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Most of us have heard the phrase “the seven deadly sins” somewhere along the way. Maybe in a high school English class reading Dante. Maybe from a movie. Maybe just floating around in cultural conversation. Pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. The list is ancient. It comes out of early Christian monastic tradition, got formalized by Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century, and has been part of Christian moral thinking ever since.

But if you grew up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, like I did, you probably noticed that we don’t really talk about the seven deadly sins. We talk about the Law of Chastity. We talk about the Word of Wisdom. We talk about commandments and covenants. The seven deadly sins are more of a Catholic and broader Christian framework, and Latter-day Saints tend to leave that vocabulary to the rest of the Christian world.

I’m not here to argue that we should suddenly start using that language in Sacrament Meeting. But I recently came across a framework that gave me a whole new way of thinking about these seven sins, and I cannot stop thinking about how applicable it is to marriage and to sex. A few years ago, I heard a woman named Elizabeth Oldfield speak at the Faith Matters Restore conference, and I had already heard her on the Faith Matters podcast before that. Her work stuck with me all this time, and I finally decided it was time to bring it to you. She’s a British writer and podcaster, and she’s written a book called Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times.

Oldfield’s whole framework is this: the seven deadly sins, at their core, are about disconnection. They are patterns of being that pull us away from the people around us, away from our own selves, and away from God. Each one, in its own way, severs something. And the antidote to each sin is not just “stop sinning.” The antidote is the movement back toward connection.

So today I want to walk you through all seven, in the traditional order: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. For each one, I’ll talk about how we traditionally understand it, then how Oldfield reframes it, then how it shows up in your marriage and your sex life. The patterns that pull you away from your spouse and away from your sexual connection are not weird or unique to you. They are old. They are human. And every single one of them has been written about for centuries.

So let’s start with pride.

Pride

In Christian tradition, pride has always been considered the deadliest of the seven. It was the sin of Lucifer. It’s the sin most often warned against in Latter-day Saint scripture. Pride, in the way we usually understand it, is the elevation of self above God and above others. It’s arrogance. It’s thinking you know best. It’s contention. It’s being unwilling to be taught.

Now, if you grew up Latter-day Saint, you have probably heard President Ezra Taft Benson’s 1989 General Conference talk called “Beware of Pride.” It’s one of the most quoted General Conference talks of the last several decades, and for good reason. What President Benson taught in that talk is that pride, at its core, is what he called “enmity.” Hostility. Opposition. A posture of being against. He said the central feature of pride is “enmity toward God and enmity toward our fellowmen.” He said pride is “essentially competitive in nature,” that we pit our will against God’s will and against everyone around us. He also said pride is a sin we can readily see in others but rarely admit in ourselves.

Here is what I find so striking about that talk in light of Oldfield’s work. President Benson and Elizabeth Oldfield are describing the same thing from different angles. President Benson describes what pride looks like from the inside: enmity, hostility, opposition. Oldfield describes what pride does to us: it severs us from the people we love and from God. Pride, at its core, is choosing to be against instead of with.

For Oldfield, the movement here is from individualism to connection. Pride says, “I don’t need anyone. I can do this on my own. I am self-sufficient. I do not need to be vulnerable. I do not need to be seen.” Pride, in her framing, is the refusal to be in real, ongoing, dependent relationship with anyone else. It pulls us into a tight little fortress of self.

And in marriage, enmity is not abstract. When pride sets in, that is exactly what happens. You stop being with your spouse and start being against them. Sometimes it looks like a competitive posture: winning the argument, being right, coming out on top. Sometimes it looks like a steady undercurrent of opposition that flavors every conversation. Pride is everywhere in marriage. It’s the spouse who cannot apologize because they cannot see themselves as ever being in the wrong. It’s the partner who won’t go to coaching because “we should be able to figure this out ourselves.” It’s the husband or wife who hears feedback from their spouse and immediately moves into defense rather than curiosity. Pride says, “I will not let you see me struggle. I will not let you see me wanting. I will not let you see me unsure.”

In your sex life, pride shows up as the refusal to be vulnerable in your own body. It’s the spouse who never asks for what they want sexually because asking would mean admitting they want something. It’s the partner who can’t say “I don’t know how to do that, will you show me?” Pride keeps you performing instead of present. It keeps you guarded. And sex, real connecting sex, requires the opposite of pride. It requires being seen. It requires saying out loud what you want. It requires letting your spouse witness you in your wanting, in your pleasure, in your awkwardness. Pride cannot survive in that kind of room.

And vulnerability is what brings you back. You let your spouse see you. You say the apology you did not want to make. You ask the question that admits you do not know. You let yourself want them, out loud, in the room. Every act of vulnerability is a small return.

In Oldfield’s language, that is the whole movement: from individualism to connection.

Which brings us to greed.

Greed

Traditionally, greed is the excessive love of money or possessions. It’s the rich young ruler who walks away from Jesus because he can’t part with his stuff. In Latter-day Saint culture, we talk about it in terms of materialism and putting our trust in worldly things instead of God.

Oldfield calls her chapter on greed “From Stuffocation to Gratitude and Generosity.” Stuffocation is a term for what happens when we are so surrounded by stuff, whether possessions or options or obligations or information, that we feel suffocated by it all instead of satisfied. She argues that greed is fundamentally about scarcity. The belief that there is not enough. Not enough money, not enough security, not enough time, not enough love, not enough attention. And out of that scarcity, we hoard. We grasp. We accumulate. We compare what we have to what others have. The opposite of greed, she says, is gratitude. The settled sense that what you have is enough, and the generosity that flows from that.

In marriage, greed shows up as scorekeeping. “I did the dishes three times this week and you did them zero.” “I initiated sex four times last month and you only initiated once.” It shows up as resentment that builds because you are always tallying. It shows up as the spouse who can never quite acknowledge what their partner is doing because they’re too focused on what their partner is not doing.

In your sex life, greed is the constant focus on what you’re not getting. Not enough sex. Not enough variety. Not enough effort. Not enough adventure. And listen, I’m not saying that wanting more is wrong. Wanting things in your sex life is healthy. But there’s a difference between a desire to grow together and a pattern of constant dissatisfaction. Greed in the bedroom looks like a spouse who is so focused on what they wish were different that they cannot enjoy what is.

Now, there’s a nuance I want to be careful about here. Sometimes what looks like your spouse’s greed is actually the story you have been telling about your spouse for years. There is a real thing that happens in some marriages where one spouse truly is chronically dissatisfied. Nothing is ever enough. Every effort gets met with “that was nice, but why don’t you also…” If that is genuinely your marriage, that is a real dynamic that needs coaching and honest conversation.

But there’s another version of this that is way more common than people admit. It’s the spouse who has decided, somewhere along the way, that “nothing I do will ever be enough for them.” “If I give an inch, they’ll ask for a mile.” “If I initiate this time, they’ll just expect it more often next time.” And when you look at those stories honestly, they often turn out to be stories, not facts. Because if you decide up front that your spouse is impossible to satisfy, you never actually have to try. You get to hoard your own generosity while calling your spouse the greedy one. And that is its own kind of greed.

And even when your spouse’s greed is real, that does not cancel out yours. Two people can be greedy at the same time in the same marriage, in different directions. If you use their pattern as justification to stop giving and stop trying, you are still hoarding. Usually when a marriage is stuck in this dynamic, both spouses are contributing to it.

And this is how greed disconnects you. When you are scorekeeping, you are not in the relationship. You are hovering above it, evaluating it, deciding whether it deserves your effort today. When you are hoarding your generosity because you are afraid of what your spouse might ask next, you are not actually showing up. When you are relating to a story about your spouse instead of your actual spouse, you have already left the room. Greed pulls you out of your marriage and into your own head, where you get to be right and lonely at the same time.

The antidote is gratitude, and gratitude is what brings you back. Not the saccharine “be grateful you have a spouse at all” kind. Real gratitude. It gets you off the scorekeeping perch and back into the room with your spouse. Every noticed moment, every real thank you, every time you give without keeping track is a small return.

And gratitude naturally spills into generosity. What does generosity look like in a marriage? It looks like doing something helpful your spouse did not ask for. It looks like offering something you know they love, even when it costs you a little. It looks like giving your spouse your attention when it would be easier to reach for your phone. It looks like speaking well of your spouse when they are not in the room. And in the bedroom, generosity looks like focusing on your spouse’s pleasure without silently keeping score of what you got back. It looks like initiating something you know they would love. Generosity is the deliberate practice of giving more than the minimum, because giving is where connection actually happens.

Generosity can get twisted in two directions. It can turn into pride, where you are giving to be seen as generous, or quietly keeping score of how much you have given, or waiting for your spouse to notice and thank you the right way. That is not generosity. That is just scorekeeping. Generosity can also turn into self-abandonment, where you give so much that you lose yourself, where you say yes when your body is saying no, where you over-function until you resent your spouse and yourself. That is not generosity either. That is just depletion. Real generosity comes from a settled place. It requires you to be a whole person first, with your own capacity and your own limits, so that what you offer is actually a gift, not a debt your spouse owes you and not a piece of yourself you cannot afford to lose.

That is what Oldfield means when she talks about moving from stuffocation to gratitude and generosity.

Next up is lust.

Lust

This is the one that always trips Latter-day Saints up. We talk about lust often. The Law of Chastity. Pornography. Inappropriate thoughts. The line between desire and lust gets confusing fast in our culture, and I think we sometimes treat any sexual feeling as suspect.

There is a biblical scholar named Jason Staples who has written about what has become one of the most misinterpreted passages in the entire New Testament. Matthew chapter 5, verses 27 and 28. You know the verse. “Whoever looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Most of us have heard that verse taught to mean that if a man feels sexual desire when he sees a woman, he has already sinned. He has essentially already committed adultery just by feeling attracted.

Staples goes into the original Greek and shows something really striking. The word that gets translated as “lust” in that verse is the exact same word used for “covet” in the Tenth Commandment. Jesus was not adding a new, stricter rule to the Law. He was pointing his listeners back to a commandment they already knew. And the grammar of the sentence in Greek does not actually say “look at a woman with lust.” It says “look at a woman in order to covet her.” The sin is not the attraction. The sin is the decision to pursue something that is not yours to have.

Do you see how different that is from what many of us were taught? Sexual desire itself is not sinful. Feeling attracted to your spouse is not lust. Even noticing that someone else is attractive is not automatically a sin. Attraction happens. God built us to notice. The sin, according to Staples’s reading of the Greek, begins the moment your will turns toward pursuing what is not yours.

And this is where it gets really painful for a lot of Christian couples, and especially Latter-day Saint couples. Staples has written about married men who have told him they try not to “lust” for their own wives. Their own wives. Because they have been so conditioned to see any strong sexual desire as shameful that they cannot even celebrate wanting the person they married. That is what a bad theology of lust does to people. It teaches them to be ashamed of the very desire God gave them for their spouse. And in marriage, that shame is devastating.

This is the ground Elizabeth Oldfield is building on when she reframes lust in her book. Oldfield titles her chapter “From Objectification to Sexual Humanism.” She is not anti-sex or anti-desire or anti-pleasure. What she’s against is the reduction of another person to a means to your end. Lust, in her framing, is what happens when you stop seeing the person and start seeing only the parts of them that serve you. It’s the pornified gaze. It’s the sex where your spouse’s body is present but your spouse is not. It’s the way porn trains you to treat sexuality like a vending machine.

In marriage, lust in this older sense can still be present, even without any infidelity. It shows up when you have stopped seeing your spouse as a whole person. You see them as a body that should be available to you. Or you see them as a service provider for your release. Or you see them as the obstacle between you and what you actually want, which is somebody else, or some fantasy, or some version of them that doesn’t exist.

And this is how lust disconnects you. Whether it looks like shame that makes you unable to want your own spouse without guilt, or objectification that reduces your spouse to a body, or fantasy that keeps you attached to someone who is not your spouse, every version of lust severs you from embodied connection with the actual person you married. You cannot be truly with someone you have reduced to parts. You cannot show up fully to a spouse you are ashamed of wanting. You cannot connect deeply with a person you have replaced with a mental image.

The opposite is what Oldfield calls sexual humanism, and sexual humanism is what brings you back. It means treating your spouse as a full, complicated, hungry, hesitant, beautiful, real human being. Their pleasure matters. Their pace matters. Their “no” matters. Their “yes” matters. And paradoxically, when you treat your spouse this way, sex gets better, because real desire flourishes when you are wanted as a person, not consumed as a thing. Every time you stay with the actual person next to you instead of the image in your head, you take a step back toward them.

And sexual humanism has its own shadow. It can tip into losing yourself in the process, always prioritizing your spouse and never asking for what you want. Real sexual humanism includes your own humanity too.

That is Oldfield’s whole arc: from objectification to sexual humanism.

If you have spent years using pornography or fantasy to bypass the actual humanity of your spouse, that’s something to bring into coaching, where you can do real work on it without the shame spiral.

Which brings us to envy.

Envy

Envy is sneaky. Of all seven, it might be the one we are least likely to admit. Pride feels almost noble in a weird way. Lust at least has energy to it. Envy just feels small. It’s the sin that says, “I want what they have, and I resent them for having it.”

Oldfield calls her chapter “From Status Anxiety to Belovedness.” She argues that envy is fundamentally about identity. About not feeling like enough. About measuring yourself constantly against others and coming up short. And the antidote, in her framing, is the deep, settled, embodied knowledge that you are beloved. That your worth was never up for grabs in the first place.

In marriage, envy shows up as comparison. You scroll Instagram and see another couple’s anniversary post and a knot forms in your stomach because your marriage doesn’t look like that. You hear a friend describe how thoughtful her husband is and you feel that little prick of resentment toward yours. You hear about another couple’s sex life, or you read a book where the characters have constant electric chemistry, and you start to feel like your own marriage is somehow defective.

In the bedroom specifically, envy is so destructive. It can sound like, “Why can’t my spouse be more like that?” or “Other people are having all this great sex and we’re not,” or even, “I bet my spouse wishes they were married to someone else.” It can sound like scrolling Instagram before bed and coming to bed already convinced your body is not what your spouse actually wants. It can sound like reading a novel or watching a show and starting to feel like your own marriage is boring by comparison. Envy makes you a tourist in your own life. You’re never actually present with what is, because you’re constantly comparing it to what could be or what someone else has.

And this is how envy disconnects you. When you are mentally in someone else’s marriage, or in a fantasy of what your marriage should be, you are not in yours. Comparison is a form of leaving. Every time you leave, your spouse is left in a room by themselves, married to someone whose attention is somewhere else.

The way out is not to pretend your marriage is perfect. The way out is to come back to belovedness. You are beloved by God. Your spouse, with all their actual real qualities, is beloved by God. This marriage, the one you are actually in, is the one you are being asked to live. Belovedness is the settled sense that your spouse’s love for you is not conditional on you being someone else. When belovedness is real, you can walk into your bedroom without needing to be a different body or a different person. You can just be there, and trust that being there is enough.

And belovedness has a shadow too. It can slide into complacency, where “I am beloved as I am” becomes an excuse to never grow or change. Real belovedness is the ground you grow from, not a ceiling that keeps you stuck.

That is what Oldfield describes as the movement from status anxiety to belovedness.

That takes us to gluttony.

Gluttony

We usually think of gluttony as overeating. The cartoon image of someone with food smeared on their face, eating until they’re sick. In Latter-day Saint culture, we sometimes fold it into Word of Wisdom conversations. Don’t eat too much meat. Eat your vegetables. Avoid excess.

Oldfield’s reframe is one of my favorites in the whole book. She titles the chapter “From Numbing to Ecstasy.” Her argument is that gluttony is not really about food at all. It’s about numbing. It’s about reaching for something, anything, to take the edge off being a human being. Food, yes. But also Netflix. Sugar. Shopping. Scrolling. Romance novels. The endless ways we have to anesthetize ourselves against the discomfort of just being awake and present in our lives. The opposite, she says, is ecstasy. Not the drug. The original meaning. To stand outside yourself in awe. To be so fully present in a moment that you are caught up in something larger than your own small worries.

In marriage, numbing is one of the great quiet killers. You and your spouse stop having real conversations because every evening you both melt into separate screens. You stop praying together. You stop touching each other unless it’s leading to sex. You numb out at the end of the day with food or social media instead of turning toward each other.

In your sex life, numbing looks like sex that happens on autopilot. Your body is there, but you are not. You’re going through the motions. Or it looks like avoiding sex entirely because being present in your own body feels like too much. The reach for awe in the marriage bed is the willingness to actually feel. To feel pleasure. To feel desire. To feel a little overwhelmed by your spouse. To let the experience of being touched, of being seen, of being met, actually land in you instead of being filtered through three layers of mental distance.

And presence is what brings you back. You put down the phone. You look up. You let the sensation of your spouse’s touch actually register in your body. Every moment of real presence is a moment of return.

That is Oldfield’s whole arc: from numbing to ecstasy.

Then there’s wrath.

Wrath

Wrath sounds biblical and dramatic. We picture Old Testament fire-from-heaven kind of anger. But Oldfield brings it home in a way that I think is much more accurate to the way most of us experience this sin. She titles her chapter “From Polarisation to Peace-making.” Wrath, in her framing, is what happens when contempt sets in. When the other side becomes the enemy. When you stop being able to see the humanity in someone you disagree with.

She’s writing about cultural polarization. She writes about the way we have sorted ourselves into camps, the way we consume content that fuels contempt for the other side, the way we have lost the ability to see the humanity in someone whose politics or theology or worldview differs from ours. She talks about how the algorithms feed us more of what makes us angry, and how anger toward a distant group is easier than the harder work of understanding an actual person. And that pattern does not stay outside your home. When we practice contempt for people we disagree with, we are getting really good at contempt. And that skill does not stay online. It shows up at your kitchen table, and it shows up in your bedroom.

Contempt is one of John Gottman’s Four Horsemen, the relational patterns he’s identified as predictors of divorce. And contempt is essentially marital wrath. It’s the eye roll. It’s the sarcastic comment. It’s the way you describe your spouse to your sister when you’re frustrated. It’s the moment when, in your heart, you stop being allies and become opponents.

In your sex life, wrath might be the husband who feels chronically rejected and lets that rejection harden into resentment that flavors every interaction. It might be the wife who is so angry about feeling pressured that she can’t be in the same room with her spouse without bracing. It might be the way old fights get carried into the bedroom, so that even on a good day, there’s a layer of unfinished anger sitting between your bodies.

Peacemaking is what brings you back. It’s not pretending the conflict isn’t there. It is the radical practice of staying soft toward someone who has hurt you and whom you have probably hurt back. It’s choosing the repair over the win. It’s taking responsibility for the ways you have contributed to the distance. It’s remembering, even mid-argument, that this is your spouse, not your enemy. Peacemaking is a return to being on the same team. And it usually requires repair work that goes way beyond the bedroom.

And peacemaking has a shadow you have to watch for. It can slide into peace-keeping, where you smooth over every conflict, avoid every hard conversation, and call the resulting silence “peace.” Real peacemaking stays in the hard conversation.

That is what Oldfield calls the movement from polarisation to peacemaking.

That leaves us with the last of the seven, sloth.

Sloth

We usually think of sloth as laziness. Not doing your chores. Not magnifying your calling. The Latter-day Saint version of sloth might be the person who shows up at church but does not really show up, who lets life happen to them rather than engaging with it.

Oldfield uses the older term for this sin, acedia, and titles her chapter “From Distraction to Attention.” Acedia, she argues, is not laziness in the sense of being too tired to work. It is spiritual apathy. It is the inability to care. It is being so distracted, so scattered, so disconnected from your own life that you stop being able to give your attention to what matters. The antidote, she says, is attention itself. The radical practice of being where you are.

In marriage, sloth in this sense is everywhere. It is being together in the same house, in the same room, on the same couch, with your phones in your hands, never actually looking at each other. It is showing up to your kid’s school event but checking work email the whole time. It is letting weeks go by without a real conversation with your spouse because you were too distracted to make space for one.

In your sex life, sloth is being physically present and mentally somewhere else. Mid-sex, you are thinking about the laundry, or the meeting tomorrow, or the conversation you had with your mom three days ago. Your body is being touched, but your attention is gone. Without attention, sex becomes routine. Something you do rather than something you actually feel.

Your mind wandering sometimes during sex does not make you a bad person. Everybody’s attention drifts. That is just being human. The pattern we are talking about with sloth is different. It is the chronic condition of never actually being there, of going through the motions with a spouse you have not really been with in months. The antidote is not perfection. It is the deliberate, repeated, sometimes difficult practice of noticing you have drifted and gently bringing your attention back. To your body. To your spouse. To this room. To this moment.

That is Oldfield’s whole movement: from distraction to attention.

Pulling It Together

So those are the seven, run through Oldfield’s lens and brought into the bedroom. Pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. What I hope you can see now is that every one of them is really about disconnection. From your spouse. From your body. From your own life. From God. They are seven different doors that all lead to the same place. A smaller, lonelier, more numbed-out version of you and your marriage.

The antidote to every one of them is also the same. It is connection. Real, vulnerable, attentive, grateful, present, embodied, peace-making connection. To your spouse. To your body. To yourself. To God.

That is what Oldfield means by fully alive. Present in your body, connected in your relationships, awake to your own desire, alive in your marriage. If any of this landed for you, I really recommend her book, Fully Alive. She goes much deeper into each of these than I could in one episode.

If you’ve listened through this whole episode and felt yourself flinch at one of them, pay attention to that. It’s not shame. It’s a signal. A signal that there is a particular kind of disconnection you might be living with, and a particular kind of connection that is asking to be tended to. And if you need help with that, you know where to find me.

I’ve decided that I want to implement something new in my podcast, some questions to take into your week. These are in the show notes too, so you can come back to them anytime.