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.

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.

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.”

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.

Not knowing is an extremely difficult skill to master, especially for those of us who grew up in contexts where knowing and believing will conflated. We’re excited to ask more questions of ourselves throughout our relationship, and on this podcast.

Trauma responses can happen as a result of a one-time incident (acute) or the cumulation of incidents (complex). Laura reflects, “Whereas when we're talking about more complex trauma that has happened over the span of years and decades, such as trauma in high control religion, I have to learn how to integrate that into my life to realize, I literally cannot process every single moment of every single time something happened. because we would be doing that for the rest of our life and then some.”

What are your goals for the New Year? What word encapsulates what you want to accomplish in 2023?

Answering those questions, be they at the start of the year, midway through a project, or at the conclusion of an event, requires an effective self-reflection process. Ideally, said process happens both individually and in relationship, be that with a partner, a friend or family member, or larger community.

In this episode, Julia and Jeremiah describe three practices, rooted in our Evangelical upbringing, that can provide a structure for having these conversations.

With the implicit or explicit messaging that the holidays are a romantic a season, and for many people, not all people, romance and sex occur together, and by default, then, sex has to be filled with some sort of holiday magic.

We're sharing this story because we need to talk about the commitments that partners make to each other around sexuality, and we need to talk about the ways that people break those commitments, and why they break those commitments, because affairs don't happen in isolation.

In connection to this episode, the reason that we don't talk about sex here on Sunday school, the reason that talking about sex is dangerous is because it threatens the dogma, the doctrine, and the belief structure that holds together religious communities. By talking about sex, you threaten the very foundation of an institution.