Erika (Swensen) Powell

So, I want to be very open and honest about my feelings for this week’s topic. In class we discussed sexual intimacy. Well, more on martial intimacy but I’ll get to that later. If I am being completely honest with myself, I don’t think I every really formally learned about sex. I would be able to gather information or discern from different contexts, but it seemed to generally come from the media. I was taught that sexual intimacy is reserved for a man and woman who were lawfully and legally married. I also knew that it was a very sacred thing, that it is a Godly power. So therefore, I knew how important it was to live a virtuous and chaste life. I knew that I wanted to save my self for marriage and that was very important to me. However, after this lesson I firmly believe that the media has distorted my views and thoughts on sex. Which I knew before this week’s lesson, the adversary has worked very hard to make this a weapon of evil. Which truly terrified me. As excited as I w

I’ve been married for almost six months now, and I have been looking forward to this week’s lesson since the beginning of the semester. This week was all about transitions in marriage. The advice that I received over and over before I got married was the fact that marriage is hard. Hard but so fulfilling and rewarding, kind of like the same advice I got before serving a mission. But I feel like this advice can instill a lot of fear. And if I’m being honest this fear has stayed in the back of my mind. But the fact that marriage is hard is justified, especially the first year. Because you have two individuals transitioning to trying to become one unit. Two people who came from different backgrounds, experiences, and possibly even standards. It is a huge adjustment. But also you got married for a reason didn’t you? You got married because you love this person and you want to grow your love and become one. You want to become a team, and create a family together so why is it so hard

Coming home from my mission, in my last interview with my mission President he said the most important choice you will ever make in this life is who you will marry. That puts a lot of pressure if there wasn’t already some.  There seems to be all of these formulas for successful dating and how to find “the one.” And there are a lot of things I agree with.  For example, there was this theory we discussed in class that I felt could help lead to a successful partnership and relationship. It’s called the RAM model. Which stands for the relationship attachment model. There are five attributes or five things you want to develop with if your relationship. But the catch is one of these qualities cannot be higher than the one before it. So the qualities are know, trust, rely, commit, and touch. So when you begin a relationship you don’t want it to be solely based on touch, or be committed so fast without knowing the person all that well.  So while we were talk

This week we talked about some topics that can be very “touchy” and extremely controversial. And I wanted to start out with a couple of scriptures. The first one is in Doctrine and Covenants section 10 verse 68, “Whosoever  declareth  more or less than this, the same is not of me, but is  against  me; therefore he is not of my church.” The second scripture is Also in the Doctrine and Covenants section 84:45, “For the word of the Lord is truth and whatsoever is truth is light and whatsoever is light is Spirit, even the Spirit of Jesus Christ.”             This first scripture can sound really intense and kind of scary. I think that the fact that the Lord instructs us to not declare "more or less" than He has declared is one, just important, just in general. Because when we add or take away from what the Lord teaches, we get corrupt doctrine. We start to teach the ways of man rather than the ways of God.  However, I feel like there is a lot to learn from it. Especially

You know how your family just has these unspoken rules? You know like little family traditions. Typically, when I hear the phrase “family traditions” my mind always goes to that song from fiddler on the roof, but also I think about Christmas. Like in my family we always get a new ornament for the year, and we always get new pajamas. It’s a lot of happy memories like those that I associate the word “traditions” positively.                 But some of the times, our “family traditions” or the culture within our family may be hurting our family relationships. Now when I think of family culture I think about my personal family. My mom was born and raised in the Philippines, while my dad was born in the US. Just between my parents I could pick up on some of the different ways they were raised. And I especially saw the culture difference when we would spend time with either of my parents extended family. But that was normal for me. Just like our own individual family culture is just the