This week, we teamed up with Rebbie Brassfield from Mormons in Media to talk about Hulu’s new reality dating show, Are You My First? The premise gave us the perfect chance to explore what dating dynamics look like when singles don’t have—and have never had—sex.

To set the stage, think of your typical raunchy reality dating show—say Love Island—where a couple dozen singles are thrown together, competing in absurd, often sexually charged challenges for the chance to score a date and maybe hook up. Everyone’s scrambling for a “connection,” or they risk getting sent home. Are You My First? looks a lot like that, except all the contestants lack sexual experience for very different reasons. Some have religious commitments to chastity (we get into the Mormon contestants in particular), some face health or psychological challenges that affect intimacy, and some just haven’t found the right person or the right time.

And here’s the twist: on a show that normalizes inexperience, these contestants often come across as surprisingly raw and genuine. They don’t have the same forced, hyper-confident performance you see on other shows. As Mallory put it, “They’re all underdogs”—and who doesn’t want to cheer for the underdog? But that doesn’t mean they’re all innocent. Some bounce from crush to crush without noticing their own contradictions. Others wrestle with self-trust and vulnerability. A few seem almost incapable of attaching at all.

In countless ways, the dynamics felt familiar—eerily like an LDS singles ward. Sometimes it was subtle, like how people pursued the contestants who looked like they “fit” the future they imagined, rather than the ones they actually felt at ease with.

We had a lot of fun with this one. What did you think? We’d love to hear.

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It’s been about a year since The Soloists launched with an episode on the history of singles wards — Latter-day Saint congregations organized specifically for unmarried members of the Church. At the center of each ward is a bishop, whose role is to offer pastoral care but also to navigate members through the repentance process. Today we’re sharing a conversation with singles wards bishops and their wives about shepherding young adults through seasons of loneliness, doubt, and repentance.

We go straight for the elephant in the room — the Church’s sexual standards for single adults — where authority and empathy potentially compete. Our guests today are Cami and Matt Vail and Jeff and Jana Parkin, who all married young, in a different cultural moment, and they readily admit that the world of dating and relationships for today’s single adults feels foreign. On paper, this looks like authority at its most mismatched: leaders who never lived this stage of life are asked to uphold sexual standards for those still in it. In practice, they witness and hold single people’s most intimate stories — the struggles, desires, and despair — and are powerful conduits of God’s love. Could they serve as conduits without deep commitment to the Church and its standards?

In this conversation, we press into that paradox. Should older singles be allowed to adapt standards in a way that suits their age and stage of life? Or are the leaders right, that the boundaries are firm and its consistency that matters most? Who’s right? How are we missing each other? Though Mallory and Diana have had countless singles ward bishops over the years, it’s rare to sit down with them outside of ecclesiastical authority and ask them, openly, about how they approach these difficulties and how serving single young adults has changed them.

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Today, we're joined by Annie Kate Peterson, a graphic designer and author of the children's book "What She Sees: A Story Investigating Body Image." She shares about developing anorexia at age 10 during a perfect storm of family stress when her desire to be seen and loved felt like "asking for too much." Bodies are inherently chaotic—they change without our permission, they age, they go through puberty, they jiggle and shift and refuse to stay put. They are a lot like life itself: unpredictable, uncontrollable, constantly in flux. The way we treat or feel about our bodies often speaks to how we are navigating the bigger questions of life — including whether we deem ourselves fundamentally good and worthy of love. There’s a heartbreaking pattern that sets in when we don’t: we punish our bodies, the one thing that seems within our control.This pattern may be especially common in cultures that connect beauty with worth or deprivation with devotion. We dig into why Utah has the highest number of plastic surgeons per capita and growing up with the religious expectation that attracting and securing a spouse was part of fulfilling God’s plan. Annie traces a fascinating historical line from Renaissance beauty ideals celebrating fuller bodies to Protestant "fasting girls" who believed starvation brought them closer to God. That legacy, she argues, still haunts religious communities today, including the Latter-day Saints.

The irony is that this attempt to feel worthy of love works against itself. Annie shares how her recovery transformed not just her relationship with her body, but with everyone she loves. One breakthrough moment came through a letter from her little sister, who said: "I tried looking in the mirror at myself the way that you did, and it was painful. So I stopped." Her sister’s wisdom to walk away from the demon that had consumed Annie's life helped Annie see a different way she could treat herself — with gentleness. The isolation of an eating disorder, Annie explains, isn't just about food—it's about deserting yourself so completely that you can't connect with anyone else. Annie has gathered resources for anyone struggling with body image issues or eating disorders. You can access them here.

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As an urban planner, Mike Christensen seeks to improve the invisible infrastructure of public transit that connects diverse people to jobs, resources, and each other — or doesn’t. Mike is on the Salt Lake City planning commission and serves as executive director of the Utah Rail Passengers Association. He has spent years advocating for people whose transportation needs are invisible to those designing the system—much like singles navigating a church culture built around families. Today, he joins Diana and Mallory for a conversation about the unexpected parallels between transit planning and the single experience in the church.

"When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail," Mike explains. "If you're used to driving all the time, then everything looks like a parking spot or the lack of a parking spot. If the whole frame of reference is all based on families, then those who don't have those blessings really feel awkward." The metaphor illuminates how easily we turn to the tools we know best—whether cars or nuclear families—when we can't imagine life working any other way. Mike describes a sobering example, where his mid-singles congregation was shuffled between three buildings in 18 months with little to no advance notice, sometimes in response to complaints from married church members. The experience reinforced a sense that singles were "a problem that the church was trying to solve awkwardly rather than really taking a look at us and understanding our needs."

The episode also captures both the isolation and unexpected freedom that can come from living differently than those around you, whether that's taking trains instead of driving cars, or building meaning outside traditional family structures. In his journey form small-town Idaho to studying in Germany to living carless in Salt Lake City, Mike has learned that there are many ways to get around in life, and many ways to thrive.

Learn more about Mike’s urban planing advocacy here.

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As a therapist, Kylee Shields knows that most cultural models for grief fall short when it comes to the full spectrum of loss we experience in life. She likes the term "ambiguous loss," which was coined by psychologist Pauline Boss in the 1970s to describe losses without clear beginnings or endings—someone physically present but psychologically absent (dementia), or physically absent but psychologically present (missing persons, deployment). There's no funeral, no casseroles, no public acknowledgment, no timeline for when you're supposed to "get over it"—which creates its own special loneliness.

Today, Kylee joins us to explore another type of ambiguous loss: grieving something you never had. As she puts it, "Nobody knows what to do with somebody who has lost the thing they never had." For singles, this might mean mourning the marriage that didn't happen, the children you didn't have, the family story you always pictured. Kylee shares how naming this grief has expanded her empathy and inspired her to create "belonging places" where people can talk about life's "unspeakable" aspects—including through her own podcast, The Belonging Place.

Our conversation ventures into unexpected territory, including what we're calling "ambiguous joy"—those gifts and freedoms that emerge from paths we never chose but rarely get acknowledged or celebrated. Turns out joy, like grief, can be surprisingly complicated to hold.

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The promise of technology is that it can extend human capacity and even help us transcend biological limitations. But when it comes to human relationships, does it actually strengthen our capacity to love, commit, and build families, or does it quietly erode our capacity to be together? This is a live question, as digital and medical technologies increasingly shape how we meet, fall in love, marry, and have children (or don’t.) That’s not to mention the specter of AI-mediated romance.Today’s guest, Carl Youngblood, founded the Mormon Transhumanist Association in 2006 to host conversations between the seemingly disparate worlds of faith and technological advancement. Each year, the association convenes an annual conference and smaller gatherings where the aims of technological enhancement and spiritual development are explored side by side—sometimes reinforcing each other, sometimes colliding head-on.

On today’s episode of The Soloists, Carl shares about on a recent conference he attended in Berkeley, California that focused on reproductive technologies and the future of human enhancement—topics that might sound like science fiction but are edging closer to scientific reality. While we hope to dig into the details in a future conversation, this one centers on more fundamental questions: Should we feel hopeful or despairing about humanity’s technological trajectory? Is the promise of transhumanism—that we can steer our own evolution—visionary or dangerously hubristic? Are we creating a better world, or new, unintended problems for future generations to untangle?You'll probably feel at the end of this conversation, like we did, that we've barely scratched the surface. We hope to have future conversations with Carl and others about how technology will shape the future of family and all our other relationships.

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In her forthcoming book, sex therapist and new author Jennifer Finlayson-Fife will be making the case that sexual and spiritual wholeness are inseparably connected. Jennifer has helped thousands of couples to reach deeper levels of intimacy and joy by illuminating this connection in her teaching and coaching. But what does this mean for people who don’t find themselves in straightforward romantic relationships? How should singles relate to sexuality, especially in a religious subculture that forbids many forms of sexual expression outside marriage? In this episode of The Soloists, Jennifer joins Diana and Mallory to discuss.

Ultimately, Jennifer argues, erotic intimacy requires integrity, no matter our situation. Integrity requires grappling with a complex moral landscape. She explains her three-stage model of moral development, from the obedience of childhood to the belonging-focused conformity of adolescence, to the conscience-driven integrity of mature adulthood. Naturally, these stages introduce conflicting moral impulses. Yet "We should never let obedience or loyalty interfere with our conscience," she says. "Our conscience is primary."

For singles grappling with the law of chastity, Jennifer reframes the conversation around what it means to be honest about life and at peace with your sexuality—whether you're having sex or not. She also challenges the idea that pleasure and indulgence are the same thing. "Are our pleasures opening up our souls or shutting them down?" she asks. "Do they make us feel truer to ourselves and to our core, or are they a betrayal of ourselves?" Even for couples, she reminds, "the quality of your relationships is directly proportional to your tolerance for not getting what you want.”

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Most of life’s major decisions come with centuries of accumulated wisdom. Think of any coming of age decision — picking a marriage partner, selecting a vocation, or making religious commitments— and you’ll never find the bottom of literary, philosophical, and spiritual discussion on it. Becoming a single parent by choice is not one of those decisions. The assisted reproductive technologies (ART) that make this choice possible have only been widely available since the late 20th century. Like many new technologies, ART open up a way to build a family that have never before been available before, and the intimate decision to use them to start a family of one’s own is relatively unexplored.

This week on The Soloists, we sit down with Jennifer Anderson and Troy Smith—two Latter-day Saints who chose to become parents on their own. Jennifer is a strategic consultant with a five-year-old daughter. Troy is an economist and solo father to two boys. We talk about how they each approached this decision in the absence of clear cultural or spiritual scaffolding, what the process was like—physically, financially, and spiritually—and how life feels on the other side.

“The fact that those options exist in the world today is a miracle for me,” Troy told us. “I felt that my heart would never, ever heal again,” Jennifer shared, “But my daughter healed my heart.”

You can read more from Troy at singlefatherbychoice.substack.com.

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In a world that tends to lionize romantic partnerships as life's ultimate destination, what if we've been quietly undervaluing one of our most sustaining relationships? This week, we talked with Adam Staveski and Jordan Hunter —two humans who have cracked the code on being genuinely excellent friends. Adam brings his delightfully systematic approach to friendship (yes, there's a spreadsheet involved, and no, it's not as clinical as it sounds), while Jordan shares wisdom on how to authentically connect with people. Both offer tips for building friendships during life stages that don’t allow it to happen naturally.

One of the anchors of our conversation was Adam’s garden metaphor: some friends are tall trees (the ones who will weather all the storms of life with you), others are sturdy bushes (reliable but not requiring daily watering), some are delightful flowers (seasonal but highly appreciated), and others are just grass (pleasant part of the social backdrop). It sounds harsh until you realize it's actually liberating—not every relationship needs to be everything, and that's perfectly fine. Noticing these distinctions can help us move more intentionally through our relationships.We also dive into friendship breakups, the art of not taking things personally, how to cope with the inherent seasonality of friendships, including the hurt when someone gets a new romantic partner and disappears, and what it means to choose a relationship "for relationship's sake."

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Today we’re sharing a conversation with Christine Emba, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Rethinking Sex: A Provocation. Her book takes a hard look at the messiness of modern sexual culture—especially the way we’ve come to rely on this “hands off” ethic that says as long as something’s consensual, it’s fine. But what happens when consent isn’t enough for people to get the types of relationships they’re looking for?

Mallory and Diana, meanwhile, can speak to the ups and downs of belonging to a religious culture that takes the opposite approach, where leaders emphasize the spiritual and relational stakes of sex and actively guiding decision-making. We talk with Christine about the trade-offs. What do we lose when we make sex entirely private and individual? What do we gain when it’s seen as something shaped by community? how do we discourage harmful behaviors without piling on shame? How do you take sex seriously without making everyone weird about it?

Se also get into the gender question—like whether we should acknowledge that, on average, men and women want different things when it comes to sex. Should we be building cultural expectations around those differences? Or are gender norms the thing we need to keep trying break free from?

We loved this conversation—and Christine gave us a lot to think about. Let us know what you think in the comments.

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