How purity culture made trying to conceive even harder (Elizabeth's story)

And how pole dancing helped

(Kayti here) This week’s listener story really struck a chord with me—it mirrors so much of my own experience growing up in evangelical purity culture and the lasting impact it’s had on my marriage. While Amy and I haven’t talked extensively about our religious upbringings on the podcast, I was raised with strict purity and abstinence-only teachings (as was my husband), and we both waited until our wedding night to have sex. I’ve shared more about this in detail here and here, but all of this is to say: Elizabeth’s story resonates in a way that feels both painful and deeply familiar. We’re so honored that she trusted us enough to share it, and we’re sending love to anyone who recognizes themselves in this experience. xo

---

Elizabeth’s Story

*transcript provided for accessibility, but we recommend listening to the voice memo

I just listened to the episode about sex and infertility, and I realized I do have some things to tell you guys. I really identified with the part of the podcast when we were talking about how purity culture really messed up your sex life.

When my husband and I met, we were in college, and I wasn’t necessarily following the teachings of Christianity anymore, not really subscribing to purity culture anymore, and so we actually had a really great healthy sex life for the first part of our relationship.

And then I came back to the church. I was involved with the youth ministry, and I was having some open conversations with my youth pastor, and he made it very clear that we were sinning and needed to stop having sex, or I wouldn’t be able to work with the youth group anymore. And so we said okay fine, you know, let’s not have sex anymore. So for the last two years of our engagement before we got married, we were trying to not have sex.

And so we went from having this really vibrant, healthy, awesome sex life to “can’t even look at you because it might lead to sin.” Now we got married, and imagine that: it didn’t magically solve itself when we got married. There’s nothing magical that happens between I’m committed to you today, or I’m committed to you tomorrow, and now we’re married. So we had a really hard time turning that back on.

And then my husband went through a really hard time the first couple of years of our marriage, and that made it even harder. And so I wouldn’t say our sex life was doing great before infertility, but oh my goodness, we had no shot once we started to deal with trying to get pregnant. All of the ovulation strips and all of the timing and all of the “we have to have sex this night and this night and this night,” it was exhausting. And it killed any vibe that we possibly had left.

We tried all kinds of things. We had one of those inside-out octopuses, where if it was on the happy side, my husband knew that I was in that ovulation window and I would welcome any advance at any point. And you know, then I would turn it to the frowny face the rest of the cycle.

So that took some of the, you know, I’m doing all the initiating out of it. But we definitely struggled with his pressure to perform. He was such a trooper and so positive about everything and always willing to drop everything and have sex. But definitely that pressure to perform started to cause some problems, and then that stressed him out and that stressed me out.

So by the time we were starting our first cycles of IUI, it’s been such a relief to not have to have sex at any particular time. We’ve really happily handed that part over to the clinic and said, “Okay, we are all in on them getting me pregnant, and we’re not gonna worry about my fertile window at all, and we’re just gonna take the meds and do what they tell me to do.” Which, imagine that, has not magically turned our sex life back on. But it has given us a fighting chance again, I think.

The other thing that’s been really helpful is therapy. Obviously you guys talk about therapy a lot, but my therapist has kind of an Eastern medicine mentality, and she thinks in all of this my second chakra is blocked. And I’m still a little, you know, from a conservative Christian household. I’m not really sure how much I... I don’t know. I don’t know what to think about the chakras. But anyway, she told me I needed to do something flowy to get into my body and to be more comfortable in that pelvic chakra.

So in trying a few different classes, I’ve ended up taking pole dancing for the past year and a half, which has been the most life-changing and healing thing I have ever done for myself. It has changed the way I feel about my body on the days where I feel like my body’s not even mine to be able to show up and fully be present in my body, be proud of what I can do, feel sexy even when it’s not about having a partner. It’s just about me getting to feel sexy.

It’s been the best and most healing and strengthening experience for me personally as far as our sex life goes. And some of that has translated back home, and sometimes I come home and I do some of the tricks and show him some of the stuff. And, you know, some weeks I don’t. And it just translates into how I feel about my body and myself and my pelvic chakra, whatever that means.

And so, yeah, I mean, I think both purity culture and infertility have been really, really hard in our sex life. But we are doing the best we can, and I’m really lucky that my partner is really, really supportive. And, you know, we’re just kind of rolling with it. We’re trying to figure out, you know, what to do next and open to all the creative solutions. But, yeah, I hope this helps.