Mormon founder Joseph Smith took his first "plural wife," Fanny Alger, in the mid-1830s. He later married many additional women — including young teens and some who already were wed to other men — and introduced the practice of polygamy to select members in the 1840s.
But Smith and his church distinguished between bonds for this life, which included full matrimonial relations, and partnerships that would exist only in eternity — though it was not always clear which type of marriage the LDS prophet was practicing in every case.
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