Seven Ways That Pre-Marital Couples Struggle Through the Practice of Sexual Abstinence
With more info about our relationship coaching business, and our podcast episode on Get Naked with Dr. Kate
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We were thrilled to be guests on Get Naked with Dr. Kate last week.
is one of the leading up and coming sex therapists in the country. The founder of Modern Intimacy, a (mostly) nationwide sex therapy practice, Kate brings her expertise on sexuality and relationships to multiple platforms, including a TikTok page with over 200,000 followers.Julia and I have bemoaned the takeover of short form media content and its influence in our country’s issues with media literacy; Kate is one of the few people in the psychology world who successfully mixes depth and context with accessibility in short-form content creation.
Kate talks with us about the influence of Purity Culture on sexuality and long term relationships, with special interest toward the grief and loss that can accompany the freedom of exiting high control environments.
Julia and I are invested in accurately representing how the messages of Purity Culture and Evangelical, Mormon, and Pentecostal (EMPish) Christianity impact relationships and sexuality. However, one of the challenges of writing about Purity Culture is that Kate, Julia, and I all left affiliation with religious institutions at least five years ago. While there are a couple of incredibly vivid memories that Julia and I have about the impact of Purity Culture on our former marriages, such as the time that my ex’s father walked in on us fooling around, the panic attacks that followed initial sexual experiences, and Julia’s horrific honeymoon experience, many of our memories are colored by time and perspective.
That’s not the same as capturing the experiences of folks who are actively in Purity Culture, and learning about how messages of Purity Culture are impacting relationships and sexuality.
We have two options for how we can gather this information.
The first is a practice that we talked about this week with
. It takes unique skills to reflect upon and write about our own experiences from the perspective of the teenagers and 20-somethings that we were, without relying on the knowledge and insight that we have as late 30-somethings.The second is to rely on research studies in which the experiences of active participants of Purity Culture are being explored, which we’ll do as much as we can on Relationship 101.
Today, we’ll talk about the work of Jennifer Bevan, professor of communications at Chapman University, and PhD student Arielle Leonard Hodges. In September, 2023, the journal Personal Relationships published their article: Some days are much holier than others: Relational uncertainty and partner influence in Christian dating couples’ sexual intimacy negotiation.
A couple of quick definitions from the title, which they take from the larger literature of Denise Solomon’s relational turbulence theory, which explores how individual and relational evolutions (i.e. moving into marriage or parenthood) and other transitions (geographic, occupational, familial, etc.) can heighten emotions of anxiety and stress and lead to greater negative interactions.
Relational uncertainty: When an individual has questions, doubts, and ambivalence stemming from feelings, behaviors, and definitions connected with the relationship.
Partner influence: When there are differences, the way that an individual might interrupt their own individual or relational goals and pursue/settle for the individual/relational goals and behaviors of their partner.
Partner facilitation: When a partner acts in a way that helps the individual achieve their own individual/relational goals, potentially at the expense of what the partner might want.
Hodges and Bevan interviewed 16 individuals from eight heterosexual couples who are actively engaged in Christian communities. Before we make the assumption that these folks are less educated, which can often happen when attempting to understand EMPish cultures, all 16 participants have some level of graduate education. And all of them place a high importance on the role of faith in their lives.
Hodges and Bevan asked participants to read a story about a couple experiencing relational uncertainty while attempting to simultaneously navigate their own sexuality and adhere to the standards of Purity Culture, and then reflect on how they might navigate that in their own relationships.
After transcribing the interviews, they discovered seven common relational challenges that couples navigating a sexual relationship in the context of Purity Culture values might face:
An assumption of shared values. Almost every participant assumed that sexual intercourse was off the table. While assuming sexual abstinence protects the relationship from uncertainty, it can also lead to significant challenges when the behaviors of one or both partners begin to differ from the desired outcomes of Purity Culture.
Discussion of boundaries. 50% of the participants reported having explicit discussions about “How far is too far” and other boundaries around physical intimacy. The couples that do talk about boundaries do so without having a preliminary conversation about “Is abstinence even what we want?”
Sexual behaviors create uncertainty to the relationship. This includes relational sexuality, masturbation, and pornography use. Uncertainty was manifested through a myriad of responses: anxiety, yelling, shutting down, questioning the relationship. Participants commonly framed this as a battle of spiritual warfare, or a lack of trust in God.
Snowball effect. Sexual activity very easily accelerates through verbal and nonverbal actions, and often passed the agreed-upon boundaries of physical connection.
Conversations about the underlying motivations for moving beyond the boundaries. (Editors note: This one brought me back.) Participants reported believing that the people in the case study whose sexual behaviors expanded beyond their agreed upon sexual boundaries were selfish, seeking fulfillment in their partner more than God, must not be “true Christians”, or were afraid of losing their partner. Participants also reported engaging in a similar process within their relationship, believing that if they were able to find the root reason for pushing beyond the boundaries of Purity Culture, they could create sustainable practices for attaining abstinence until marriage.
Gatekeeping “sexual temptation”. Both male and female partners believed that it was the man’s responsibility to monitor the sexual relationship as part of being a “spiritual leader”. Both male and female partners reported that it was the female partner who actually executed the cessation of the sexual experience. Both male and female partners talked about guilt and shame about escalating the sexual experience.
The role of sacrifice and prayer. Many participants described prayer as something that either preceded a makeout session or that followed the crossing of a boundary. These participants asked God for “strength to maintain boundaries” and “insight to identify underlying reasons for boundary violations”.
If these dynamics sound familiar to you, you are not alone. Many of these dynamics have significantly damaging implications for long-term relationships.
For example, starting a conversation about sexuality with boundaries—what you don’t want—leads to a very different, more limiting outcome than starting a conversation with what you do want.
The snowball effect assumes that the final goal of a sexual experience is intercourse; if you want that in a sexual experience, that’s fantastic. But there’s no obligation to include intercourse in a sexual experience.
Gatekeeping and assumption making places an enormous amount of burden and anxiety on relationships, especially women, which makes it extremely difficult for a person to give themselves permission to determine what they might actually want in a sexual experience.
Julia and I specialize in working with couples who have navigated Purity Culture values in earlier parts of their relationship. We would love to help your relationship explore how to make sexuality a shame-free act of playing and connecting with yourselves and each other.
Email us at sexvangelicals@gmail.com for more information about relationship coaching.
Let’s heal together!
Jeremiah and Julia