Why Mormon Girls Fear Their Wedding Night

There's a version of a wedding night that Latter-day Saint girls are told about from the time they're old enough to sit through a Sunday lesson, and there's the version many of them actually experience. The gap between those two things is something researchers, therapists, and hundreds of former members have been talking about openly for years now, a conversation the Church itself has largely preferred to have on its own terms rather than in public. Today we're walking through what growing up inside LDS purity culture actually involves, what it teaches young women to expect from marriage, and why so many of them have described arriving at one of the most significant nights of their adult lives feeling not only unprepared but genuinely afraid, despite having waited their entire lives for exactly that moment.