Kathy then explained that she was referring to the earliest days of their marriage and that they had been virgins before their wedding day. “We were fumbling around and just learning the mechanics, not to mention the romance, of sex. My comment, which is indented so everyone knows it is a quote (is headed): As Kathy said in her notes: It refers to our performance anxiety (mostly Tim’s) and my discomfort (as a virgin on my honeymoon), and our willingness to abandon both of those things and just love one another.”
“[This quotation] has wrongly (and inexplicably) been attributed to Tim, which means you have robbed me of my voice, ladies,” Kathy continued. “At no time and in no way was there the least suggestion that women should accept painful intercourse as their lot. If that is what they are experiencing, they should see a doctor immediately!”
“In our case, my pain was very temporary and common among virginal brides,” Kathy concluded.
Bryana thanked Kathy for her clarification and reiterated that her comments weren’t “intended to be a personal attack” on the Kellers’ marriage. Rather, her issues were with the text of the book.
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Sharing a photo of the specific text from the book she was referring to, Bryana pointed out that “the text here doesn’t say anything about the painful sex being something that only happened during the honeymoon or the first months of marriage. Tim writes, ‘in those years, we started to dread having sex,’ and the ‘it just hurt’ line appears right after that. Hopefully you can understand how confusing this might be for a young bride (like myself). To me, the text seemed to suggest that over a long period of time you & Tim were engaging in sex in which you felt only pain and yet did not ask Tim to stop.”
Bryana shared with Kathy that she suffered from “severe vaginismus” as a young woman which made the words that she read in their book “absolutely devastating for the early months (even years) of my marriage—It made me think it was okay (even expected) for me to hide my pain from my husband during sex, and this made things so, SO much worse for us.”
“My husband & I read your book together in good faith just before our wedding, with no intent to criticize or find fault—and we did find much wisdom in it,” Bryana continued. “But sadly, the tangible and long-term damage this passage did to us was so great that we now regret reading it at all.”
Gregoire shared that her team did a study of 20,000 women and found that over 22 percent experienced vaginismus. Further, Gregoire said that if any of those women read the passage from Keller’s book, they’d probably interpret it the same way as Bryana did.
Bryana argued that while Kathy said the book doesn’t suggest a woman should accept painful intercourse, it could easily be misunderstood as such. “I hope you can understand how easy it would be to read the passage that way since there’s no caveat or warning given to couples that the anecdote (‘it just hurt’) is problematic,” Bryana said.
Commenting on Kathy’s response, Gregoire said, “Even if Kathy WASN’T enduring vaginismus; even if this was only temporary; even if this wasn’t a chronic problem–none of that was said in the book.”
Gregoire then pointed out that one of the problems with the way sex is portrayed in Keller’s book “is that it portrays not communicating during intercourse as normal. Kathy didn’t speak up, and Tim didn’t encourage her to. Nowhere was the solution given that they would start communicating.”
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