuse by people associated with it. There are also matters within the wider family circle that I am deliberately not discussing publicly. Those stories belong to the people involved. And where appropriate, the authorities.
What I will say is that learning more changed the way I interpreted things I had previously dismissed as simply odd. Because in any environment — religious or otherwise — secrecy, isolation, obedience and resistance to outside scrutiny can make it harder for people to challenge behaviour occurring inside the group.
That does not mean every member is responsible for what another member may have done. It means systems matter. Culture matters. How communities respond when allegations emerge matters. And I started looking back at things I’d witnessed differently. One Christmas, for example, adults at the lunch table were laughing about children using Roblox to pretend to be 12-year-old girls in an attempt to catch predators online.
They were talking about it like a game. I remember sitting there thinking: What the actual fuck? Because that didn’t feel normal to me. And later, when I became aware of discussions about how members should respond to allegations and accusations involving the wider movement, those memories began sitting differently.
I don’t know the motivations of every person involved. I’m not interested in inventing them. But I do know this: When any community becomes more focused on controlling the narrative than examining what might be happening inside itself, questions deserve to be asked.
Proving there are dangerous people outside your community doesn’t automatically mean danger cannot exist inside it too. I was always the outsider For 15 years I felt like the outsider around that part of the family. And because I thought belonging was something I had to earn, I changed myself.
I watched my language. Changed how I behaved. Tried not to swear. Tried to respect every rule. Tried to understand their world. Tried to make myself smaller enough to fit into it. Then, toward the end of last year, many of them moved to Australia. Distance changed things.
Information surfaced. Conversations happened. Things I had never known became clearer. Events from years earlier suddenly looked different. My perspective changed. A lot. And today? I genuinely don’t know whether I’ll ever sit in the same room as some of those people again.
Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t. That part isn’t completely mine to control. My husband has his own relationship with his family. His own history. His own story. And being married means we navigate parts of that together. But there is one thing I know. If I do walk into that room again, I will not be trying to make myself acceptable.
I’m not policing every sentence. I’m not shrinking. I’m not editing myself into something they find easier to tolerate. I’m not sleeping metaphorically — or literally — in the single bed they decided I belonged in. Because I finally understand something.
For years, I thought being the outsider meant there was something wrong with me. Now I understand that sometimes being the outsider simply means you’ve walked into a room whose rules were never yours. And you don’t have to adopt them. This story is bigger than religion for me.
It’s another recurring pattern. Control. Belonging. Speaking. Silence. Authenticity. Who gets to decide what version of you is acceptable? I’ve had that lesson delivered to me through relationships. Through business. Through trauma. Through family. Through sex.
Through Woulf. Different setting. Same fucking question. Are you going to become what the room wants you to be, or are you going to stay yourself? Wolfie spent years adjusting. Woulf Ryder doesn’t. So technically, yes. I’m still married into what I describe as a cult.
Maybe in some ways I always will be. Because it’s part of my husband’s history. Which means parts of it inevitably became part of mine. But I don’t belong to it. I don’t live by its rules. And I’m done behaving like the outsider in my own fucking life.
Arwoooooooo 🐺