Dating and Desire Podcast
The Dating & Desire Podcast is a Christian dating and sexuality podcast for singles and dating adults who want more than rules or fear-based answers. Hosted by relationship coaches Bridgett Blood and Lauren Mathues, the show explores Christian dating, sexual desire, emotional safety, boundaries, and integrity. Through honest conversations with pastors, therapists, and relationship experts, it helps navigate physical boundaries and sexual formation with faith and self-trust.
Episodes
EP.30 Women and Porn Addiction: Breaking Shame and Finding Freedom with Ellie Berry
Ellie Berry, a Sexual Addiction and Recovery coach, joins Lauren and Bridgett for an honest conversation about women, pornography, and what the path toward real freedom can look like. Drawing from her own experience with pornography addiction and recovery, Ellie names the isolation many women carry when their story does not fit the common assumption that pornography is primarily a man's struggle.T
EP.29 Christian Dating Advice You Should Stop Believing
Have you ever been told dating should feel easy, that the right person will show up when you stop looking, or that maybe you’re just being too picky?In this episode of Dating & Desire, Lauren and Bridgett unpack some of the Christian dating advice singles hear over and over and ask whether it’s actually helping. They talk about why anxiety doesn’t always mean a relationship is wrong, why datin
EP.28 Sexual Compatibility Before Marriage: How Can You Know Without Sex?
If you're waiting until marriage to have sex, how can you know if you and the person you're dating are sexually compatible?Lauren and Bridgett explore what sexual compatibility can look like long before sex enters the relationship. Rather than treating compatibility as something you can only discover through sexual activity, they look at the ways attraction, emotional safety, boundaries, h
EP.27 How to Know If Someone Is Emotionally Safe to Date with Dr. Glenn and Phyllis Hill of Connection Codes
Dr. Glenn and Phyllis Hill, the couple behind Connection Codes, offer a grounded and hopeful vision for emotional connection in dating, marriage, and everyday relationships. Their own story includes a painful start to marriage, years of misunderstanding, and a later discovery that emotional language could change everything about how they loved and understood one another.The deeper tension here is
EP.26 How to Heal After a Breakup
Lauren and Bridgett tackle one of the hardest parts of dating: Breakups. From the disappointment of ending early connections to the heartbreak of losing a relationship you thought might become your forever person, they explore what it means to grieve with honesty, dignity, and self-trust.Because dating requires risk, and risk sometimes leads to loss. Instead of minimizing grief, over-spiritualizin
EP.25 Reclaiming Wholeness After Sexual Abuse with Tabitha Westbrook
Tabitha Westbrook, a trauma therapist and author, brings clarity, courage, and compassion to the tender realities of sexual abuse, healing, and dating after harm. With deep honesty and a fierce belief in God’s good design, she helps name what has been distorted, what has been taken, and what restoration can actually look like.A central tension in this conversation is how often abuse is hidden unde
EP.24 The Cost of Avoiding Rupture & Repair in Dating with Dr. Jake Porter
Dr. Jake Porter, a couples therapist who specializes in betrayal and repair, offers a grounded conversation about how people actually grow in faith, love, and relational maturity. With insight from neuroscience, Scripture, and human development, he helps name why dating is not just about finding the right person, but about becoming someone capable of healthy connection.The deeper tension here is t
EP.23 Singleness, Sexuality, and the Desire to Be Known with Dr. Carol Tanksley
Dr. Carol Tanksley, a physician and minister, brings a rare blend of medical wisdom, theological depth, and lived experience to the conversation around singleness and sexuality. Having lived through long-term singleness, a cherished marriage, widowhood, and singleness again, she speaks with honesty about desire, intimacy, the body, and what healthy sexual formation actually takes.One of the deeper
EP.22 Is Masturbation Wrong for Christians? A Thoughtful Conversation on Discernment
Bridgett Blood and Lauren Mathues step into one of the most tender and often misunderstood conversations in Christian sexuality: masturbation, self-pleasure, and how adults make embodied, faithful decisions. With warmth and nuance, they name the range of perspectives people often carry, from “always wrong” to “always empowering,” and invite listeners into a more honest conversation about story, Sc
EP.21 What we are learning, loving, and a whole lot about kissing
Bridgett and Lauren gather the threads from recent conversations with Dr. Anthony Bradley, Barb Hill, Dr. Andrew Bauman, Dr. Jenna Mountain, Jonathan Hernandez, Adam Young, and Dr. Tony. Across themes of men’s formation, emotional capacity, abstinence, shame, story, and embodied sexuality, they keep returning to what healthy love actually takes. The tension is honest: rules can feel safer than dis
EP.20 Holistic Health for the Man You Want to Be with Dr. Tony Krohn
Dr. Tony Krohn, chiropractor and men’s holistic health coach, brings a thoughtful and needed perspective on men, formation, health, and what actually prepares someone for love. He speaks to the pressure many men feel to become impressive on the outside while avoiding the deeper work of identity, community, healing, and embodied integrity. This conversation moves beyond appearances, apps, and exter
EP.19 Making Sense of Your Sexual Story with Adam Young
Adam Young, licensed clinical social worker and author of Make Sense of Your Story, brings a compassionate and clarifying lens to why our past continues to shape how we date, desire, and attach. Rather than asking us to summarize our whole life from a distance, Adam invites us to pay attention to the particular memories, relational patterns, bodily responses, and places of pain that have formed us
EP.18 The Night God Met Me in My Addiction with Jonathan Hernandez
Jonathan Hernandez, certified Connections Codes Coach, specializing in porn recovery and men's emotional wellness, joins Bridgett and Lauren for an honest conversation about sexuality, shame, curiosity, and wholeness. Through his story with pornography, trauma, faith, and dating, he names what it looks like to pursue healing with integrity instead of fear. The tension is real: many of us learn
EP.17 From Formulas to Formation: Abstinence, Sexual Fragility and Maturity with Dr. Jenna Mountain
Bridgett and Lauren sit down with Dr. Jenna Mountain, a sex therapist and educator who works at the intersection of faith and sexuality, for a conversation that gently rewires how many of us were taught to think about abstinence. Jenna brings both clinical experience and a deep love for the church, and she does not shy away from the places it has gotten things wrong. Together, they explore what it
EP.16 Good Friends and Full Honesty will Level Up Your Dating Life with Jamie Haigh & Blake Roberts (Three Percent Co)
Bridgett and Lauren sit down with Jamie and Blake of the Three Percent Podcast, two therapists, friends, and husbands whose work centers on what it means to be a safe, embodied man. The conversation moves through male friendship, attachment, the difference between knowing your story and doing the work, and the quiet ways loneliness shapes how a person dates. It is a grounded, honest look at what h
EP.15 Why "Don't Waste My Time" Is Hurting Your Dating Life
Bridgett and Lauren sit down for an honest conversation about one of dating's most loaded phrases: "don't waste my time." They unpack where that posture comes from, why it often reveals more about our own fear than about a potential partner, and what it really looks like to date from a place of groundedness rather than self-protection.Underneath the urgency to know everything on
EP.14 Awe vs. Consumption: The Difference Between Lust and Healthy Desire with Andrew Bauman
Therapist and author Andrew Bauman joins Bridgett and Lauren to explore embodiment, sexual story work, and what it really looks like to grow into healthy, connected relationships.Together, they name the difference between understanding your story and actually experiencing healing, and why the body often carries what insight alone cannot resolve. It is a thoughtful look at how awareness, formation,
EP.13 Emotional Maturity vs. Emotional Capacity: What Compatibility Really Looks Like with Barb Hill
What if the person you love can't actually meet you where you need to be met? Therapist and author Barb Hill joins Bridgett and Lauren for a conversation that reframes what Christian compatibility really requires. Barb walks through five kinds of compatibility (emotional, spiritual, intellectual, physical, and how they all interact) and draws a line that changes the whole dating conversation:
EP.12 The Masculine Formation Crisis: Why Young Men Are Checking Out with Dr. Anthony Bradley
Dr. Anthony Bradley joins Bridgett and Lauren to talk about what's actually driving the crisis of young men - and why the church's standard diagnosis is wrong.Bradley traces the problem past porn and video games to a formation breakdown that started with the Industrial Revolution. When fathers left for factories and children left for schools, the developmental process that shaped boys into
EP.11 Listener Questions on Safety, Rejection, Desire, and Singleness: D&D Debrief #1
Episode 11 kicks off the D&D Debrief, a new recurring format where Bridgett and Lauren answer listener questions, recap past episodes, and preview what's coming. In this first one, they tackle four real questions: how to read whether someone is safe to date, what to do when rejection keeps happening, how to talk about different physical comfort levels, and how to tell if your desire is hea
EP.10 When Dating Gets More Serious: How Connection and Commitment Actually Grow
Bridgett and Lauren pick up where they left off in the stages-of-dating series and walk through what committed relationship actually looks like - what it requires, what conversations belong here, and what most people skip until it's too late. They define what commitment means at this stage (it's not knowing you want to marry someone - it's knowing you'd regret not finding out), and
EP.09 The Early Stages of Dating: What to Know Before Becoming Exclusive
Bridgett and Lauren break down the first stage of dating - the part between meeting someone and deciding whether you want to be exclusive - and they want you to stop treating it like a marriage audition. Lauren shares her three-stage framework and makes the case that six to eight dates is enough time to know if you want to move forward, as long as you're actually being yourself. Bridgett talks
EP.08 You're Not Missing Your Purpose: Vocation, Calling, and Where We Go Looking for Worth - with Malissa Mackey
Your job is not your calling. Your relationship status is not your worth. And singleness is not a waiting room.Malissa Mackey has spent over a decade helping people locate themselves in a better story - one where ordinary work carries real dignity, and where identity doesn't depend on job title or relationship status.In this conversation, she and the hosts dig into what the Bible actually says abo
EP.07 Sex Addiction Recovery and Dating: A Therapist's Honest Advice with David Boyajian
David Boyajian is a licensed marriage and family therapist and certified sex addiction therapist based in San Diego. In this episode, he joins Lauren and Bridgett to talk about what lust actually is, how it differs from normal sexual awareness, and when a pattern crosses the line into addiction.David explains the practical signs of addiction, why shame often makes the problem worse, and how the br
EP.06 Contempt, Curiosity, and What Ruins Dating Relationships (Understanding Desire) with Jay Stringer
What if desire isn't the problem? What if the real issue is that you've never been taught how to develop it?Jay Stringer is a licensed mental health counselor and author of Unwanted and the new book Desire. His original research on over 4,000 adults found that our longings, attractions, and even our unwanted behaviors carry real information about our stories. In this episode, he joins Brid
EP.05 The Case for Flirting: Why Christians need to reclaim it
Bridgett and Lauren think flirting deserves a reputation upgrade - especially in the church. In this episode, they talk about why most Christians have been taught to suppress one of the most natural ways we connect with people, and what it costs us when we do. They get into the fears that keep people from flirting - fear of rejection, fear of being misread, fear of being labeled "too much&quo
EP.04 - Men Want Romance and Women Want Sex (The Sex Talk You Never Got) with Sam Jolman
Therapist and author Sam Jolman joins Bridgett and Lauren to unpack what most Christians were never taught about sexual arousal - and why it matters for dating, marriage, and your relationship with your own body. Sam defines sex as a form of play and awe - something the church rarely frames that way. He explains arousal non-concordance, breaks down how arousal and desire actually work, and offers
EP.03 The Fear of Being Single Forever (And What Your Longing Reveals)
Longing makes dating feel risky because something real is on the line. In this episode, Bridgett and Lauren discuss the fears that surface when desire goes unmet - including the lies about God's character, your appearance, and your worth. Lauren explains how she rebuilt her sense of beauty apart from whether any man chose her. Bridgett shares how she learned to stop putting all the weight of h
EP.02 How Purity Culture Shaped Our View of Our Body with Courtney Alexander
Many Christians grew up hearing that desire was dangerous. That their bodies couldn't be trusted. That rigid rules were the path to purity.In this episode, biblical trauma-informed coach Courtney Alexander unpacks four specific distortions that came out of purity culture—and how they continue to affect both singles and married people today.Courtney, Bridgett, and Lauren discuss:Why desire and
EP.01 You're Not Asking for Too Much: A Better Framework for Dating
Your past shows up in your dating life whether you acknowledge it or not.In this introductory episode, hosts Bridgett Blood and Lauren Mathues share who they are and why they created Dating and Desire. Bridgett is single, a former pastor, and now a sexual story work coach. Lauren is married with two kids and has coached Christian singles since 2018. Both have wrestled with insecurity about whether
Dating & Desire Podcast - Trailer
The Dating & Desire Podcast helps Christian singles and dating adults navigate faith, sexuality, and relationships with honesty and hope. Hosted by coaches Bridgett Blood and Lauren Mathues, we explore sexual formation, emotional safety, and integrity in dating through real conversations with pastors, therapists, and relationship experts. Because your desire is holy, your body is good, and you
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