A woman posted anonymously in the LDS Dating Midsingles Facebook group on June 9th and asked something that apparently a lot of people have been thinking but not saying out loud. She had noticed a pattern: some LDS men seem to move the goalposts on physical boundaries whenever it's convenient, finding clever theological workarounds for nearly everything short of one specific act, while simultaneously criticizing women for wanting emotional connection and intimacy during dating. "If you can always find a way to justify it," she wrote, "are there really any boundaries at all?"
The post generated dozens of comments. Some were thoughtful. Some were compassionate. Several people pointed out that women push boundaries too, which is fair. A few commenters went straight for the throat, including one person who declared that anonymous posts get their opinion "disregarded" and another who called the original poster's perspective a "delusional female opinion." At least one person had to look up "soaking" in the Urban Dictionary, which, honestly, is a reasonable place to be in life.
What the thread mostly produced was heat without much light. The question underneath the original post is genuinely worth sitting with. It is not really about soaking or technicalities or who pushes boundaries more. It is about the distance between the values people say they hold and the behavior they actually engage in, and what that gap costs the people who date them.
Scott and Laurie read the whole thread. Here is what they want to say.
The Loophole Is the Lie
Scott
Let me be plain about what the original poster was describing, because I think some of the comments in that thread softened it past the point of usefulness.
When someone holds strict behavioral standards in public and then quietly engineers a set of private justifications that let them do almost everything they wanted to do anyway, that is not a boundary. That is a performance of a boundary. And it is a particular kind of dishonesty because it gets performed for an audience, usually a date who is trying to figure out whether this person's stated values are real.
I have heard every version of this. "We did not go all the way." "It was not intercourse." "I looked it up and technically this does not violate the law of chastity." The more elaborate the legal brief, the more certain you can be that the person writing it already knew the answer and was working backward from a conclusion they wanted to reach.
I want to be careful here because this is not a men-only problem. Several commenters were right that women engage in this pattern too. But the original poster was describing something specific about the dynamic she was encountering as a woman trying to date in this community, and her frustration was legitimate. When the same person who rationalizes his way through physical boundaries also lectures you for wanting emotional closeness and reassurance, you are not dealing with a values mismatch. You are dealing with a double standard that runs in exactly one direction, and it is worth naming that clearly.
The question to ask is not whether the rationalizing is technically possible. The question is whether the person you are sitting across from is operating with integrity. Those are very different questions.
What the Emotional Connection Argument Is Actually Saying
Laurie
A few commenters offered a framework that shows up constantly in LDS dating conversations, and I want to examine it carefully because I think it does a lot of damage while sounding like it is being generous to men.
The argument goes like this: women crave emotional intimacy, and for men, sexual intimacy is the equivalent. Therefore, expecting emotional connection from a man before marriage is roughly as demanding as expecting a woman to be physically intimate before marriage. The implication is that both are asking too much, and both should be met with patience and understanding.
I understand why this framing feels balanced. It is not.
Emotional connection is not a physical act. It is not something that violates a covenant or crosses a line that any faith tradition has marked as sacred. Wanting a man to show genuine interest in your inner life, to be present in conversation, to treat your feelings as real and worth engaging with, is not a high-stakes demand. It is the minimum viable condition for a real relationship.
When we treat a woman's desire for emotional presence as if it is the moral equivalent of a man's desire for sexual contact, we are quietly telling her that her relational needs are excessive. We are asking her to manage her expectations down to accommodate someone who has not yet learned to connect outside of physical touch. That is a significant ask, and it is being dressed up as fairness.
None of this means men do not have genuine emotional needs, or that they experience intimacy differently than women. They often do. But "different" does not mean "lesser," and it definitely does not mean a woman should apologize for wanting to be known by the person she is considering building a life with.
The Anonymous Comment Problem
Scott
I want to say something directly to the people in that thread who dismissed the post because it was submitted anonymously, and to the person who called the poster's opinion "delusional."
The original poster chose anonymity for reasons she did not owe anyone. Maybe she has been in this community a long time and did not want her name attached to a sensitive observation. Maybe she has experienced exactly the kind of dismissal that the thread then proceeded to deliver on schedule. Whatever her reason, choosing not to attach her name to a post in a Facebook group is not cowardice. It is a reasonable calculation about social risk.
Here is what is actually telling. Two different commenters in that thread declared the post invalid and moved on without engaging the substance at all. One called it an "anonymous post, opinion disregarded," and another called it a "delusional female opinion, disregarded." Both of those responses reveal something. They reveal that the responder was not interested in whether the observation was accurate. They were interested in whether they could find grounds to dismiss it. That is not engagement. That is avoidance wearing a costume.
If the observation in that post was wrong, the way to say so is to explain why it is wrong. The fact that several people in the thread chose dismissal over argument suggests the observation landed a little closer to home than anyone wanted to admit.
When the Culture Teaches This
Laurie
I want to say something to the women in this community who have experienced what the original poster described, because I suspect there are more of them than this one thread represents.
You are not confused. You are not asking for too much. When someone moves the boundary markers around to suit the moment, you are allowed to notice that. You are allowed to name it. You are allowed to decide that a person who does this is not someone you can trust with your life.
The culture many of us grew up in taught a very narrow and very rule-focused version of physical boundaries. It listed the specific acts that were prohibited and said relatively little about integrity, about emotional honesty, about the spirit of what chastity is actually trying to protect. When rules are the whole story, loopholes become inevitable. And when someone is committed to finding a loophole, no amount of clarity in the rule-book will stop them.
What you are looking for is not a man who knows exactly where the line is. What you are looking for is a man who does not want to spend his energy finding it. That man exists. He is not looking for a technicality. He is looking for a partner.
If you are exhausted from dating people who treat your relational needs as unreasonable while quietly redefining what integrity means for themselves, that exhaustion is legitimate. You are not broken. You are just not finding the right people yet, and that is worth staying in the search for.
And when you are ready to go deeper, we will be here.
- Scott & Laurie
Weighing in from the lowest tier of the Celestial Kingdom, where we long ago decided that a man who reads the rulebook looking for loopholes is not the same thing as a man with values, and that distinction is worth every bit of patience the search requires.