Here is what you are signing up for.

I signed the pledge before I understood what I was promising.

I grew up in purity culture, in the late eighties and the early nineties. I went to the conferences. I heard the talks. I signed the letter. I promised to wait. My body was a gift to be kept wrapped until a wedding night. My worth and my whole future marriage hung on getting this one thing right. I believed every word. Most of us did.

Here is the strange part of my particular childhood. My mother was a sex educator. So in our house, unlike nearly every house I would later sit across from in my office, language was never the problem. We had the words. We said clitoris and orgasm and desire the way other families said cholesterol or homework. The information was there. What came wrapped around it were the same religious boundaries, the same rules, that everyone else carried. I grew up holding the vocabulary of freedom and the theology of fear in the same young body.

And I grew up believing the thing almost everyone in that world believes. That sex and sexuality were the same thing. That what you did and who you were could not be pulled apart. So if you did the wrong thing, you simply were the wrong thing. It would take me half a lifetime to learn how untrue that is. "Sex is something you do. Sexuality is something you are." Nobody ever told me there was a difference. Learning it, much later, is part of what saved me.

I became a professor of human sexuality. And a therapist. I loved it more than almost any work I have ever done. There is a moment, when a frightened student finally turns around and meets their own body for the first time, that I will never get tired of watching. There is a deeper joy still. It comes later, when that same student goes on to lead other people into the same freedom. I trained pastors. I trained leaders inside churches and faith communities, people who would go on to shape how hundreds of others understood their own bodies. I took that seriously. I still do.

I was not dogmatic, and it cost me. More than once I was criticized, sometimes sharply, for being too honest. For refusing to hand people a tidy list of rules when what they needed was the truth. I taught around two words that I still believe hold the entire thing. Orthodoxy, which is what you believe. And orthopraxy, which is how you actually live it. I spent years helping people drag those two back into the same room, because in most of the lives I touched, the belief had grown enormous while the practice had withered down to nothing. And I leaned on the people who got there before me. Esther Perel on desire and distance. David Schnarch on how thoroughly our culture and our religion have worked to kill desire and then call the killing holy. Many more besides. They gave me language for what I kept watching happen inside real people.

And the entire time, I was living a contradiction I could not resolve.

I was married to my college sweetheart for many years. I loved her. And almost from the first day, our marriage struggled. The thing it struggled with most, relentlessly, was sex. It was the wound that would not close. We did the things you are supposed to do. We sought counsel. And more than once, sitting across from mentors out of the highly religious world we both came from, I was the one told I was wrong.

One of them said I approached sexuality like a sports car.

He did not mean it kindly. He meant that my wanting itself was the defect. I spent my days telling other people their desire was good, and holy, and theirs. Then I drove home and was told that mine was a flaw to be managed.

I cannot easily say what that does to a man. Sex got weaponized against me. My own appetite became the proof that something in me needed correcting. And slowly, I surrendered to it. I made a quiet peace with the idea that my own sex life would never be the thing I was helping everyone else go and find. I stood at the front of the room. I pointed at a door. I had decided I was not allowed to walk through it. That contradiction ate at me for years. It felt like a lie I was living in plain sight.

That marriage eventually ended. That is a story for another time, and it is not mine alone to tell.

I thought I knew what came next. I assumed I would become a playboy. Free at last, no one left to disappoint, I would finally live all the way inside my own sexuality. That plan lasted about as long as it took me to learn I am not built that way. The act on its own was never the thing I was hungry for. I craved connection at least as much. If I am honest, more. A body with no person attached to it left me emptier than the old celibacy ever had.

Then I met Mrs. O.

The chemistry was immediate, and it was enormous. Passion of the kind I had read about and quietly stopped believing was real. But that was not the part that changed my life. The part that changed my life was that she was free in exactly the way I had only ever taught. She had lived inside her own sexuality, without shame, for a long time. And she began, patiently, to show me what that actually looks like from the inside.

We did not rush. That matters to say, because people assume this life starts with a leap. Ours started with conversation. She would tell me about experiences she had had. She would tell me, plainly, how much she craved the company of other women. How much she loved a woman's body. She would tell me her fantasies, slowly, as a kind of warm-up, a foreplay built out of pure honesty. Just hearing her be that free was enough to undo me.

And then, on a trip in another country, we met a woman. I saw it the instant it happened. The chemistry between her and Mrs. O, unmistakable across the room. That night became our first experience as three. It was wild. It was joyful. It was alive. And the part that surprised me most was not the sex. It was the talking. She had come from a background remarkably like our own, and the conversation before and after went deep, far deeper than I had braced for anything that night to go. I walked away changed. It was nothing the frightened boy who signed that pledge could ever have predicted.

From there, we kept going. We have been meeting people, connecting with couples and with a few remarkable individuals, ever since. And some of the closest friendships of our whole lives have grown straight out of this community. That is the thing no one on the outside believes until they have lived it.

I have my own fantasies. My own kink. I embrace all of it, and I am open about it, because hiding it was the very thing that nearly broke me. But the most important thing I can tell you about myself is this. I am not a hit it and forget it man. I never was. I crave the person. I crave the relationship. The connection is the point, and everything else is just the beautiful language we use to say it.

That is why so many of the places Mrs. O and I tried felt so hollow. They were built for the act and nothing underneath it. Profile after profile, all skin and no person, everything on display except the one thing that matters. And you could rarely trust what you were looking at. A lot of it was catfish, lifting someone else's photos. Some were bots. Some were plain scammers working an angle. The handful of real, warm, honest people were buried under all of it, with no good way to find them and no way to be found. We were not looking for more strangers. We were looking to be known, and to truly know someone in return.

The two of us also love to create together. We make videos. We take photographs. We do it with people we are genuinely close to, because for us that is part of the intimacy and not something separate from it. And we have spent many nights teaching other couples how to do the same. How to see themselves through a lens without flinching. How to make something beautiful out of their own desire.

Which brings me to why Sodalis exists.

In the end we realized the room we wanted did not exist. So we built it. I wanted the room I spent my whole life describing and never managed to find. A place that teaches, the way I loved teaching. A place that is actually safe to connect, the way the empty sites never were. Sodalis is an education as much as it is a club. It is couples-first. It is female-safe by design, because the woman has been an afterthought everywhere this has ever existed, and here she never will be. It is small on purpose, and we say no often, because a room is only ever as good as the people you let into it.

It is, in the end, my orthodoxy and my orthopraxy finally sitting down together at the same table. What I believe about freedom. And how I actually get to live it. For the first time in my life, those two are the same thing.

The table is set for four. If any part of my story felt like your own, come and find out what we have built.