These things are an abomination in the sight of the Lord

Seems that the topic of "sex and the single Mormon" has been circulating around lately.

I suppose I ought to weigh in.

No one needs much explaining regarding the LDS church's position on pre-marital and extra-marital sex, especially those of us who grew up hearing the church's teaching that the only sin a person could commit which is worse than sex outside marriage is to murder someone. Suffice it to say that it's based on a wildly misinterpreted scripture from The Book of Mormon, in which a prophet chastises his missionary son over the consequences of the son's affair with a prostitute.

I'm not sure, though, whether even those who grew up in LDS Sunday Schools and youth Seminaries really understand the impact all that anti-sexual dogma has on us. For me, a shy and obedient child, and adolescent at heart, believing that my physiological urges were so evil contributed in large part, I think, to emotional and sexual dysfunction so profound that it took me until I was in my early thirties to come to reach a place where I am at peace with myself and my the person I love.

My own neuroses, of course, contributed their share to what can really only be described as my pathetic attempts at relationships in college and beyond. Still, I don't think that the LDS approach to sex is completely blameless for the fact that it took me until I was twenty two years old to press my lips to a person I loved.

She was a Mormon, but unlike me had begun to have sex when she was in high school. I suppose many others in the church faulted her for that, the fact that she converted to the church in college notwithstanding. I never did. She never struck me as a grave sinner because she had sex.

I never kissed her lips. Not because I didn't want to. I most desperately did, but a barrier existed, at least in my own mind, built of a profound lack of confidence, a lack of trust, an inability to conceive, in the first place, that the woman who occupied such a constant place in my heart and thoughts, would actually want me to be physically affectionate with her, and in the second place, that I was capable of connecting with her in that way.

To think of having "sexual relations" with her would have amounted to thinking about a sin just short of murder, her murder and mine. Yet I wanted to sin with her like that, as badly and urgently as any twenty one year old man, Mormon or not, and I wanted to believe that she wanted that as well.

Yet how could she? How could she want to commit a sin that serious? Especially with someone like me?

In any event, the psychological trauma of being taught that sex with her, the act I so desperately and biologically desired, was a sin next to murder in gravity formed a major part of the barrier that kept me from engaging in a healthy relationship with my first infatuation of adulthood. Sure, other factors played a part, from my own depression and anxieties, to the stress of college, to my simple lack of confidence, not to mention her own issues. But to say that the church's stated doctrine regarding physical intimacy didn't influence a young man who had just returned from a two year full-time mission would be to deny the influence of the wind in creating the waves of the water.

Needless to say, I never experienced with her what I wanted, and the relationship ended disastrously. For the next ten years or so, I moved from one relationship to another, never actually coming anywhere near an abiding, healthy, mutually fulfilling emotional and physical connection.

The second girl I loved in college had been raised a Mormon, but had also had sex before meeting me. Our physical relationship consisted of nothing more than holding hands. That pure chastity caused me great satisfaction and relief, on one level, because as physically attractive as she was, I was succeeding in bridling my passions, in loving her without lusting after her, in being the good Mormon young man I was taught to be.

Eventually she confronted me and asked why I was holding back. I didn't then and still don't completely understand what she meant, but I do know that I was holding back with her physically in the same way I had held back before, never allowing my mind to consider what it would have been like to be physically intimate with her, to kiss her, to touch her, to penetrate her. I wanted to. I wanted to believe that she wanted me to. Needless to say, regardless of what she or I may have wanted, I steadfastly managed to keep anything abominable from happening.

And shortly afterward, the relationship failed to culminate in anything resembling what either of us wanted.