Mild at Heart: Love, Sex, and Masculinity After Purity Culture: Ep 9
On Mourning the One and the lessons about love you never learn in church.
Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's book: https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-War-Extremist-Christian-Nationalism/dp/1506482163
SWAJ Apparel is here! https://straight-white-american-jesus.creator-spring.com/listing/not-today-uncle-ron
To Donate:
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/BradleyOnishi
Venmo: @straightwhitejc
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Axis Mundy you you You're listening to an Irreverent Podcast.
Visit irreverent.fm for more content from our amazing lineup of creators.
What's up y'all?
Welcome to Mild at Heart, our series on love, masculinity, and sex after period culture.
My name is Brad Onishi and today I want to just read a little bit of an essay that I have written.
I actually wrote it a while ago and I never published it.
This is an excerpt and for me it really exemplifies some of the things that I've come to understand about What purity culture taught me and what evangelicalism taught me about love and marriage, how the soulmate myth imbued my understanding of my relationship, and just kind of how I healed from it all.
Some of you may know, but I've shared this on the show, I was married at 20 to somebody I'd been dating since I was 14, and so we got divorced when I was 24.
and living in England, and so I've always looked at that period in England as the time I lost both my soulmates.
I deconverted or deconstructed from evangelicalism, and my marriage ended, and so I was 6,000 miles from home and really just trying to cope with both of the ones leaving my life.
And so this essay is titled, Mourning the One, and it touches on a lot of things we've been talking about in this series.
On the coach from Oxford to Heathrow, the world had been transformed, or perhaps what was there all along was finally revealed.
The chip shops, dilapidated churches, and run-down villages remained.
The pavement led the coach hurriedly to the same destination.
There was a different driver, but he was grumpy and unshaven like the others.
Despite seeing all these things through more seasoned eyes from when I arrived less than a year prior, it's not them that had changed.
It was us.
April 2006, seven months since Amy landed, we were on a coach headed for London accompanied by my mother-in-law so that my soulmate could leave for good.
Four weeks prior, we had finally admitted to each other that it was okay if she left.
Our minuscule living space, a tiny apartment assigned to families of graduate students at Oxford University, was only one factor in the uncomfortable proximity we experienced in the half year she was in Oxford.
In addition to the lack of space, there was a dearth of social and professional buffers that forced us to face the decay of our relationship.
Look, she said, if I walked through that door at one of those fancy dinners at your college, let's be honest, you wouldn't pick me.
You'd have your eye on someone else.
I wouldn't even show up on your radar.
We'd be friends, not partners.
She said this during a key conversation two weeks before.
I didn't want it to be true, but it was.
Dragging out into the open only confirmed something that both of us knew and Creating one of those situations where truth is accompanied by an awkward adjustment to an already known but suddenly public reality.
And you wouldn't pick me?
I asked.
I asked this already knowing the answer.
She couldn't get herself to say it.
Just an empty but intentional stare and a slight nod of her head.
Despite dozens of conversations about our relationship during those months, It's this one that sticks out in my memory.
It led directly to a plan about her going home and resuming her teaching career in California.
I hinted at coming with her, but both of us knew that wasn't the point.
Going back together wouldn't change anything.
It was time for us and our souls to separate.
For the seven months that she was in Oxford, we slept in separate rooms.
She pulled the sleeping mat into our tiny living room and slept there.
It became her living space and sleeping space for the duration of her stay.
As I reflect on that seven months, the symbolism of us living and sleeping on two sides of a wall, one that split a normal-sized room into two, is clear.
That period was a perpetual attempt to break down a barrier separating two souls that had once been united.
We had no other spaces to distract ourselves from this task, no living room or the big screen to drown the quiet, no porch on which to sit with company in order to avoid having real conversations with each other.
And no basement to which one of us might run and hide.
We were two people on either side of a wall.
I can't remember fighting even once during that seven months.
Ours was not a relationship coming to a spasming, violent end.
It was more like an elderly person with a slowly decaying senses who finds it increasingly difficult to taste their food, hear their grandson on the other end of the phone, or see the television.
Thanks for listening to this free preview of our Swadge episode.
In order to get access to the full episode and so much more, become a Straight White American Jesus Premium Subscriber by clicking the link in the show notes.
It'll take you like two clicks, I promise.
In addition to getting access to this episode, you'll have access to the entire Swadge archive, over 550 episodes.
You'll also get an extra episode every month, ad-free listening, Discord access, and so much more.
All that for less than six bucks a month, and it helps us keep our flag up and continue to safeguard democracy from religious nationalism, extremism, and rising authoritarianism.
