We're thrilled to have Teddi and Nick, co-hosts of the podcast Oh God I Forgot About That, to talk more about how their upbringings in Pentecostal communities impacted understandings of gender, dating relationships, and sexuality.

Join Julia and Jeremiah in an eye-opening episode as they explore the intricate dynamics of sexual positivity after leaving Evangelical, Mormon, and Pentecostal communities. Discover how the post-marriage script perpetuates myths about seamless sexual bliss and the importance of communication skills in fostering a healthy sexual perspective.

We’ve been talking about the first three levels of the Sound Marital House model from couples therapy gurus John and Julie Gottman. This week, Julia and Jeremiah talk about the fourth value: the positive perspective and how Purity Culture damages this practice for couples.

After our month-long foray into the disturbing literature from the Evangelical Christian publishing industry, we continue our new series The Sex Ed We Wish We Had.

Sixteen years ago, Linda Kay Klein captured the experiences of hundreds of women, herself included, who grew up within and confronted the consequences of the Evangelical purity culture movement in the 90s and early 2000s. Through Pure and her nonprofit, Break Free Together, Linda has created numerous spaces to bring folks together to share their stories about repression, bravery, and ultimately freedom. We are thrilled to have her as a podcast guest!

Tia Levings is a writer and content creator whose work explores the female narrative in patriarchal spaces. We are thrilled to have Tia share her experience of surviving and escaping a religious fundamentalist community, discovering healing and self-exploration, and using her story to help others find their own versions of healing.

Our focus within the sexuality and deconstruction sphere is on the relationships that have survived a church exit or the relationships that are forming for the first time without the rigid confines of the dictates of purity culture.

Luke and Lauren from the Filled to Flourish podcast talk about the ways that they learned to turn toward each other, and the ways that protected their relationship as larger religious systems turned against them when they practiced their relationship differently from the values of their families and religious communities of origin.

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.