We talk with Luke and Lauren from the Filled to Flourish podcast about their experience navigating dating in a Purity Culture context. They describe how their efforts of turning towards God, through perfectionism, "atonement", and practicing obligatory sexual abstinence resulting in them turning away from themselves, and each other.

Respect is earned by making agreements between two people and keeping them. And when you don't keep those agreements, making sure that you hold yourself accountable and talk about the things that prevented you from keeping those agreements and talking about how you wanted to do better next time.

When admiration for our partners is not taught or modeled, people can default onto gender norms as a way to show their appreciation. Appreciation then becomes about performing the gender role as opposed to celebrating the holistic person and uniqueness of the relationship.

When we spend every day with our partner, sometimes it is hard to come up with creative and intriguing questions to ask one another and this is a great starting off point for serious and not-so-serious questions. Getting the ball rolling on curiosity is the most important thing.

Curiosity, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is the strong desire to know or learn something. In this episode, we talk about how EMPish (Evangelical, Mormon, and Pentecostal) communities discourage curiosity, and the ways that people can learn and practice curiosity in your relationship.

This summer, we’re talking about seven principles of healthy relationships from John and Julie Gottman in a series that we’re calling Partnership Building:

Labels can be constricting, and while they’re not that they are bad, a lot of people do not fall into the gay, straight, or bisexual labels, but find themselves identifying more with the term “queer” or sexually fluid. It’s okay to not have a label. All that matters is practicing safe and consensual sex with whomever it may be.

Anger's such a powerful emotion because it allows you to carve out space and hold your boundaries in a way that shame and fear can kind of incapacitate you. While there are pros and cons, anger is one of the few emotions that really, I think, shores you up and you can push it back on things.

Independence is a beautiful thing, but when you're not kind of taught to work with people in your community, the people around you, you're not really gonna apply that as you get older. You're not gonna apply that to dating, you're not gonna apply that to sex.

What I'm mostly encouraging folks to do is both get to a place where they're able to really like step into the shoes of the other person. And then that works both ways because it helps with pacing. I think the biggest issue that leads to harm is we're trying to move too fast.

“I got pretty good at repressing a ton of like sexual urge, sexual desire, sexual exploration, sexual identity exploration, to where I thought I was getting a good sense of who I was and building this like really strong identity, but the reality was I was losing myself.”

How can we have honest dialogue about sexuality when we’ve been so dishonest with our kids and adolescents about sexual health?

To help us answer this, we invite Kara Haug, co-founder of Reframing Our Stories, a business that provides sexual health education, resources and tools for families and communities to normalize conversations around sex and relationship in Sacramento.

A person is beginning to date and is exploring multiple potential dating, sexual, and or romantic relationships. What are some ways to help set initial conversations around STI or pregnancy prevention?”

It’s not just like I have this STI I status I need to disclose. It's that I wanna talk about these things around sexual health and safer sex because I had an experience that opened my mind. That looks like, “I'm curious about what you need. I'm curious about what you'd like to do around safer sex or sexual health. I'm curious when you were last tested, cause here's when I was tested here was, here were the results of my tests.”

We commonly talk about exploitation from the perspective of individuals leveraging their individual power and control to receive sexual gratification. On this, and in future episodes, we acknowledge that individuals who exploit are commonly enacting cultural and societal directives to exploit. As such, we are holding both systems and individuals accountable.

We want consent to be an easy, straightforward thing. And when there are clear intentions to use sexuality as a way to physically and emotionally hurt and violate other people, the line between consent and non-consent becomes pretty straightforward.

However, if we think about consent not as attorneys do, as a yes/no binary, consent was or wasn’t given, but more as a relational process, a dialogue, a conversation, here’s where things become a bit more complicated.

From the Harvey Institute: Consent means voluntary cooperation communicates permission to try and reach sexual satisfaction and intimacy with willing partners. Consent transforms the act of sex from invasion, intrusion, or violation into an act of transformation.”

In all seriousness, this messaging by Butler is not new, just repackaged for 2023. You could have realistically picked up a book like this in 2013, 2003, and 1993 and the same message would be clear: Don’t. Have. Sex. (Unless you are married, then it’s okay!) He stays true to Evangelical beliefs by making it clear that Queer people do not exist and reinforcing the binary that you can only be single or married. We hope you enjoy this episode where we read yet another book repacking the same purity culture values again!

Naming these rigid expectations and understanding how Evangelical theologians come to these conclusions help us deconstruct unhelpful expectations for humanity and recreate new possibilities for people to explore themselves and celebrate life through relationships.

This week there has been controversy surrounding Joshua Butler's new book, Beautiful Union: How God's Vision for Sex Points us to the Good, Unlocks the Truth, and Sort of Explains Everything.

And yes, that is the real title.

The Gospel Coalition, a media source for conservative evangelicals, published an excerpt from Joshua Butler's new book, which was so horrendous, even THEY had to take it down.