Eros, A Woman's Body, and Coming Out of Hiding

Quick note: The Lavish Well has moved to Substack. Same well, new address. Update your inbox settings so we stay connected.

---

I grew up knowing exactly what my body was for.

Not in a good way.

I was told — plainly, repeatedly, by the faith tradition that shaped everything I understood about being a woman — that my body was dirty. That sex outside of marriage was a sin. That short skirts and bikinis and piggyback rides with boys were all doors to something shameful. I wasn’t allowed to attend school dances. I was taught that my body could not exist in proximity to a male body without consequence.

The message wasn’t subtle. It was doctrine: a good woman submits to her husband. Serving him is honoring God. That is what a Godly wife does.

And then you grow up and get married.

And suddenly all of it — all that careful, years-long architecture of shame — is supposed to dissolve overnight. You’re expected to want sex now. Not just when you want it. When he wants it. On his schedule. Because that, too, is what a Godly wife does.

No one explains the transition. No one acknowledges the whiplash. You’re just supposed to arrive at the marriage bed somehow both pure and willing, ashamed and available.

I absorbed it the way we absorb all the deepest things. Without knowing how much of me it was costing.

---

When I began my training in sexology and sex, love, and relationship coaching, something strange happened.

I was drawn to this work the way I have been drawn to very few things in my life — with my whole body, with a knowing that lived below my thoughts. I could feel the rightness of it. And yet I kept running into a quiet, persistent confusion: I wanted this work so badly, I felt it so deeply, and I still did not experience the kind of urgent, constant sexual drive I thought I was supposed to have. The kind I saw discussed and celebrated in so many conversations about female sexuality and liberation. The kind even my best friend had with her husband.

Somewhere in the back of my mind lived the assumption that this work required a woman who wanted sex constantly. Ravenously. I was not that woman.

I wondered, privately, whether I was a fraud. Whether there was something wrong with me — or worse, something still broken from all those years of being taught that my body was not fully mine, even though I’d done decades of work to heal.

I was willing to live in that doubt because the pull toward the work was stronger. But the doubt was there.

One day, I brought this to my mentor. I said it plainly: “I want this work so badly. I feel it so completely. But I don’t feel the deep eros and sexual drive that I think I’m supposed to have. How do I make sense of that?”

She didn’t pause. She said: There are people who don’t desire sex outside of its spiritual nature. You are one of those people.

I felt it before I understood it.

Something in my chest released that had been held for a very long time. I felt like I had been given the keys to the Universe. Seen. Understood. Free in a way that finally made my whole life make sense.

Of course this was true.

My breath was lighter. Divine permission — I finally, explicitly had it — to just let myself be the woman I had always felt I was but had been too afraid, too uncertain of my wholeness, to come out of hiding.

---

Eros. The word itself is beautiful—it’s where we get erotic—and almost no one understands it or uses it correctly.

Eros is not a drive toward sex. Eros is a drive toward union. Toward the dissolution of the boundary between self and something larger — a lover, yes, but also beauty, truth, God, the ocean, a piece of music that breaks you open.

The ancient Greeks understood this. Even Plato’s Symposium isn’t really about desire in the way we mean it now. It’s about the soul’s longing for wholeness. For return. Not lust, but a spiritual yearning for beauty, truth, and goodness that elevates the soul.

When I was taught that my sexuality was to be contained, managed, and offered in service to someone else, what was actually being suppressed was my capacity for this kind of union. My access to my own depth. My body’s intelligence as a pathway to the Divine. The possibility of experiencing sacred union with another human.

That is an enormous thing to suppress in a woman.

The women I work with — high-achieving, medically literate, spiritually hungry — are not struggling because they don’t know enough about sex. They are struggling because they have never been given permission to want what they actually want. To feel what they actually feel. To trust their bodies as sources of wisdom rather than sources of shame.

Every expression of eros in a woman is normal. Every one is beautiful. The woman who wants constant heat and electricity. The woman who wants slow, deep, soul-level connection and nothing less. The woman who has never been able to name what she wants because no one ever told her she was allowed to have it.

All of it is real. All of it belongs.

---

I am not a sexologist because I want to teach techniques or optimize performance. I do this work because I’ve spent decades watching women — patients, friends, myself — live in bodies they had been taught to distrust. And I have felt, in my own flesh, what it means to live in a body that is finally yours. How it feels to be in love with yourself. To own your pleasure completely.

To be sovereign.

I did my own deep work first. I had to. This is somatic work, depth work. You cannot sit across from a woman’s shame and offer her freedom from a distance. You have to have gone there yourself.

I came out of hiding. And now I know, with full authority and sovereignty, what I want, what I don’t, and what I will not settle for — in alignment with the spiritual eros that calls to me.

I am still emerging. I won’t pretend otherwise.

What will my family think? How will I explain this? I have sat with those questions. And here is what I know: I don’t need to make an announcement. I don’t need anyone’s permission. My evolution will continue for as long as I do this work — on myself, and with the women I serve.

This is who I am. This is what I am doing. Like it or not. Take it or leave it.

Being here, writing this, showing up like this — this is my announcement.

And so it is.