by

I have a fondness for cheesy Christian romance novels. Their plots feature all of the emotional turmoil and external drama of harlequin romance novels – but they add faith crises and subtract sex.

One trope in these novels is to set up a wicked foil to the wholesome protagonist. In-need-of-repentance characters lurk in the subplots, steeped in dark allusions and transgressed boundaries. Think of Mr. Wickham in Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen evinces plenty of scandal, yet there are zero explicit mentions of sex.

In order to stay “clean,” Christian novelists have learned to invoke religiously-tinged shame by writing proxies for sex. All “sin” happens off-screen. A common scene is the chance encounter after dark. A woman stands in the shadows, heart pounding, face lit by candlelight. A man with a half-unbuttoned shirt leans against a doorframe. After two pages of banter, he steps across the threshold. The door shuts. The chapter ends. At that moment, the reader is cued to assume the characters had sex.

As a teenager reading Christian romance novels on lazy summer afternoons, the scandalous implications of shut doors worked. They matched the vagaries I had learned at church about “celestial dating” and chastity. Do not set foot into an opposite-gender bedroom. Do not lie down next to each other while watching a movie. Do not stay out after midnight. Do not park a car just to “talk” on a starlit mountaintop. Those paths lead to sex and sin.

So great is the danger of shut doors, the BYU Honor Code and Residential Standards infamously ban these proxies-for-sin themselves, separate and apart from actual acts of immorality. Those proxies rest at the center of recent BYU sexual assault scandals. Years of sex-euphemisms conditioned campus to accept the twisted logic. “Everyone knows crossing the line-of-chastity in an apartment is a proxy for sex, so why were you surprised when even though you told him you just wanted to talk, he forced you to have sex?”

But here’s the problem. Shut doors do not equal sex. Shut doors are not facades for sex. Shut doors do not equal consent to sex. Shut doors are not sins.

When I look back at my aged 15-25 exclusively-Christian-romance-reading-self, I’m stunned by my ignorance. When doors shut, my knowledge ceased. I didn’t know what emotionally or physically happened behind relationships’ closed doors. My Christian romance novels and my Young Women’s / Young Single Adult lessons omitted those conversations.

Instead, I had heard repeated warnings that any sort of deep conversation with a romantic interest, and especially any discussion of sex itself, might accidentally tempt us into sex. In one notable example, an institute leader warned me against reading the scriptures with my boyfriend. Apparently, spiritual gospel conversations threatened such a depth of emotional intimacy we would invariably proceed to sex. Even Bible studies should be reserved for marriage.

Physically, I was committed to strict For the Strength of Youth adherence. I consumed only “clean” media. I willfully refused to read or watch sex scenes in any form in any context. (One notable byproduct? I, like Elder Cook, struggled to differentiate between rape and fornication – after all, they both shared the underlying sin of “sex.”) I believed even academic knowledge about the physical mechanisms of sex might be so titillating as to inspire me to commit curious sins. So I avoided learning anything beyond “a penis in a vagina makes a baby.”

In my ignorance about the physicality of sex, my mind defaulted to a binary physical classification: Spencer W. Kimball approved kissing vs. the basic biological mechanics of penetrative sex. Kissing was approved for dating, sex was approved for marriage. I had no concept of how kissing physically progressed to sex, except that closed doors and privacy were dangerous and there was “hazard in the horizontal.”

This had hilarious results. At the age of 21 I once prayed for forgiveness because I had a scandalous dream where my then-boyfriend unbuttoned the top two buttons of my blouse. (Literally. That’s it.) My college friends were amused to discover I had no idea what the words “foreplay” or “orgasm” meant. I was well into my 20s when I learned from a crass joke that female masturbation even existed. I was slightly more knowledgeable than Grover but not by much.

Based on my limited knowledge, my brain decided to file the sin of “sex” next to the sin of “getting drunk.” I conceptualized sex as the inverse of alcohol-consumption rules. An average man “holds his liquor” better and an average woman “holds her libido” better. The way I envisioned it, if a man and I started kissing he risked getting “drunk” on sex-hormones faster than me. That’s why it was my job as a woman to wear modest clothes and not become walking pornography. My modesty helped reduce (but not eliminate) male sex-drunkenness.

Sex-drunkenness was also why it was my responsibility to police boundaries. As a woman with a presumptively lesser libido, it was my job to tell a date to stop kissing me the moment he seemed excited. Any soft sound of enjoyment was a warning sign that his uncontrollable drunkenness was kicking in. If I didn’t tell him to stop immediately then his penis would get erect and he would lose all mental capacity and even if I said no later he would by that point have become physically incapable of backing off and would justifiably get angry if I stopped him and anything and everything that followed would be my fault.

Even worse, if I agreed to keep kissing, I risked getting “drunk” myself. If “drunk” lust hormones overtook both of us, we were doomed. We would both completely lose control. I imagined sex as the moment when kissing morphed into “blacking out.” A fog of animalism would kick in, conversation would cease, our clothes would get ripped off, neither one of us would have the brain power to remember condoms, and the next morning I would wake up naked, diseased, and pregnant.

This was the danger of closed doors.

Frankly, my understanding of how sex would work in marriage wasn’t much different. I understood marriage vows as an upfront exercise of agency to forever agree to sex. The commitment of marriage was necessary because exercising agency amidst uncontrollable sex-drunkenness was otherwise impossible. I interpreted the widespread silence about sex from family and church members as an indication that even within marriage, sex was so physically overwhelming it was effectively impossible to converse about rationally.

Even regarding marriage, I had absorbed the message that a man’s uncontrollable sex drive was overpowering and terrifying. (I didn’t learn about “marital rape” until law school, and was surprised the concept existed.) I accepted that even if not “in the mood,” married women had a religious duty to satisfy their husband’s sex-drunken demands. Even within marriage, women were supposed to minimize themselves in order to maximize their husband’s pleasure. Even within marriage, women were solely responsible for using birth control to prevent pregnancy. A married woman might be able to say “no” occasionally, but if she said “no” too often it would be her fault if her husband ever turned to pornography or had an affair.

Sex was an omnipresent threat. Church and cultural instruction perpetuated my assumptions about its unassailable power. After all, the Handbook bans mixed-gender travel. The Church discourages mixed-gender business trips. Conservative religious culture (not unique to our faith) frowns upon unrelated men and women meeting for meals. The Eternal Marriage manual lists “being alone” in offices or cars as a serious threat to fidelity.

The assumption, once again, is that closed doors are proxies for sex.

– – – – – –

Imagine my surprise when I got married at 25 and discovered that sex looks nothing like blacking out with uncontrollable drunkenness.

Closed doors do not turn adults into sex fiends. Sexual arousal does not radically change people’s personalities. Sexual arousal is not overwhelming. We are always alert. We are always in control. We are always able to respect boundaries. We are always capable of dialogue. We are always able to pay attention to our partner’s words, body language, and comfort. We are always capable of stopping. If you think otherwise, you’re wrong. If your partner insists otherwise, that’s abuse.

The bleak messages I had learned about chastity, sex, temptations and closed doors all teemed with lies.

One divorce, a second marriage, seven years of feminist readings, and 18 months of the #MeToo movement later, I’ve come to realize the magnitude of the gaps in my youthful chastity education. I had no vision of what realistic emotional conversations and progressive physical interactions looked like the moment a bedroom door closed. “Consent” should not have been a radical concept – but it was.

We are so paranoid that conversations behind closed doors might lead to sex outside of marriage, we refuse to teach true chastity. We’re so committed to setting up false proxies for sex, we’ve accepted physical ignorance and the stunting of healthy dialogue as collateral damage. We claim that marriages and forever families are our paramount goals, but we’re failing to equip our members with both the knowledge and the communications skills necessary for marriages to succeed.

I hope I can make a feeble effort to correct that for the next generation. So now in my thirties, here’s the message I want to send about chastity.

– – – – – –

I have a fondness for feminist romance novels. I discovered them after my divorce. Their plots feature all of the emotional turmoil and external drama of bodice-ripping romance novels – but they add education, empowerment, and empathy.

One trope in these novels is to have a protagonist with a massive hang-up around sex. Maybe they were abused as a child or in a prior relationship. Maybe they were sexually assaulted. Maybe they were betrayed. Maybe they lost the love of their life and are afraid to ever be vulnerable again. Maybe they have a physical condition that makes intercourse difficult or painful. Maybe they struggle with infertility. Maybe they are just beginning to understand their sexual orientation. Maybe they were raised in a religiously or socially oppressive environment. Maybe they have suffered through a series of miscarriages and the idea of getting pregnant again is terrifying. Maybe they fear childbirth could kill them.

These are real conflicts. These are fraught conversations. And in the novels, they get solved with radical patience, love, and consent. One chapter in one novel in particular reduced me to tears. A scientist rejects a proposal because she is too broken from too much sexual abuse to ever marry again. Her suitor responds with kindness. He holds her close and tells her to take all the time she needs to heal. Even if penetrative sex will never be an option in their relationship, he loves her, and he still wants to marry her. He hopes to explore a hundred ways of making her feel both emotionally safe and sexually satisfied that have zero risk of pain or pregnancy.

I re-read the chapter three times. I couldn’t believe the emotion of it. Fiction, in that scene, had gone too far. This was the vulnerable conversation that happened behind a closed door? Instead of having sex, the couple discussed not having sex, recognized their emotional limitations, and respected each other’s physical boundaries?

What else was possible behind closed doors? I peppered trusted friends with questions. Yes Carolyn, they responded, that’s what true love and healthy relationships look like. Anything else is selfishness, a sin, or a crime.

Reading the scriptures, I realized Galatians 5 and 1 Corinthians 13 provide helpful models for relationships. As Christians we should strive to develop patience, kindness, joy, peace, selflessness, safety, and trust. And we should strive to eliminate anger, jealousy, lust, rudeness, arrogance, and self-centeredness.

Focusing on these traits is why Christ differentiated between love and lust. Love places the emotional well-being of yourself, your partner, and your long-term relationship first. Lust, by contrast, ranks short-term selfishness, anger, or arousal higher than any other person’s health, happiness, or humanity.

Chastity, at a minimum, means the avoidance of lust. Chastity means never injecting sex into professional or non-romantic or non-consensual situations — regardless of anyone’s gender, wardrobe, physical appearance, or marital status.

In romantic relationships, chastity means exercising the affirmative, loving choice to set physical boundaries before marriage. Chastity is not a fear-based exercise of avoiding knowledge, avoiding privacy, and avoiding arousal. Rather, chastity is an affirmative decision to cultivate emotional intimacy before physical intimacy. Chastity is an empowering acknowledgment that we control our sexual actions. Chastity is a choice openly discussed on and agreed to by couples. (Chastity also encompasses disagreement, including mature discussions to break up due to incompatibility in physical desires or expectations.) These conversations necessarily require the emotional capacity to maturely and informatively talk about sex without having sex.

Chastity outside of marriage is fully consistent with both privacy and emotional intimacy. There is nothing contradictory about couples kissing behind closed doors, or talking alone in their apartments, or driving alone on road trips, or crashing on each other’s living room sofas, or staying together in hotels on vacations, and still choosing to honor a mutual agreement to be chaste.

I will never chastise adults who seek out privacy behind closed doors because privacy creates space for emotionally intimate conversations. Privacy is not a proxy for sex. Sex doesn’t happen “accidentally.” Sex is and must always be a positive choice.

Within marriage, this affirmative model of chastity as emotional intimacy continues. If our religious goal is marriages based on loving kindness (and not selfish or abusive lust), then we must recognize that chastity extends far beyond a technocratic permission to engage in physical acts. Chastity recognizes, for example, that loving a partner “in sickness and in health” means embracing the choice to exercise physical abstinence if and when your partner needs to heal from flu, surgery, childbirth, or past sexual trauma.

Chastity is love.

I will forever be grateful to feminist romance novels, for teaching me what healthy interactions look like behind closed doors.

*Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash