I Waited Until My Wedding To Lose My Virginity, and It’s the Best Thing I Ever Did

I Waited Until My Wedding To Lose My Virginity, and It’s the Best Thing I Ever Did

Phy, you need to read this.”

I got that text from my friend while I was sipping coffee in renovated cottage-turned-cafe. It contained a link.

“This writer did a purity pledge,” The texts continued. “And has rejected all of it. You need to read it, and some of the comments.”

So I did, and as tears welled in my eyes, I knew I’d have to do what I really don’t like doing: write a response post.

The article was entitled “It Happened to Me: I Waited Until My Wedding Night to Lose My Virginity and I Wish I Hadn’t”. I read it in its entirety. The more I read, the more heartbroken I felt for Samantha (the author) and the twisted experience she relayed in the post. But my sadness was overwhelmed with a sense of utter urgency.

A lot of young women will read that post: young women who have made purity pledges and are waiting for an excuse to walk away from them. Young women teetering on the bring of sexual and spiritual destruction. Young women wondering if it is even worth this waiting-for-marriage.

So I’m going to battle for the other side because this waiting-for-marriage thing – it’s worth it. In fact, waiting for marriage to lose my virginity was the best decision I ever made.

1. My commitment to purity wasn’t to a church: it was to Christ Himself…

Go Now, and Sin No More

Go Now, and Sin No More

The light was bright as the sun: gleaming, searing, so intense I could only squint down at my feet as I shuffled up the steps. Enormous doors opened slowly as I approached, their engravings deep and elaborate. Everything – the doors, the steps, the light – was brilliant white.

Is There Forgiveness for Repeated Failure?

Is There Forgiveness for Repeated Failure?

So when I failed – whether in word, thought, or action – I would go through days of spiritual turmoil attempting to figure out whether God would forgive me, if I had jeopardized my salvation, and if I was worthy to even call myself a Christian. Sometimes I wondered if I was even a Christian at all. Whatever the sin, I saw my repeated failure as mounting evidence that I very obviously did not love Jesus, and because of that, Jesus must not love me.

Sexual Freedom and the Christian Girl

Sexual Freedom and the Christian Girl

Sometimes I wish there were a Christian Cosmopolitan magazine. I know – it’s an oxymoron. But bear with me.

What if there were a magazine for Christian young women that had articles not only about being your best at work, how to wake up in the morning, modesty and fashion – but also about birth control options other than the pill? About what sex looks like in marriage? Articles about the questions young women are asking that the church and family refuse to answer in a Christian context?

While plenty of books have been written, I know there are many young women who have questions they didn’t dare ask, and those questions were eventually answered by an eager world of Cosmo, Self, and Elle. The girls find their answers – but from the wrong people, and in the wrong places, with the wrong worldview.

So we find girls who started out with every tool necessary to build a future bright with hope and blessing, and watch them throw it away to prove nothing to nobody. We see little daughters grow up into young women, their innocent eyes now lined with anger because they believe the purity ring prevented them from experiencing real life. But as they go about experiencing, experimenting, and finding themselves, they lose something far more precious.

In the grocery store check out line we’re told that sexual freedom is being in control of your own body and giving it to whoever you please, whenever you please, and in as many small pieces as you choose to meter out at a time. But Cosmo only tells girls about the night before, not the morning after…

The Purity Ring is Not the Problem

The Purity Ring is Not the Problem

In my early teens, my bookshelf included such titles as:

Before You Meet Prince Charming by Sarah Mally
Becoming a Young Woman After God’s Own Heart by Elizabeth George
Beautiful Girlhood
When Dreams Come True by Eric and Leslie Ludy
Why I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Josh Harris

I liked to read about relationships (in that sense, nothing has changed; I’ve just developed a more grown-up taste of biographies of famous married couples) and read all the above titles, plus more. I grew up at the height of the purity movement: a church-led initiative encouraging commitments to abstinence, intentional relationships, courtship and purity rings. My dad gave me my ring at age 13, and most of my friends had one, too. I thought I had relationships figured out.

And then I got into a relationship, and I discovered that not only did I not have it figured out, but there were capabilities within me directly contrary to all I had ever learned…

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