Olivia Plath gets real about the negative affects her religious upbringing had on her sex life — and how it influenced her romance with Ethan Plath — on Welcome to Plathville.
“I’m realizing that I actually have way more handicaps than I thought I did,” Olivia, 26, tells her sister Lydia Grace in Us Weekly’s exclusive preview of the Tuesday, September 3, episode of the TLC series.
Olivia was raised in a fundamentalist Christian household alongside her nine siblings. Both Olivia and Lydia Grace, 24, have left the religion, which is centered on keeping up patriarchal gender norms.
After filing for divorce from Ethan, 26, in October 2023, Olivia learned her whole approach to sex and romance was stewed because of religion.
“What I knew about sex growing up was don’t have it until you’re married, and that resulted in so much misinformation even as a teenager,” Olivia shares in a confessional interview. “I remember being a teenager and thinking I could get pregnant if I was literally, like, sitting too close to a guy.”
Olivia notes that her lack of knowledge about sex played a factor in marrying Ethan, who is also from the fundamental world.
“The other thing that I was told is, like, once you are married and you can have sex and not go to hell, your job is to make him happy,” she claims. “Your job is to please him. It’s about him.”
Olivia notes that being subordinate to her spouse “worked” for a “few years because Ethan was told the same thing.” However, she no longer abides by that teaching. “That doesn’t work for me anymore,” the reality star declares.
“Being out on my own, I feel like I’m realizing for the first time how much purity culture really f–ked me up,” Olivia confesses. “That’s why I married the first boy that I held hands with.”
Olivia and Ethan tied the knot in October 2018 after being engaged for nearly one year. The photographer previously told Us that when she was dating Ethan, “I knew that I was being controlled in what we were allowed to do [and] what we were allowed to say.”
The control factor is something that Olivia claimed was evident in all aspects of her life prior to marrying Ethan because of her family’s fundamentalist ideals.
“By the time I was 13, I was being given books on how to be the best wife possible,” Olivia told Teen Vogue in April, comparing the religion to “a cult.” She explained, “From a very young age I assumed that what was expected from me in life as a woman, and what I was told what was expected of me as a woman was to get married and to have kids and to be a stay-at-home mom.”
Earlier this season, Olivia told the cameras that “casual connections are really hard for me” after her marriage to Ethan.
Olivia pointed at her childhood as the possible cause of her romantic hesitation. A few episodes later, Olivia joked that she was being a “very careful hoe” after going out on a few dates post-divorce.
“When I use [the word], it’s in kind of a reclaiming way,” Olivia told the cameras on the August 20 episode. “Like, ‘This is my body. And I get to decide if I want to go on dates, if I want to spend the night, if I want to be intimate with somebody.’ That’s all my choice.”
In a separate episode, Olivia recalled her “first time spending the night at someone’s house” as a single woman, calling her date a “lovely gentleman.”
Olivia has since found love again with a mystery man, whom she met working at a wedding. “For the most part, I keep our relationship more quiet,” she exclusively told Us in July, calling her boyfriend “an amazing guy.”
Welcome to Plathville airs on TLC Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET.
