"Attachment is forbidden. Possession is forbidden. Compassion, which I would define as unconditional love, is essential to a Jedi's life. So you might say, that we are encouraged to love."

today my brother, who is an lds missionary, wrote home that he has feelings for a sister missionary. he's almost done with his time as a missionary, and he has a past of deep love and a sincere need to take care of and be attached to someone he loves. his relationships with his girlfriends influenced him greatly and he esteemed them in a way beyond teenage love.

my mom removed the paragraph about his feelings before sending it out. i got both versions, and thought it was an interesting choice.

i was surprised when, over dinner, my husband asked me what i thought and felt about his feelings. he probably wasn't surprised by my answer. i expressed frustration that mormon culture sexualizes all relationships with members of the opposite sex. we only begin dating at the age of 16, and only then on group dates, and many marry young. i remember reading, as a teenager, a book from a popular lds woman who suggested that lds girls remain physically and emotionally aloof from men until marriage, for their husband was the only person (of the opposite sex) that intimacy should be shared with. a friend from byu in the accounting major heard of seminars where they conducted seminars with students on how to interact witht he opposite sex because the university got so many reports on how weird their male graduates acted (i.e. refusing to go to lunch meetings one on one with female co-workers or bosses). this hypersexualization is, of course, meant to protect marriage and by extension the family that are so key to lds life and doctrine and happiness.

however, here we have young people who are scarred and struggling because of a lack of sexual experience. i mentioned again to hubs an article going around where an lds missionary in a tropical location struggled with the bikini-clad culture, but had a companion who was from a tropical location and expressed that the "immodest" women were normal to him--not that he didn't feel attraction, but it was a feeling he had learned to mediate and had become a non-object to him. my brother, essentially, is the first missionary--terrified by attraction, immobilized by it, praying to god continually to be delivered from it because he has been instilled with fear. he is an exceptional man and is doing what he is taught to be right. he is not at fault. but the suffering makes me so sad, and i think it shouldn't need to be that way.

my husband agreed. he suggested that if i hadn't grown up in mormon culture, i wouldn't have such a problem with jealousy in my relationships. i agreed. we talked a little more about it, and both feel very concerned for him.