i only came in my dreams

by Kristy Money

I didn’t have my first orgasm until I was 40. This was by design: In my adolescence and early adulthood, being able to hold myself back from orgasm was my “superpower.”

I was raised Mormon. I was told that worthiness mattered more than pleasure: that the body was a liability, a risk to a happy life on Earth, and a source of temptations I would have to overcome to find eternal happiness in heaven. The Church of the Latter-Day Saints said that if I chose to give in to what my body wanted, I’d die alone. And then after death, I’d be separated from my loved ones, genital-less, and trapped in the same section of the afterlife as Hitler. I wish I was joking. Only if I kept my body pure would I have any hope of getting married and going to heaven with my family.

Back then, I never would have predicted that I would in fact be relegated to an even lower level of the afterlife than Hitler—Outer Darkness—for, according to the LDS Church, committing a sin greater than genocide: turning my back on Mormonism. (Hitler was never a Mormon to begin with.)  But in truth, it didn’t feel like I left the Church. It felt like the Church left me. To stay, I needed to sacrifice on the altar of my devotion, my agency, the ability to choose a path for my children that held space for gender equality. But I digress…

Type A, achievement-oriented teen that I was, I was determined not to give in to temptation. I didn’t even have my first kiss until I was 17 and in college. Unfortunately for me, I really, really enjoyed it. So, I became very good at not feeling a thing.

This “turn my feelings off” approach did have its limits, though. I was at Brigham Young University, which is owned and run by the Mormon church, and all of us were expected to obey the “law of chastity” to keep our good standing as BYU students and members of the church. The specifics of that law were purposefully vague to keep the scrupulous ones among us on our toes. After all, at BYU the goal was to get a solid undergrad education while also finding someone of the opposite sex to marry, marriage being an LDS requirement to procreate and get into the highest level of heaven. Securing a life partner required dating, which is almost impossible for hormone-laden teenagers to separate from all the, ahem, activities that tend to go along with that.

We were supposed to date in groups, so everyone would stay good under their peers’ watchful eyes. When we did find “the one,” we couldn’t allow ourselves to be alone with them too much, in order to avoid temptation. If you slipped up and broke the law of chastity, you had to confess it to your bishop, and then he wouldn’t be able to sign your “temple recommend,” i.e. your ticket into the Mormon temple to get married in the eye of the LDS Church. Sure, you could get married the gentile way on a beach or even in a chapel, but then you would have failed the most important test of your life, and everyone would know it.

When I explained all of this to the occupational therapist who was helping me relax my hypertonic pelvic floor, her response was: “I bet most people just lie in order to get their temple recommend.” And she was right. For those of us who were believing members of the church, that piece of paper was our ticket to the highest level of heaven. Even Mormons who didn’t believe in the Mormon architecture of the afterlife knew perfectly well that, without a temple recommend, they’d be an eternal disappointment to their family, their partner’s family, and their community. So, yes—I’m sure many folks lied.

But I couldn’t lie. Thanks to my particular flavor of then-undiagnosed neurodivergence, I was (and still am) a terrible liar. Lying was just not in my brain’s repertoire. Plus, I believed that surely God would punish me for lying by preventing my temple wedding some other way. Either I’d die, or my fiancé would die. I’d catastrophize about dying in a car crash on the way to the temple, which was a variation on a story most of us Mormons have been told all our lives, about a couple who were separated in the afterlife because they got into a car crash and one of them died on the way home from their civil ceremony, before they got “sealed” in the temple. Mormonism is full of mythology and folklore like that. I personally had a recurring nightmare in which I was due to get married, but my fiancé or my bishop called off the wedding because they deemed me unworthy.

I hadn’t broken the law of chastity, and I was still shocked that nothing terrible happened on my actual wedding day. I had a hard time being present on what many people remember as the happiest day of their life because I was waiting for a lightning bolt to strike me dead. Sure, I’d remained pure, but I had by that point internalized so much religious messaging that I believed even having sexual thoughts or dreams made me unworthy, rebellious, disobedient. It would take me several decades to deconstruct those toxic beliefs. In some ways, I am still deconstructing them.

Thanks to patriarchal social norms, almost all the responsibility for keeping the law of chastity, beginning as early as preschool Sunday school lessons, fell on us as girls. After all, boys had natural drives and desires, and they couldn’t be expected to put on the brakes. That was our job.

As for girls’ healthy natural drives and desires? We never had lessons about those. Unfortunately, even in 2025, those lessons are still not offered. Even if female desire is normalized in some communities, it is often considered secondary to men’s, whether Mormon or not.

I did as a Mormon child get an abundance of specifics on how to not get aroused. Starting at the age of 8, when you are baptized and theologically considered responsible for your actions, Mormon boys and girls start having regular interviews with a male church leader behind closed doors, to determine if you are keeping yourself worthy. One of the questions that is asked every time is, “Do you keep the law of chastity?” The hoped for answer is a simple “yes,” though many naturally curious kids like me had some follow-up questions. Like, for example—what the heck does that mean?

I learned what masturbation and orgasms were from a male church leader who was also an accountant, because Mormonism uses lay clergy. Suffice it to say my education was incomplete and purity culture didn’t help fill in any gaps. When I moved out of the Jello Belt, I left Mormonism behind too. I finally had my first orgasm. And when I had a daughter of my own, I bought all the picture board books for sex education written for toddlers and up. The cycle ends with me. Or so I hope.

Photo by Kristy Money

BIO: Kristy Money is a psychologist but writing will always be her first love. She majored in English before switching to the soft sciences for her PhD. She loves to explore the intersection of science, the written word, and spirituality. Mo-no-mo (i.e. post-Mormon), she lives in Austin Texas with her husband, their five kids, and their chihuahuas Dolly and Elvis. Her interviews and writings have been published in the New York Times, Salt Lake Tribune, Inscape, Little Old Lady Comedy, and the Exponent. Find her at kristymoney.com, on instragram @drkristymoney, and bluesky @ofjacob.bsky.social.