For years, the whole world has wondered why exactly Jana Duggar hasn’t gotten married. She’s 33 years old, and she’s the only adult Duggar daughter who isn’t married. Conspiracy theories have gone wild for years. But now, two of her sisters have accidentally revealed why she hasn’t gotten married yet — and the story is truly dark and twisted.
It all started a few months ago, when a few BIG things happened with the Duggars. First, Jinger released a book called “Becoming Free Indeed,” which exposed a lot about just how toxic the religion that she and the rest of her siblings were brought up in.
Mostly, it exposed just how horrible the leader of their religion, Bill Gothard, truly was. But it was something that happened on her press tour that truly opened up a lot of questions about Jana’s marital status. Jinger talks about how Bill Gothard highly encouraged big commitments.
Why Jana Duggar Isn’t Able to Get Married
She said that he asked young women to make vows to God that they wouldn’t get married for 10-15 years. And almost immediately after the interview came out at the end of May this year, people raised a lot of eyebrows, mostly because there was someone who fit that description almost perfectly.
A woman who hadn’t gotten married for over a decade, and who was now considered too old for marriage by their religion’s standards: Jinger’s sister, Jana. The questions and conspiracy theories surrounding Jana’s marital status were some of the most talked about things in the Duggar world for years.
Some people thought that she was a closeted lesbian or that she didn’t want to have a million kids, so she was waiting to get married until she was older — or even that she was tired from raising her own siblings and didn’t want to start over again with her own family.
But this little slip that Jinger made brought an entirely new conspiracy theory to the table — Jana may have made a vow stating that she wouldn’t get married for years, which meant that she literally couldn’t get married this entire time. The only issue was, there was no proof of this.
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For months, people wondered if Jana could’ve possibly been one of the girls that had made a vow to God because of Gothard, but there was no direct connection between Jana and Bill Gothard. But then a documentary called Shiny, Happy People came out in June of this year, and that really exposed just how sick and twisted Gothard was.
According to the documentary, Bill Gothard had a group of young girls, as in, minors, who he had follow him around, and help him, and work for him. They made similar vows to the one that Jinger spoke about in the podcast interview, and many of the girls came forward in the documentary and said that Gothard had SA’d them.
Now this isn’t new information. Gothard was kicked out of the IBLP, the religion that he started himself, in 2014 when these accusations originally came out, but it was the first time that the public knew the full extent of just how creepily intertwined he was with minors.
Jana Duggar Worked for Bill Gothard
And even still, we had no proof that he was directly connected to Jana in any way. Until her sister Jill released her own book.
And even though she didn’t have a ton to say about Bill Gothard or the IBLP, especially compared to Jinger’s book and the Shiny Happy People documentary, she did mention one thing about Bill Gothard and Jana that had all the puzzle pieces come together for a lot of people.
In the book, she says that Jana was considered a quote unquote “Gothard Girl” and that Gothard liked her because she had blonde hair — and he always preferred blondes. Yes, this was something that the family joked about, and this was something that a lot of former Gothard girls also said about him.
Jill also confirmed that Jana had been sent away to work for him in Chicago. It’s never been clear for how long that was or how old she was at the time. Because when you consider how long they’ve been on TV, it’s hard to remember a time where she was ever off of the show or away from home.
But that’s what Jill said in the book. Obviously, we have no way of knowing if Jana was a victim of Gothard, but when you combine all of these things together…
Between Jinger’s statement about young women making 10-15 year vows of singleness to God because Bill Gothard told them to, and Jill’s passage about Jana being a Gothard girl. you have to imagine that this is the real reason why Jana has never gotten married.
I mean, think of it this way. If Jana did make a 15-year vow at the age of 20. She’d still be bound to her vow. It would mean that she has two more years before she can even get married. Don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely possible that it wasn’t a 15 year commitment. Maybe it was shorter, and it’s done, but she just hasn’t met the right guy yet.
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But considering how weird the family always has been and still is when it comes to Jana getting married, that wouldn’t surprise me. But what purpose would this vow even serve? Because we all know that based on how sick and twisted Gothard is, it has nothing to actually do with God.
No, it most likely was something that he came up with either for his own benefit, or for the fathers of the girls that were making these vows. The way that I see it, Gothard either wanted the girls to make a vow of singleness so that they wouldn’t be taken away from his supervision.
Why Gothard Encouraged Girls to Make This Vow
Because while their fathers may have sent them away to Gothard, their husbands most likely wouldn’t have been okay with that. And Jill even says in her book that it was expected that a daughter is passed off from the authority of the father to the authority of the husband at the time of the wedding.
But it also could be for an entirely different reason. One of Bill Gothard’s biggest teachings was to encourage people to have as many children as possible, which meant that almost all of his adult followers had their hands full with their dozens of children.
Almost exactly like Jim Bob and Michelle…And we all know that there’s no way Michelle, or any woman for that matter, could handle all that childcare by herself. But in Jana’s situation, she has essentially been helping to raise her siblings since she was still a child.
It’s definitely possible that Gothard encouraged one daughter from each family to make this vow, because he knew that the parents needed help with childcare, and that’s just something that they wouldn’t get for free if all of their daughters got married and left home.
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And if you’re just having a hard time believing that this is true. A former member of the IBLP on Reddit came forward and confirmed that this was something that was asked of them frequently.
“Yes this was a thing Gothard promoted. I was at girls conferences where we were encouraged to make a vow for a certain amount of years to be celibate and not pursue relationships with guys. I thought it was dumb so I never did. I don’t know that it was ever a Duggar thing but it definitely was a Gothard thing,” the Redditor said.
So again, if Jana made that vow, she might still be bound to it all these years later, and we might finally have cracked the code to why she’s the only Duggar daughter who isn’t married. It seems like now that we have confirmation that she was the closest to Gothard out of all of the Duggar girls.
