Thank you so very much for your blog!! I just discovered it yesterday as I was googling for a Mormon therapist. I\u2019ve never been to therapy or used counseling before, but my boyfriend and I are planning to marry soon. We are both in our late 20s. He is a convert who was sexually active before finding the church, I am a lifelong member and virgin. One of the things I love about him so much is that he embraced the gospel when he was in the middle of a world where celibacy and soberness are strange and even ridiculed. He is a rare individual and I have great respect and much love for him. We have a very good relationship and he makes a concerted effort to have good communication and we try to be open and honest with one another about most everything \u2013 except that we\u2019ve never really discussed this one part of him. I think I mentally was able to accept the fact that he had had sex in his past (he\u2019s been a member for a few years, so its not even a recent past), but as soon as we started talking seriously about marriage and actually planning to get engaged, I found I had some strong emotional issues with the fact that he had had sex before. It surprised me because I thought I was progressive enough and mature enough to appreciate that his entire life experience contributed to making him the wonderful man he is and the wonderful man that I love. And yet I still had these doubts and insecurities and even emotional pain and feeling of hurt that would very randomly occur to me, and I did not feel like I had the emotional tools to handle them. That is why I started looking for a Mormon therapist who would understand my sexual values and even understand and maybe help me understand how Mormon cultural expectations could be having some kind of subconscious effect on my ability to let go of his sexual past. I avoided actually brokering the topic with my boyfriend, he had told me that he had had sex in his past life and that was pretty much all that was said. I didn\u2019t acknowledge it too much and he didn\u2019t provide any other comment on it and we haven\u2019t discussed it since. I even began feeling guilty about feeling any kind of emotional pain about this since I know he has gone through the repentance process, and I have a firm faith in repentance and forgiveness and the incomparable healing power of the Atonement. I didn\u2019t want to tell him I was feeling hurt by his past because I know in my mind that this is in the past and has been accounted for, but my heart still wanted to feel some pain about it for a reason my mind couldn\u2019t figure out on its own. I couldn\u2019t understand it and couldn\u2019t figure out how to deal with it. But I didn\u2019t want to bring it up and have him feel like I was accusing him of anything or angry with him about it. Since finding and reading some of your extremely helping posts on the topic, I have come to understand that I\u2019m not as upset by the fact that he has had sex before as I am about the fact that I don\u2019t know how he feels about it now. We haven\u2019t had an open dialogue about it and so I harbor all kinds of ridiculous thoughts like: maybe he had super awesome sex with a super hot girl that he will never forget and I will never be as fun or wonderful as her and he will never forget her in favor of me, maybe he will treat me as a student and play the role of a teacher and I won\u2019t feel like we\u2019re getting to discover sex together, because he has a sexual history that doesn\u2019t involve me that will somehow lessen or disparage the quality of our sex life, etc. Your blog did a lot to open my eyes to the fact that we just need to discuss the issue and then put it away permanently. I don\u2019t kid myself that the fact won\u2019t ever occur to me again or that I will never feel insecure about it again. But without needing or getting detail about his sex life, he can tell me basic things like number of partners, exposure to STDs, and then I won\u2019t feel like its some dirty little secret he\u2019s keeping all to himself. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Thank you so very much for your blog!! I just discovered it yesterday as I was googling for a Mormon therapist. I\u2019ve never been to therapy or used counseling before, but my boyfriend and I are planning to marry soon. We are both in our late 20s. He is a convert who was sexually active […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":766,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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