The Affair (Amid Purity Culture) They Don’t Regret: Julia and Jeremiah

“The Affair (Amid Purity Culture) They Don’t Regret: Julia and Jeremiah”

a Girl Boner podcast transcript

Hey, friend. A quick note before we begin. If you’re struggling in light of the election in the U.S., I’m sending you love and care. At the episode’s end, after the outro music, keep listening for a short bonus segment that I hope will bring you some light.

Jeremiah:And people have asked, do you regret having an affair? No. But I wish I had been more forthcoming with my ex.

Julia: I do regret hurting someone that I love. I wish that I had done it differently… It was and still is hard to reflect on how much pain I was in and then how I was experiencing so much joy. But it was a secret.

August/narration:

Julia and Jeremiah are certified sex therapists and co-hosts of the podcast, Sexvangelicals. They feel it’s part of their work as therapists to talk about taboo topics — like sex and infidelity.

By talking about their own experiences with both, they hope others will feel less alone. And their path sheds so much light on the complexities that often surround affairs, especially for folks who grew up deeply religious, as they both did.

Jeremiah: I’ll start. I grew up in a conservative Christian household. There were lots of messages around doing the right thing. I don’t remember explicit messages around purity culture values.

My dad was often naked and I remember being like, “Dad, what are you doing? Put clothes on.” My dad is a funny mix of very religious, but also wild child, redneck hippie.

I remember really, really internalizing that and feeling super uncomfortable by that. I think that that’s connected with messages from the church around presenting yourself in a way that is appealing before the Lord.

So I have always had a little bit of a history of anxiety around my body, especially growing up as a boy growing up as a guy, growing up with other guys, I was always one of the smaller people. And picked up pretty quickly on popularity was given to those who are the most athletic, those who kind of had the best control over their body. And I never really did.

August/narration:

Jeremiah was adopted, which influenced these things, too.

Jeremiah: I’m ethnic Hispanic, grew up in a white family. My body was different from a lot of the other kids that I grew up with. Which kind of fit into this larger version of like, what do I need to do to like pass as a white kid?

August/narration:

So Jeremiah laid low, and relied on his intelligence…

Jeremiah:

…and thinking my way through things as a way of getting attention from other people in my life.

August/narration:

Julia did grow up with overt purity culture messaging. Especially around modesty: “the state of being unassuming or moderate,” in things like appearance.

Julia: As a young girl, modesty was a huge value within my religious community.

So modesty was a part of my vocabulary before I actually had a consciousness or an actual definition of what that might be. The narrative that I received was that I, as a girl and a prepubescent girl, needed to protect both myself and protect older adult men from the sin of lust by ensuring that I was as covered as possible.

The interpretation was men are mentally raping you all the time. They can’t control that, so you have to be the gatekeeper of that.

I remember even at the age of eight, nine, having conversations with my friends about whether or not spaghetti straps were sinful. And these were serious conversations that I had with my peers.

In high school, I bought jeans that were probably at least four sizes too big for me because I knew that if clothes touched my body in a way that anybody could see the outline of my body that was dangerous and that was sinful.

I learned that God made men to be sexual creatures and that was something that they were simultaneously supposed to fight outside of a married context, but it was also exactly how God wanted them to be so modesty actually had a bit of a higher calling.

Being modest was something that was important to me. I felt like I was doing the right thing.

August/narration:

Jeremiah and Julia both learned limited and confusing things about sex.

Jeremiah: Interestingly, I think my dad did the best that he could talking with me about sex.

There were some awkward conversations. And I think the way that he tried to talk with me about sexuality was not the way that I would do it. But at least he tried.

So he made reference to condoms. He never called them condoms. I think he used the word raincoat. That’s the word that’s sticking out in my mind. Obviously he never showed me how to use them or anything like that.

Part of the ideas about sex that I learned was that if I had sex, I massively increased the chances of getting someone pregnant because we didn’t talk about contraceptives.

And then also, if I have sex with someone, I’m going to put someone in a situation like my birth mother who gets presented as this victim in all of this, and well, I don’t want to do that. So I’ll go so far, in romantic relationships. But  I don’t want to move into anything sexual.

August/narration:

Julia went to a private school that was more like a homeschooling co-op. She went to class in a rented building and graduated with three other people.

Julia: I did not have any formal sex education. I definitely received messaging explicitly and implicitly through my school, church, and camp about sexuality. And by sexuality, I specifically mean purity culture.

Since before I can remember, I asked my mom what sex was probably when I was about seven, and I remember having a lot of panic about it. I remember crying and feeling panicked. And I had this idea that I know it’s bad and wrong, and I shouldn’t know what it is, but I want to know what it is.

So I was always very curious about sexuality. And in my adolescent years, very eager to have sexual experiences, but those were off limits, and I was not having sexual experiences.

I wanted to be having sexual experiences But I certainly would never tell anyone about that, because I also learned that as a woman I didn’t really have any kind of sexual desire, that my role was to be a sexual outlet for the man that I married.

August: Wow. So you knew you had, maybe without thinking the words, but you felt a desire.

Julia: Yes.

August: And you also felt the need to keep it private and maybe push it down.

Julia: Yes. And I didn’t have any kind of sexual arousal that I can remember, which is important because I didn’t actually have any information about sexuality. All I knew growing up is that I wanted to have this experience that I didn’t really know what it was.

I learned that sex was vaginally penetrative intercourse, but I didn’t know what a penis looked like. I didn’t know about erections. I didn’t know where my own vagina was. So even the parts that I did know, I didn’t know. And I had this desire for something, but I couldn’t really name it.

August/narration:

Jeremiah continued on his religious path in early adulthood, which continued to impact his sexuality.

Jeremiah: I started working at a church when I was 20. I ended up leading worship in my twenties, my first career is in worship ministry.

Any sort of interactions around sexuality that I individually had, I kind of had that in the back of my mind: what do good religious leaders do? And if I am establishing myself as a quote, religious leader, whatever that means when you’re 19 or 20, how does that inform the way that I do relationships?

The church of Christ, which is the denomination I was a part of, there were some ways that it very, very explicitly engaged, in the edicts of purity culture in the nineties and in the early two thousands.

There were also some ways that, “Oh, well, purity rings, purity pledges – that’s something that the Baptists do.” The churches that I went to didn’t really go in, in that direction. They used kind of coded language that represented purity culture. The university, specifically women who got pregnant, routinely expelled and kind of shunted those women aside.

I had picked up on messages that men are sexual, men are visual creatures, men are sexual creatures, and as such they are dangerous. And I don’t want to be that.

August: So you try to shut that part down, it sounds like?

Jeremiah: For sure in public senses, absolutely. There were ways that I explored that in private senses behind closed doors.

August: Did you have a strong sense of faith? Maybe that’s obvious. Or did you just feel like you should be a leader in a church?

Jeremiah: It was much more the former. One of the ways that I got recognition was stepping into leadership roles.

August/narration:

He picked up on that super early. He remembers a specific time.

Jeremiah: I’m a 7-year-old boy. I’m in a small group with a bunch of women and none of the other men show up to this. So I’m the only boy. And so I have adult women saying, “Jeremiah, like you’re the boy, you’re the man. Like you lead the songs, you lead the scriptures.” And me being the compliant oldest adopted kid, being like, “You got it.” With gusto.

August/narration:

He said that gusto carried over for 30-plus years. It was more about fitting in and being considered good in the culture than a spiritual experience.

For Julia, there was a lot of expectation and pressure to “save herself” for her husband. And unlike Jeremiah, her faith was a hugely important part of her life.

Julia: I actually never had a purity ring. I’m shocked because it was probably the most important part of my life. Being a good Christian girl, which translated specifically to “girl who is pure,” was everything about me to a large degree.

Even the successes that I had academically or in other contexts all pointed back to who I was as this pure person.

On one hand, performing purity culture was a way to garner attention and success, but I also believed it. My prayer life, my memorization of scripture, the ways that I was boldly a Christian when I worked at Applebee’s, which was really my first time encountering quote unquote nonbelievers, was a big part of my identity. So probably anyone who knew me knew that Christianity and purity culture and not dating and not having sexual experiences was high.

August/narration:

In young adulthood, some years before they met, both Julia and Jeremiah fell in love with someone and got married. By then, Julia had started questioning her religious roots for the first time.

Julia: …which is interesting because I went to a Christian college. However, I was in the liberal pocket of a Christian school because my background was in sociology and social work. However, I really didn’t unpack sexuality.

I thought I unpacked sexuality because it then became really important to go to LGBTQ affirming churches and churches that were committed to anti racism. So I had this idea that I’ve unpacked the harmful parts of my religious roots. But when I got married and when I was dating and engaged, I was still very much within communities that were highly prioritizing purity.

Jeremiah: I got married at 24. The woman that I married and I dated for five years, because one of the things that did carry over from our school with other Christian schools is “the ring by spring.”

August/narration:

“Ring by Spring” is this thing in some Christian colleges where students aim to get engaged before graduation.

Jeremiah: And my ex and I wanted to push back against that. We’re not going to be an ACU statistic. We’re going to wait till we’re 24. Uh, good one, early 20-something-year-old us.

August/narration:

Before the couple got married, the relationship became sexual. And…complicated.

Jeremiah: One of our earliest sexual experiences was actually about four weeks into our relationship at her family’s house. Things were building and then her dad walked in.

She grew up in a Southern Baptist community that’s very dedicated to the values of purity culture. And the result was bad. He unleashed in some sort of a way on her, yelled at me for a little bit, and I wonder if that event had not happened, how different our relationship might have been.

I think that that was a turning point in the relationship and that’s four weeks into the relationship and remember we dated five years. So we continued to have sexual experiences, although following the laws of purity culture, we kept our clothes on. And all those like good appearing types of things.

We would have sexual experiences. We would both orgasm and then she would begin to shake. She would begin to cry. She would begin to apologize: “Hey, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

And in my mind, I think, Why are you apologizing for…Okay, like whatever. There’s another part of me that’s like, oh this person that I love deeply is also hurt. So I’m just holding on for dear life, trying to get the shakes to stop so we could have some sort of a connecting point.

August/narration:

Jeremia didn’t have the language for it at the time, but today he realizes she was having panic attacks.

Jeremiah: And that happened easily 50 times over the course of three or four years. Those types of experiences really were punctuated throughout our dating experience. And built and built and built even once we got married.

We were never able to talk about it. As we talk about in relationship therapy when you don’t talk about things directly, shit comes out sideways.

August/narration:

Julia’s would-be marriage essentially started out as a courtship.

Julia: I don’t think we specifically called it that, but that’s what it was. I learned that you only date with the intention to get married. So after a first date, three tops, you’ve got to know that this is the person that you want to commit your life to. Which is a lot of pressure on a relationship.

August/narration:

They dated for six months.

Julia: …and got engaged and then were married six months later. Not a particularly wise decision, but it was everything that I knew. And it was applauded by all the important people in my life.

Nobody asked, is this exactly what you want or some version of that? Now if somebody had, I don’t think it would have made a difference because I was so entrenched. I’ll even say indoctrinated to the values of purity culture that I would have held steadfast in the decision to get married when I did. And probably have a lot of pride in it.

August/narration:

Jeremiah’s marriage started out on a high note.

Jeremiah: We get married. The first couple of months, I would even say probably the first six months were really positive. We lived in the town where we went to school. We had friends there. We had good sexual experiences. At least I had good sexual experiences. I think that my partner had good sexual experiences. I don’t know what the turning point was, but at some point the dynamic of that changed.

My ex would say things like, “Oh, well, Jeremiah, all you think about is sex. Oh, well, you just want sex all the time.” And would be making these types of anger, rage-based comments towards my sexuality, which was, one, not true. Like, I don’t think about sex all the time. I work with a bunch of sex therapists, and I’m probably on the lower end of thinking about sex compared to most of the people that I work with.

And two, it also reinforced this idea of, Oh, no matter how hard I try to be a good person, and to like not be those guys, not be those dangerous white men that we’re railing on, in the last 10 to 15 years – like, it doesn’t matter. Over time, that became weaponized.

And because I wanted to be a good person, I didn’t know how to respond to that. So I would shut down.

I didn’t help myself in some ways. I was always kind to my ex. I wasn’t an especially helpful partner. So there were definitely ways that I contributed to the downfall of the relationship, the avoidance of the relationship.

August/narration:

Meanwhile, Jeremiah was studying relationship therapy. One day his boss asked him to join the sex therapy program he was running, and said it would be subsidized for him – so basically free. So Jeremiah sort of fell into his sex therapy career path. Immediately, it was eye opening.

Jeremiah: The first class that we had was about the values of sex therapy, so consent, non exploitation, honesty, shared values, contraception, mutual pleasure…

August/narration:

Something big donned on him:

Jeremiah: I haven’t talked about any of that. Oh fuck. I have been doing this wrong. The sexual experiences that we’ve had, have just been for the sake of doing sex. If I ever tried to talk about sex, the panic would come back up.

And so I came home and was like, “I need to apologize to you because the way that we have been doing sex is terrible.” And she’s like, “Okay. Well, it’s no big deal.”

That interaction for me kind of became a kind of a fork in the road where our paths began to diverge in some really interesting ways.

I began to study more about sexuality, have conversations with other people about sexuality. I think her resentment began to build. I got treated in some pretty poor ways over the course of the next few years.

At a certain point I realized, I don’t think this relationship is tenable anymore. I said, “Hey, I really want to go to couples therapy.” She rejected it. She denied it.

August/narration:

Jeremiah also realized that while he was exploring sex academically, she was exploring it with someone else.

Jeremiah: There was a man that she was hanging out with for some time, they would hang out late. We were driving somewhere. I had peeked over into her phone. We were ordering coffee and I saw her message pop up and this guy that I knew said, “Hey, love you!”And I said, “What’s this?” And [she said],“Oh, it’s no big deal.” And I’m like, uh huh. Okay… Like, this is an affair good for you, even though she would continue to deny it.

There was never any time that I tried to initiate conversations about sexuality, the same patterns that happened early in the relationship, the panic attacks returned, the criticism of me returned. And it was, it was really, really difficult.

August/narration:

When Julia’s relationship with her ex started out, she said they “flirted with the line of what’s too far or not enough” sexually.

Julia: There is the version in which you essentially do everything but penetrative sex and all good. Or you have the version of my story, which was more competitive

August/narration:

Trying to be the “purest possible.” For example, during Julia’s teens, her youth pastor didn’t kiss her husband until they were at the altar. She was glorified for that.

Julia: So for me, it wasn’t just, oh, we saved this specific sex act for marriage. We are trying to avoid almost anything aside from hand holding.

Now when I first started dating my ex-husband, we were having all these sexual experiences that were wonderful, but both of us, especially me, were wracked with all kinds of guilt and shame.

And so we decided that we just needed to stop being sexual at all in order to preserve this purity that was so important to both of us. So after maybe just a couple months of dating, we completely de eroticized our relationship.

At the time I thought, I’m protecting myself, I’m protecting this relationship so that we can have the best sexuality possible.

August/narration:

But completely de-eroticizing the relationship sort of did the opposite, once they said “I do.”

Julia: I couldn’t recover. We couldn’t recover. I grew up with this very mythical narrative around your wedding night sex and honeymoon sex, and it was simultaneously the best experience of your entire life. But also, if you did it right, sex was going to get better and better.

And I was completely disillusioned. I was completely heartbroken. My world really crumbled after I got married.

Some people, well intentioned, have questioned that. They’ve said, “I mean, it was just sex, right? And the rest of your relationship was good. So why was it that big of a deal?” And what I say is that it wasn’t just sex. It was my entire world. My entire world was building to this point. This was my whole identity. And then this thing that was the most important part of our relationship and our life was physically and emotionally painful. I cried every single day of my honeymoon and pretty frequently after that. So my world crashed after I got married.

August/narration:

Still, she didn’t question her faith or the religious teachings she had long abided by.

Julia: Initially my perspective in the perspective of my ex husband was that we are going to pray through this.

We saw a Christian counselor before we saw a sex therapist. We asked people to pray for us. We prayed before we engaged in sex. And that actually just further disillusioned me and further broke my heart.

Jeremiah: I didn’t know this by the way.

Julia: Oh yeah. We were a part of a vineyard church, which is this strange combination of Pentecostal and Evangelical, and they were doing this leap of faith event in which you were supposed to pray for something really specific and ask for a miracle. And my miracle was my sex life, that I could finally be out of pain and enjoy it, which did not happen.

And when I did go to sex therapy for the first time, she asked me about my background, and I remember saying, “Well, I grew up in this very insular type of community, highly religious, but I don’t think it impacted my sexuality at all.” And I had no idea that it was probably the most impactful part of my sexuality.

August/narration:

That was over two years into the marriage, when they found a sex therapist who had an understanding of religion and purity culture. By then, Julia said, so much damage had been done.

Julia: Who knows? Maybe if we had stayed married, we could have recovered. I don’t know, I suspect not. Sometimes the relationship doesn’t survive it.

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August/narration:

The therapist who was so helpful planted the seed for Julia to pursue sex therapy as a career. She said:

Julia: “If you decide to become a sex therapist, I think you’d be a great sex therapist.” And that was really inspiring to me. But when I did study sex therapy training at the University of Michigan, those were like the Jenga blocks that dislodged the whole tower.

August/narration:

When they were both in sex therapy training, Julia and Jeremiah had the same supervisor. They were both still married to their exes at the time.

Julia: I met Jeremiah through the supervisor and we met for a collegial coffee, which is super common for therapists.

I really enjoyed meeting Jeremiah and I remember thinking how great it would be to have a friend who could understand some of my experiences. We were both sex therapists and we learned at the end of the coffee date, that we had different yet similar religious upbringings.

And in Boston, there actually are a lot of phenomenal sex therapists. Many of them don’t have either experiential or academic training around how religious fundamentalism can impact sexuality.

So it was like that time when you meet someone and you’re like, Oh, you get it. Oh, you get it. I don’t have to explain it to you.

August/narration:

Jeremiah felt similarly. Not just that they got each other, but also:

Jeremiah:…the centrality with which we could potentially kind of hold moving out of religious spaces and also helping other people move out of some of the damaging messages of religious spaces was important for both of us as well.

I’m like, Oh, this could be like someone that I could bounce some ideas off of and we could potentially like, partner and collaborate in the future and at the time I was just thinking about professional collaboration. I had no idea The expansiveness to which collaboration could happen.

August/narration:

Soon, that expansiveness grew in a personal direction.

Julia: Probably the second or third time we saw each other, the vibe was a bit flirtatious. But not heavily so, and I have many people in my life who have more flirtatious personalities even when they’re not necessarily sexual. So I clocked it as a bit flirtatious and I definitely sensed an attraction, but I didn’t make any assumptions about it.

August/narration:

Then they started sexting each other. It started out silly, like let’s see what kind of ridiculous sex things we could say. Over the holidays, it became a game.

Jeremiah: I was with my in-laws, navigating conservative Christmas. I had actually just been fired by a church for my perspectives on sexuality.

August/narration:

The game went like this:

Jeremiah: For every obnoxious thing, we hear a preacher say, let’s send each other a sext just to kind of be humorous about this.

August/narration:

Jeremiah’s then wife got into his phone.

Jeremiah: And saw all of these sexts that happened and came into the bedroom freaking out like, “What is this,” in tears.

August/narration:

While she herself had been having an affair, she was still really hurt by what she found. So Jeremiah explained, or tried to.

Jeremiah: “It’s a funny game that we’re playing.”

But the more that I begin to think about it the more I’m like well, I already don’t see a way forward in this relationship.

August/narration:

Julia was in a tough place with her marriage then, too.

Julia: I was avoiding that I didn’t want to be married.

August/narration:

A few months into their sexting flirtations, things became physical.

Julia: I didn’t share that my husband and I were not in an open relationship at the time. We had previously had a short stint in which that was a part of our relationship.

August/narration:

Julia knew Jeremiah was married, but didn’t know if he and his wife were in an open relationship – they didn’t discuss any relationship agreements. They just knew they wanted to bring their emotional flirtations to bed.

Julia: So we made plans to have a sexual experience. We had a sexual experience, we talked about it, and we both said after the fact that no, our spouses didn’t know what we were doing that day.

August: Interesting. Did you not want to know the answers? Were you just, I just want to do this and see how it feels?

Julia: I don’t think I cared. And that sounds really callous, but if I had known in advance that you and your ex wife didn’t have an agreement around this, I still would have done it.

Jeremiah: Yeah, same here.

August/narration:

Soon after, Jeremiah felt the need for honesty at home.

Jeremiah: I realized that I needed to tell my ex. The evening that I planned on doing that, I’m like, okay, like, I’m also seeing like our supervisor.

I’m like, I need to tell Joe, this is what’s going on. And so I’m concocting, preparing myself while driving over to his office.

August/narration:

Jeremiah arrives and walks in.

Jeremiah: Joe’s like, “How are you doing? And Joe’s this like mid-fifties bear from East Boston.

I sat down and said, “Hey, Joe, I want to talk to you about something.” He doesn’t skip a beat: “You’re fucking Julia?” And I’m like, “Yes, thank you. Let’s talk about this.” I appreciate his directness with that, first of all. And then also his kindness toward me in that.

I had also expected to get some negativity from religious spaces.

August/narration:

He had been kicked out of the religious community by then. But still, Joe’s kindness gave him the confidence to talk to his ex.

Jeremiah: And I refer to this as truth day. Where I said, “Hey, I need to talk with you. You know this girl Julia, we are having sex. I think we had sex two or three times at that stage.

And she said, “I’m having an affair with this guy.” I said, “I know that you are. You told me that you weren’t, but I knew that you were.”

That day is also really, really sad because I think that that was the day that we were the most honest with each other. I think that is the only time that we talked about sex in ways that didn’t bring up anxiety.

I talked about some of the ways that I was thinking about sex and sexuality. She was, too. There wasn’t a ton of defensiveness.

And then the next day it was business as usual, unfortunately. She did some pretty ugly things in the 10 months that followed between the separation and the divorce.

Disclosing the affair was also like the last kind of close experience that I had with my ex. And then it all went to shit after that.

August/narration:

Meanwhile, Julia and Jeremiah had conversations about what they wanted their relationship to look like. They made a mutual decision:

Jeremiah: “I want you in my life. I want you to play a role in my life in some capacity. I don’t know what that means, but like, let’s keep meeting up.”

August/narration:

They continued going on walks and having lunch together. And a few months after Jeremiah’s “truth day with his wife,” Julia disclosed the affair in couples therapy.

Julia: I knew that as soon as I told my ex husband that our relationship would be over. And some relationships can survive an affair, some can’t. I knew that it would be a deal breaker for him, which I absolutely respect. However, I did and still have a lot of love and affection for that relationship. I was both really heartbroken and also scared to leave it.

So it was a very difficult day.

August/narration:

Neither Julia or Jeremiah regret starting their relationship when they did, but they do regret parts of how everything unfolded.

Jeremiah: When I look back, I wish I had been more forthcoming with my ex.

I had actually decided divorce is probably going to be the way that this ends. And I need to figure out a way to initiate that. And if I could have done it differently, I would have been more direct in talking with my ex about that.

I love our story. I love the ways that we connect. And people have asked, do you regret having an affair? No. But I wish I had been more forthcoming with my ex in saying, “Hey, like if you aren’t willing to do couples therapy with me, this is over.”

August/narration:

Admitting the affair to her therapist and then husband was really scary for Julia.

Julia: …because if I got divorced, I knew that I would lose a hell of a lot.

I accurately predicted that I temporarily lost most of my family and many friends. Other community, to some degree, some financial security as well. I had a very good career. But being a private practice therapist, I had no benefits. I had no insurance.

There was a lot in my marriage and outside of my marriage that I was going to lose. The religious shame that I accurately predicted would come was the thing that kept me married for a longer period of time.

I also don’t regret having an affair, which is a thing that probably many people will understandably bristle at. I do regret hurting someone that I love. I wish that I had done it differently and theoretically I could have, but knowing where I was at developmentally, I suspect that it probably would have been an affair at some point. That was probably going to be my entryway out because I don’t think I would have been able to, to leave unless I had been able to taste that something could be different.

August/narration:

Beyond their personal experience, Julia and Jeremiah have explored the topic of infidelity as clinicians — which, paired together, brings up interesting points about religious versus non-religious couples.

Jeremiah: When we sat in the study of infidelity, most people actually who have affairs don’t actually want to leave their primary relationships. So our story is in the minority. I don’t know if that’s true specifically for religious couples, however, because the thing that for both of us that we were both trying to avoid is the idea of divorce.

Because in religious land and evangelical land, divorce is one of the worst things that you can do. For me, it was about, okay, if I am the one that initiates ending this relationship, am I going to end up looking like the bad guy on top of all the financial loss, cultural loss – my ex had the nsurance, she had a rich family, like all that stuff. But there was also the cultural shame of continuing to not want to be the bad guy and seeing and avoiding that in a direct kind of way.

Julia: And I had experienced firsthand, growing up, what happens when women have affairs. My very close friend’s mother had an affair and I was at my friend’s house when the mother disclosed it.

By the next day, when I came home from the sleepover, the entire community and multiple communities knew about this. This affair was on the prayer chain. My friend’s mother ended up being in a psychiatric ward for suicidal ideation. That cemented to me how much Absolute, even deeper than shame, like ostracization. The absolute humiliation and shaming of a woman when she makes a choice.

And I think probably people could misinterpret what I’m saying. I’m not suggesting that people necessarily have affairs. I don’t think it is a great idea, for all kinds of reasons. And people do make those choices and the ways that people are treated within religious communities are horrendous.

This woman was barred from communion, which for those who grew up in religious backgrounds know that that’s how you connect with God. So this choice to have a sexual experience outside of her marriage barred her from God.

Having affairs and getting divorced were the worst things that a person could do, especially a woman could do. And I knew that by getting divorced, that I was going to potentially be in exactly the same position that I had witnessed firsthand.

August: I so appreciate everything you’re sharing. I think context is something that’s so missing. When people hear about affairs, it’s almost headline-y. We hear so and so did this and so and so, and there’s always context, whether they’re trying to leave a relationship or not, and it’s so important. Even if people bristle at the idea of not regretting an affair, I feel like with this context, it doesn’t have to be like the quote unquote right or ideal thing.

It could still be the brave thing. It sounds to me like you were both really courageous. You had to stand up against all of these, Beliefs and what ifs in these dangers for, yeah, for love and to have like a richer, truer life that is more spiritual, if you use those terms.

Jeremiah: And some of the ways that we connected in the first six months, nine months, traveling, hiking, walking, eating good foods.

Those are things that we’ve continued to maintain throughout the six years of our relationship, that I’ve really enjoyed. And so these things that I like discovered also about myself, Oh, I really like to walk stupid distances in the course of one day. One of the first times we met up, we went to New York together. I think I walked like 20 miles to New York City that day. Loved it.

That’s something we’ve continued to do, and to build on, so this isn’t a relationship in which we have these really kind of cool bonding experiences and then like two to three years later, those go away. We’ve built on those over the course of our relationship in some really beautiful, meaningful ways.

Julia: But it was hard because it was the first time in my adult life that I felt good sexually, that I felt good about my body. And it was so hard to experience joy in a way that I never had my entire life and not be able to talk about it.

I have some friends who in retrospect know that we had an affair and they have chosen not to be a part of my life. It was, and still is, hard to reflect on how much pain I was in and then how I was experiencing so much joy. But it was a secret. Even though I didn’t think that I was doing the worst thing imaginable – a lot of people did and a lot of people still do.

I don’t blame the church for having an affair. It was a choice that I made with insight. That being said, I do say that my religious upbringing set me up to fail in my marriage and set me up to make a choice, and to have one of those choices be an affair. And then the same system that set me up to have that really awful choice then shamed me.

August/narration:

Julia and Jeremiah have now been for about six years. They approach their relationship very differently from their marriages. They’ve learned a lot, continue to learn, and continue to apply the lessons

Jeremiah: For me it is being able to communicate when I am upset by something or when something is off, I’m not great at it. I think being willing to take risks and to communicate like what’s happening for me and then what my needs are and being able to practice that it is a practice. I hope that I’m better at this in five years. It’s a practice that I’m committed to.

And I appreciate that even though I piss Julia off sometimes, there’s also an understanding and a celebration from Julia that I am practicing being a different person.

August/narration:

Julia has said to him:

Jeremiah: “Oh, Jeremiah, I want you to tell me what’s going on. You have a history of, of swallowing your needs, of swallowing your feelings and it coming out sideways. I don’t want that for you.”

And then being able to trust that and step into that.

August/narration:

These are things we can all take to heart.

Jeremiah: I work with so many couples who have such high expectations on themselves to get it perfectly. And as soon as things derail a little bit, they like throw a grenade into the situation and completely decompensate, and then begin beating themselves up or any number of things.

I would encourage folks to remember that communication is an ongoing practice.

August/narration:

Julia values how she and Jeremiah navigate conflicts.

Julia: In many ways my ex husband and I engaged in conflict pretty well. I’m glad that we went to therapy twice when we did. Even though the relationship ended, I learned quite a bit from those experiences.

Towards the end of the relationship, though, the conflict that we needed to have around our relationship and around sexuality ultimately did break the relationship. That wasn’t a conflict that our relationship could hold because our world views, wants, goals, and dreams had shifted in other kinds of directions.

One of many things that’s meaningful in this relationship is that when we do have conflict, it doesn’t hold the same level of fear. Even in conflicts that are less productive, I have a deep trust that we will come back to each other and resolve and heal and reconcile.

Now, hopefully we’ll have more productive conflict than unproductive conflict, but all relationships have unproductive conflict. And I don’t feel as much distress and fear about the relationship. I have distress, fear and shame about myself and I’m still working through that, but I have so much confidence in the relationship.

And especially from religious backgrounds, conflict in a relationship and a marriage or a partnership holds quite a bit of stigma. The default is to avoid conflict. And if you’re not having conflict, then, then you’re a healthy couple.

I’m glad that we can engage in conflict in the way that we do.

August/narration:

Jeremiah agrees, and said he’s learned a lot from Julia about this.

Jeremiah: …if that’s solving a problem around parenting, if that’s trying to communicate something about yourself, if that’s a sexual experience, like knowing that they are simultaneously singular episodic things and that they are also ongoing interactions that you can come back to.

And we do really well at coming back to things, even if we get stuck, even if I become completely overwhelmed and, blow my top, or if you shut down or, or kind of whatever that is, there is a trust and both an implicit expectation, but also an explicit statement that we will like come back. And that we do. We come back to each other.

[music]

August/narration:

Julia and Jeremiah talked a bit about their affair on their podcast, Sexvangelicals. They open one of the episodes checking in with each other — they were about to talk about a difficult topic. Still, they feel it’s important to have such conversations — and they felt it was worth exploring for you all, too.

Julia: If strangers listen to this podcast or our podcast, I have zero concerns whatsoever talking about having an affair. I do have fear and anxiety when I think about the people close to me knowing about an affair. I think that it’s important because affairs are misunderstood.

Jeremiah: Yeah.

Julia: I am hoping in the future to write a book that could be part memoir, but part qualitative research about women in religious contexts who have affairs. Affairs are very, very common, and I wouldn’t want anyone to feel alone in the way that I did, and I can hold nuance for the ways that an affair hurts another partner or partners, and I can hold empathy for how devastating that would be.

I know that I deeply, deeply wounded my ex partner, and that will always be a hurt that he carries. I can have a huge amount of empathy for that, and I can hold space for the complicated decision that I made. I just would want other people to know that they are not broken or a bad person for making a choice that could hurt someone else.

Jeremiah: On top of that, part of our work as sex therapists, as relationship coaches, is to talk about taboo things, is to name things that our culture, for whatever reason, has told us not to talk about. Sex is one of those things, obviously, but there’s a lot of different subcategories within sexuality as well. And I would suggest that infidelity is one of those subcategories.

We want to communicate to other people that in working with us, anything’s on the table and that we’re going to do 99 percent of the times, with the exception of nonconsensual abuse, we’re going to do whatever we can to accept that type of behavior and to accept what you bring into the room with us and to be able to hold that. And we have the responsibility in some ways to model that.

For me talking explicitly about infidelity and talking explicitly about sexuality and other elements of my story kind of sets that precedent that my space is a safe space that Julia, your space is a safe space to talk about really hard things.

Julia: Affairs don’t just happen. We talk about the complexity of choosing to have an affair, but affairs also don’t just happen in the sense that two people make a choice outside of a context. All kinds of contextual factors can contribute to an affair and those are worth exploring.

The affair is usually the outcome of a whole host of other stuff that has or is happening. And I don’t know how I would have survived having an affair and a divorce without a therapist who could hold that non judgmentally because even in the world of therapy affairs hold a huge amount of stigma. And I wasn’t looking for my therapist to tell me that It was a great idea that I was having an affair.

She didn’t need to say, “You go girl,” but I did need someone to be able to hold me and my story without judgment. I remember the first time that I had disclosed the affair to my therapist and she knew it was in the works. She wasn’t surprised, but I was watching her so closely because Jeremiah knows sometimes I pick up on body language too quickly. And it was one of the most healing experiences of my life to be in the room with this other woman and disclose this thing that I learned was the worst thing I could do and have her look at me and say, “Okay, we’re going to figure this out.”

[encouraging, acoustic music]

August/narration:

To learn more from Jeremiah and Julia, check out Sexvangelicals, where they provide “sex education the church didn’t want you to have,” on your favorite podcast app. Subscribe to their Substack, Relationship 101, for twice a week newsletters about the research of communication, relationships and sexuality. To inquire about individual relationship coaching with either of them, send an email to sexvangelicals at gmail dot com.

If you’re enjoying Girl Boner Radio, a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts would mean so much to me. I would also love it if you’d share links with your friends. Thanks so much for listening.

Bonus segment transcript available upon request! Drop me a message here.