This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Episode 006 – Virgins and Volcanos part 2

May 24, 2023

T: Hey, I’m Tracey.

S: And I’m Sharon. And this is our podcast…

T: Feet of Clay – Confessions of the Cult Sisters.

S: On our last podcast we started delving really deep into the putrid pits of what is now known as Purity Culture. You see how I always sneak in alliteration, Tracey? Are you sick of it yet?

T: I do see that. I am not quite sick of it, I think there’s more coming. So for all of you out there, this is part two of that conversation, so if you haven’t yet heard the last episode, please go back and listen to that first, and come back to this one. And again, as with that first one – since we’re getting very personal with this, with our own sexual histories, and on this one some virginity stories, if you have kids you probably would want to come back to this later.

S: Yes, and if you are one of our kids out there listening, you will not offend us if you turn this off. It’s your choice.

T: Exactly.

S: One other thing I want to say is clearly we’re talking about personal stories that involve us, but also involve our former spouses, and it is not at all our intention to try to make fun of someone or make someone feel bad. We were all fucked up. Tracey, you and I recognize that. Other people might not necessarily believe that but we see it for what it was and how we were all really struggling. I think we were all in one sense perpetrators, and all in one sense victims.

T: Yes.

S: So again, this is not about trying to hurt anyone, it’s just about trying to be really, really real. Right?

T: Well said, and I think as I get into my story we’ll see that men are absolutely also victims of purity culture. This is not good for men either. As women we’ve been the ones that are complicit in keeping quiet about this subject, so going on record now to talk about it because it’s not good for anybody, and I think you’ll start to see in our stories just how locked away we became, and how that’s not healthy for anybody.

S: That’s right. Alright. When we recorded part one of this topic we did not have an episode title yet. I think both you and I thought it had to have something to do with virgins (clearly) and so I was thinking verified virgins…

T: Because we were! We were verified, card carrying virgins. Of course that didn’t last very long, right. It actually solves itself pretty quickly.

S: Although wait a second, we were self-verified, or self-proclaimed. There wasn’t like, the test. Nobody tested us like they do in some Middle Eastern cultures, so…

T: Well, as we get into my story I think I had verified proof of my virginity.

S: Oh. Okay, well that means you were a better virgin than me.

T: Oh, it was not good.

S: And then the other thing I thought about – how about volcanos? What do you think about that? Voracious volcanos?

T: Is this because it’s illiterate?

S: Well, it is that.

T: I can’t even say it. Alliterative.

S: Ps & Vs.

T: Ooh, Ps and Vs.

S: Ooh, I didn’t even think about that. Penis, vagina – hey, it really works.

T: Ps and Vs. Okay.

S: Okay. Verified Virgins and Voracious Volcanos. But now we’re going to have to expand on what the volcano part means. What do you think?

T: What do I think?  You’re the one that came up with volcano!

(laughter)

T: Cos definitely I got the virgin part down and as you’ll learn, I was also a card-carrying home-schooling mother, so we actually made volcanos in our home school science days.

S: I’m sorry but home schooling moms – you don’t have the monopoly on that. My kids went to school and we still made those volcanos. So you’re not better than me.

T: Oh okay.

(laughter)

T: And there’s definitely a reaction, a base that reacts with that acid so I guess for me the volcano was – we eventually erupted. Right?

S: That’s right. Well, you know there’s that boiling over volcano of burning magma lust that we were all fighting against so maybe it’s that, or maybe it’s just because it sounds good and we’ll leave it at that.

T: We’ll leave it at that, because you were married. I thought that was the reason you got married was for lust, so…

S: Well, maybe that’s the reason you got married. I got married because it was God’s will.

T: That’s true. It was one of two choices.

S: Right.

T: Alright. So we do this title with the Vs – now that that’s settled, are you ready now to pick up where we left off and spare these poor people our wordplay?

S: Yes, yes I am. And I have my notes from the last time, so if we recall I’d come up with the 7 Ps as the categories we’d use for our last episode. We’d discussed number one the Promises of God according to fundamental Christianity – notice I pronounced it correctly this time.  Number two, the Predicament. So there’s this human condition of all of us trying to measure up to this standard. Number three, we talked a lot about Purity Culture, which is what it’s called these days, not what we knew it as back then, but before we go into more of this, is there anything you wished you had said in part one that you want to add here before we get going?

T: Yeah, I think one of the things that I alluded to at the very beginning is that we as women have been complicit in this message and I was thinking a lot about that. It wasn’t good for me as a woman, but then we had daughters. So I don’t know if part of us, that either or that we talked about in the first episode – it’s either this pathway of this purity culture, this virginity, this abstinence culture, or you just are sleeping with anyone that you want; sexual disease, unhealthiness, so if that’s part of why we stayed silent in this for so long. I’m not quite sure. But I know that it’s time for more women, especially older women like us, to go on record to say hey, this is our experience with purity culture, this is our experience with being virgins on our wedding night – this is where it was super unhealthy for us and we don’t want to be complicit in that message anymore.

S: Right. I realized that we had mentioned a number of the Last Days articles – these were articles that originally appeared in the newsletter – which was really a magazine, so kind of a misnomer there – and were later reproduced and printed in pamphlet form, which we called tracts.

T: Tracts!

S: And there was another one in there that I forgot to mention; it was called Love versus Romance, by Kathleen Dillard. Another message that is not good, not good.

T: I had found this article a while back ago and for those of you who have found us on Instagram, it’s Feet of Clay.Cult Sisters – I point this out, because one of the things that is mentioned in there is – I’ll quote it. There is a place for romance within a true, Godly commitment, but this romance cannot be the foundation of the relationship itself. You must look at romance within a relationship like icing on the cake. Just thinking back and some of the stories that you’ll hear about, about my marriage, all I could say is not too much icing folks! Don’t get too much icing!

S: Oh my gosh. Okay, I just want to imagine enjoying a dessert of German chocolate cake without any icing, or even carrot cake without any icing. It’s not complete. It’s not right.

T: It’s not complete. Of course she’s saying well you can’t just have all icing and it’s like – I know.

S: Of course not! Of course you can’t have all icing, but you can’t have all just cake either.

T: So it was very indicative, just the emphasis on the Godly commitment, which you’ll see was definitely a part of our relationships, right.

S: Yes. That commitment was, without a doubt. So now we’re going to discuss our next set of the Ps, preparations – that’s us getting ready for this amazing marriage that we’re going to go into. The pain that we actually experienced in those marriages, the parting – what we did when the pain became too much and we couldn’t do it anymore, and then the after party that we discovered when it was all over. So are you ready to dive into this?

T: That’s four Ps, right?

S: It is four Ps.

T: Four Ps on the P-trail.

S: On the P-P-P-P trail. Alright. preparations. In getting ready for our marriages, our Godly, Godly marriages. I don’t know about you, but we didn’t do any making out. We held hands, we …

T: Too much icing!

S: Actually, for me though, remember I was going into this not like you. You came into it with an attraction to your fiancé. I came into it not starting with that, and then just letting myself go okay, okay, this is what God wants so this is what I gotta do. So there’s a whole lot of dissociation on my part. I didn’t miss out on the fact that we weren’t making out while we were engaged. Did you even kiss when you were engaged?

T: We did kiss probably a couple of weeks before our wedding, which we’ll get into why we kind of came up with that answer for us specifically. But for those of you guys who haven’t heard Sharon’s interview with I was a Teenage Fundamentalist episode 76, she talks about her marriage that’s basically like an arranged marriage. I have a couple of questions on that because you were starting to date and be engaged – one of the earliest couples at Last Days Ministries.

S: The second.  We were the second couple.

T: And at that time obviously it’s a co-ed environment, a co-ed commune, you had what, maybe 30-40 people at that time when you were getting married, or was it a little bit more?

S: Yeah? I don’t remember honestly. Somewhere in there.

T: So what I’m interested in – because I came to Last Days when we already had a school and a lot of teachings in place, but you got married so early at Last Days Ministries and so in that commune environment I was wondering how you guys set the rules for yourselves, or were they laid down for you as far as how you were to behave with each other as an engaged couple?

S: I don’t remember clearly there being absolute specific rules. I know we were talked to about how to be careful and guard yourselves against lust and temptation and that kind of thing, which for me at the time wasn’t what I was worried about. I was worried about the other way. We would take walks together, we would walk between the big ranch house where we all lived and had dinner to the office building warehouse. I was in charge of doing computer tape backup changes and the physical things I remember prior to the wedding were we would touch barefoot feet under the table while we would eat.

(laughter)

S: I know, that was really pushing the limit, wasn’t it. We did hold hands. I do remember the first time that he kissed me and again – I’m not here trying to … this is so hard, because I’m not trying to hurt anyone. And also, this is my reality. I had been groped and kissed by my high school choir teacher when I was 16 which was a very awkward, horrible thing, but I just froze. Some of the work I’m doing with a therapist now and looking back at trauma responses, I recognize that. The teacher…

T: Oh gosh, yeah.

S: He showed up at our house. This was right after I graduated high school. He showed up at the house, sat on the couch talking with me and my mom and then she left, but I could tell he had been drinking, I could smell it on his breath. It was in the middle of the day. At some point he just reaches over, he grabs one of my breasts in his hand and he grabs me and starts kissing me and sticking his tongue in my mouth. I didn’t know what to do or say. I know now a lot of that’s conditioning – you grow up as a child of an alcoholic and you learn to just set aside anything that is your own sense of identity or boundaries. I remember when he finished he said you are a really good kisser.

T: Oh, my gosh.

S: And I said, thank you. You are too. And then I somehow got him to leave, but I was just frozen. So that’s what I recognize as my response is just a freeze response. I already had that history, which of course then I just shoved aside – nobody to talk to about it, nobody to deal with it – and I think I internalized and blamed myself too. I must have been too tempting – I don’t know what the bullshit was, but it was out of the blue because I’d always looked at him as sort of a father figure. So it was a pretty crappy thing.

T: Hold it right there. This is just indicative of how this permeates culture, even outside of the Christian culture. That’s a horrifying story that a trusted teacher – that I’m sure at that age you were looking to as a mentor – would take that advantage of you. And you don’t feel that you have an ability to talk to anyone about it, and then you internalize it. I’m terribly, terribly sorry about that, and it really goes to show the importance of having these conversations and bringing these out so people know this is not normal, this is not to be accepted and we do need to be a safe space for people to come talk to us.

S: Right. So then the first time that my fiancé wanted to kiss me, I was sitting on the desk in his office and he went to kiss me, and then afterwards he said okay, open your mouth, so I did and you know – again, I know I pretty much dissociated from it. I can remember the poster on the wall in the office. I remember the whole thing, so it’s embedded in my memory. And it’s not that he did anything wrong. That’s what I want to make clear. It’s not like oh my God that was a horrible thing. We’re engaged. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to kiss your fiancée, but what my history was, and also the fact that I couldn’t say to myself this was something I didn’t choose, but that’s really what it was. So that was hard, that was difficult. I remember one other time we were on a burn – there was a burn schedule going on.

T: Can you explain that just a little bit for our listeners who don’t understand Last Days Ministries or …

S: Okay, okay. We published this magazine called the Last Days Newsletter. It was supposed to go out every six weeks, which was an internal joke because it never did. It was always later than that. What would happen – at least from our point of view (many of us there) was that Keith would delay and procrastinate and whether he was waiting on God for inspiration or he was just delaying and procrastinating I don’t know, but it would be getting later and later and past the time and then finally he and Melody would get their act together and get these things written, and as soon as these things were written, now it became a crisis for all of us. Now between the art room and the typesetting and the darkroom and the printing press and then the mailing – it just became we were all working almost 24-7. This is God’s mission, this is God’s word, we’ve got to get this thing out, so you’d go at least 24 hours without sleep, sometimes 48 hours without sleep, and we’d call it the burn schedule. Occasionally you’d grab a little bit of sleep here and there whenever you could. I remember one evening – I don’t know if I was waiting for new galleys to proofread, or if I was waiting for something on the collating machine to get fixed so that we’d have the magazines and go back and run the mailing machine (it was called a Kirk-Rudy thing) – anyway, I don’t remember why but for  some reason I’d gone into the darkroom and I’d laid down on the floor so that I could catch a half hour sleep, or something like that. Then I’m gently woken up because my fiancé has come in and he’s sat down on the floor next to me, and then he lays on top of me and kisses me. We’re fully clothed, but I can feel that he’s got an erection. It just felt – I felt guilty and wrong. This is crossing a boundary in God’s eyes because we’re not married yet.

T: And had you had any conversations with him up until that point of these are going to be our boundaries and we’re not going to cross them, or was this just something you were intuitively figuring out about each other? What made him think that that was okay, because as someone who was at Last Days Ministries and did have relationships, we would have said that would have been a step too far for most of the teaching that we were giving and receiving.

S: My guess is that it was a step too far in his conscience. That would be my guess. But no, I didn’t talk to him about it, I didn’t talk to anybody about it. Because my response is a freeze response. As we got closer to the time of the wedding, I was given this book by Tim and Beverly LaHaye called The Act of Marriage. It’s just absurd and horrible and awful on so many levels. In it there’s all these tips, right? I remember them talking about doing these pelvic exercises, and I don’t even remember what that was about, if that was supposed to strengthen you or loosen you or who knows. I remember something about considering inserting your fingers into yourself to stretch yourself a bit so that you wouldn’t be as uncomfortable. Of course I’m a girl, I’ve had my period, I’ve had tampons. I’m not unfamiliar with the anatomy, but it was just weird. And then the other thing that was very clear was they put this huge emphasis on making sure you had lubrication – I think it was actually brand named, Johnson & Johnson’s KY Jelly.

T: KY Jelly. Yes.

S: Yeah.

(laughter)

S: And you know what, I have to say – this is awful – I remember later in our marriage at some point, my husband and I joking about we should buy this stuff by the 55-gallon drum. It’s like okay, so why – think about it. Why do you need so much artificial lubrication? Because – any woman who’s had sex knows why. If you’re into it, you get wet, and if you’re not into it, you don’t. And that’s not about he’s not a good lover. It’s not about that. It’s the whole psychology of how we got where we got. There’s a wonderful book called The Body Keeps the Score that’s talking about trauma, really great research-based stuff. What I have begun to realize is I used venerate cognition. You know, your frontal lobe. This is what’s supreme about humanity is how we can think through things, and not really giving so much value or credence to what our bodies are telling us. So my preparation was very limited. That’s what it consisted of, that’s what I got. Let me just say one more thing in regard to artificial lubrication. I realize that doesn’t mean if a woman needs that, that means there’s something wrong or abnormal about her. I’m post-menopausal now, and from time to time a little bit of lube is a helpful thing. So I’m not trying to make a blanket statement, I’m just saying what my experience was.

T: Yes. And that was the expectations laid out.

S: Yeah, you were expected to need it.

T: Yeah. I think that is the thing that goes hand in hand with it. I’m going to ask you – my story’s got so many similarities and we’ll get to it in just a minute, but as far as your own natural lubrication; have you ever been in a situation – masturbating (I know we talked about that a little bit in our last episode, so again, if you haven’t heard that go back and listen to it) but is that something you either were familiar enough with your body to recognize that you had some natural lubrication sometimes, or was that so few and far between that you didn’t put that together?

S: No, I did not put that together. I don’t know that I actually did earlier on with masturbation. No, I did not put it together that there may be a reason why. Certainly – later with the after party I recognized and learned geez, I’ve got a veritable fountain down there.

(laughter)

T: Ha, yes. What is so sad in all of this is seeing how young you were and how much this message is put in our brain wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Now you’re married it’s supposed to be okay, but you know nothing, you don’t know how your body works, you don’t know these things that you don’t know, so the expectation is you do apply this lubrication and then the mechanics of the act then work.

S: The mechanics work. I did have times when I had orgasms. We’re jumping ahead. Let’s stay on preparation.

T: We’re jumping in on preparation and again, reiterate how old you were when you were preparing for this night.

S: I was 18 when I got engaged and 19 when I got married.

T: Okay. So my preparation was very similar, although Tim and Beverly LaHaye – I think they went on to write several more books. They had kind of gone either out of fashion a little bit by the time I was a much older, wiser woman of 23 when I got engaged and married. So at Last Days Ministries you had to have this Special Relationship. I think you went through that same thing, even a couple of years later when I was starting to have a relationship with my soon to be spouse. We worked together for a long time but we didn’t become official in a relationship until July, I’m pretty sure it was July, and within three weeks of him coming to me saying he thinks God has called me to him – within three weeks of that we were engaged.

S: Oh my God. There must be something magic about the three weeks, because that’s just what happened with me as well, only it wasn’t him coming to me first, it was Keith coming to me in three weeks and saying yeah, you wanna marry him? It’s the magic number. Wait, wait.  I got a theme going here Tracey; think about it. We had seven Ps because that’s the bible completion number, and then we have three as in the Trinity. What could be more perfect than that.

T: So perfect! So we got together in July and engaged three weeks later in August. Then by December we were married. So from the beginning of July where we’re still struggling; I don’t know if this guy likes me or not – from July to December … we’re married. And again, the foundation of all of this is anything that excites sexual excitement in the opposite sex is sin. You guys had heard before, I hadn’t masturbated, and I maintained that through my 23 years. Again, also, we lived in dormitories and I ended up working at the school, so I was always in a dorm setting with at least three girls in my immediate bedroom on the three-high bunks. And we worked. We worked from 9 o’clock in the morning to 10 o’clock at night.

S: Well, you could have. You just would have had to be quiet. You couldn’t have gotten really vocal. But you could have snuck it. You could have.

T: I could have, and I guess the effort to go exploring would have taken a lot more permission than I believed I could have.

S: Okay.

T: So now I’m in this rocket ship of being engaged, and hurtling towards what’s going to be my wedding night, as a virgin. The book that we were given was Intended for Pleasure by Ed Wheat and Gay Wheat. One of the things that I was very sensitive to was this kind of nod-nod wink-wink kind of pushing at the elbow – I don’t know if you ever experienced that. Sometimes Keith had a little bit of that going on, where it’s almost like your virginity is on display for everybody. They’re all doing this wink and a nod of you’re heading towards the night where it’s gonna all be amazing.

S: It’s all going to be gone.

T: Yes.

S: I can’t remember if in our last episode – did I talk about how Leonard Ravenhill proclaimed that we were both virgins during the wedding ceremony?

T: Yes. You did mention that. I don’t think we punctuated that enough, because that’s also underlining all of this. There is a sense of embarrassment – I was embarrassed. It definitely embarrassed me.

S: Did that get called out in your wedding ceremony as well?

T: I don’t recall. Our wedding ceremony ended up being two hours long and some of that …

S: Ohhh hahaha, I was not there.

T: You were not there! God bless you, everybody who was not there, you should be thankful. Lots of reasons to get into that, but at one point I was rocking back and forth thinking of passing out at my wedding, just so the preacher would stop.

S: Oh man.

T: But there was definitely a sense of the virgin bride is to be praised. And I mean, it’s in all of the cultural symbolism; wearing the white dress; walking down the aisle; the father is giving us away to the betrothed – we’ve grown up with that, didn’t really think a lot of all that symbolism. In the 80s – I was married in 1986, the rest of the world – I mean, Madonna, she’s having her music debut Like a Virgin, so the world has gone on and moved into a lot more sexual freedom than we were enjoying in our lives, so all of those symbols became very palpable and real. The Virgin Bride. So much so that this book that we were given had pages that they said you can read up until whatever page number, and then you have to put it away and not read it until either your wedding night or honeymoon, where you can read it with your spouse because it gets into so many of the specifics, and you are not – even at this stage – allowed to do anything that’s going to fuel that excitement because you can’t lawfully fulfil that excitement until you are married.

S: Right.

T: It was just weird to me.

S: Very weird.

T: It was just weird. I think since then I’ve learned I am an intuitive, spontaneous person so I don’t like a whole lot of by-the-letter planning in certain areas of my life, and especially my sex life. I felt like I’m being given this blueprint that we’ve got to follow. We’re both reading it, we’re both reading it sexually, and my fiancé at the time would actually do check-ins with me to see how far I had got.

S: In the book?

T: In the book! And it’s been a long time and I did not go back and read certain pages before we did this episode but I remember feeling icky reading this book about how I was going to perform on my wedding night.

S: It takes all the spontaneity and spark and humanity and fun and freedom – it totally obliterates all of that, doesn’t it.

T: It does. And now, like I said – just to reiterate exactly what you’re saying – this does not mean my spouse was a bad lover or that he did anything wrong; he was absolutely also a victim of this purity culture. He was also a victim of purity culture; he was also shutting the valve of excitement off; he was also trying to live a pure life, then he’s been given this book with the mandate that he’s the head of the household that is about to form. He’s wanting to make sure he does everything right by this book. At one point we’ll get into where we’re almost trying to call up, well what does the book say next? What are we supposed to do next?

S: Wait, wait, are we talking about on your wedding night?

T: Ah, yes!

S: You’re reading it together on your wedding night?

T: No, we didn’t read it together, but I could tell that our brains were both wanting to make sure we weren’t violating the instructions of the book.

S: Okay. Wow.

T: We had determined some of our own rules.

S: How did you go about doing that?

T: In our very quick engagement, and of course we didn’t have to wait very long. I also want to reiterate why that was, because if you go back to one of – I don’t remember which P it is, but the two reasons you can get married are to avoid lust, right, it’s better to marry than to burn, or for the kingdom of God. So now we’re getting married for the kingdom of God but still we can’t burn with lust. So get married fast.

S: Right.

T: So we did. We got married really fast.

S: Faast.

T: Most of that was really using the energy to make sure we weren’t stirring each other up before the wedding night.

S: Right.

T: So the rules were yes, we could go on walks together, we could hold hands together. I think we were counselled by other couples in the ministry to not be alone in a room. And that had two reasons; one so that we wouldn’t be stirring each other up, and the other was that we were still leaders of a school, and we had to avoid that appearance of evil. At that time maybe we were at 150 people, it was a bit busier and it was harder to find time alone, and a place to even be alone.

S: You know what’s amazing as I think about this is how did you actually have time or space to even really get to know one another if you can never be alone together? Just to be able to talk and share emotions or goals or fears – I mean, you had no privacy.

T: We had no privacy. Our connection was built when we led the school together and was completely fostered by how we viewed our roles and how God was leading us in our roles. And we did connect pretty well on that. We also had our own private prayer meeting with a few of the other – mostly other brothers. On Saturday night there was a handful of us who had our own – it was not ministry sponsored but we had a prayer meeting together. So I got to know his heart in prayer and…

S: (laughing) I’m sorry, I’m just thinking – I remember we would say that. You can really learn somebody’s heart and who they are as you hear them pray.

T: As you hear them pray!

S: But it’s a public performance. I’m sorry, those fucking prayer meetings are public performances.

T: And it definitely doesn’t give you a chance to figure out how are you going to live together, how do you feel about finances, how do you feel about child rearing, how do you like to spend your free time? Because at that time the only free time we had we spent it either going into town and just getting the necessities we needed, or going to church – like, Sunday. We all had Sundays off and we all went to churches and became involved…

S: Well you guys went to church because you were a better Christian. I did not go to church on Sunday. I went out into the field and played with the horses.

T: Well, that’s much better for your soul than ours. For those of you who don’t know the Garden Valley area – and we have a couple of episodes where we’ll put them in our show notes – but Leonard Ravenhill was a neighbor; David Wilkerson was a neighbor so they were often preaching and teaching at these surrounding churches, so of course you’re going to take advantage of these great men of God on Sunday.

S: Greeaat men of God. So great. So great.

T: So we determined that we would not French kiss because that seemed to be a step towards really exciting – the book talks about – I can’t remember if it uses this terminology but other books have – where it’s like the engine you’re revving up and you get it to a point where you can’t go backwards so your energy is to prevent yourself from getting to that point. This was very mysterious for me because if you remember, I didn’t masturbate so I had always stopped my engine way, way, way before so I would become perplexed of how do you even get to such a point where you couldn’t go backwards? That defied my brain. I had never kissed another boy, ever. I got saved early, I couldn’t date a non-Christian, didn’t have any relationships, went to Last Days very early where you couldn’t have them unless they were sanctioned, so my spouse was my first boyfriend, my first serious relationship, and I had never kissed a boy except for on the playground in elementary school, little pecks on the cheek and maybe a stolen one on the lips. So even French kissing was a mystifying thing to me.

S: So you guys had drawn the line there, but did you…

T: We had drawn the line there but then we moved it.

S: Did you do little pecks – oh wait, you moved it?

T: We moved the line. So here’s what happened. We’re engaged and I had to go home to see my dad for something. My fiancé at the time was not coming with me. So he drove me to the airport and just in – I don’t know what got into me but maybe because in a family of travellers we always kissed people goodbye, I leaned up (he’s taller) and I pecked him on the lips goodbye to him because I’m flying away, and he was so angry with me.

S: Wait, he was angry with you?

T: He was angry with me!

S: How did you know he was angry with you?

T: Right then and there he recoiled from me, he had a look of astonishment. I meant it completely innocently. I had to leave and go catch a plane, and we ended up talking on the phone while I was away, and he later apologized. He said he was caught off guard, he felt like I had crossed the line without having a conversation with him and that I had taken the lead in something that was definitely his territory to take the lead in.

S: So to initiate a kiss – in his mind that’s not what a woman is allowed to do, only a man can do that?

T: Yes. And that is definitely…

S: So that was a gender thing for him.

T: It was a head of the household thing, it was the spiritual protection because he was the spiritual protector of me.

S: Okay I’m jumping ahead a little and we’ll come back to this, but I’m curious as it comes up because one of the complaints that my husband had for me as years went on is that I did not initiate sex. He was upset that I did not initiate. But you’re saying that your husband didn’t think that you should initiate it because you were the woman?

T: And also I think because we weren’t married yet.

S: Okay. Well then, yeah.

T: And we had set boundaries. In my head the boundary was French kissing and heavy petting, but a kiss on the lips goodbye didn’t seem to fall into that category to me. But he said…

S: So light petting was okay? You said heavy petting. Was there light petting, like with a feather?

T: Ohh, I just think that if you’re in an airport in public you can kiss someone on the lips whether it’s your mother or brother, so I didn’t think I had crossed that line, but he did. And he did not think it was my place. All that to say we spent so much of that really short engagement working through crap like that. I was clearly hurt because I hadn’t meant to usurp his authority – which is a thing, right, a woman is not meant to usurp the authority of the male. I’m already engaged and clearly I’ve already violated a principle he holds dear. So I’m devastated, and we’re away from each other so we talk, and I guess in that conversation he starts mulling it over and then he thinks it’s okay if we don’t go from zero to 100 on our wedding night but as we got closer to our wedding we could introduce kissing.

S: Okay.

T: I had already blown it, so…

(laughter)

S: You’d opened that door; he’s going to walk through it.

T: I’d opened the door.

S: So the two weeks…

T: This is so crazy.

S: It is. So the two weeks leading up to your wedding – what were those like?

T: So then again, we’re not really supposed to be in a room alone, but remember the big old cafeteria? For those who have been at Last Days they’ll get this. We had this big old cafeteria and on the upstairs we had rooms we would let families stay in. They were like hotel rooms.

S: Guest rooms.

T: Yes. And one of them was usually free for a prayer room. We ended up going into that room more often than probably we should have because we were alone, and he started making out with me. I can so relate to your response – it just a. still seemed wrong, and my initial response was I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all. But I’m not quite sure if I don’t like it because I’m not sure about the boundary (this is what I was telling myself at the time) but even then if I can be very honest – and this is where again, we’re not trying to hurt other people but really unpack some of that stuff that goes on psychologically in the background. I would recognize that now that there’s not a lot of chemistry that we have between us, and in his approaching me that way, I really felt like a warm body, is the best I can describe it. I didn’t feel it was me, I felt like it was something he is doing to me, not with me, if that makes sense.

S: That makes total sense. I get it.

T: And I hated it. but I am trying so hard to get myself prepared to be what is going to be my role as a Godly woman.

S: Did you say to yourself, did you acknowledge to yourself in that two week period that you hate this? Or did you shove that away?

T: I did. I did acknowledge that to myself. So in comes the story from the playground when I was made fun of for being frigid. Even – and I guess this is why we always want to keep speaking out about these – even these little things that little girls and little boys have to go through as they’re forming, they have power and they stay with us. So now I’m calling up – maybe I am frigid. This is before I’m to be married and I dismiss that because logically I’m telling myself well it’s still wrong. You still haven’t given yourself permission because you aren’t married. Once you’re married and all these barriers are removed then it will feel differently. So I just soldiered on.

S: In that two weeks did you ever think maybe I shouldn’t get married?

T: Yes.

S: You questioned it.

T: Yes. Because in this timeframe – again, remember when I said whenever you ask a question about all of these topics, it’s never one simple answer. It’s always this web of stuff going on. Simultaneously my dad is also very sick at home and so my sister’s life is having a lot of challenges as well, we’re trying to get her to come to my wedding. Last Days is falling apart. We hinted at it, we’re going to do another episode where you guys have gone to Melody and basically challenged her leadership. You guys are all gone…

S: That’s right, we were in Hawaii at the Youth With A Mission leadership training school. Yep, we were all gone.

T: Yes, so YWAM had inserted one of their leaders and so there’s just a whole environment…

S: I think we can say his name. He’s still out there, and my rule is if you are out there still, propagating all of this shit, then you’re going to get named. So that was Fred Markert, who is still out there doing stuff.

T: Fred Markert had come in. He had been a teacher at our ICT school several times and the students always loved him. He was like this big papa bear kind of person until he was inserted into leadership at Last Days. The whole vibe of the place was crazy. I’m trying to figure out my family situation and now I’m about to be married and I’m uncomfortable, and I start losing my hair. I lost a significant amount of hair. This has never happened to me before.

S: You mean it’s falling out?

T: Falling out.

S: Wow.

T: I could take a brush and I knew it was stress. We didn’t have the internet to go google it but somehow.. I tried to get B vitamins but it was really upsetting me, so much so that I remember talking to my fiancé at the time and making a joke as far as hey, I hope I have hair on our wedding because I might not have any left by then. I was looking to him to say it’s okay honey, if you’re bald I would love you no matter what, and he didn’t. He said oh I hope you have hair too.

S: Oh my God.

T: Which is probably a fine thing to say, right?

S: I know, but not when you’re – think about it. Every woman on earth, for her wedding day, wants to be the most beautiful she can be. Most of them start starving themselves; it’s all about this sense of beauty and your hair – for him to not be compassionate about how that would be impacting you – wow.

T: It was definitely a struggle because that also pointed to had God convinced him, and I knew that that was a struggle he had had, and it’s all throughout my journals. I want to be beautiful for my husband. I want him to find me attractive and beautiful, and here I am so stressed out and losing my hair and I might be bald on my wedding day, and he doesn’t want me to be bald. I ended up talking to his best man who was also a friend of mine and his best man said all the right things to me. You know, he’s not going to care – you’re his wife and he loves you. He said all the right things. But my fiancé did not.

S: I just want to go back and say all of this – these are just like, pathetic stories of teens and early 20s and really ridiculous stuff, but the fact is it is because of the Christian message of being sold out to Jesus and that the most important thing is to serve the kingdom of God – that is what put us both in these marriages.

T: Yes.

S: And the point here is to try to expose that while it may sound to some as isn’t that wonderful, you just want to serve Jesus, you want to do the right thing, you want to serve God, you want to advance the kingdom of God, you want to help people and there is nothing wrong with that – bullshit. There can be horrible, horrible things wrong with that, because it eliminates personal autonomy. It eliminates personal preference, and every human being has the right to self-determination. These fucked up beliefs take that away from you, and that’s why we’re talking about this.

T: Amen! If I can use that word. So much so that I did try to back out and said I don’t think I can go through with this.

S: Really! Who did you talk to?

T: I said that to my fiancé at the time, and his answer was God told me to marry you. I am going to be at that altar whether you show up or not, because I’m going to obey God.

S: Wow.

T: That’s almost word for word.

S: Wow. That was his self-sacrifice, right? He was sacrificing himself to the will of God, too.

T: Yes. So I went back and I thought about that. There were some signs, as we were conditioned to look for, that seemed this was a good choice for the kingdom of God and I thought well, if he’s willing to obey God even if it’s not great right now, that’s proof that he’ll be willing to obey God through the hardships of life, so okay. And that’s how messed up that is. Not that he loves me so much through this that he’ll love me through the hard times. Not that at all. I want people to understand that. It’s he’s willing to do what he believes God is telling him no matter what, and that was good enough for me.

S: I’m virtually speechless, and that never happens to me. You know that.

T: Yes. And I do want to reiterate; it isn’t like oh aren’t these so sad stories, or aren’t we just so young and stupid; it was definitely a sense of calling. We are called to lay down our life, and every song that we sang and every verse that we read, and every poem that was written in this form of Christianity is my life is nothing, I make my life a living sacrifice, I lay it down; Jesus is the one who laid it all down, can’t we do as much. So I laid my life down so I could serve him through the marriage that he had chosen for me.

S: Yeah. Yeah. Alright, let’s talk about our actual weddings then.

T: Yep. So that was preparation.

(laughter)

S: You liken it to preparation – I’m gonna tell you girl, there’s nothing to soothe hemmorrhoids this big.

T: Ohhh.

S: I guess this is where we are transitioning now to talk about the pain. And when I say pain, I mean the mental, the emotional, psychological, and also a bit of the physical pain that comes with okay, we’ve prepared, and now we are getting married. We both discovered, Tracey, that it is not actually a great thing to be a virgin on your wedding night, is it.

T: It is not. And again, this is not just a message for women. It is also a message for men as you will hear, as I tell my story in more detail, but definitely that feeling of inadequacy, that feeling that you’re not living up to the promises that you held definitely hold a deep inner pain that took me a long time before I would open up, recognize them, and eventually deal with them.

S: Right. Okay well, do you want me to talk about my wedding first?

T: I do. Because enquiring minds want to know – when you had done your interview, I was like well then what happened? How did it all go? And for those of you who want to go back again to the Instagram Feet of Clay.Cult Sisters, there’s a great picture of you and your family taken right before your honeymoon. It’s just a precious picture. To me it paints the tone so well. You have Keith Green next to your spouse, just kind of happy and ready and then a line of all the ladies in the family and that was taken right before. So tell us how it was.

S: Yep, sitting down and looking kind of haunted. When I go back and I look at the wedding pictures – I mean, I see pictures of me smiling and I see others where I have this glazed over, haunted look. I know now that there was a lot of dissociation going on for me during that whole experience. I still was thinking to myself am I doing the right thing? Jesus, how can this be right? My heart’s going to be divided. I’ll have to please my husband and not just you. And that was – given my mindset, my worldview, my belief system – that’s how I had to frame the strong misgivings and fear that I had. I had to view it through I’m afraid because I’m afraid I won’t be as good a servant of Jesus. But I was just afraid. That’s the truth of it. I do remember Keith told me that he had wanted to perform our wedding ceremony, because he’d led me to the Lord when I was 14 and he had obviously played a huge role in my life as a mid and late teenager, and he set up this marriage, but then he said it’s going to look too culty if I do the wedding, so we’ll get Leonard Ravenhill to do it.

T: Yeah, I’m gonna stop you there. I heard that the first time when you shared that in your interview. I was like, he knew. For him to even say that – I thought that was a very strange thing to say. I get it, because when I came which is shortly after you got married, it was still the van load of hippies going into the local town and going into the back of the grocery store trying to get their day-old food to bring back and it definitely had a lot of culty vibes going on. This was the 80s by the time I came, it wasn’t the 60s anymore but it definitely had throwbacks to the hippies on the hill.

S: Yep. Alright. So the wedding itself – as I said, Keith asks Leonard Ravenhill to perform the ceremony. I’ve already mentioned this, but in his sermon he says something like these two come to this altar, the holy altar of matrimony, in virgin purity. I remember just being aghast, embarrassed, and wondering how does he even know that and yet it was seen as a point of pride. Us being held up as we are role models for all other Christian singles and couples that want to follow in a Godly marriage. I really was just kind of dissociated. I went through it kind of like, almost looking at myself from a third-party position. I don’t remember feeling joy, I don’t remember feeling excitement, I just remember feeling kind of numb, but things are going well and this is what we do. That was the wedding itself.

T: So I did notice in the pictures that your mom was there. Did she at any point try to have any mother daughter conversations about what it means to be married or what are you doing?

S: I don’t think so. I don’t remember anything like that. She was kind of a big old mess herself so I don’t think I would have wanted any advice from her. It’s possible that Melody had a talk with me sometime ahead; it’s probably likely, but I don’t remember it. like I said, there was a lot of dissociation – I’m going to get through this. One thing as I look at the photos that makes me just laugh, so much is after we changed out of our wedding clothes and we’re hanging out before we’re going to drive off on our honeymoon and **** had changed into – he was in a T-shirt and jeans, and the front of this T-shirt said Coming Soon …

(laughter)

S: I did not at all make the association. I did not. Because the back of shirt says Jesus Christ, because it’s about the coming of the messiah.

T: Oh my god.

S: And I’m looking at these pictures now, and I can’t imagine that that was not worn with actual intent, perhaps irony or boastful, I don’t know what, but I am …

T: I’m glad you’re saying that because it is really hard for me to believe that that was completely innocent.

S: There is no way that was innocent. There is no way. Because he had confessed – I don’t think he publicly confessed his sin at the house meetings of the sin of masturbation, but he had been into pornography. I mean, come on. These are young men.

T: Yes.

S: They’re just being normal, sexual beings and yet it’s viewed as being so wrong and sinful and he was a normal guy in his mid-20s. Of course he knew what that mean. The funny thing is Tracey…

T: And Keith and Melody, they were not innocent either.

S: Everybody had to know what that meant, and look at the two of us standing next to each other and kind of smile.

T: That’s so embarrassing.

S: But I wasn’t embarrassed Tracey, because I had no clue.

T: I know.

S: No fucking clue.

T: Even more embarrassing now.

S: Yeah. Oh yeah. So anyway that’s now naïve I was.

T: I don’t want to talk over you but I do think it’s indicative of exactly how naïve we both were. I would not have noticed that either. This is something that as my sister watched on, because she ended up coming to visit a couple of times and even stay there – she would totally clue into and I’m just like no, no, no, we don’t mean it that way. And the fact that you were so naïve to that is just again, par for the course of what you’re heading into. Wow.

S: Totally. So for our honeymoon – because I think we had the timing of a newsletter burn or something was going on, I remember that. We had the question mark about how many days. Originally we were going to go for a week, but because of the delay – the normal procrastination in the cycle of getting the newsletter ready to go – I think, well we got one night for sure, we might have gotten two maybe. It wasn’t very much time.

T: Ohhhh Sharon.

S: Maybe it was a little bit more, I don’t remember but you know what, it was probably fine because for me I just wanted to get back to the ministry and get back to work.

T: For those of you who don’t know – and I’ve said it before – you and your spouse were the operations. You ran everything. So for you two specific people to be away as a newsletter – I mean, it’s always in cycle at some point would be a huge hardship on the working production of that. I know you didn’t get mentioned in the book…

(laughter)

T: But you guys really did run it all, so I can see that your time away would be limited. Ugh.

S: Yep. But like I said, I didn’t look at it like oh my gosh, I wish I had more time away with my new husband. I don’t remember feeling that at all. So it’s fine. it worked out just fine.

T: But no trip, no special time away just to get to know each other…

S: No, we went to a – no, not at all. We went to this lake cabin kind of east of Dallas. It was called Lake Tawakoni. I’m assuming at the time – again, this is 1981 that it was a newer reservoir. I remember walking around the lake before it got dark, and all these dead tree tops – you know what it looks like when the dam’s been put in and the reservoir has been created and all the trees that are still there – they die and they turn into these dead stumps, or even tall trees. I remember walking around it and it was kind of creepy, because all these dead treetops are sticking up out of the lake. Here’s all these once beautiful living things that are now just desiccated and they’re just standing there as memorials of what they once were. I look back on it now and go huh, that was maybe a little bit of foreshadowing.

T: Mmmm.

S: For the night itself, I remember being very nervous. I remember asking him to turn off all the lights before I’d even take my clothes off.

T: Okay, I’m going to stop you there. So in our book (and I’ll have to look it up to be sure), but I’m pretty sure there’s a chapter that deals with women asking for the lights to be turned off and how we should not deprive them of being able to see our beautiful bodies. I guess LaHaye didn’t mention that, so you didn’t have anything where…

S: I don’t remember if it was in the book I read, all I know was I was afraid and I said can we please turn the lights off.

T: Aww, and we look at you and you’re the most gorgeous thing. Young and beautiful and how much you should be so…

S: I don’t think it was about feeling not pretty, it was about just feeling vulnerable and naked. That sense of vulnerability. I was nervous. So we did. He was understanding – and I now again, looking back, I now do understand that again I was in some pretty significant dissociation. When I recall, I’m viewing myself and us from the side. I’m not looking out from my own eyes. I don’t have a lot of memories of it. He would have been on top of me, standard missionary position, and of course, lots of lube like the good book says. Definitely had lube. I do remember penetration still being uncomfortable, I remember it hurting. I don’t remember all that much more, other than it was fairly quick and there was – there was no arousal (on my part), no arousal, no orgasm. Afterwards I remember getting in the bathtub. I remember sitting in the hot bathtub and just trying to soothe away the physical ache, but I’m sure it was also the emotional numbness and ache as well. Yeah. Again, I’m kind of looking at myself over my own shoulder, more dissociation, but I believed in Jesus and this is the will of God and this is the duty of a Godly wife and I’m going to obey, I’m going to follow Jesus, I’ll figure it out, I’ll make it work and this is just part of the package. That’s what I remember about the wedding night. Again, this is not about my spouse not being a good love or being inadequate. It’s not about that at all. It’s about how and why we got into this for all the wrong reasons.

T: And these were the expectations. You probably didn’t have better expectations of the wedding night.

S: No, I didn’t. Because this is for Jesus. It’s not about – I mean, that idea of love versus romance. I bought into that. I don’t need to feel romance. I don’t think I had misgivings at the time of leading up to the wedding like you did. I didn’t have that clarity. I do remember one time during the engagement where we had – it was a late night thing again, there was something we were working on, art room stuff or whatever – and my fiancé at the time had said something to one of the guys in the art room and had said something pretty harsh and mean. It wasn’t kind, he was being a bit of an asshole. I remember seeing that and feeling oh no. That’s not what Jesus wants, and thinking okay my role, I’m his fiancé, wife to be, and we’re to encourage one another and help each other to be more like Jesus and to walk in the fruit of the spirit, so I wrote a little note with a little scripture, probably a smiley face, just saying a word of encouragement about being patient or kind, or something to that effect, I don’t remember exactly. But a few minutes later he came and got me from wherever I was and said just come outside for a minute. We walked out that sliding glass door, the back of the ranch house, the lights are on, the porch or patio light is on because it’s dark. I expected to hear him say oh Sharon, thank you so much, you’re right, I need to let the Holy Spirit guide me more. That’s what I expected. Instead, I got blasted with you are not my mother, you don’t have the right to speak to me like this – I mean, just so harsh and hard. I think I broke down in tears. And it just was this shock, this utter shock. Again, we’re all coming from places of being fucked up. He had his baggage from his family of origin and all that other stuff, but it was like an assault. I felt like this little girl, just crumbling inside. I must have said something to Keith the next day, because he told me later Keith came to him and basically read him the riot act about how he had treated me. But there wasn’t any counselling or understanding of like, maybe we’ve got a compatibility issue here, or maybe this is indicative of what this relationship is going to be like and this doesn’t bode well. There was none of that. If a friend or a daughter of mine were to recount a situation like what they experienced like that, I would be pulling all the ropes I could to say whoa, whoa, whoa, let’s pull that brake rope.

T: Right.

S: Let’s talk about this. This is significant, this is serious, there needs to be a lot of discussion and understanding on this because this is not a good foundation for any relationship. But that did not happen.

T: No. Good for Keith for pulling him aside, but… And later as the teachings would come through the Christian Training School, receiving correction was foundational. You’re supposed to be able to receive correction from anybody. So for him not to be able to do that was kind of against the very foundations of what we believed in.

S: Yes it was.

T: Definitely a red flag. And you know Sharon, in some of the show notes when I saw your description, it makes me so sad because I can very much enter in to you looking at yourself experiencing all this. Now there’s a lot of shows out, particularly in the Mormon circles where childhood brides have been common practice, they’re way under age, right, I’m not necessarily trying to compare it on that level, but there are so many similar elements because you were a child, you were not much more than a child, and it’s that sense of my body is not my own; my body is God’s first and now he’s given it to this man so I am dissociated from it, and anything that I feel or think I feel or shouldn’t feel or should feel, I have to hold that and just wait until God continues to work it out and it’s – as a mother, if any of my daughters described that to me, I would be heartbroken. Heartbroken that that’s what they are entering into, believing that’s a Godly marriage or how sex is supposed to be.

S: Yep. So what about your wedding night, Tracey? Or wedding itself leading to the wedding night, or all of the above?

T: The wedding itself, again, has so many crazy things going on because the leadership that we would have chosen to do our wedding was in Hawaii because the ministry was falling apart. So **** had a dear friend that he wanted to have do the wedding, and because Last Days was going through – I don’t even know what you would call it, but this particular pastor friend of my going-to-be husband thought it was his opportunity to preach to the Last Days community about revival and our need for repentance.

(laughter)

T:  If you know anything about the Last Days community, the last thing we need is another repentance message.

S: Oh, my god.  That we did well.

T: Oh, we already did that so well. And of course, all these red flags that were going from July to December, I’m getting married into this family that I don’t even know. Now, that family is a very close and connected family, and they come to each other’s weddings, so we have relatives of his flying in from all over the country to join us for this wedding, which I never expected. A large portion of his family is Jewish.

S: I did not know that.

T: Yes.  The other portion is Episcopalian, and my father is basically a very fallen Catholic with very strong atheistic tendencies, although if he had to put his chips down he would say that the holy Roman Catholic church is still the right church. So you have all of these people mingling into this congregation of our wedding, and this message of repentance goes on – no lie, for two hours. I’m embarrassed, I’m mortified…

S: Are you standing up?

T: We were standing, then they brought us – I had signed up for hey, I do want this to be a time of worship that people can feel all the good things that we believed at that time would draw people to Jesus.

S: Tracey, Tracey, Tracey, were you going to have spiritual orgasms during that time of worship?

(laughter)

T: So, remember in Song of Solomon how there were the little cheerleaders?

S: The cheerleaders in the Song of Solomon. No, I don’t remember. Please inform me.

T: Okay. Well, they’re not necessarily football cheerleaders, but they’re basically cheering on – I guess it was the marriage of Song of Solomon – it’s been a while since I read it. but we did have three little dancers …

S: Wait a second. You mean they’re like, watching them fuck and going yeah, yeah, give it to her? That kind of cheerleaders?

T: So, in the Song of Solomon it does get very spicy and it gets very orgy-like, I would say now, reading it – as far as Solomon had however many wives and concubines, he had a lot. There is a place in there (we’re probably going to have to edit this because I’m screwing the story up so much).

S: I’m going to have to stop you a minute. That is not an orgy; that’s a harem. An orgy would be a mixed crowd, all of whom are there out of choice and desire so no, I’m sorry, Solomon wasn’t have orgies. He was having his harem that he could do what he wanted with.

T: Yes, and I don’t know how we got from that in the bible to what we were now living, we were very far from that. But we did have these – back to the orgasming worship. Yes, this is a celebration of the covenant of the coming together of these people to live for Jesus, so we did have these three dancers up at the front, all dressed in white. It was so bad, Sharon. It’s so embarrassing. It was so bad.

S: Do you have video?

T: I couldn’t watch the video for years because it’s like a parody on a wedding, it’s so bad.

(laughter)

T: And I knew it was bad at the time. So they had already planned to bring us chairs when the sermon was going to be preached, but there was no chair comfortable enough for the length of that wedding, so one of the other local churches in the area was doing the worship part, and he was actually a fair, balanced guy. We were making eye contact though his wedding, and my eyes were saying get this man to stop. And he’s looking at me like, I can’t, I don’t know what to do. And I’m thinking what if I pass out? If I pass out he has to stop.

(laughter)

T: I’m squeezing my betrothed’s hand like this is so awful, I hate this.

S: And that was his friend who was up there preaching?

T: That was his friend, and that was not only his friend doing that, but they were going to be the ones driving us to our honeymoon the next day.

S: Excellent.

T: My dad walked out of the wedding. I can hear him over my left shoulder saying (not under his breath at all), they’re out of their collective minds.

(laughter)

T: So I’m heartbroken that he’s just walked out, so my sister didn’t have a place to go afterwards, I’m trying to get her a place to stay – a lot of feels, a lot of emotions in this wedding. That will figure in differently when we start going into what divorce is and dedicate a whole episode to that, that’s a whole other topic – but you are married for life, right? I’m getting ready – as you were – to make the commitment that would be till death do us part. It is for the rest of my life.

S: Till death do us part.

T: We had read the book in preparation, and there was a really cute Victorian tearoom that was about 45 minutes from the ministry, run by Seventh Day Adventists. I think we got married on a Saturday, it must have been, so they were out of the house (which was very convenient for us, because that’s their sabbath) so they gave us the key, kind of like Air BnB before Air BnB, so we had this whole Victorian house to ourselves, which was super cute. Then the next day we were going to drive into Dallas which was two hours away, and then fly to Kiawah Island, South Carolina, which was a wedding gift from one of my spouses’ friends who had a home there. Still all done on the cheap, as cheap as possible, because we didn’t want to squander God’s money.

S: We’re in the ministry; there’s not a lot of money.

T: Yep, so I didn’t want him to spend money on a wedding ring, that was donated to us. Our honeymoon was donated to us, all the flowers and decorations, donated. The kitchen crew donated the food, so a lot of love – people really did step up in that area to bless each other, which is one of the good things right? We have a lot of things we’re saying are not the good things, but that’s one of the good things, that people really tried to give to one another, and gave a lot of their time, which wasn’t in a-plenty because they were working so long. So, we went to this beautiful Victorian tearoom, and everything in the book said to take it slow. There was a lot of emphasis on making sure that the woman is comfortable – which I had mixed feelings about, because it’s as though I’m – the book is written as though the woman is about to lose something very precious. Which is part of my whole problem with this purity culture. My spouse was also a card-carrying member of this purity culture, and he was a virgin – I was going to ask you, was your spouse a virgin on your wedding night?

S: Yes, he was a virgin as well.

T: But it was still all about – treat her so carefully and so gently because she’s about to be traumatized like never before.

(laughter)

T: But it’s all God, and you have to kind of handle it well. It was just weird.

S: You know what Tracey, pause this for just one second, because here’s what I’m thinking. I’d never really kind of connected those dots, but if you’re viewing it from yeah, this woman is not really into it because think about what comes out of that whole arranged thing, whether it’s families arranging it, or religious systems, or whatever, and somebody else is making the decision for this woman as to who she’s going to marry, yeah, something is about to be stolen and trampled all over her, so yeah, you should be compassionate and gentle because she is about to be traumatized. It’s really interesting now to think about the men who were writing that, right? Tim LaHaye, Ed Wheat, whatever – you’re looking at a young woman who is about to be “deflowered” – it is being done to her. It’s not something she is entering in as an equal partner. And therefore if you can help the dude who’s doing it to try and be a little bit more gentle when he takes and breaks, then uh…

T: Takes and breaks. Mmhmm.

S: Takes and breaks. Yeah. Then that would be seen as Godly and compassionate. Holy fuck, it’s really fucked up.

T: It really is. Again, I think why I’m having so much conflict within myself is because I am a child of the 70s, I didn’t come from a family that was prim and proper and all buttoned up. My sister did live a little bit of a wild life, and she had told me things, so I was adopting this lifestyle because it was supposed to be healthier and better, and ultimately for God, but there was still something from my 70s-ness that said this should be fun. I’ve waited all this time to do it God’s way, and this should be fun, but the whole tenor of the book was that I’m not entering into the most fun of my life; I’m entering into this ritual that is going to take something from me. I think especially if you marry someone who is also a virgin, he doesn’t have a sense of oh, this is the most fun that I’m going to have, either. This is a consecration that we have to do.

S: I think your spouse was entering into it because he was being obedient to God, but you were not his first choice. My spouse was entering into it, he’s being obedient to God but yeah, he’s totally into me. So there was a difference in the dynamic.

T: Yes, and in your dynamic (and that’s why I was so sad when I read that, because yours seems to go along the lines of those arranged marriages of old in other cultures, in other religious systems), he was in good with the leader who got him a good wife. So I think that dynamic is just so sad, especially when it comes to the wedding night and it’s a duty. You’re doing your duty. I think I definitely knew it was my duty, but also believed it was supposed to be fun. I wouldn’t say resented – that’s probably too strong of a word – but I definitely felt the painstaking, we’re following a manual, and this is not the fun that I expected. Back in the 80s gunnysacks were a really popular brand of dress, so I had a really beautiful  dress that had those Victorian buttons all down the front, so he did unbutton those and I didn’t ask to have the lights turned off, I had really done a lot of – what was the Christian form of jazzercize at the time – I was doing that a couple of times a week.

S: I remember that!

T: To Stormy Omartian, I was really trying to get my body in tip top shape, so I was pleased with where my body was at. I was not shy and not afraid for him to unbutton, and he seemed to like what he saw, and we decided to take a bath together first, which is always a good thing for me, I love baths. That was the most fun part of the night. We’re doing that and then it’s like okay, now we have to get out of the tub and do the deed.

S: Mmmhmm.

T: So it was this sense of I’ve got this performance that’s facing me, that I have to do it. Of course in the book, the preparation is to put the towel down – I don’t know if your book went into that great detail – but it was make sure that you lay a towel down in case there is any bleeding so that you don’t mess up the sheets, and because we were in this beautiful Victorian tearoom I was very conscious of not wanting to mess up – so much so that I was like where’s the towel, where’s the towel, am I over the towel – very conscious of the towel. So we go from the unveiling – it’s the first time he’s seen me naked, I think that was all good, I’m feeling confident, go into the bathtub and that was nice, then we go into the bed and we lay the towel down, and this is where I think the book really fails, because there’s not – I think it mentions foreplay but I couldn’t really connect the dots on what that was. We’d spent our lifetime really turning all these valves off, so now there’s the duty of getting this done without having any valves turned on. There’s no let’s turn on lust, let’s turn on attraction, there’s none of this stuff at all. At all. It was okay, it was fun, I’m going to get on top of you and I’m going to enter you. And he could not get in. Like, not. Not get in.

S: Because you were a virgin. A verified virgin.

T: I was a virgin. If this is too graphic, we warned you guys. So he tried once, he tried again, and this is where I’m very conscious of the towel, because now we’re having to change up positions, but it was very much almost like a clinical exam. It’s kind of like okay…I think he felt probably a little – definitely flustered, because the book said it might be a little difficult. I didn’t have the book that told me to stretch. I had that before my first baby, they told me to stretch, so I missed that key part of advice. Then it was like, let’s just get this over. In my head, I didn’t say that out loud, but I’m embarrassed now, I’m a little bit freaked out because does this happen? How many times does this happen that somebody just doesn’t fit in? He tries and he tries and then, ta da, he gets in. And it definitely hurts me, but he’s been taught to be gentle, are you okay – of course I’m okay. I’d be grinning and bearing it. I’m like yep, yep I’m okay. He does I think a few thrusts and then he comes, and then he pulls out and he’s still partially on top of me and he goes – that’s it?? With that tone, and that disappointment.

S: Oh my god.

T: This is why I started saying hey guys, this purity culture is bad for men too. He has waited his whole adult life, turning off valves to have this most amazing time and that was his unguarded, truthful response of – THAT’S what I’ve been fighting all the time? As soon as he said that I was crushed. Crushed.

S: I can’t even imagine.

T: Because I’d failed. I felt like I’d failed in my most important wifely duty. I tried to care about the towel again and get it up before we moved around too much and it was, of course, the proof that I was a virgin, Sharon. It was a very bloody towel. Maybe if I had been horseback rider like you it would have been better.

S: Yeah. I don’t remember any blood. I remember it being uncomfortable, but I don’t remember any blood.

T: And so that was our wedding night. We have a lifetime to figure this out, so I do also think I got back in the bathtub, mainly because you’re wanting to feel clean, even though logically I’m supposed to be clean before Jesus, and just said. I was very, very sad.

S: You say you thought, we have a lifetime to figure this out, or was it I have a lifetime, this is what I’ve gotta do for the rest of my life.

T: I think at that time it was still we have a whole honeymoon ahead of us. And he wasn’t cruel at all.

S: Right, and neither was my spouse.

T: I feel like it was raw honesty. Now I would know we didn’t do anything to even foster chemistry together, so that’s just what that was, but then we had to go into Dallas, meet this person who just ruined my wedding,

(laughter)

T: So there was waves of other emotion too – there was sadness, there was dread, there was oh my god what have I done, and soon – within two weeks I would be pregnant.

S: Was that intentional? Did you intend to get pregnant?

T: I don’t know how you guys earlier – I got married in 1986, you got married in 1980…

S: I got married in 1981 and we did use birth control. I was on the pill for a couple of months before we got married. Back then the emphasis was on work, and children  would keep married couples from being able to spend as many hours working for the kingdom, so yes, we were using birth control.

T: Yes, so in that time between when you got married and I got married, the winds were a-changing. Every married couple at Last Days that got married when I got married, started to shift to you should trust God with your family size. You shouldn’t use birth control. Natural family planning is okay, but really children are a blessing from the Lord so why would you prevent that. So we went into that right out of the gate, natural family planning isn’t just a way to welcome a bouncing baby child into your world.

S: Well, you know what they call couples who use the rhythm method. Parents. That’s what you call ‘em.

T: Yeah, and you know whenever I would hear that before I got married, I thought it was the way you did sex.

S: Oh, like the rhythm of the…

T: Yes! I was like oh, so there must be this secret rhythm that if you do, it’s your birth control. That’s how naïve I was.

S: Oh my gosh, we’re going to have another whole episode about this birth control and Quiverfull and all that other stuff, so we’ll save that for another one.

T: That definitely impacts. The flood of emotions from my wedding to my wedding night to my honeymoon – I can’t understate that the ministry falling apart during this time added a whole other emotional layer to our newly blossoming marriage as well. Just the depression and the spiritual confusion and the questioning in the midst of soon I would be pregnant with those hormonal changes. I will add that my father died three weeks after I got married, so the grief of losing my dad – there was a host of layers of emotional stuff as I was starting this thing call marriage.

S: It’s like the perfect storm to just make it as hard and difficult and horrible as possible – even though from the beginning – it wasn’t the right match to begin with, was it.

T: Yeah, so sex was just a small piece of the overall turmoil, but it was definitely a piece of the turmoil that I locked away very secretly, because it was my secret shame. I did feel like a sexual failure; a failure to my husband, a failure to myself. Now I would see there were some real mental health issues there, but it was so wrapped in shame that I didn’t feel I could talk to anybody and I held a lot of that for years. Clearly, because I didn’t have an orgasm until I was 30, so if I was married at 23 I didn’t have an orgasm until I was 30, you will see there was seven years of some deep confusion there.

S: Wow. Well, Tracey, once again I think we have taken a lot more time to talk about this than we expected to. I think we’re going to have to pause where we are and pick it up again on our next episode. What do you think?

T: I think you are right. This P trail is a little bit longer than we thought it would be.

S: Yes it is, because we still need to cover the parting and the after party. And guys, as Tracey said before we’re talking about heavy stuff, but there is also a lot of fun and a lot of crazy stuff to laugh at. So we hope you’ll tune in for our next episode; in the meantime be sure to follow us on whatever podcast platform you use, Feet of Clay, Confessions of the Cult Sisters. Give us a good rating if you liked it, and share it with your friends. Tell them about us.

T: Yep, and also check us out on Instagram – Feet of Clay.cult sisters where you can see some pictures of some of the things we’re talking about.

S: There’s some great pictures, that’s for sure.

T: Especially if you’re interested in that shirt that Sharon’s spouse wore before she went on her honeymoon. It’s right there. Instagram, Feet of Clay.cult sisters.

S: Alright folks, well thanks for hanging in there with us and we look forward to talking with you in a couple of weeks.

T: Bye.