We Were Never Taught How to Be Whole

Why both purity culture and sex-onomics leave us disconnected. And what staying human actually requires.

Valentine’s Day is here, and I want to talk about sex. But not in the way you might expect.

Not with tips or techniques or advice about spicing things up. Not with roses and romance and happily-ever-after promises.

I want to talk about what happens when an entire culture, both religious and secular, teaches you to be afraid of your own aliveness. When your body becomes something to manage instead of inhabit. When intimacy becomes performance instead of presence.

I want to talk about what it costs us. And what it takes to get it back.

This post is personal. It’s vulnerable. It includes stories about my own failures, my divorces, my decades of believing lies about my body and my desire. It includes a morning ritual where I moved my hips and spoke truth to my throat. It includes grief about what purity culture stole from me and from the teenagers I taught.

But it’s not just my story. It’s yours too.

Because whether you grew up in purity culture or hookup culture, whether you were taught that sex is sin or that sex is currency, whether you’ve spent your life suppressing desire or performing it, the result is the same:

We were never taught how to be whole.

This post is about reclaiming erotic wholeness. Not as sexual technique, but as a way of staying human. It’s about integrating body and spirit, passion and commitment, desire and wisdom. It’s about learning that pleasure is sacred, that consent is essential, that your body gets a vote.

It’s about what it means to be alive in a world that wants us performing, numbing, hiding, or extracting.

So if you’re tired of performing. If you’re carrying shame about your body or your desire. If you’re wondering why intimacy feels so hard. If you’re realizing that what you were taught didn’t prepare you for real relationship.

This one’s for you.

Let’s talk about missing the intimacy that keeps us human. And let’s talk about how to get it back.

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The Whole Story

This post exists because a couple weeks ago, I woke up with my sacral energy, that sensuality and passion that is more primal than curated, buzzing like a swarm of bees. Not in a way that needed managing or suppressing, but in a way that wanted integrating.

I could feel it as a low hum, a warmth pooling in my pelvis. Not urgent. Not demanding. Just... present. Alive. It’s not unusual for me to feel that way, but on this morning it was particularly intense. And unlike decades past, rather than trying to make it go away, these years I aim to embrace the wisdom on Mantak Chia and cultivate it. Nurture it. Even expand it.

On this particular morning I sat with it in my morning ritual: one hand on my sacral center, one on my heart, breathing from my pelvis through my solar plexus, heart, and throat with the words, “I speak the whole truth of me.”

And what rose through that channel wasn’t shame. It was wholeness.

I let my hips move. At least as much as my 51-year old hips that are about as antithetical to Shakira’s as you can get can move. The goal was slow figure-eights, circles that felt like prayer. And while I’m not sure what an outsider would have observed, my body remembered something my mind had forgotten: that desire isn’t the enemy of holiness. It’s part of it.

“I allow desire. I am alive,” I whispered as my hips swayed.

Then I brought both hands to my throat, that vulnerable space where truth either gets spoken or swallowed, I continued: “I speak the whole truth of me. Sacred and wild, tender and free.”

And that’s when the resistance hit.

Not from my body. From my mind.

The “good boy” voice that’s been with me since childhood. The one that wants to conform so I don’t get in trouble. The one that invites me to be smaller so I can stay hidden in the corner. And this time, it combined with cultural awareness in attempt to get me to limit myself: You’re a 50-something straight white male. Do you really want to focus on sex and desire in a world shocked by the release of the Epstein files? A world where men who look like you have used sex to do so much harm? You? Twice divorced and still figuring out how to be in a healthy relationship, you?

And as abusive as it felt, there is a fairness to the question.

But then another voice rose. Quieter, steadier, rooted deeper: You’re contextually wise.

My partner, she invites this sacral-to-throat integration to show up as consensual possession and claiming. She asks me to speak desire plainly. To take what I want. To delight in our mutual aliveness.

With my friends, it’s playful raunchiness in contexts where everyone knows the game and consents to the banter. We’re real with each other. Unfiltered. Human.

In my grief work, be it funerals, coaching, breathwork or the creation of ritual, this same channel becomes compassionate truth-telling. The courage to sit with what’s uncomfortable, to name what’s real, to hold space for the unspeakable.

And in my public voice, like this one, it’s the willingness to address sexuality, embodiment, and desire with integrity. Not titillation. Not performance. Just truth.

The throat doesn’t need to speak everything everywhere. It needs to speak the right truth in the right context with the right people.

That’s not repression. That’s wisdom. That’s staying human.

As I continued through my ritual space I sat with the ancient texts. Like Ephesians 5:3-4. Ones the church used to beat me with, and sadly, ones I once used to abuse, “But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality… nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking.”

Except this time, I read it differently. This time, I wondered: what if raunchiness rooted in gratitude is actually holy? What if desire expressed with consent and context is a form of worship?

And then Thomas Merton’s words landed like a benediction: “For me to be a saint means to be myself.”

I realized something. My body was telling me the truth I’d been too afraid to speak for decades:

Erotic wholeness is not optional for staying human. It’s essential.

And purity culture tried to kill it in me.

The Golden Gate Bridge and the Tragedy of True Love Waits

When I arrived at the church in 1998, one of the first major events I was asked to organize as the new youth pastor centered around True Love Waits.

At that point, it was still relatively light. Just a “say no to sex before marriage” message. A commitment to honor God with your body. But by the time I was a few years into youth ministry, it had metastasized into a full theological system.

Multi-church gatherings for kids ranging from 7th to 12th grade. Mainstage events followed by breakout sessions where groups divided based on age and gender. We talked about purity, about guarding our hearts, about how sex was a gift from God meant only for marriage.

I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris became required reading. We had accountability groups where guys confessed their “struggles” with lust. We taught girls that their bodies were stumbling blocks, that what they wore could cause their brothers in Christ to sin. We framed desire as the enemy, not as information.

Purity wasn’t just about behavior. It was about thought life. It was about guarding your heart so completely that you didn’t even allow yourself to imagine intimacy until you had a ring on your finger.

The message was clear: Your body is dangerous. Your desire is a threat. The only way to be holy is to be sexually dead until the wedding night, and then, magically, to come alive on command.

After some “mishaps” earlier in my twenties, I’d recommitted myself to purity. I followed all the rules.

The Courtship That Wasn’t

I dated the way I was supposed to. We kept ourselves accountable. We set clear boundaries that kept us from even kissing until after the engagement, and not openly until our first kiss at the altar.

I married the woman I was supposed to marry. Not because I was deeply in love, not because we had built something together that felt like life, but because when you’re the youth pastor you’re supposed to marry the woman who spends every non-working and non-sleeping hour at the church.

We had a foundation of friendship. We’d spent a lot of time together in group settings. She thought I was funny. I appreciated her as a person. And according to the theory and theology, that was enough.

Here’s what I knew about her: her church involvement, her commitment to ministry, that we could laugh together in a crowd.

Here’s what I didn’t know: that she avoided conflict like it was contagious. That she carried trauma I couldn’t see. That she had no more framework for thinking about sex and sexuality than I did. I knew nothing about what her body wanted or feared. I knew nothing about mine.

I knew the surface church version of her. She knew the surface church version of me.

We didn’t know each other.

I had my doubts. I remember sitting in a coffee shop in the months before the wedding, reading about how things are different in Eastern cultures versus Western ones. The analogy offered said that in the West, we put a hot cup on a cold saucer, while in the East, they put a cool cup on a hot plate.

The idea was that we tend to start off hot and heavy and then cool with the familiarity that comes during life together, while they would learn to warm up to each other over time.

I went forward, trusting that the warming would come.

I believed that if I followed the formula, if I put in the right input, I’d get the right output. That’s what my theology taught me: obedience produces blessing. Do it God’s way and it will work.

There was a moment I could have walked away.

I remember it clearly. Shortly before the wedding, my parents came out to meet her. We were on a walk, and she was a few steps ahead of me. I looked up and saw her, and something in me whispered, What the hell are you doing?

I could have stopped. I could have been honest. I probably would have had to leave that church, find another job, start over somewhere else.

But I didn’t. I kept walking.

The Switch That Didn’t Flip

On the wedding night, you were supposed to flip a switch. All that dead, guarded, suppressed desire? It was supposed to become holy, joyful, mutual intimacy. Just because a pastor said some words and you signed a legal document.

It didn’t work that way.

The switch didn’t flip. Not for me. Not for her.

Because neither of us knew ourselves, we couldn’t know each other. And because we didn’t know each other, we couldn’t meet each other in that vulnerable, tender, terrifying space where intimacy actually lives.

The warming I’d hoped for never came. Maybe we had a few moments here and there where it felt like something close to connection. But mostly, we stayed cool. Lukewarm at best.

I don’t want to tell her story. That’s not mine to share. But I can tell you mine.

I didn’t know myself. I didn’t know my needs, my aches, my longings. I had no attunement to my own body, no language for what I wanted or feared. All I knew was that she seemed to trigger every wound I carried and leave every longing untouched.

And I’m sure, on her side, I did the same.

She wasn’t ready for any of this. Neither was I.

We tried. We really did. But you can’t build intimacy on a foundation of shame and obligation. You can’t suddenly trust your body when you’ve spent years treating it like the enemy. You can’t experience mutual desire when one person has been taught to suppress all longing and the other has been taught it’s owed to him.

It was tragic.

The Bridge

I remember one day when I was 26, I’d been married just a few months. Still in that early, delusional phase where hope overrides evidence. Still believing that if I just did it right, everything would work out.

It was this day where I led our youth group to San Francisco to join hundreds of other teenagers for a True Love Waits march across the Golden Gate Bridge.

I remember the fog that morning. Thick and cold, the kind that makes the bridge cables disappear into gray. We walked in pairs as the cars rushed by. Someone at the front carried a banner. Parents who’d helped us drive down snapped pictures that would land in the next church newsletter.

We thought we were crossing into a new world. We were crossing into a trap we’d built together.

The tragic irony wouldn’t reveal itself for years. Joshua Harris, the man who wrote I Kissed Dating Goodbye, would eventually renounce the book and divorce. I would divorce. Twice.

As I look back on that season of life I realize I was trying to map my way through a relationship world I was never taught how to navigate. I was too nerdy to date in highschool. I only had one girlfriend in college. As I stepped into my role as a youth pastor, I was offered purity culture as the way forward. But purity culture didn’t prepare me for relationship. It prepared me for performance. It didn’t teach me intimacy. It taught me compliance.

But here’s the thing I’m learning: mainstream culture isn’t any better.

Whether you grew up in purity culture or hookup culture, whether you were taught to suppress desire or commodify it, the result is the same. We were never taught how to know ourselves. We were never given tools for building real intimacy.

We were taught to perform.

I’m sorry to her. For not being ready. For not knowing myself well enough to show up as a whole person.

I’m sorry to those kids. For teaching them a theology that would fracture their ability to trust their own bodies, to feel their own desire, to build real intimacy.

I’m sorry to myself. For staying in obligation when love was never there. For choosing the formula over the truth my body was trying to tell me.

And now, on this Valentine’s Day morning I find myself inviting all of us into something different:

Not performance. Not obligation. Not purity or sex-onomics. But erotic wholeness that keeps us human.

Photo by Kelly Moon on Unsplash

What Our Culture Stole From Us

So what has our culture stolen from us?

Purity culture is one expression of a much deeper problem in how Western culture teaches us to relate to our bodies, our desires, and each other. Whether the church taught you to suppress sexuality or mainstream culture taught you to perform it, the underlying message is the same: you are not allowed to simply be human.

Your body is either a threat to manage or a product to market. Your desire is either sin or currency. Your relationships are either contracts of obligation or transactions of consumption.

Nowhere in this system are you invited to know yourself. To feel your own aliveness. To build intimacy rooted in presence instead of performance.

So let me name what we lost. Not just in purity culture, but in the broader culture that reduces us all to performers in a script we never agreed to.

1. We lost the integration of body and spirit.

Purity culture taught us that the body is a threat to the soul. That sexual desire is the enemy of holiness. That to be spiritual, you must be disembodied, especially below the waist.

But mainstream culture taught us the opposite extreme: that the body is all that matters. That sexuality is performance. That desire is something to optimize, not integrate.

I learned this viscerally. In those accountability groups, we’d confess our “struggles” with lust, and the prescribed solution was always the same: pray more, read your Bible more, stay busy, avoid triggers. Never once did anyone say, “Your body is telling you something true. Let’s get curious about what it’s trying to communicate.”

We were taught to “bounce our eyes,” literally trained to look away any time we noticed an attractive person. We were told to “take every thought captive,” which in practice meant we spent enormous mental energy trying not to think about sex, which of course made us think about it constantly.

The result? A generation of people who can’t feel their own aliveness without shame. We learned to live from the neck up. We became brains on sticks, disconnected from the very bodies God called good.

And here’s what neither culture told us: You can’t selectively numb sensation. When you shut down your capacity to feel desire, you also shut down your capacity to feel joy, grief, tenderness, delight. You don’t become more spiritual, you become less human.

And when you treat your body as a performance vehicle, when sexuality becomes about metrics and technique instead of presence and mutuality, you lose the same capacity. Different path, same destination: disconnection from your own aliveness.

2. We lost consent.

This one took me the longest to see.

Purity culture didn’t teach us about mutual desire, boundaries, or enthusiastic yes. It taught us obligation. The man was owed sex in marriage because that was his “need.” The woman was supposed to submit, even when her body said no.

In premarital counseling sessions across evangelical churches, couples were taught that sexual refusal was a form of withholding. That both partners had a biblical duty to meet each other’s needs. Pastors quoted 1 Corinthians 7: “The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband.”

Duty. Not desire. Duty.

No one ever asked, “But what if one person doesn’t want to? What if their body is saying no? What if they’re tired, or touched-out, or grieving, or just not in the mood?”

The answer was implied: your body doesn’t get a vote. You made a covenant. You owe this.

But secular culture isn’t much better. It just flips the script. Instead of women owing sex as marital duty, women learn to use sex as currency. Give him what he wants physically in hopes of getting what you want emotionally. Trade your body for connection, attention, commitment. Or in the age of rampant seeking of Sugar Daddies, it’s your body for provision or luxury.

It’s the same extraction. Just dressed up differently.

Whether it’s Christian obligation or secular transaction, the result is the same: sex becomes something owed or traded rather than mutually desired.

I didn’t understand consent. Not really. I understood obligation and transaction. And when desire didn’t show up the way I expected, I felt hurt, rejected, like something was being withheld.

It never occurred to me that a body saying no carries wisdom. That “no” is valuable information about what someone needs, what feels safe, what’s actually mutual.

I’m learning this now, at 51, in a relationship that’s teaching me what I should have learned at 20: that consent is not just the absence of “no.” It’s the presence of enthusiastic yes.

That desire is not something one person gives and another takes, trades or earns. It’s something that arises mutually, that both people get to feel and express and honor in each other.

That “I don’t want to right now” is not rejection or withholding. It’s self-knowledge. And it creates space for “I do want to” to mean something real.

Whether you were taught that sex is marital duty, transactional currency, or casual no-big-deal, the result is the same. We were never taught that consent is ongoing, embodied, and sacred. That mutual desire is the only foundation for real intimacy.

And without that? There is no intimacy. Only extraction.

3. We lost curiosity.

Desire is information. It tells you what you long for, what you value, what makes you come alive. It’s a compass pointing toward beauty, connection, and delight.

Purity culture taught us to fear our own desire. To see it as something that would lead us astray. So instead of getting curious (Why am I drawn to this? What is this desire trying to teach me?), we shut it down.

Meanwhile, consumer culture taught us to fulfill desire immediately. Swipe right. One-click purchase. Instant gratification. No space for the slow unfolding that real intimacy requires.

Both approaches kill curiosity. One by suppression, one by satiation. And without curiosity, we lose the ability to be playful, explorative, vulnerable. We lose the capacity to discover ourselves and each other.

4. We lost the sacredness of pleasure.

Purity culture framed sex as duty, not delight. Procreation was holy. Everything else was suspect.

And consumer culture framed sex as commodity, not connection. Pleasure became a product. Orgasms became metrics. Bodies became objects to optimize.

I was taught that sex had three purposes: procreation, unity, and (distant third) pleasure. But even that third purpose was framed carefully. The “marriage bed is undefiled,” sure, but there was always an undercurrent of suspicion around pleasure for its own sake.

Especially women’s pleasure.

I don’t remember a single conversation in all my years of purity-culture youth ministry where anyone acknowledged that women’s bodies were designed for pleasure. That the clitoris exists for no other reason than to feel good. That female orgasm has no reproductive function. It’s pure gift.

Instead, the message was clear: men have needs. Women have duties. Sex is something women give and men take.

I carried that into my first marriage. I didn’t know how to ask my wife what she wanted. I didn’t know how to slow down, explore, be curious. I knew how to perform the mechanics (because that’s what marriage allowed), but I had no framework for mutual joy.

It wasn’t until much later (after divorce, after therapy, after a lot of unlearning) that I began to understand: the body was made for pleasure. God wired us with nerve endings that have no purpose except to feel good.

And that’s not incidental. It’s essential.

Because pleasure is presence. Pleasure requires you to be fully in your body, fully attuned to sensation, fully meeting another person in vulnerable openness.

Both cultures robbed us of sacred pleasure. One by framing it as sin, the other by framing it as transaction.

But here’s the truth: pleasure is incarnation. It’s what it means to be fully alive in your body, fully present with another person, fully meeting in vulnerable mutuality.

A culture without sacred pleasure, whether religious or secular, isn’t liberation. It’s just another form of control.

5. We lost the integration of passion and commitment.

Purity culture sold us a lie: that passion and commitment were opposed. That you either had wild, uncontrolled lust or you had covenant faithfulness.

Meanwhile, secular culture sold us the opposite lie: that commitment kills passion. That real desire requires novelty, not depth. That staying with one person means settling.

But real intimacy, staying human intimacy, requires both passion and commitment.

It requires the fire of desire and the rootedness of trust. It requires showing up to your partner not as a sexless saint or a controlled object, but as a whole person: longing, tender, wild, and free.

We were never taught how to hold both. Religious culture said choose commitment. Secular culture said choose passion. And both left us starving for wholeness.

What if Desire Is Sacred?

Here’s what my theology says now. It’s what I wish I’d known at 26, marching across that bridge:

Desire is not sin’s playground. It’s the compass of the soul.

The body is not an obstacle to transcend. It’s the sacred interface through which we encounter the world, each other, and God. Resurrection doesn’t deny the body, it affirms it. Jesus didn’t come back as a ghost. He came back embodied, with scars still visible, asking for food, inviting touch.

If God honors the body that much, then our sexuality isn’t something to suppress, it’s something to integrate.

And integration doesn’t mean “anything goes.” It means consent and context.

That morning, when I felt that sacral-to-throat activation, I realized something. My erotic aliveness doesn’t have one expression. It has many. And each one requires contextual wisdom.

The throat doesn’t need to speak everything everywhere. It needs to speak the right truth in the right context with the right people.

That’s not repression. That’s wisdom. That’s staying human.

Erotic Wholeness Keeps Us Human

Here’s the through-line I want to offer you this Valentine’s Day:

Erotic wholeness is not about “getting off.” It’s about staying alive.

In a world that wants to commodify your body, numb your longing, and reduce your sexuality to either performance or shame, to stay erotically whole is an act of resistance.

It means:

• Honoring the aliveness in your body without needing to act on every impulse.

• Feeling desire as information, not demand.

• Letting passion and commitment dance together, not war.

• Celebrating pleasure as a gift, not a transaction.

• Speaking your whole truth, sacred and wild, tender and free, in the contexts where it can be received.

Erotic wholeness doesn’t mean you’re always sexually active. It means you’re alive to your own longing. Awake to beauty. Willing to feel the pull of desire without collapsing into compulsion or shutting down into numbness.

It means your body gets a vote. Your pleasure matters. Your “no” is sacred. And your “yes” (when it’s free, mutual, and rooted in trust) is holy.

A Theology of Sex That Keeps Us Human

So here’s what I believe now, at 51, after two divorces and a morning ritual that integrated my sacral fire with my sacred voice:

Sex is not about procreation alone. It’s about connection, play, presence, and mutual aliveness.

It’s about two people showing up as whole humans: not performing roles, not fulfilling obligations, but delighting in each other.

It’s about consent as the baseline and curiosity as the fuel.

It’s about letting your body speak its truth and trusting your partner to hear it without fixing, shaming, or demanding.

It’s about pleasure as a form of prayer, because when you’re fully present in your body, fully alive to sensation, fully meeting another person in mutual vulnerability, that’s incarnation.

God doesn’t ask you to be disembodied. God asks you to be whole.

And wholeness includes your sexuality. Not as an add-on. Not as something you manage until it’s socially acceptable. But as a core part of what makes you you.

What Now?

If you’re reading this and recognizing the wreckage of purity culture in your own story, if you’re realizing that you’ve been living from the neck up, performing intimacy instead of feeling it, or stuck in shame every time desire stirs, I want you to know:

You’re not broken. You were lied to.

And if you never had purity culture but grew up on the secular side, if you’ve been using sex as currency, trading your body for attention, connection, or the hope of commitment, I want you to know the same thing:

You’re not broken. You were lied to.

Mainstream culture taught you that your body is leverage. That if you give physically, you might get what you need emotionally. That sex is the price of admission for intimacy, the down payment on connection, the audition for commitment.

Maybe you learned to say yes when your body wanted to say no, hoping this time it would turn into something real. Maybe you performed desire you didn’t feel because that’s what keeps someone interested. Maybe you got really good at technique but lost touch with what you actually want. Maybe you gave your body away freely while your heart stayed locked up tight, because vulnerability felt more dangerous than nakedness.

Purity culture dressed extraction up as duty. Secular culture dresses it up as liberation.

Different script. Same disconnection.

The way back to wholeness doesn’t require you to blow up your life or abandon your freedom. It requires you to reintegrate: body and spirit, passion and commitment, desire and wisdom.

It requires you to grieve what was stolen. And then to reclaim what’s yours. That’s the way we stay human.

Need Something More Personal?

The three practices below the paywall are powerful. Whether you take 60-seconds, 60-minutes, or embrace a larger transition, they are some of the same tools I’ve used to help me reconnect with my body after decades of disconnection. I believe they can help you too.

But sometimes, you need something designed specifically for your story.

Maybe purity culture didn’t just disconnect you from your body. Maybe it tangled itself around a specific trauma, a particular shame, a wound that needs its own medicine.

Maybe secular culture’s transactional script left you performing so long that you don’t even know what your body wants anymore.

Maybe you’re carrying something that needs more than a general practice. You need a ritual built for you.

That’s some of what I do.

I create custom rituals that help you step back into your body. Rituals that meet you exactly where you are. That speak to your specific disconnection, your particular grief, your unique path back to wholeness.

We’ll start with your story. What you were taught. What was stolen. What you’re longing to reclaim. And then I’ll design a ritual that gives your body a way to move from disconnection to integration, from performance to presence, from shame to wholeness.

Sometimes it’s breathwork. Sometimes it’s movement. Sometimes it’s a sequence you do alone. Sometimes it’s something you bring into relationship. Always, it’s yours.

If you’re ready for something designed specifically for your healing, book a custom ritual session here.