If one or both couples in a relationship were heavily indoctrinated by religion in their childhood this often makes achieving 

the deepest intimacy with their partner, a challenge to say the least.

Here are some helpful ideas to be considered.

1. Religion Often Conditions People to Distrust Their Own Bodies 

High-control religions frequently teach people to experience desire, pleasure, and embodiment through shame, fear, and moral surveillance, creating long-term anxiety, dissociation, and difficulty with intimacy.

2. The Damage Often Becomes More Visible in Midlife and Later Adulthood 

As people age, long-suppressed questions about identity, desire, authenticity, marriage, and embodiment often surface for the first time, 

leading many to reevaluate the life they have lived.

3. Purity Culture Has Long-Term Psychological Consequences 

Purity culture did not merely regulate behavior. It shaped nervous systems through shame, fear, repression, and self-monitoring, effects 

that can persist decades after someone leaves religion.

4. Religion Often Split Spirituality From Embodiment 

Many religious systems framed spirituality and sexuality as oppositional, teaching people to distrust the body rather than experience 

embodiment, intimacy, and desire as part of being fully human.

5. Many People Confuse Sexual Morality With Sexual Health 

Religious environments often emphasized rule-following over emotional literacy, consent, communication, relational maturity, trauma awareness, and mutual dignity, leaving many people sexually compliant but relationally disconnected.

6. Healing Requires More Than Leaving Religion 

Recovering from religious sexual conditioning involves rebuilding self-trust, embodiment, emotional honesty, nervous system safety, relational integrity, and the ability to experience intimacy without shame, guilt or fear.

The good news here is that with a liitle insight and guidance, in time all of the inhibitions associated with this conditioning can be overcome.