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Are awkward “side hugs” the best we can do when it comes to opposite-sex friendships?
Juli sits down with author Bronwyn Lea, who helps us rethink what it means to live as brothers and sisters in God’s family. They talk about why we often confuse intimacy with sexuality, how Jesus modeled close, non-romantic relationships, and what healthy Christian community can look like (even in a sex-saturated world).
Listen in to discover how moving beyond fear-based boundaries can lead to more connection and stronger, life-giving friendships in the body of Christ.
Juli (00:00.11)
Hey friends, I’m Juli Slattery and you’re listening to Java with Juli. This is a podcast that’s an outreach of Authentic Intimacy, helping people make sense of God and sexuality. So I am really glad you’re here and would encourage you to grab your coffee and settle in because I’ve got a really fun conversation for you today.
My guest is Bronwyn Lee and she is a leadership coach at Propel Woman. She wrote a book called Beyond Awkward Side Hugs: Living as Christian Brothers and Sisters in a Sex-crazed World. If you spent any time in church, maybe especially as a single Christian, you probably know what a side hug is. It’s kind of our way of trying to avoid temptation, sort of keeping people at a distance. But that doesn’t really reflect how Jesus taught us to live as brothers and sisters in the family of God.
Juli
I can’t really imagine Jesus giving Mary Magdalene a side hug. But in this conversation, Bronwyn and I talk about how we confuse intimacy and sexuality, why that’s a problem, and how Jesus actually modeled for us close, non-romantic friendships with the opposite sex, and how whether you’re single or married, you can have healthy relationships as brothers and sisters in Christ.
Now as you listen, I want you to think about somebody you might share this conversation with somebody that you can actually have a meaningful conversation about what healthy relationships look like, how to build community, and how to really live as God’s family. Now let’s dive into my conversation with Bronwyn Lee.
Juli (01:42.702)
Well, Bronwyn, welcome to Java with Juli, and I love having guests on that have intriguing accents, and you have one. So let’s hear it.
Bronwyn
Good morning, Java with Juli, listeners.
Juli
There you go. All the way from South Africa.
Bronwyn
Indeed.
Juli
Well, you’re not literally there right now, but you’re from South Africa. And I feel like I’m talking to a soulmate because you’ve written on the topic of sexuality and there aren’t many of us out there. So thank you for your work in this area.
Bronwhyn
It’s my joy. It’s not something I ever pictured doing with my life, but life is full of conversations that need to be had, even if they weren’t the ones you would have chosen.
Juli
Amen. Mm-hmm. So people will often ask me, why did you write on this topic? Why do you minister on this? And they know my story, but what’s your story? What drew you to writing the book that you wrote and really having a passion for biblical sexuality?
Bronwyn (02:41.816)
What really fueled this book was two decades of pastoral and discipleship conversations where these are the real questions that Christians are struggling with as they work out their faith. And real questions about how do I handle this friendship? How do I handle this dating relationship? How do I know if he’s the one? How far can I go? Can I be friends with someone who I’m not married to? What do I do if this other person who my husband is?
Bronwyn (03:10.102)
Real questions like… you know, working with seems like they’re getting too close. Is that appropriate in evangelism, you know, to build relationships with people? Or should I view that as a harbinger of an emotional affair? I don’t know how to process all of these relational questions that I have as a believer. And in many and various shapes and forms over the years, as I’ve tried to, you I committed myself to Christian ministry and discipleship, how we steward our bodies and how we conduct our relationships is just always at the forefront of how we live out our faith.
Juli
Mhmm. Amen. And those are the questions that people are asking. And honestly, a lot of people in ministry don’t know how to answer them outside of the cliche of what my parents told me or what my pastor told me. So what was it about you that prompted you to go deeper than that and to really get beneath the surface of some of the just cliche advice that’s been offered down through generations?
Bronwyn
I think that there were two things probably that have bubbled up in conversations over the years. One of them is just that the council and advice on male-female relationships has been insufficient. I’ve heard a lot about married sexuality and sort of husband-wife bedroom sexuality. And of course, I grew up even in South Africa on the other side of the world hearing just wait, no sex before marriage. But, there was very little counsel and instruction on what it meant to live as a woman in a woman’s body or what it meant like to be a guy in a guy’s body with feelings and puberty and hormones and attraction and mixed signals. There was just no instruction on that whatsoever. And so there was a big gap and people kept on asking about the gap. I thought we better figure something out. So on the one hand, I was concerned about the gap.
Bronwyn (05:04.642)
And then the other side, I was concerned about the things which had been taught doing harm when they were over-applied or very legalistically applied. You know, if someone is married and feels like the only person that they are allowed to be friends with is their small female Bible study group and their spouse, and they have a question, are they wrong to go seeking counsel from a male pastor or from a guy friend? And then feeling stuck, like half the church was not available for support or counsel or mutual encouragement. And I thought, that’s dangerous. That’s really dangerous. Or when my friends who are single in their late 30s and in their early 40s feel like church is no longer a place that they feel like they belong because they’re not a wife. And so now they’re too old to date, which was the label that they sort of, the role that they had in the singles group was, this is a dating pool. So now who can be their friends? Who can they spend Christmas with without them feeling like, I’m like the pity invite or I’m a threat to someone’s marriage.
That’s wrong. I look at that and think, that is an application that is doing harm to our community because it’s not finding space for believers. kept thinking the apostle Paul and Jesus would have a hard time making their way as single people in the way we’ve arranged a lot of our churches.
Juli
You’re absolutely right, and not just the Apostle Paul and Jesus, but you think about the single women that ministered to Jesus, Mary and Martha and others that were a core part of his community in the early church who really would have had a hard time fitting into our modern church today.
Bronwyn
That’s right, and the married woman who supported Jesus’ ministry.
Juli (06:44.736)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. We’re gonna get into that in a minute. I just have to mention that I love the title of your book, Beyond Awkward Side Hugs. And it makes me think, like, would Jesus have ever just given Mary a side-hug? Can you picture that?
Bronwyn
I wonder if side-hugs were a thing in Judeo-Christian culture. I’m sure whatever way he treated her, it was with dignity and deep love.
Juli
Mm-hmm. Yeah, but I can’t picture this side-hug thing.
Bronwyn
No, that is, it’s really such a cultural moment that’s like, isn’t it? I understand how it came about. I understand the motives and the wisdom that people are trying to put into place. And also, you just got to laugh sometimes at the weirdness of how that’s worked out.
Juli
Yes, it really is. We’ve all experienced that. But you know, I really feel like the core of where we need to start the conversation is talking about the difference between intimacy and sexuality. And in your book, you talk about a distinction that Deborah Hearst made in her book between genital sexuality and social sexuality.
Juli (08:02.666)
And I think those concepts are kind of hitting on the same thing, that we always think of intimacy in our day and age, particularly as it’s related to male-female relationships, we always think of it as something that is romantically or erotically sexual. And we can’t have good conversations about what friendship looks like unless we understand that there’s a type of intimacy, even between a man and a woman, that doesn’t have to be sexualized.
Bronwyn
Yep. Totally agree with that. I mean I absolutely see Jesus as having been a person who had intimate friendships, who was really close, who shared his true self, vulnerably with people and they shared their true selves, vulnerably with him. He was close. Intimacy is the right word to describe that. And yet we know that there was no sexual impurity involved in that, whatsoever. And we use in our modern day and age being intimate as a euphemism for sex. It’s what we supply. It’s the, it’s the nice way to describe having sex. And so it’s really hard for us to see the word intimacy in its broader context, which is just relational closeness.
And for all that I have heard many, many talks, on the four loves and the different loves in the Bible and how God loves us with agape love and eros is like song of songs love. And we pay lip service to sort of the filet of friendship love and storgay, the strong commitment and sort of community affiliation kind of love. I haven’t heard a lot of people talk about how there can be intimate relationship built on storgay love, filet of love and agape love that doesn’t go into eros.
Bronwyn
And when I look at Jesus’s life, surely that’s what he was modeling. He was a man in a body, you know, having friendships as a human male with other men and women around him. We know that he did not have any sexual inappropriateness, but he loved deeply with Fileo, Storgue and agape love. And it is right to appropriately say that those were intimate and holy.
Juli (10:18.862)
Is it an American thing that we don’t understand healthy friendship or did you experience that in South Africa in Christian circles as well?
Bronwyn
I did experience that in South Africa growing up. And I think a lot of that had to do with just how dominant American books, TV, movies and music are.
Juli
So it’s our fault, even if it’s all over the world.
Bronwyn
No, I’m not blaming America. I’m saying it’s hard to parse out what the influence is because my diet of reading was, I experienced that conflation of ideals and part of my influence was American. I can’t say that it’s one particular culture. I do think that it is strong, like the purity culture idea was stronger and more damaging here, but I absolutely recognize the theology and coaching and teaching as being similar to stuff that I grew up with even if I never went to a True Love Waits rally.
Juli (11:18.562)
Yeah, I believe that. And I’ve talked to people who grew up in other cultures and they come to America and they just think it’s really weird how we treat friendship and physical contact and how we’re afraid of it. And so it does seem like those roots are really strong, particularly within American Christianity. And so let’s just talk about the difference. I mean, you mentioned this about the purity culture, but I love the way you distinguish between using caution tape around our sexuality, which is the way that many of us think about it, and stewarding our sexuality. How would you describe the difference between those two?
Bronwyn
Well caution tape is the way that I’m describing that just don’t even touch, just don’t look. Way to stay safe. Don’t even go there. And that’s the way we treat very dangerous situations. And it’s how we treat our small children when we put them in playpens to keep them away from the road or from the frying pan or whatever the case. There’s a time and a place for just a firm boundary that keeps nobody touching to keep them safe.
But that’s not workable as a long-term solution for maturity and community. Keeping people away from each other forever is not feasible and it ultimately, where there’s a will, there’s a way. And just like kids figure out a way to climb out of a playpen and keep walking towards dangerous things. So we all, no matter how many rules we put into place, no matter how much caution tape we put into place, it’s character, it’s sin that ultimately is what is going to lead us towards righteousness or unrighteousness. And so I think that there’s a time for saying, look, don’t even touch it, don’t even go there. But that does not serve us well in the long term because like the difference between the law and grace, it doesn’t address the heart issue. You know, just trying to police our sexuality doesn’t acknowledge it for the gift that it is. Our sexuality is not a problem we have to deal with. It’s part of the way that God has made us. It’s a good part of the way that he’s made us.
Bronwyn (13:24.962)
Yes, it can be used for evil, but God intended for us to use it for good. So let’s use it for good.
Juli
And people are like, amen, but tell me how to do that. Yes. Like what does that even look like? I’m thinking about as you’re describing this, the contrast between two college campuses. So you’ve got the secular university that puts everybody in co-ed dorms, encourages sexual experimentation, gives classes on sexual experimentation, versus all the way on the other end colleges that I won’t name, that do things like have dating parlors, where the only time you can talk to somebody of the opposite gender is to be basically in a big room that looks like a lazy boy furniture showroom. And it’s supervised. And I’m not sure if colleges are still doing this, but they were up till about 10 years ago. Christian colleges, where there’s this fear of interacting with the opposite gender, and a fear of romantic attraction. So those are the extremes. And what you’re talking about is really working on the character so that we don’t have the extreme of legalism, but we also don’t go off the deep end of just sin. What does that look like in real life? And you can talk about it in terms of that age, like a college age and dating, but in general, we’re all battling, what is the balance between legalism and having no morals at all?
Juli (15:02.83)
I know that’s a million dollar question.
Bronwyn
Jesus, we need Jesus. I want to, before I go into the battle on legalism and what this looks like embodied to your illustration of the two colleges and share that one of the things that was striking to me in the last couple of years of reading and learning about this is how much those two campuses actually have in common in their approach to sexuality. You know, the very, very liberal campus that just puts everybody together and says, go ahead, experiment. And the campus that keeps everybody apart for fear of doing things, are still making the same assumption that when you put men and women together, sexual sparks will fly.
One of them is celebrating that, and the other one is terrified of that, but both of them are assuming that that is just how men and women are together. You put them in a room for long enough and sexy stuff will happen, right? And that’s very Freudian. That’s a very Freudian way of saying, you know, there’s just always a phallic element or a sexual undertone in every interaction. And so part of what I wanted to do in the book is just stand back and say, does the Bible really agree with that assumption that that’s always the way it is? Or is there a different way for men and women to share space and be in community? And I am overwhelmingly persuaded that there is and that men and women in God’s family are brothers and sisters first and foremost, and that’s a gendered way of being together, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be sexual. And it’s not always true that we’re gonna have sexual spark either, you know, that we really want or that we’re really trying to avoid, but just to push back on that bigger picture.
Juli (16:42.892)
Yeah, let me say something before you move on because I think that’s a really profound statement right there. And as I’m thinking about it, being the parent of kids that are in that age, there is that feeling that there’s always the danger or the good of sexuality happening and sexual sparks. And I think part of it is because we don’t leave room for other forms of intimacy. And so everything gets channeled into
Well, I feel close, so this must be sexual. And so I must act sexually. Like we don’t even have the construct for what it is for 25, 20 somethings interacting together in a way that’s not sexualized. Yep.
Bronwyn
Totally, totally. And so when it comes to what does this look like for me as a person to try and figure out how to be in relationship with people, part of this is doing the work of me saying, I have often been really uncomfortable around other people’s, know, maleness or had them being uncomfortable around my femaleness. And part of that has to do with the fact that I’m uncomfortable in my own body. So then I’m uncomfortable with other people’s bodies because we just have had such a disembodied theology of really thinking, you know, my true spiritual self is kind of neither, you know, it’s just like I’m spiritually androgynous in my perist form. And then I only switch on my male and female when I get into the bedroom and me thinking, no, actually God created us as men and women from the very first moment we are that before we go through puberty, before sexual agency is even a thing.
And I need to learn to be comfortable in my own skin as a woman, that I am a woman with sexuality in every context, in every situation, in every relationship I show up in, a small portion of that which might be sexual and in my case is directed towards my marriage. But I have opportunities then to be comfortable in my skin and love as a woman all of the people that come into my path. I love my children as a mother, not just as a parent, but as a mother. There is actually a female expression of my intimacy with my children.
Bronwyn (18:56.544)
I love my friends as a female friend. I’m experiencing filet love and storage love towards my friend, but that is a gendered intimacy that is not sexual towards one another. And I’m needing to think about, okay, that’s okay. I am a bra wearing, hormone producing human that God is not ashamed of my femininity and he calls me to love well as a woman in this body. And that has helped me to just calm down a bit instead of always being afraid that I am a ticking bomb waiting to go off and that the men around me are ticking bombs are waiting to go off to say, no, you know, being sexual is not a problematic state. It’s a created state that God has given us and we can leverage this for good. There’s lots of ways to do it wrong, but God is with us in it to teach us how to be humans in our own skin.
Juli
I love that and I just want to say amen to what you just explained. You gave examples like being a mom, being a friend, that you bring your femininity into all those relationships and how you love. I think where people get really off the track with this, they don’t know what to do with it, is that brother-sister relationship. We’re adults, we’re male and female, we’re not married to each other.
And we’ve been told whether it’s explicitly or implicitly that you always have to be careful in those situations, that there’s only so much you should share. This is potentially a snare to your marriage. True or not true? How would you respond to that?
Bronwyn
I can think of so many stories in my life of marriages and families that have gone off the rails because there’s been a friendship that lingered too long that got dangerous. I really want to acknowledge how painfully real that problem is. I would want to say though that it doesn’t have to be that way and siloing men and women into different corners doesn’t solve that issue.
Bronwyn (21:04.96)
And one of the ways that’s been helpful for me as an adult to think through this is to think about my relationship with my brother-in-laws and sister-in-laws who are, you know, mine by marriage. My marriage is actually very important in the way that I relate to, and my siblings’ marriages are important, you know. So whatever relationship I have with my sister’s spouses or with my husband’s siblings is brokered by a bedrock of being respectful and treating the integrity of my marriage. But I get to be filial or whatever the female equivalent of filial is towards them. So I can be close, we can share family meals, we can share birthdays, we can talk about some family stuff. And that’s all in the context of sibling relationships which are honoring my marriage. And the more I think about my relationships in the church, it helps me to think of them as brothers and sisters, but with that feeling of the in-law intimacy, which acknowledges their marriage, acknowledges mine, acknowledges their sort of single state. And we’re close, but no one’s going on a date.
Juli
Yeah. And so the way you describe that, there’s an intimacy, a familiarity, but there’s unspoken boundaries that everybody respects without them even needing to be said.
Bronwyn
Yeah, they’re there. And I think we intuitively know how to do that. That that’s not an unworn neurological pathway. It’s just one we’re not accustomed to using or thinking of in church circles.
Juli (22:35.788)
Yeah, I like how you make the distinction that they’re brothers in law. They’re not brothers. Because there’s a difference. Do you have a brother, a natural brother?
Bronwyn
I have two sisters and my husband has a brother and a sister. So we have a couple of extra adults.
Juli
Yeah, I have two brothers and three sisters, so we have a big family. But I think of my brothers very differently than I think of my brothers-in-law. And it is a different relationship. So that’s a helpful thing I’m going to need to chew on, like, look at all the men in my life as brothers-in-law. With that kind of love and affection and cheering for their marriages and cheering for them. And there are built-in boundaries based on the respect for their marriages. So that’s a good construct.
Bronwyn
And the one scripture gives us is adoption. know, like if you’re adopting children into families, they’re going to have very different family of origin experience, but you’re all coming into the same household and you’re having to learn how to love one another’s as brothers and sisters, because that’s what you are. Right? So the scripture uses that analogy of having to learn to be the brothers and sisters that you are by status.
Bronwyn (23:48.394)
And we, feel like that also is helpful for me as a church. I can’t assume the same background, but we’ve been adopted into the same family and I may not know your name yet. You’re brand new. You have all your family baggage. I have all my family baggage. We’re all getting to know the father and trying to learn the family business and we’re getting to know one another. So there’s not an assumed closeness, but we’re going to be family for the rest of eternity. So we need to learn to love one another as brothers. So it allows some space for not presuming on shared experience of saying we have this status, we have this relationship, and we have a lot of work to do to learn how to live into that.
Juli
We’re assuming, even as we talk about this, that people know what healthy boundaries are, that they have a family experience where there’s been intimacy and there’s been sharing, but it’s been healthy. But that’s not everybody’s situation. They’re not coming into this with a grid of understanding where those boundaries are, what you should share, what you shouldn’t share, when you might be entering into a danger zone without realizing it.
And maybe the people you’re interacting with are crossing some boundaries and you don’t know what to do with it. So do you think it’s helpful to have some of the boundaries that quote unquote marriage experts or relationship experts would give about like, you should always know each other’s passwords or share social media accounts. And I mean, there’s all kinds of books that are written on here’s how to protect your marriage. What do you think about those kinds of things?
Bronwyn
I think that those are good gut checks for me in terms of my own transparency and honesty with regard to my spouse. Like having those kind of guidelines and thinking about them is more important for me on am I willing to show and share everything than it is for me to know that my husband’s like, my husband and I’ve talked about that and we have a, well, of course you could look at all of my things. He’ll tell me.
Bronwyn (25:49.186)
I keep forgetting what his passwords are. like the value in that conversation is that he’s willing to share it, you know, that it could be shared at any time rather than it’s being policed. But I think that that reflects back then on the fact that this is ultimately internal work that we land up needing to do.
Juli
Yeah, and it’s that quality of authenticity that you’re talking about and transparency. So it’s not that I know every single conversation my husband’s having, but it’s that the nature of our relationship is we trust each other enough to have open door policy in terms of transparency.
Bronwyn
And I’m learning, you know, I’ve been married for nearly 20 years and I’m still learning what it is to be married. And I don’t come from a background that has a Christian worldview or that had particularly good boundaries. And so one of the things I wrestled with in my late teens was like, show me how to be married. My parents loved us really well, but they had some complicated marital relationships. You both of them were married and divorced twice, you know, a number of relationships and I came into early adulthood thinking, I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how people can fight and they can stay together. I don’t know what faithfulness looks like. I don’t know how marriages can tackle crisis or coldness or infidelity or addiction or any of those things. And sort of set myself on a path in my late teens and early twenties of trying to find other married couples to hang around with so that I could watch them. And secretly I would hope that they would fight in front of me.
I really hoped that I would get to see some conflict so that I could see them come out on the other side, right? And it’s just so important. So when you haven’t had healthy boundaries and you haven’t had healthy examples, like this is one of the gifts that the church can give us is an opportunity to learn from other pattern than maybe we had from our families of origin. And I continue to want to put myself in the presence and in the stories of people who are further along this, along the road than me in marriage and in ministry to learn from them about what it is to be a faithful woman in my forties.
Juli
And what you’re describing right there, that kind of interaction can’t happen if you’re only in women’s groups. It requires again, this familial kind of relationship that God calls us to within the body of Christ. We have spiritual brothers and fathers and sons. So you talk quite a bit in your book about how this applies to single Christians, both in the context of how do you have healthy relationships with the opposite gender that aren’t romantic but are intimate? You really address like the classic When Harry Met Sally question of can men and women really be friends? So give me your overview on how you’d respond to that.
Bronwyn
Yes, I think they can be friends. But the fine print I would want to put on that is if you buy into the Freudian premise that the trajectory for men and women is strangers, then you meet, then you become friends. And then at some point sex follows, then you’re going to have problems. If, our fundamental orientation towards one another is grounded in kinship and other ways to love one another and build community, there’s lots of ways to be friends with one another.
I don’t just want to be friends with a guy, a brother, unless he’s a friend to my marriage too. And this is important, I think, for the health of marriages, like all around. You know, my husband and I are part of a community. We talk about dating in community, the wisdom of dating in community, and there’s wisdom to being married in community. Like it’s not like you say your wedding vows and then you go riding off into the sunset to just be the two of you with Jesus forever.
Bronwyn (29:39.5)
Like you are married and then you two together are in service of God’s kingdom, which means you’re to have to turn around and deal with other women around you. And we need some matrix for to be able to do that. But in all of that, I am very concerned about the way that single people have been just overlooked and not fully honored as adult men and women in the family of God. All the emphasis on if the conversation goes like this, let’s talk about sexuality. Okay.
Now we’re in the church talking about sexuality. Instantly we talk about marriage. We talk about being wives and husbands. The big question mark is, if you’re not a wife and a husband, are you not a sexual being? Is this a button that gets pushed on the day you walk down the aisle? No, no it is not. And this is just implicit in so many ways the church does church. You know the fact that we only want to hire married pastors. What is that?
Bronwyn (30:35.456)
On the one hand, we want to protect people against the temptation of adultery, you know, but at the same time, we’re disqualifying single people as being more sinful, more prone to temptation, you know, less able to do kingdom ministry. There’s a real problem if every time we talk about sexuality, we default to talking about marriage because it means we haven’t talked about agency and ministry and the really important role that single people play in the family life of the church. They’re not junior brothers and sisters who are waiting for rings to be activated for kingdom service. They are fully commissioned brothers and sisters.
Juli
That’s tweetable right there. I love the way you put that. And I think, you know, that’s a key of it. You said that one of the fears is that they’re more susceptible to inappropriate romantic relationships. But I think the key of it is there’s this underlying assumption that somehow you haven’t reached maturity if you’re not married. And then we add on to it unless you’re also a parent, that those are the things that are the graduate degrees of Christian maturity. So how do we have somebody in a leadership role that hasn’t experienced those? And that’s an underlying assumption that again is so unbiblical when we look at would we hire Paul? Like, no, you can work, you can maybe work in the kids ministry, but I’ve arrived at…
Bronwyn
But not if you’re a guy!
Juli
Yeah, that’s true. That’s a good point. What could he do?
Bronwyn (32:06.647)
Yeah, lead the morning men’s prayer team, maybe.
Juli
Yeah, I don’t even know. Maybe he could be the treasurer. But we’re saying it facetiously, in reality, how true is it? And it makes us uncomfortable to push on those assumptions.
Bronwyn (32:28.238)
Yeah, it really does. And I am so aware of the fact that this is just part of the cultural narrative that you really reach maturity when you’ve jumped through the hoops, when you’ve lost your virginity, you’ve got married and you’ve got a career, then you are a real adult. That’s how you’ll know that you have and if you’re a woman and when you’ve had children, right? As if you have to earn your stripes to be an adult. Because we don’t have rights of initiation in our culture, you know, in Western culture anymore where the whole culture now knows that you’re a man. So we think, maybe it’s when you graduate, maybe it’s when you get a job. And we joke about, you know, the 40 year old Virgin movie of a couple of years ago, like as if he wasn’t a fully functional adults because he hadn’t had sex. hadn’t been through whatever this rite of passage is.
And I think that just as the Christian faith constantly reminds us that there are things that we experienced by grace, not because we have earned them, things that are a gift not given by performance. We also need to take a step back and say sexuality is a gift that God has given us. You do not have to earn your stripes as a woman or as a man by going through some kind of adult rite of passage. I was fully a woman before I got married because God made me one. And I was fully a woman before I had children because God made me one. And I really, really want the men and women around me to know that God has made them men and women in their bodies and it is a beautiful and good thing.
Juli
Amen. Boy, that’s such a powerful statement. In walking this out, I want to go back to something that you said a few minutes ago. You talked about sort of that Freudian underlying concept that leads us to believe that men and women can’t really be friends without it turning sexual. But in a lot of people’s experience, particularly with singles, a man and a woman become really good friends and one of them develops feelings for the other one.
Juli (34:29.578)
And maybe it’s sexualized or maybe it’s just, I want to do life with you. You’re my best friend. Why don’t we get married? Why don’t we date? And then it’s awkward. Then it’s a rejection. And I think that’s a real fear of men and women and friendship is what if it does develop that one of us has feelings and the other one doesn’t, then I lose my best friend. So why do I even want to go there?
Bronwyn
Yeah, that is one of the reliefs actually of getting married. That answer is quite clear. Like if I feel like I would like this to be more than friendship, that’s off limits. And so we’re not going to go there. And so the open question mark of, what if there’s unrequited feeling? What if this is not reciprocal? It’s definitely part of the hazards of a life where we negotiate our own partnerships and they’re not handed to us because we’re always trying to discern that. I don’t have a solid answer for that, in terms of a solution to that.
I certainly have been part of a number of friendships. I married later than many of my peers and have been part of a number of confusing friendships where I wanted more or where he wanted more. And it takes courage to show up. I think though that it helps to realize that whether this relationship with another believer turns into marriage, or whether, no matter how far you’re able to take the friendship or not, you’re still going to be in relationship because you are connected in Christ. There’s some bedrock level of connection that is both comfort and constraint to us in these relationships because no matter how badly it goes, you’re not going to be able to kick this person out of your world for eternity, right? So, however we conduct ourselves, even if you break up, this person is still going to be a brother in Christ or sister in Christ. So manage your words and your flame throwing accordingly. And I think it’s right. And it gives us a little bit of a buffer on the front end as well, that it is okay to explore conversation and friendship and to lean into some closeness without you having to say, I’m committing to being engaged to you.
Bronwyn
Like the family learning to live as the family of God actually gives us not just permission but a co-mission to develop relationships with the people around us. And so some of the risk that I see sort of people in the early 20s worrying about like, if I develop a friendship with this person, am I communicating the wrong thing is predicated on an assumption that any friendship is an interest in dating. Whereas I think that looking at the family of God and the invitation to community just a little bit more broadly gives us some space to have the first 20 conversations just under the protection of where family getting to know one another without it having to mean anything. But of course this is only as meaningful as the community commitment to that. If you are just one person walking into a world where everyone assumes you mean something, the community needs to have some conversations. This is not something we can do alone. Yeah. of the way we need to talk.
Juli
Yeah, some of this is very systemic in terms of, let’s say you’re on a college campus. If that’s the unspoken rule of the campus that you can’t be friends with somebody from the opposite gender without it being dating, then that’s a challenge. But one thing that you say in your book that I think really helps make sense of this is even when you’re dating, don’t think of it like if it didn’t end in marriage, it’s a waste. And I think that can be applied to this situation too.
When we approach relationships with the idea of what can I take from this person? And if I don’t get what I want, then it’s a waste. Then we’ve lost the healthy perspective. But when we can approach a relationship of how can I know this person? How can I bless them? How can they bless me? Then even through disappointment, even through awkwardness and awkward conversations or differing expectations, if you can stay in that, you can walk away if the friendship does change or if there is a disconnect, you can walk away just saying, God blessed me through this person and I believe I blessed them through my friendship. And again, that’s a grid we don’t have for a lot of our relationships, including dating relationships.
Bronwyn (38:56.724)
I think that’s so true. That’s really well said. I had a couple of relationships in my 20s. I dated someone for four years through college and I had a couple of, you know, months long to year long relationships after that. And they really hurt to end. And in all of them, I went in hoping that this was the person that this was the last first date that I would go on praying for some discernment. And none of those particularly worked out and I made my mistakes and I was hurt. But in hindsight, I’m also really grateful for things that I learned about the other person, things that I learned about my faith, some very deep things that I needed to confront and learn about myself. And it’s part of the journey, I think, that God has got us on. He doesn’t waste anything. He doesn’t waste any conversations, any of our mistakes, any of our relationships. He uses this all.
And even the awkwardness and the pain of some dating relationships, he is able and willing to redeem. mean, my own marriage started with profound miscommunication of me intending to be friendly and welcoming and my now husband thinking that I liked him and then him responding in kind and then me going, oh, I didn’t mean that way. And then him being, well, you’re sending out mixed signals. And then, I mean, it was just really very awkward for us, but it makes a good story now, and pressing in to learn is important.
Juli
Hmm. There are so many different applications to the conversation that we started today. We didn’t really even get to, how do you have those conversations about having friends when you’re married? Like how do you put those boundaries there with your spouse and jealousy and all that? We touched on it, but we didn’t dive in too deeply. Same thing with questions like how far is too far physically or emotionally to go in dating relationships. And you cover some of those things in your book.
Juli (40:55.858)
And so I really recommend that people follow up with what you’ve written. But the broader context of what you presented to us today, it applies to all of us no matter what age we are or what stage we’re in, is just to really think more deeply about what it means to be female, what it means to be male, and what it looks like to have gendered intimacy with one another that is familial, that’s deep without it being sexualized. That’s a good thought for all of us to take before the Lord and to discuss in our community. So thank you.
Bronwyn
Thank you so much for inviting me to be part of your continued conversation. It would be a terrible thing if we were the only person saying this, right? The fact that I think God has raised up different people like your work and my book and other people who are writing. I think I see as a movement of the Holy Spirit for him to say, hey, church, let’s work on this aspect of health in the family of Christ. I’m really grateful for your work in this.
Juli
There is a lot more that I didn’t get a chance to dig into with Bronwyn, including practical information about how we actually go about building intimate opposite sex friendships and where do we need to set some healthy boundaries? So I would encourage you to pick up a copy of her book, Beyond Awkward Side Hugs. We’re going to link to that in our show notes and you will also find there a blog that I wrote called What Defines Intimate Relationships? You’ll also find a few short videos where I answer the questions, what is the purpose of my sexuality as a single, and how can I tell the difference between sexual desire and a healthy desire for intimacy. As always, you can just stop by authenticintimacy.com for more resources like blogs, videos, and podcast episodes like this one to help you navigate how to make sense of God and sexuality. Thanks for listening, and I look forward to having coffee with you next time for more Java with Juli.