American influences were increasingly making their way into British church culture, especially in Pentecostal circles. Speakers and musicians frequently traveled between the two countries, so ideas cross-pollinated. As I attended conferences, listened to tapes, and watched Christian documentaries, I was discovering more of them.
A movement called True Love Waits—also known as the purity movement or abstinence movement—was sweeping the States, and it didn’t take long for it to reach me on British shores. Various authors, speakers, and singers taught an impassioned message insisting not only on no sex before marriage, but also on avoiding any physical affection at all between dating couples.
I watched several documentaries featuring American Christian teens who were choosing not to kiss until their wedding day. “I’m choosing to put Jesus first,” one of them said to the camera in a documentary, “that means choosing the way of the Spirit, not the way of the flesh.” Another said, “Physical intimacy—even a quick kiss—is a slippery slope toward sex, and I’m worried I’ll go too far. Better to avoid anything besides holding hands until marriage. I know it’s what God wants, and I want to please him with my life.”
Spokespeople for the abstinence movement described it as follows: “True Love Waits promotes sexual purity not just in a physical way, but also in a cognitive, spiritual, and behavioral way.” It was all-encompassing; thoughts of sex, sexual feelings, and any physical affection between young people were seen as potentially dangerous. Sexual desire was the enemy, and life was a battlefield where we must wage war against it.
A major book on this theme, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, by Joshua Harris, was published in January 1997, when I was seventeen. His book sold 1.2 million copies worldwide. Harris was a homeschooled, twenty-one-year-old Christian when he wrote it, and he was proud to be a virgin.
The book opens with a story about a young Christian couple, Anna and David, who are soon to be married. One night, Anna has a dream about their wedding day, but gradually it turns into something of a nightmare. In this dream, as she walks down the aisle to David, other girls suddenly start standing up and walking toward him too, taking his hands and standing next to him.
“Who are these girls, David?” Anna asks in the dream, feeling tears welling up.
“They’re girls from my past,” David answers, looking ashamed. “Anna, they don’t mean anything to me now … but I’ve given part of my heart to each of them.” Anna was devastated and David was deeply ashamed as this strange scene unfolded. It left both of them ashamed and uncomfortable, turning a beautiful wedding day into a scene of tears and shame. This was just a dream, but by using it in the opening of the book, Joshua Harris hit home his message about the fallout that not being sexually abstinent could create for any of us. Our own wedding days might turn from a dream to a nightmare.
Reading this was enough to shock any churchgoing teen. It left us anxious and horrified. Harris wasn’t just talking about sex in his analogy; it was about David giving his heart to other girls emotionally too. Emotional closeness was something that should be saved for marriage as well.
Not only were sex and kissing off-limits, according to Harris, but so was dating itself. Dating, he argued, was a selfish approach to relationships. It treated them casually, as something you could start and finish at will. Dating was “a training ground for divorce,” as teens would learn to walk away whenever relationships became difficult.
Harris proposed a different model, known as courtship. This meant spending time with the person you liked only in groups, not one-on-one, and having family members present as much as possible. Also, a guy and girl should only begin courting if they believe it is likely to progress toward a lifelong marriage.
The book contained stories of various young couples who had “strayed” into sex before marriage and (apparently) dealt with debilitating guilt, trauma, and damaged future relationships as a result. It was distressing stuff.
For me, this extreme ideology was strangely appealing; if any Christian teen was keen to distance themselves from the effects of puberty, it was me. Hormones seemed like the ultimate enemy, as they were causing my feelings for girls.
Perhaps, I thought, I can make up for those secret feelings by being a perfect example when it comes to my morals around saving sex for marriage. Someday God will change me, I’ll fall in love with a guy, not a girl, and when I do, we’ll save everything beyond a brief kiss for our wedding night.
The purity movement was encouraging young adults to buy “purity rings” and wear them as a sign of their commitment to stop dating and to save sex for marriage. When I attended a concert that preached this message and sold these rings on a merchandise table, I bought one and put it on.
True Love Waits was igniting a generation of Christian youth, mostly in the US, but also around the world. Other resources followed, to keep us all reading and learning. Josh Harris’s flagship book was still flying off the shelves, and he followed it with sequels, including Not Even a Hint: Guarding Your Heart Against Lust and Boy Meets Girl: Say Hello to Courtship.
Well-known Christian artist Rebecca St. James wrote the foreword to Harris’s first book and, a few years later, released her hit song “Wait for Me,” a prayer for her future husband to remain a virgin until they met and were married, and a promise that she would do the same. The song was nominated for a Dove Award (Christian music’s equivalent of a Grammy) in 2002. Following the song’s success, Rebecca published a book, Wait for Me: Rediscovering the Joy of Purity in Romance, which sold over a hundred thousand copies. The abstinence movement was gathering huge momentum.
Ever a perfectionist and never one to go half measure, I fully embraced the ideas of True Love Waits. Not all of this was entirely bad, but it was certainly extreme, and it damaged my perspectives on sexuality and the body. Seeing my sexuality as the enemy, leading me away from God, provided a religious reason to completely distance myself from my own body.
Slowly, I felt less and less of a connection to my emotions too, and dissociation became my norm. This brought some relief—I now had fewer feelings for girls. But it had far broader consequences; it became harder to feel anything at all. At a high-school parents’ evening, when a teacher praised me in front of my mum and dad for an essay I’d written, I couldn’t even crack a smile. I didn’t feel happiness, or pride, or encouragement. I felt nothing.
“Vicky, you can look pleased if you want,” the teacher remarked jokingly, taken aback by my blank expression. I tried to look happy, but I felt numb and unaffected.
On my sixteenth birthday, when other girls were picking out the shortest dress they could get away with to go on a date with their boyfriend, my parents had asked me, “Vicky, what would you like for your birthday?”
My response? “I’d like two Bibles, please.” I had my eye on two specific versions at our local Christian bookstore in Canterbury. One was a study version—The Spirit-Filled Life Bible—complete with commentary, maps, and translations of Greek and Hebrew words. The second was a contemporary translation—The Message—that put the Bible into everyday language. These were genuinely what I wanted—a way to deepen my faith.
Delighted, I unwrapped and pored over those books, filling them with underlining and notes. I loved God deeply, but faith was starting to get out of balance in my life and becoming a form of escapism. I thought about, read about, and spoke about little else. Prayer and worship provided me with a different reality to live in—a spiritual one. This otherworldly, ethereal realm was easier to focus on than the physical world I was finding so tough to navigate.
Like many evangelical Christians, I got up early each morning and did devotions for an hour, following a daily Bible reading plan. Gradually those morning devotions became more self-critical; I adopted a practice used by John and Charles Wesley, the founders of Methodism, who used to get together for meetings that they called the Holy Club. During those gatherings the Wesleys painstakingly assessed themselves using twenty-two accountability questions that explored how well they’d lived up to God’s