All of my wives are great, but you see that one right there, no the other one, she's my favorite.

National Geographic offers up a different sort of V-Day love story this month with a cover piece titled, Polygamy in America. The story looks at marriages with multiple wives in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), a sect that split from the Mormon faith in the 1920s and became centered in Colorado City, Arizona.

The sect became infamous in recent years when their compound in West Texas was raided by federal officials amid domestic abuse and child-endangerment allegations. Perhaps trying to change their public image, church elders opened their doors for National Geographic. An excerpt in which women from the sect discuss their unorthodox marriages:

“Joyce is a rather remarkable example of this harmony. She not only accepted another wife, Marcia, into the family, but was thrilled by the addition. Marcia, who left an unhappy marriage in the 1980s, is also Joyce’s biological sister. ‘I knew my husband was a good man,’ Joyce explains with a smile as she sits with Marcia and their husband, Heber. ‘I wanted my sister to have a chance at the same kind of happiness I had.’

Not all FLDS women are quite so sanguine about plural marriage. Dorothy Emma Jessop is a spry, effervescent octogenarian who operates a naturopathic dispensary in Hildale. Sitting in her tiny shop surrounded by jars of herbal tinctures she ground and mixed herself, Dorothy admits she struggled when her husband began taking on other wives. ‘To be honest,’ she says, ‘I think a lot of women have a hard time with it, because it’s not an easy thing to share the man you love. But I came to realize this is another test that God places before you—the sin of jealousy, of pride—and that to be a godly woman, I needed to overcome it.'”