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This is my second episode of a series I am doing. If you have not listened to last week’s episode on the hundred-year history of all of this, I would encourage you to go back and start there, because this episode is going to make much more sense with that context.

Today, we focus on the women. Specifically, on Rosalie, who you met briefly last week, and on another woman I want to introduce you to named Hazel.

What It Did to Rosalie

Rosalie grew up in the 1990s. Some of what she was taught was explicit. Her youth leaders said her body could make boys stumble. She was given object lessons about chewed gum and licked cupcakes. She was told to guard her virtue with her life. She was measured against modesty rules at dances and activities.

And some of what she learned was implicit. Not in the words that came out of her leaders’ mouths, but in what she absorbed underneath them. That her body was both powerful and dangerous. That her sexuality was a force she had to manage to be a good Latter-day Saint woman. That her worth was tied to keeping herself covered and pure. That her future husband would want sex more than she did, and that her job in marriage would be to make herself available. None of that was stated outright in any one lesson. All of it was the takeaway.

She heard, over and over, that marriage would be the place where this would all change. Where her body would suddenly become beautiful and wanted and celebrated. Where desire would finally be welcome.

She got married. And her body did not get the memo.

Her body had learned something else entirely. That desire was a threat. That attraction was something to suppress. That noticing her own arousal was dangerous. That wanting sex made her less holy. Her nervous system absorbed all of this and built protective patterns around it, long before she ever met her husband.

Then she got married and was told, essentially, flip the switch. And her nervous system could not flip the switch, because the switch was not wired to wedding rings. It was wired to years of coded messages about who she was allowed to be.

There was desire in the anticipation, before the wedding. The butterflies, the longing, the feeling of finally being on the verge of something she had waited for. And there was some desire in the very early days of marriage, when everything was new and her body had not yet caught up to what was now permitted. But it was never sustained. The newness wore off, the conditioning reasserted itself, and within months Rosalie was lying next to her husband wondering where the wanting had gone.

That is what she has been living with. Not a marriage that has gone cold after years of growing apart. A marriage that never quite caught fire in the first place, despite both of them showing up faithful and committed and trying. She loves Bennett. She wants to want him. But her body has gone quiet, and she does not know how to call it back. When he reaches for her, she goes somewhere far away. She stays present enough to perform but not present enough to be there. Afterward, she feels guilty for being absent, ashamed for being broken, and grieved for the version of marriage she thought she would have.

And she has carried it almost entirely alone. Because the messaging she absorbed taught her that sexuality and spirituality were on opposite sides of a line. So for years, she did not really think to pray about it. She did not go looking for books. She did not talk to a friend. Praying specifically about her sexual desire felt almost wrong, like she was dragging something profane into a sacred space. Reading about it felt indulgent, maybe a little worldly. Talking about it felt like exposing something she had been taught to keep covered. So she held it inside, year after year, and assumed this was just how marriage was for her.

Until she could not anymore. She could see the pain her marriage was in. She could see Bennett pulling further away. She could see herself going through the motions of a life that was slowly draining of color. And one day she decided she could not keep doing this. So she went looking, and she found me, and now she is on a Zoom call with me, asking the question she had never been able to ask anyone else. I did everything right. Why doesn’t it work?

That is not a broken marriage. That is a nervous system doing exactly what it was trained to do.

The Quieter Version: Silas and Hazel

Rosalie at least knows something is off. She is in pain, and that pain is an opening. There is another version of this that is harder to see, because the person living it does not experience it as a problem. Let me tell you about Silas and Hazel.

Silas and Hazel have been married for twenty-eight years. They got married in the late 1990s, at the height of everything we just talked about last week. Hazel grew up in the same window of conditioning Rosalie did, and like every girl in that era, she absorbed certain things, some of them said out loud, most of them learned by implication. She learned that her body was a sacred but dangerous thing. She learned that her sexuality was something to be contained, managed, and offered to her husband within the bounds of marriage, not something to be explored or known for its own sake. She learned that pleasure was nice but not the point, and certainly not for her. She learned that a good wife is available to her husband. She learned that motherhood was the highest calling a woman could have, and that pouring herself into her children was the holiest version of who she could be. She learned that her own desires and appetites and curiosities were less important than her service to others, and that the more she could disappear into being a wife and mother, the more righteous she was. Nobody handed her a list of these rules. She learned them from Young Women lessons, from conference talks, from her parents, from the way the women in her ward talked, from what was praised in her, from what was overlooked in her, from a thousand small messages that added up to a script she now lives inside without knowing it is there.

From Hazel’s perspective, her marriage is good. They go to church. They keep their covenants. They have sex regularly enough, and Hazel participates because that is what a good wife does. She shows up for her husband. She lets him initiate when he wants to. She is not refusing him. In her mind, she is being generous, being available, being the kind of wife she is supposed to be.

What Hazel is not doing is knowing her own body. She does not know what she likes. She does not know what turns her on, or even whether she can be turned on. She has never really explored any of that, and she does not particularly want to. The idea of paying attention to her own arousal, her own desire, her own pleasure, feels vaguely uncomfortable to her, maybe a little self-indulgent, maybe a little too close to something she was taught was not for her to focus on.

So she has sex with Silas. And she is not checked out. She is actually very focused during sex. But she is entirely focused on him. She is paying attention to his experience, making sure he is taken care of, making sure he gets what he needs. What she is not focused on is herself. She is not in her own body. She is not noticing her own sensations. She is not present with her own sexuality. She is performing a wifely function, and she is happy to do it, but under her very strict terms.

Those terms show up in what she is and is not comfortable with. When Silas wants to touch her with more than just his penis, when he wants to slow down, when he wants to linger, when he wants to explore her body with his hands or his mouth, she is not comfortable with that. She is not comfortable with toys. She is not comfortable with variety. She is not comfortable with her own body. Sex has a specific shape for her, and that shape is narrow, oriented around him finishing so she can be done.

Hazel is like so many of the women whose husbands I coach. The husbands come to me confused and lonely, and when they describe what is happening in their marriage, I recognize it immediately. Hazel is not a rare case. She is one of the most common versions of what purity culture and checklist religion create inside a woman.

And most of these women have something else in common, though they would not name it this way themselves. Motherhood has quietly taken over as the whole of their identity, and the marriage, without anyone noticing, has slipped down the list. If you asked Hazel whether she prioritizes her kids over her husband, she would probably say no. She would say she loves her husband, she is committed to her marriage, of course her family comes first. But if you watched her life, you would see that her energy, her attention, her emotional center, her sense of purpose, all of it runs through the kids. Six of them. The oldest two are married and have given her four grandbabies between them. The middle two are in college and on missions. The youngest two are still at home in junior high and high school. And Hazel still organizes her whole life around them. The married daughter who calls every day. The missionary’s weekly email she has been waiting for since Monday. The grandbabies she watches whenever she can. The teenagers’ rides and homework and emotional weather. Her schedule, her phone, her conversations, her prayers. All of it runs through her children. The marriage gets what is left over, which is usually not much.

Ask Hazel who she is, and she will tell you she is a mom. She will tell you about her kids and her grandkids, their activities, their needs. She will not tell you about herself, because she does not really have a self outside of that role. She does not know who she is as a woman apart from being someone’s mother. She has no sense of herself as a sexual being, as a person with her own desires, as a human with interests and appetites that exist independent of her service to others. And the role that has held her together for nearly thirty years is not going to hold her together forever. Eventually the youngest will leave too. Eventually the calls and the emails and the schedules will quiet. And when that happens, Hazel will not know what comes next, because there is no one underneath the role.

This is not accidental. It is what she was taught. The messaging she grew up with elevated motherhood as woman’s highest and holiest calling. It shaped her to believe that her worth and her identity were found in nurturing and sacrificing for others. So she built her whole self around that, without ever deciding to. It was not a choice she made. It was the shape she was formed into.

When you put the pieces together, it is no wonder this happened. A girl was taught that her sexuality was dangerous and that her virginity was the most precious thing about her. Then she was taught that motherhood was her highest calling and her truest identity. So once she got married, the sexuality piece stayed loaded with all the old shame, while motherhood was the one identity the church had wholeheartedly affirmed. Of course she leaned into the role she had been celebrated for. Of course she quietly stepped back from the part of herself she had been taught to fear. And in her mind, sexuality, motherhood, and spirituality came to feel like they were in opposition, because the same culture that elevated her as a mother had taught her that her sexuality was something to manage, suppress, and contain. To be a holy woman, to be a good mother, she came to believe she had to leave her sexual self behind. Nobody told her that out loud. But the structure of what she had absorbed made it almost inevitable.

Once motherhood is the entirety of who you are, sexuality becomes very hard. Sexuality asks you to be a person, not just a role. It asks you to have desires of your own. It asks you to take up space in your own body. And if you have no self outside of being a mom, there is no one home to show up in the bedroom.

This is why so many wives shut down or narrow their sexuality once they have children, and why some of them, like Hazel, never come back from it. It is not just exhaustion or touch fatigue, though those are real. It is that the identity of motherhood can swallow the identity of self, and when the self disappears, the sexual self goes with it. What is left is a woman performing a function. Wife. Mother. Grandmother. Checkbox. Task. But not a whole person in her own body, with her own wants, with her own capacity for pleasure.

Hazel does not see this as a problem. If you asked her, she would say things are fine. She would say she loves her husband, she makes herself available to him, and that is what marriage is. She would not name a lack because she does not feel a lack. She cannot miss something she has never been invited to imagine.

Silas feels the absence, though. He can tell she is not really there with him, not in the way he longs for her to be. He can tell that sex is something she gives to him rather than something they share. He feels the polite, dutiful quality of it, and he knows exactly what it is. He is not the priority. He has not been the priority for a long time. The kids come first. The grandkids come first. The callings come first. And he is left with whatever attention is still in her hands at the end of the day, which is usually not much. He does not want a wife who tolerates him. He wants a wife who is in her body with him. He wants mutuality. He wants to know that she wants him back. He wants to be able to love her whole body, not just have access to a narrow script.

When he tries to talk about it, Hazel does not really understand what he is asking for. From her frame, she is already doing her part. She is having sex with him. She is not withholding. What more could he possibly want? And underneath that response, though she does not articulate it this way, is a deeper resistance. Because what he is really asking her to do is come into her own body. Pay attention to her own desire. Be a sexual person, not just a sexual partner. And that is not something she has any framework for wanting, because the framework she was raised in taught her that good women do not do that. Good women are modest, nurturing, and available to their husbands. They are   not, in any active sense, sexual.

Nobody is cheating. Nobody is fighting. From the outside, the marriage looks functional. They have sex. They are kind to each other. They have raised six children, built a life, served in callings, kept every covenant. But Silas is quietly heartbroken, because the woman he married is not actually in the room with him, and Hazel does not even know that she is missing.

This is the quieter casualty of the checklist. Not the women who shut down and feel it, like Rosalie. But the women who were trained so thoroughly to prioritize everyone else’s experience that they never learned their own body was allowed to exist. They check the box of being a wife who has sex with her husband, and they do not notice that there is no woman at the center of the act.

Two different couples. Two different expressions of the same inherited conditioning. Both carrying it without knowing it is there.

A Few Things to Hold Before We Move On

I have only given you two expressions, and the variety is wider than that. Some of you are thinking, that is not me. I am not Rosalie and I am not Hazel. You may be right that you are not exactly either of them. The conditioning expresses itself differently in every woman. Some shut down completely. Some narrow themselves to a manageable script. Some perform without being present. Some carry pornography catastrophe scripts that color every interaction with their husband. Some have huge unexpressed desire they have shamed themselves out of. Some struggle with their own bodies in ways that do not look like any of these. If you do not see yourself fully in either Rosalie or Hazel, the question is not whether the whole picture fits you. The question is whether parts of it do. The work is not to identify with one of these stories. The work is to look at the pieces of yours.

I also want to be honest about something, because I do not want this to come across as a story where the church is the villain and we are all victims. The conditioning did not just come from a Sunday lesson or a conference talk. It got reinforced at home, by parents who had absorbed the same conditioning and believed they were being good parents by passing it along. A mother who taught her daughter the chewed-gum object lesson genuinely believed she was protecting her. A father who emphasized modesty was trying to keep his daughter safe. They were not malicious. They were doing what they had been taught was the right thing to do. The impact was not just the church and not just the home. It was both, working together, each one strengthening the other. That is part of why it hit so hard, and why it is so hard to untangle now.

And this matters too. We always have agency. We always have access to the Spirit. We can always seek personal confirmation about what we are being taught. But when the institution tells you the prophets and apostles speak for God, and your parents say the same thing, and the women in your ward all say the same thing, and your friends are absorbing the same messages, the path to using your agency to question any of it is genuinely hard to find. Not impossible. Some women did. But hard. So if you are thinking, why didn’t I push back, why didn’t I question this earlier, please be gentle with yourself. The system was designed in a way that made questioning feel like rebellion. It was not your fault that you could not see clearly through it. And the fact that you are looking at it now is the agency working, just at a different time than you might wish it had.

What About the Women Who Came Through This Differently

With all of that said, there are also women who came through with relatively little damage. Not because the conditioning did not reach them, but because something softened its impact along the way. Some women came through with a much healthier sense of their bodies and their sexuality, and the question of why is worth understanding.

The Protective Factors

The first one is having at least one parent who talked openly and positively about sex. Not awkwardly. Not just the mechanics. But who actually communicated, in words and tone and body language, that sex was a good thing, that bodies were good, that desire was normal and welcome inside marriage. A mother who told her daughter she enjoyed being married to her father and meant it. A father who treated his wife with obvious affection and warmth. Parents who did not flinch or shut down when sex came up. And in some cases, parents who openly taught their daughter something different from what she was hearing at church. A mother who said, that lesson you had on Sunday, I want to give you another way to think about that. A father who pushed back when his daughter came home upset about a chewed-gum object lesson. Parents who gave their daughter explicit permission to question what she was being told and to hold a different view. That kind of input, even from just one parent, gave a girl a counter-narrative to the modesty talks and the folk doctrine.

The second factor is what her specific leaders and lessons looked like. Some Young Women presidents and Sunday School teachers, even in the height of the purity culture era, were naturally compassionate and grace-oriented. They did not pull out the chewed-gum object lessons. They did not pass around the licked cupcake. They did not shame the girls in their care over what they wore or what they had done. The folk doctrine version of purity culture was concentrated most heavily in what we sometimes call the Jello belt. Utah, Idaho, parts of Arizona. The places where most of the neighborhood was Latter-day Saint, and where leaders and parents and friends all marinated in the same cultural water. Girls who grew up outside that bubble, in places where the church was a minority, often had a different experience. The leaders there had to work harder to make the gospel land for kids in mixed environments, and many of them naturally avoided the harshest rhetoric. Those girls heard the broader institutional teachings about chastity and modesty, because those were unavoidable, but the worst of the folk doctrine often did not reach them. And the bishops they happened to land in front of were sometimes the kind who handled questions and confessions with compassion instead of shame, with reminders of the Atonement instead of probation. The same confession made to a different bishop could have shaped her very differently. Priesthood roulette cuts both ways. Some women got lucky.

The third factor is exposure to outside frameworks early. A book about female anatomy that a mother gave her at twelve. A health class at school that was actually informative. A friend who talked openly about her own sexuality. A college roommate from a different background who normalized things the church had treated as unspeakable. These outside inputs gave her additional reference points before her sexual identity calcified around the church’s frame alone.

The fourth factor is temperament. Some girls are just constitutionally more questioning, more skeptical, more inclined to push back against authority and figure things out for themselves. They heard the same lessons everyone else heard, but they did not absorb them with the same compliance. They thought, that does not sound right, and they kept their own counsel about it. That disposition is partly genetic, partly birth order, partly family culture. It provides a natural buffer against absorbing every message wholesale.

The fifth factor is what happened on the wedding night and in the early years of marriage. A couple who had a positive, communicative, gentle entry into sexual life had a very different trajectory than a couple who had a confusing, painful, or shame-laden start. If the husband was patient, if he was curious about her body alongside her, if they could laugh together and figure it out together, the conditioning had less of a foothold. The body got new information that started to override the old.

The sixth factor is later choices. Some women, even after a rough start, sought out books, coaches, or honest friends who helped them rebuild. They did the work, sometimes without naming it as work. They examined what they had been taught and decided what to keep and what to set down. They got curious about their own bodies. They had hard conversations with their husbands. The conditioning was there, but it was not destiny.

So those are the protective factors. None are guaranteed, and most women who came through in better shape had several of them, not just one.

When “Fine” Isn’t Quite What It Looks Like

I want to talk about something more delicate. Because some of the women who appear to have escaped have not actually escaped. If you are listening and you think you are fine, I want you to be honest with yourself about what fine actually means.

There is a category of woman who does not feel shut down, who has sex regularly, who enjoys it most of the time, who would say her sex life is good. On the surface, she is doing well. But underneath, she has narrowed her sexuality to a manageable shape. She has a script that works. She does not really explore beyond it. She is not curious about her own body in any deep way. She is not comfortable with her husband initiating things outside the script. She is not exploring fantasy or expanding her erotic imagination. Her sex life is functional, but it is not flourishing. She has built a workable container, and she is not inclined to look outside of it.

That is not the same as healthy sexuality. That is partial conditioning. The container was built around the rules she absorbed, and the rules are still running the show, just more quietly.

There is another version that is even harder to see. The woman who feels like she has integrated her faith and her sexuality, who feels fine, but who has never actually examined the messages she received. She just landed on a tolerable middle ground without doing the work. If pressed, she could not tell you the difference between her authentic sexual self and the sexual self the conditioning shaped her into. She has not asked the question. And if she has not asked the question, she does not actually know.

I am not saying this to make anyone feel bad about feeling fine. If you feel fine, that may be wonderful, and it may be real. The honest test of whether you came through in good shape is not whether your sex life is functional. The honest test is whether you know your own body, whether you are curious about your own desire, whether you can be in your own experience during sex without performing or managing or splitting off, whether you have examined the messages you absorbed and made your own choices about which ones to keep.

If you can say yes to those things, you really did come through in good shape, and I am genuinely glad for you.

If you cannot, that does not mean you are broken or that your marriage is in trouble. It means there is more to discover. And that discovery is a gift you can still give yourself, no matter how long you have been married.

The point is not to convince you that you are damaged. The point is to name what was in the water you grew up in, so you can decide, with eyes open, what you want to carry forward and what you want to set down.

Coming Home to Yourself

For the women who might be more like Hazel than Rosalie, I want to speak to you directly. If you think your sexual life is fine, if you are a willing and available partner, consider something gently. Being present for sex is not the same as being in your own body during sex. Showing up for your husband is not the same as being there for yourself.

There is a difference between having sex and being a sexual person. If you do not know what your own body likes, if you have never been curious about your own desire, if sex is something you participate in rather than something you experience, you are not broken, but you are also not home in yourself. And the quiet loneliness your husband feels may not be about frequency or technique. It may be about the fact that the woman he married has never actually been in the room with him.

This is not about becoming someone you are not. It is about meeting yourself for the first time. Your own body was never meant to be a vehicle for someone else’s experience. It is yours. Getting curious about it is not indulgent or selfish. It is a way of coming home.

A few months later, Rosalie was on another Zoom call with me. She had started to understand that her numbness was not a moral failing. It was a nervous system response to decades of coded training. She had started to speak to her body gently, like she was meeting it for the first time. She had started to have small moments of curiosity about her own desire, not as something to suppress, but as something to notice.

She and Bennett had started to have conversations they had never had before. Not about sex, at first. About fear. About what they each thought the other expected. About how they had both been performing for years without realizing it.

The desire did not come back all at once. That is not how it works. But the flat line started to have small movements in it. And she started to believe, for the first time, that her body was not broken.

What Comes Next

Next week, we do this same work for the men. Same series, different conditioning, different shapes inside the marriage. If you have a husband, a son, or have wondered why the men in your life seem so locked up around their own sexuality, that is the episode for you.

If you are a woman who has been listening and recognizing yourself in any of this, I want to leave you with one thing. Your body is not broken. Your desire is not broken. What was installed in you was not yours to carry in the first place. And you get to choose, with reverence and honesty, what you do with it now.

Alright my friends, that’s all I have for you today. Remember, love is a journey, not a destination. Stay committed, stay passionate, and stay connected. I’ll see you next week…ba-bye.