Protecting Intimacy When One of You Stops Believing

Here’s the part of faith transition no podcast warned you about: it follows you into the bedroom. When one partner steps away from the Church — or both step different directions — the couple’s entire sexual framework quietly comes up for renegotiation. I’m Daniel A. Burgess, LMFT, a marriage and family therapist specializing in sexuality and faith, and this collision is probably the single most common — and least discussed — issue in my practice.

Why faith transition destabilizes a couple’s sex life

For most LDS couples, the rules of their sexual relationship were never actually chosen — they were inherited: what’s permitted, what’s wholesome, what desire means, whose job initiation is. When belief changes for one partner, that inherited framework cracks, and each partner responds differently. The transitioning partner often experiences a surge of sexual questioning — revisiting old shame, wanting to explore what was forbidden, or discovering desire that purity culture had suppressed for decades. The believing partner often experiences the opposite: the changes feel destabilizing or even threatening, as if the person they made covenants with is becoming a stranger in the most vulnerable part of the marriage. Neither response is wrong. They’re just happening at the same time, usually in silence.

The four collisions I see most

1. Desire asymmetry flips or widens. Transition can unleash long-suppressed desire in one partner while grief and anxiety flatten it in the other — sometimes reversing years of who-wants-more overnight. If this has hardened into a sexless season, that pattern is treatable; see sexless marriage counseling.
2. The rulebook conflict. One partner no longer feels bound by the old boundaries; the other still holds them sacred. Requests that feel like freedom to one feel like disrespect — or spiritual danger — to the other.
3. Shame surfaces on both sides. Purity-culture conditioning doesn’t leave when belief does. The leaver discovers that guilt outlived the theology; the stayer discovers fear they can’t explain. (This is the territory of purity culture recovery, and my “Don’t Touch” series.)
4. Sex becomes the scoreboard. When the faith conversation is too dangerous to have directly, couples fight it through intimacy — withholding, pressuring, or reading every yes and no as a referendum on the marriage. The bedroom can’t survive being the courtroom.

How couples protect intimacy through the transition

Separate the two negotiations. Your theology and your sex life both need renegotiating — but not in the same conversation. Couples do better making explicit space for each: belief talks with a time limit and ground rules; intimacy talks that are about the two of you, not the Church.

Build the chosen framework together. The task isn’t returning to the old rules or adopting the new partner’s wholesale — it’s designing a sexual relationship both of you actually consent to, value by value. Couples are often startled to discover this conversation is the first time they’ve ever talked about what sex means to them, in twenty years of marriage.

Keep touch alive while you negotiate. Non-sexual affection — the six-second kiss, holding on longer than comfortable, sitting close — keeps the attachment system fed while the harder renegotiation happens. Couples who let all touch lapse until “things are resolved” find that the distance itself becomes the problem.

Honor the slower partner’s pace without surrendering to it. Pressure breaks trust; but so does indefinite avoidance. The workable rhythm is: nothing happens without genuine consent, and the conversation itself never stops happening.

The surprising upside

Couples who do this work often end up with a sexual relationship better than the one they had when they believed identically — because for the first time it’s theirs: chosen, spoken, and built on knowing each other rather than assuming each other. A faith transition breaks the autopilot. What you build after the autopilot is up to the two of you.

If you’re stuck

This exact intersection — faith, marriage, sexuality — is the center of my clinical practice. I offer couples therapy in California and Utah, and coaching worldwide, all starting with a free 15-minute consultation. You will not have to explain your world to me — I’ve lived on both sides of it.

This article is part of the Mixed-Faith Marriage Survival Guide.