Eric and Leslie Ludy

Purity Culture and My Sexuality

HA Editorial Team4 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Cynthia Jeub’s blog CynthiaJeub.com. It was originally published on April 17, 2015. 

“I know that it’s a secret,
And that I gotta keep it,
But I want the lights on
Yeah, I want the lights on
And I don’t want to run away anymore
Leave the lights on, leave the lights on, leave the lights on
What would they say, what would they do?
Would it be trouble if they knew?” –Meiko

I had my heart broken twice before I realized I’d been in love. That might sound like an exaggeration or melodrama, but it’s actually possible thanks to the wonders of purity culture.

When I was a teenager, I read and re-read books like Sarah Mally’s Before You Meet Prince Charming, Eric and Leslie Ludy’s When God Writes Your Love Story, and Debi Pearl’s Preparing to be a Help Meet.

They kept me strong in my dedication to never think about sex, or to think about members of the opposite sex. I had my obsessions and celebrity crushes, but if the image of seeing someone naked ever entered my mind, I’d fight it out with quoting the Bible.

I knew I would only ever give my heart to one person – the man I would marry. He must show interest in me; women don’t initiate. The concept of mutual consent, mutual interest, was never introduced. If he didn’t reciprocate my feelings, it was a meaningless feeling, and feelings were worthless. I needed to control my very thoughts, so I could give my whole heart to my husband, along with my first kiss. Just toeing the line of saving sex for marriage was too low a standard for me.

Blame doesn’t fall on any one person for how I controlled my thoughts. It was a personal choice, something that was very important to me. The people around me reinforced the notion that I was doing the right thing. Some people were better at the game of self-thought-policing than I was, and they made me feel like I could never be good enough. Some people saw me as unapproachable because I was so sincere. Every failure looked like rebellion and felt like despair.

Surely I didn’t love my best friend when I started college. He didn’t love me, so I told myself to “guard my heart” and push away all emotions of attachment. At the same time, our late-night conversations kept me going through my darkest depression and most intense stress. I finally told him that I needed space to figure out why the sight of his name gave me such indecipherable pain.

It would take me months to unlearn what purity culture had taught me to do: conceal all desire, even from yourself.

So it was that I fell in love with a man, and didn’t realize what had happened until afterward. I just assumed I was straight because I was attracted to men. It never occurred to me that I might make the same mistake twice, equally blinded to my desires toward a girl.

It was similar – I had a crush on her, but didn’t know it. She once kissed another girl in front of me, and I desperately wanted to kiss her. Even that feeling was not enough to make me think I wasn’t totally straight. I figured I was just curious, having never been kissed. Giving gifts is something I rarely do and often feels like an obligatory chore, but I gave her thoughtful things that I knew she’d like.

When we had a fight that ended our friendship, I was devastated. Another friend asked if I’d been in love with her. I said no, of course I wasn’t.

A few months later I got an email, and was instantly interested – this person, who hadn’t revealed their gender or identity, matched me intellectually. I assumed the sender was male, and entertained thoughts of meeting, and we exchanged lengthy emails.

The person who wrote these intelligent, complex, and beautiful emails revealed that she was a girl, and I realized it made no difference to me.

I started asking my friends questions – you don’t see both the male and female body as equally attractive? I’d assumed that everyone appreciated the aesthetic differences between the genders.

In the world I grew up in, there were two kinds of people: straight, and broken. Nobody was born gay, the church and chapel services insisted. The idea of other identities on a spectrum was far outside our reality. The idea of romantic and sexual relationships other than marriage was blanketly labeled as “sin.”

Of course I’d think I was straight. If I could close off my feelings for men, I could certainly close off my feelings for women. It was only after I started to learn what attraction felt like, that I knew I liked girls. I always had liked girls. I just didn’t know that my experience was any different from anyone else’s, because we never talked about our feelings. We never defined our terms.

Humans are beautiful to me – whether they’re male, female, or non-binary.

You could call me sapiosexual, in that I love people for their intelligence, and my level of attraction depends on how smart and interesting the other person is. Many sapiosexuals, though, don’t find the human body sexually attractive, and I do. It’s also accurate to call me pansexual, because I’m open to dating non-binary or trans people, in addition to the binary genders. For me, the title I’ve chosen is bisexual.

I’m bisexual. There, I’ve come out, now you know.

Rethinking Purity

HA Editorial Team5 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, MadisonElizabethx.

The following is an excerpt from R.L. Stollar’s “Facing Our Fears: How the Voices of Homeschool Alumni Can Help Homeschooling,” originally prepared for the 2014 Great Homeschool Convention in Ontario, California. You can read the presentation in full here.

When we consider modesty and purity as a dialogue and not simply a monologue, we will realize what has often been communicated to homeschool children about modesty and purity has tied directly to abuse they have experienced and mental illness they struggle with. So, in fact, the dominant monologue about modesty and purity is a great example of how everything I’ve been talking about is all inter-connected. There’s this vast web of issues and no one issue is itself the “problem.”

If you follow homeschool news, you’ve probably heard a lot of homeschool “problems” as of late. Maybe those problems involved specific people, like Doug Phillips or Bill Gothard. Or maybe those problems involved specific ideas, like “Patriarchy” or “Legalism.” Over the last year, for example, homeschool debate coach Chris Jeub declared that “Patriarchy Has Got To Go,”[i] Presbyterian pastor Shawn Mathis claimed one of the “root problems” in homeschooling circles is Legalism,[ii] and HSLDA’s Michael Farris drew “A Line in the Sand,” denouncing both Patriarchy and Legalism as “damaging” and “threatening” to homeschool freedoms.[iii]

While I do think both Patriarchy and Legalism as systems of thought need to be called out, I want to point out that you are more than two-thirds of the way through this paper about issues homeschooling communities desperately need to address and this is the first time I have mentioned Patriarchy and Legalism. And I only mentioned them in the context of what homeschool leaders have called out thus far.

What I hope to communicate in highlighting this fact is that is that there’s no singular problem. While it is convenient to target certain systems of thought like Patriarchy and Legalism (especially since their most outspoken advocates, Doug Phillips and Bill Gothard, recently came under fire for sexual assault and harassment allegations[iv]), we cannot content ourselves with thinking that as long as we reject those two systems of thought, homeschooling will suddenly be healed. As Christian theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer has stated, “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”

The wheels of abuse and neglect in homeschooling are driven by much more than Patriarchy and Legalism; those systems are but a few of the wheel’s parts. All these problems are connected. They involve valuing ideas over children so much that we don’t stop and ask how our children experience those ideas. We neglect dialogue.

So.

Modesty and purity.

I want to make this simple. Let’s talk about a phrase, a phrase that you have probably heard many times. This phrase goes something like this:

The greatest gift a young Christian woman can give her future husband is the gift of her purity.

Now, some of you might hear that phrase and think, “Amen.” Some of you might instead think, “That’s not true.” What I want to focus on is not whether you agree or disagree. I want to focus on interpretation. In other words, I want you to think about how this phrase gets interpreted by children.

Let me tell you how children — and by that, I mean almost every homeschool alumni I have talked to — has interpreted that phrase. That phrase means:

If a woman is no longer a virgin, she’s worth less.

One of the clearest examples of both this teaching as well as how it has been interpreted comes from a book that was wildly popular among homeschoolers when I was a teenager: When God Writes Your Love Story by Eric and Leslie Ludy. (In fact, it continues to be popular today, even to the point of being a recommended resource in the context of sexual abuse prevention.[v]) The Ludys’ book, marketed as “The Ultimate Approach to Guy/Girl Relationships,” claims to be “for anyone searching for the beauty of true and lasting love, for romance in its purest form, and is willing to do whatever it takes in order to find it.”[vi] In one of the final chapters of the book, entitled “Too Late?”, Leslie Ludy discusses “sexual sin” and “moral compromise” — in other words, “lost virginity.”

There are two issues I want to highlight from this chapter about lost virginity: The first is the story Leslie tells about a 12-year-old girl named Rebecca. Leslie says that Rebecca — again, a 12-year-old — was lured by a 16-year-old boy from a church youth group into his house one day. Leslie says that Rebecca “left as a used and defiled sex toy” and was “forced from childhood into womanhood.”[vii]

From Leslie’s description alone, Rebecca’s story reads as a straightforward account of a 12-year-old girl being raped. The words “used” and “forced” indicate a lack of consent. Yet Leslie puts Rebecca’s story in the same chapter as stories of willing sexual encounters of individuals who chose to have sex before marriage. All these stories are then discussed as “sexual sin” and “moral compromise.”[viii] At no point does Leslie identify Rebecca’s story as a story of child sexual abuse, sexual assault, and/or rape — and at no point does Leslie then relate it to the importance of children and teenagers learning sexual consent and safety. The message to young women reading this would be and has been clear: you being “forced from childhood into womanhood” is you sexually sinning, even if you were “forced.”

The second issue I want to highlight from Leslie’s chapter on “lost virginity” is how accounts of losing virginity are described. Leslie describes a number of young women’s first sexual encounters in the following ways: Karly, for example, “made the mistake of giving [her boyfriend] her most precious gift—her virginity, but now he was distant and cold towards her. She was full of guilt.”[ix] An unnamed 25-year-old from Australia is described as saying she had “given away the most precious thing I had—my purity. There’s nothing left of my treasure… Now I have nothing to offer my husband.”[x]

While Leslie does state that God can “forgive” each of these women for their sexual impurity and “can give us a ‘second virginity,’ spiritually speaking,”[xi] at no point does she question whether a young woman’s virginity (or “purity”) is “the most precious thing” one has. At no point does she question whether virginity is “the most precious gift” one can give one’s husband. The Ludys, in fact, endorse this idea — hence the importance of God granting a spiritual “second virginity.”

The Ludys are not alone in fixating on a person’s virginity as all-important. Another essential reading on relationships for homeschool teenagers was (and continues to be) Elisabeth Elliot’s Passion and Purity. While Elliot’s book is more contemplative than the Ludys and focuses on Elliot’s personal story of her relationship with her late husband Jim Elliot, Elisabeth states upfront that her book “is, to be blunt, a book about virginity.”[xii]

The message that homeschool students and alumni have received from books such as these is pretty clear: that if you are not “pure” (in other words, if you are not a “virgin”), then you no longer have “your most precious gift” that you can give your spouse. I want to take issue with this because I believe that not only is it a damaging message, I also believe that it is an unbiblical message. Marriage is a covenant of love: individuals deciding to commit and give themselves to one another, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. And the greatest gift within the context of marriage is not one’s “purity” or “virginity” but one’s self.

In the Book of John, Jesus declares to his disciples that, “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.” And to make clear what it means to love another, Jesus adds that, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”[xiii] According to traditional Christian theology, Jesus himself demonstrated this greatest act of love when he sacrificed himself on the cross for humanity. And what Jesus sacrificed was not any one part of his body, or his virginity, or his “purity” of heart. Rather, he sacrificed himself — he gave the totality of his being for humanity.

Traditional Christian theology also tells us that marriage is to look like the relationship between Jesus and the Church. One must conclude, therefore, that the greatest act of love, the greatest gift, within the context of marriage is not any one part of one’s body or one’s virginity or one’s “purity” — but rather, in similarity with Jesus’s greatest gift, the giving of one’s self to another. You — not your virginity, but all of who you are, your body, heart, and soul — is your greatest gift to your spouse. This doesn’t mean virginity cannot have value; the problem is the message that it’s the most important thing when it comes to romantic relationships. You are such much more than whether you are a virgin or not. And that you — being an amazing and beautiful individual made in the image of God — want to give your life to share the journey of life with another human being? That is the ultimate gift.

But homeschool students and alumni learned otherwise. They learned that the greatest gift was not their selves but rather their virginity. And it is so important to see how this unbiblical teaching has led to great damage. Because when students and alumni are taught to value their virginity over their selves, their self-worth becomes inherently linked to their “purity.” Hence the idea young women have absorbed — that, If a woman is no longer a virgin, she’s worth less. Kidnapping survivor Elizabeth Smart spoke of this idea last year when she said that after being kidnapped and abused it was “easy…to feel like you no longer have worth, you no longer have value.”[xiv] Smart directly related this feeling to the purity teachings she had imbibed.

To fully appreciate how this idea has manifested for homeschool alumni, let’s look at a few examples of their experiences:

The first is from a young woman named Laura. She wrote,

“I had to go through the True Love Waits program. The ‘activity’ I remember the most was a wrapped present. I held the package and stood at the front of the room. Then, the youth leaders lined up the guys and each of them tore off some of the paper. Then I had to read some paragraph about how virginity is like a gift – no one wants a present that was ‘meant for them’ to have already been opened by someone else. Because of that one activity, I never told anyone I was raped at 15 until years later.”[xv]

The next story is from a young woman named Cora. Cora says,

“Having been told all of my life that my worth was in eventually being someone’s wife, serving him, and having children and that my virginity essential to attracting a husband, I naturally informed my [boyfriend] that I wanted to wait until marriage. He agreed. Then he started pushing. And pushing. Until he held me down in the bathroom one day, and forced himself on me… I told my friend. She told me it was because I was teasing him. I believed her. We both lived in a world that demanded that women be responsible for a man’s desire. The mere fact of existing and causing a man to want you means you should expect to be violated… I never told anyone else for a long, long time. I knew my parents would also tell me that it was my fault.”[xvi]

Another story, from another young woman named Auriel:

“When I was 9 years old, [my mom] told me that having my hair down made me look like a ‘lady of the night.’ Even though I was a shy, modest girl, Mom constantly told me that something I did or wore was sinful, displeasing to God, and might turn on my dad or my brothers. I was so scared that I was going to lead my brothers or dad into sin for lusting after me.”[xvii]

I know these stories are difficult and troubling to hear, so bear with me for just one more. This last one is from a young woman named Christine:

“When my boyfriend [in college] raped me, I felt horrible but thought it was sex. I thought to complain about it to a friend would be to say that sex was wrong… I had not been taught about ‘good touch’ and ‘bad touch’. As a child, I was taught that I must always put my own interests and feelings aside and serve other people, and not argue. My body had never been my own – not when my parents coerced me to hug someone or when they’d told me to pull down my pants so that they could give me more spankings… I was unused to being in touch with what my body told me… So, ironically, the teachings that my parents thought would keep me abstinent and make me a ‘good girl’ actually ended up putting me in unwanted sexual situations.”[xviii]

I think Libby Anne, a formerly homeschooled blogger, summarizes these stories in an importantly precise way. She says,

“Presents, chocolate bars, roses, chewing gum, packing tape—these sorts of metaphors abound in circles where what I call ‘purity culture’ is strongest, and each one is used to illustrate how having sex before marriage will ruin you, rendering you dirty and potentially even unable to bond or form real relationships for the rest of your life. In the effort to keep young people from having sex before saying marriage vows, Christian leaders, pastors, and parents resort to threatening their youth… in the process, these very teachings have led young women…to leave their rapes unreported, remain in abusive relationships, and stay with their abductors. This is not okay.”[xix]

Libby Anne is right. This is not okay. What young women — and young men, too![xx] — heard about modesty and purity is nothing less than cruel.

Now, you might agree with that. When you hear these stories, you might also have a kneejerk reaction like, “But I never said that!” Or, “I would never say that!” Or, “If my children asked me, I would let them know I don’t think that.” All of these reactions bring us back to the importance of dialogue.

See, communication is a two-way street. Though honestly, sometime it’s more like a traffic-jammed freeway in Los Angeles. Through my decade-plus experience with speech and debate, I can confidently tell you that communication is so, so much more than what you say. In fact, communication experts often say that what you say is probably the least important aspect of communication. Far more important than what you say is how you say it, your body language when you say it, the mindset of your audience, and — probably most important for our current discussion — what you don’t say.

All of these factors go into the turbulent mixture of communication. And sometimes? Sometimes you have no control over some of the factors. You can’t mind-read your audience and thus know their mindset. You can’t prepare in advance an entire list of things you are not saying but you unintentionally communicate.

This is directly relevant to the homeschooling conversation — both in general and about the modesty and purity aspect of that conversation in particular.

It’s relevant in general because your lived experiences as homeschool parents are completely different and distinct from the lived experiences of homeschool children. Things that you might take for granted, aren’t taken for granted by your kids. I was struck by this fact when blogger Libby Anne wrote a piece about finding out her mom didn’t actually believe everything in a homeschool magazine that their family regularly received. Here’s an excerpt:

“My mother subscribed to Above Rubies and read each issue thoroughly. The ideas contained within the magazine aligned at least generally with beliefs I heard my mother espouse. When my parents disagreed with a religious leader, they were quick to say so. In fact, I grew up hearing James Dobson described as too wishy-washy and soft. Yet, I never heard my mother call Nancy Campbell or her magazine into question, so I assumed that the messages contained therein were approved, and that it was something I should read, take to heart, and learn from. And read, take to heart, and learn I did… I’ve talked to more than my fair share of homeschool graduates who grew up in this culture and took to heart things they later found out their parents never even realized they were learning…. Parents may not realize the toxic ideologies their children taking in through osmosis from the Christian homeschooling culture around them… ‘You need to tell the girls, mom,’ I said. ‘They read Above Rubies just as I did at their age. You need to tell them you don’t agree with all of it, because if you don’t, they’ll think you do.’”[xxi]

I was blown away when I read this interaction between Libby Anne and her mom because, wow, I can so relate to it. I remember hearing all sorts of messages from my friends, my friends’ parents, from the magazines that were in our home, from the leaders who spoke at conventions — and I, too, just assumed that we were supposed to agree with what they said. I assumed my parents agreed. Years later, after all sorts of fear and anger and fights between my parents and I, we realized that (1) I thought they thought things they didn’t and (2) they had no idea I thought they thought those things. I was living in a shadow of misunderstanding and fear because my parents did not publicly express dissent about certain prevailing ideas and they never bothered to ask me what I was hearing from the homeschool culture around me.

Now take all those observations and apply them directly to the modesty and purity issue. You have a whole life of experiences. For my parents, it was experiences growing up in the 60’s and 70’s and reacting to certain expressions of love and sexuality they found harmful. And in response to those experiences, they came up with — and listened to others come up with — ideas for how to avoid the pain and heartache they experienced. They came up with ideas about modesty and purity and bought Josh Harris’s book I Kissed Dating Goodbye and we attended seminars by Reb Bradley about Preparing Your Children for Courtship and Marriage.

But my fellow alumni and I didn’t grow up in the 60’s and 70’s. We grew up in often sheltered and protective homes. So our parents’ expressions of love and sexuality — built in reaction to their culture’s expressions of love and sexuality — mean something entirely different to us than to our parents. They are heard differently, felt differently, and lived differently. So much is lost in translation.

And when modesty and purity get communicated — in our culture with our experiences — with a line like,

The greatest gift a young Christian woman can give her future husband is the gift of her purity.

…we are not thinking about Woodstock. We are not thinking about the Free Love Movement. We are thinking about holding hands or the Antebellum Dances or the swing dances so popular in homeschooling circles. We are thinking that if we lose that “gift of purity” (whether by force or willingly), our worth has been diminished.

So you need to stop and ask yourself difficult questions like, what if my child gets assaulted? You probably don’t want to, because that is probably one of the most heart-wrenching and sickening scenarios you could ever imagine. You would probably do everything in your power to stop such a situation from occurring.

But you can’t just wish away the possibility. As a parent, you have to come to terms with what we talked about earlier: that as many as 1 in 3 girls and 1 in 7 boys will be sexually abused at some point in their childhood. What are your modesty and purity messages teaching those girls and boys? How will your messages be interpreted after an experience of trauma? Are your messages going to empower them to speak up, or will they silence them into shame, guilt, and secrecy? Into darker moments? Perhaps even longer and more abusive relationships?

What I want to challenge you to do today is to go home and rethink everything for yourself. I want you to put yourself in Laura’s shoes; I want you to put yourself in Cora’s shoes; I want you to put yourself in Auriel’s shoes; I want you to put yourself in Christine’s shoes.

How are they hearing your metaphors? How are they hearing your analogies?

This is why dialogue is so important. This is why we need alumni to keep speaking up and we need to hear from you — you who are parents and leaders of our communities — that you welcome our voices. Because you actually can’t put yourself in our shoes entirely. We need to tell you what roads we walked and what words we heard from you. We’re the ones who can tell when you communicated messages that trapped us in abusive mindsets, abusive relationships, or drove us into depression or suicidal thoughts. And if you will listen, if you will open your arms and hear our words and show us you care, then we can work together to make things better for the next generation.

But we have to do it together. You cannot change this world alone.

Click here to read the rest of “Facing Our Fears: How the Voices of Homeschool Alumni Can Help Homeschooling.”

Sources

[i] Chris Jeub, ChrisJeub.com, “Patriarchy Has Got To Go,” April 16, 2014, link, accessed on September 29, 2014.

[ii] Shawn Mathis, Examiner, “Homeschool apostates, homeschoolers and legalism,” December 17, 2013, link, accessed on September 29, 2014.

[iii] Michael Farris, Home School Court Report, “A Line in the Sand,” August 2014, link, accessed on September 29, 2014.

[iv] Regarding Doug Phillips, see Chelsea Schilling, WorldNetDaily, “Christian Giant Sued For ‘Using Nanny As Sex Object,’” April 15, 2014, link. Regarding Bill Gothard, see Sarah Pulliam Bailey, Religion News Service, “Conservative leader Bill Gothard resigns following abuse allegations,” link.

[v] Lisa and Kalyn Cherry, “Recommended Reading List For Parents and Teens,” Kalyn’s Secret, Word and Spirit Resources, 2009, p. 293. Also see Frontline Family Ministries, “Sexual Abuse: Recommended Reading,” link, accessed on September 29, 2014.

[vi] Eric and Leslie Ludy, When God Writes Your Love Story, Loyal Publishing, 1999, p. 13.

[vii] Ibid, p. 202.

[viii] Ibid, p. 203.

[ix] Ibid, p. 203.

[x] Ibid, p. 205.

[xi] Ibid, p. 204.

[xii] Elisabeth Elliot, Passion and Purity: Learning To Bring Your Love Life Under Christ’s Control, Baker Book House Company, 1984, p. 11.

[xiii] John 15:12-13, New International Version, Bible Gateway, link, accessed on September 29, 2014.

[xiv] Elizabeth Smart as quoted by Elizabeth Esther, “Elizabeth Smart & the life-threatening danger of shame-based purity culture,” May 8, 2013, link, accessed on September 29, 2014.

[xv] Libby Anne, Pathos, “Things Woman Hear In The Church,” May 15, 2013, link, accessed on September 29, 2014.

[xvi] Cora, Homeschoolers Anonymous, “When Home Is Worse Than Rape,” May 13, 2014, link, accessed on September 29, 2014.

[xvii] Auriel, Homeschoolers Anonymous, “Growing Kids the Abusive Way,” August 13, 2013, link, accessed on September 29, 2014.

[xviii] Christine, Homeschoolers Anonymous, “Asexuality And Purity Teachings Can Be A Toxic Mix,” May 24, 2013, link, accessed on September 29, 2014.

[xix] Libby Anne, Patheos, “Question: What Do Presents, Chocolate Bars, Roses, Chewing Gum, and Packing Tape Have in Common?,” June 6, 2013, link, accessed on September 29, 2014.

[xx] An example of how purity teachings have impacted males can be seen in Abel’s story on Homeschoolers Anonymous, “Ticking Time Bombs of Atomic Hormones”: link, accessed on September 29, 2014.

[xxi] Libby Anne, Patheos, “They Why Didn’t You Tell Us That, Mom?,” September 1, 2013, link, accessed on September 29, 2014.

The Dangers of Ideology: Salome’s Story, Part Two

HA Editorial Team2 Comments

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HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Salome” is a pseudonym. Also by Salome on HA: Home for the Holidays.

< Part One

Part Two

The closest I came to real danger (and the longest relationship I had) was with the misogynistic control freak (the knife-bearing sociopath frequently did so in a crowded room, and was disarmed before he became a threat), so I wanna talk further about him. Let’s call him James.

James was everything I’m not.

He was intensely emotional, tall, slender, metrosexual, and spent more time in front of a mirror than I do. At first, everything was great. He understood me to a degree that very, very few people ever do, and accepted me for who I was. We had long conversations, joked, and played pranks together. He was extremely observant, and would go out of his way to understand what I was thinking. He quickly adjusted to my tendency to be brutally honest, and we talked about literally everything. I enjoyed our conversations, and I basked in the feeling that I mattered to someone.

I’m not entirely sure when the first warning signs started appearing. They were almost imperceptible at first, and I had no one who was close enough to the situation to point them out to me. We were lying to each other (and everyone else) about our intentions. He told me he wasn’t attracted to me, and didn’t want a relationship. I certainly didn’t want to call him my boyfriend, because then I’d have to deal with all of the baggage my upbringing attached to that label. I think I might have loved him to some degree, at least at first. I never really was physically attracted to him, but I figured I probably couldn’t do better than thoughtful, suave, and funny James.

It took me a really long time after we broke up to admit that we were dating. We just called it hanging out.

Our hanging out included sneaking out for an entire Saturday to see Act of Valor when it first came out. Today, I can’t believe I didn’t see that that was a date. Then I was too blind and too young and too repressed – and I didn’t have my mom to counterbalance my blindness. It’s really hard not to feel cheated, you know? Anyway, on top of our lies, he started making misogynistic comments. He always found a way to exclude me from his “all women are untrustworthy bitches” attitude, but I eventually started noticing that he was on dangerous ground. When I pressed him, his underlying attitudes didn’t exclude me at all. Then, he started timing how long it usually took me to reply to his messages (around 5 minutes), and if I took any longer than that, he’d freak the hell out, spam me with messages, text me, and call me, and say he was gonna come over to check on me.

He tried telling me what music to listen to (and what to avoid), and what TV shows to watch, and started regulating my caffeine intake and even my bedtime. I eventually started lying to him and telling him that I was going to bed early every night, but then staying up till the wee hours of the morning to try to get my work done free of him. Over Spring break that year, I traveled to Europe without him for a couple of weeks, and when I got back, he demanded to know every detail of every day. He then told me that he literally had not slept for 2 weeks because he didn’t know I was safe.

I hadn’t realized that I felt stifled until I was on another continent, and all the sudden James’ messages felt sinister.

My grades had plummeted (because he demanded that I spend all my time with him rather than do my work), I was intensely depressed, intensely exhausted because of my sleep habits, and intensely stressed, because I couldn’t bear the thought of being controlled by James the way my father had controlled me – and in the name of protecting me! The few classes I didn’t have with James became my solace during the week, because I had a few hours free of him.

My professors even started noticing that something was wrong, and several started going to extreme lengths to give me grace. They tried to help me, but I couldn’t bring myself to admit how bad it was. It wasn’t until very recently that I found out that the attempt to control a significant other is a hallmark of abusers. My patriarchalism-steeped parents certainly never taught me that, because then they would have had to allow me some autonomy. Soon after the Spring break debacle, I completely cut off contact with James, and have not missed him at all (even though we live in the same area still).

Let me be clear: I wasn’t in a toxic relationship because I was homeschooled.

Controlling jackasses exist everywhere. That was my screw-up, and I’ll have to live with that bad decision. But the ideologies that were preached at me from every direction left me without a security net, and kept me in that relationship longer than was healthy (because a controlling, arrogant, narcissistic, misogynistic man raised me. That’s my norm.).

Ideology led me to be dishonest about the nature of my relationship with James, which complicated the situation even further, and probably only exacerbated his urge to control me, because he had no assurance that we were exclusive (and I, being a total jackass, went to a dance with another guy to prove to my friends that James and I weren’t dating… my naivete still astounds me.).

Ideology set the stakes high, because I was not supposed to be in a relationship without the intention of eventually marrying the guy (which almost certainly would have been disastrous with James).

Ideology left me without any clue which boundaries were healthy, what was a normal expression of affection, and what was a big, flaming red flag.

Ideology left James feeling like I needed to be protected and guided, and left me feeling like that was normal.

Ideology led my parents to exercise parenting techniques which left me vulnerable, broken, and with the deeply internalized belief that I’m worthless and unclean, and no one will ever want me. It’s really hard not to feel victimized, bitter, and angry, to be honest. I missed out on – no, I was cheated out of – a beautiful and normal part of growing up.

I’m so pissed about that.

End of series.

The Dangers of Ideology: Salome’s Story, Part One

HA Editorial Team2 Comments

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HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Salome” is a pseudonym. Also by Salome on HA: Home for the Holidays.

Part One

My family, my church, and my homeschooling group were up to their eyeballs in purity culture.

My youth pastor used to say that if he could tell you were dating, you were doing it wrong. That meant no holding hands, no hugging, and no kissing. He’s since relaxed a lot, but the damage was done. Later, we realized just how badly our purity culture had screwed us over when a significant contingent of my grade (most of whom were also members of my homeschooling group where the courtship model was also wholeheartedly embraced) got pregnant out of wedlock, and most abandoned Christianity because of the judgment and the pronouncement that they were now unclean. Some were subjected to epic parental freak-outs, which did nothing but deprive their parents of a meaningful relationship with their child and grandchild.

Most of my friends were homeschooled — well, the few that I had; I have always been extremely introverted, and due to the level of emotional abuse I suffered, I have always been angry, blunt, and kept everyone at arm’s length. Such friends belonged to the same homeschooling group I did. Our parents were all close, and all shared books.

This, unfortunately, included Eric and Leslie Ludy and Josh Harris.

(Interesting side note, here. Years later, I got to know the Harris twins. One of them, I believe it was Brett, informed me that when Josh fell in love, he found out his advice sucked. He ended up ignoring it himself, and didn’t ask his wife’s father for permission before he married her, because his wife didn’t have a good relationship with her father.)

My mother and her friends, however, took it as the gospel truth. My mom regularly told me that she wished she hadn’t had her heart broken by any of her pre-Dad relationships. She admitted that she still occasionally thought of her other boyfriends. Now, years later, I think that she was just unfulfilled and bored as well as supremely unhappy, because I was her confidante multiple times when her marriage was on the rocks (when I was wayyyyyy too young to healthily process any of what she told me). Then, my innocent little mind filed away all of that information, trusting that my mom knew best.

My parents also stigmatized normal relationships.

I don’t think they purposely created an environment where it was unsafe to bring someone home, because they’re pressuring me to settle down, find a guy, and give them grandkids. They were partially victims of their own assumptions – that Dad was somehow gifted with more wisdom than normal (which is bullshit. He’s a fool.), that he had the right to exercise absolute control over us, that his job was to protect me from myself and all of the depredations of lustful young men (even though when I was victimized he attacked me instead of protecting me, and ended up “protecting” me from people I didn’t need to be protected from, while ignoring the real threats), that I had to “guard my heart (a phrase I internalized too well, because I can’t fall in love for the life of me.),” and that anything less than their ideals of modesty, purity, and emotional distance was too “worldly,” which is a criticism my father leverages against literally everything he disagrees with… I still wince whenever I hear it, whether it’s warranted or not.

Thanks a lot, Dad.

They’re also ridiculously awkward and almost Victorian about romance and sex, and they deal with that by joking about it. It’s impossible to have a serious conversation about it. I literally have never brought, and never plan to bring, a guy home with me, because I’m just not sure if my family will chase him away at gunpoint, will be terribly awkward, or will accept him with open arms. And the worst part? They don’t know any of that, and aren’t open to being told, because they hear every criticism of their parenting skills as a judgment of them personally.

My parents also tried (and failed) to enforce rigid gender roles for awhile. 

Since I have never been the most feminine woman ever, my parents lectured me more about that than basically anything else. I wear whatever the hell I want, don’t cook unless I have to (and have cussed my father out when he tries telling me to make him dinner), and swear like a sailor. I’ve never been meek and submissive. I’ve never accepted my mother’s demands to show respect to men (which means meekly assenting to whatever they ask me to do and never standing up for myself – which would have been disastrous in my relationship with James.). However, I’ve still internalized those lectures. I still feel like my body is dirty, and my modesty somehow a coat of armor.

I still feel guilty for loving more traditionally masculine things.

Instead of protecting me, the environment I have described led my sister and I to go behind our parents’ backs and seek emotional fulfillment without calling it dating, while taking away the support structures which could identify warning signs early and save us from dangerous situations. In my sister’s case, it ended with a call to the cops, because she was involved with a bad apple.

My experiences are a little more complex. I have consistently attracted psychopaths in every sense of the word (including one knife-bearing sociopath, a drug addict, a patriarchal scumbag, and a raging misogynistic control freak… and those are just the ones I ended up having a close relationship with – with the exception of the drug addict. He was scared away fairly quickly. There are a few more who made unwanted sexual advances, including one who then threatened to kill me when I turned him down. My parents still don’t know.). I swear, they can smell blood in the water, because good God they swarm around me. This tendency is only made worse by the fact that I tend to be emotionally and mentally attracted to someone before I’m physically attracted, and thus tend to want to heal broken men.

Maybe that’s because feeling compassion is the closest thing I feel to tenderness anymore. I don’t know.

Part Two >

How the Teachings of Emotional Purity and Courtship Damage Healthy Relationships

HA Editorial Team122 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Randi Deuro.

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Darcy’s blog Darcy’s Heart-Stirrings. It was originally published on January 18, 2011.

There are many times that I don’t realize just how much strange teaching I’ve had to “un-do” in my life until I try to explain them to someone else. This happened to me the other night. A dear friend and I were talking about our kids and how to help them transition from children to adults. The topic of dating and relationships came up and we started talking about my story. Sometimes it’s actually comforting to me to be met with blank or incredulous stares from people I consider “normal”, good Christians. It somehow validates my belief that some of the teachings I grew up with were very wrong.

I’ve also lately started facing the ways in which the teachings of “emotional purity”, (a la Josh Harris, the Ludys, and others) have damaged the part of my brain that makes healthy relationships function.

I define “emotional purity” in the same way that popular homeschool writers have: it is the idea of “guarding your heart”. Which sounds all noble and righteous and everything but in this context is really just a facade for fear. Fear of loving and losing. Fear of making the wrong choice. Fear of getting hurt. Fear of being damaged. Fear of not measuring up. In my life it meant never having a crush on a guy, never allowing myself to “fall in love”, basically training myself to shut down a normal, healthy, functioning part of my human heart.

I’m 27 years old, been married for almost 7 years. I rejected the teachings of courtship and emotional purity when I was 19. But their effects have yet to leave.

There are several ways that these teachings can damage a person’s heart.

1. They cause shame.

Shame because sometimes you can’t help but like one guy a little more than another. Shame because that’s “sinful” and “emotionally impure”. Shame because it sets a standard and proclaims that you are somehow shameful if you cannot keep it. You are considered damaged goods if you have fallen in love and had your heart broken. It was Josh Harris in I Kissed Dating Goodbye and the Ludy’s in several of their books that popularized the idea that everytime you fall in love or get “emotionally attached” to someone, you give away a piece of your heart. The more pieces you give away, the less of your heart you have to give to your spouse someday. He even went so far as to say that each of those former flames actually have some sort of hold on you. This has got to be the most bogus and the most damaging teaching of this entire movement. Love doesn’t work that way. The more you give, the more you have. My 3rd child doesn’t have less of my heart just because I’ve loved two other children before him. And, really, I haven’t given them “pieces” of my heart. I’ve given them each all of my heart. The miracle of love is that it multiplies by being given.

Each person I love has “a piece of my heart”…my best friend, my sisters, my husband, my parents, my kids. It is ridiculous to suggest that there is not enough of my heart to go around.

And what view of redemption does this teaching proclaim? Not one that I want anything to do with. It is an incompetent redemption.

2. They cause pride.

Pride because suddenly you are better than everyone else. Because you have never had a crush on a guy. You have kept your heart for your spouse. You didn’t say “I love you” til your wedding day. Pride in human accomplishment. Pride because you are so much more spiritual than that poor girl over there who is crying because her boyfriend broke up with her. Because your heart is whole and she just gave a piece of hers to a guy she isn’t married to. Pride because you did it right, she did not. You have more to give your future husband than she does. She is damaged goods, you are the real prize.

This is exactly what happened to the Pharisees. They made up laws that God never condoned, then patted themselves on the back for keeping them, while looking down on those who didn’t. This has nothing to do with the righteousness and grace of God, and everything to do with the accomplishments of man. I remember watching a video where one of the biggest names in the courtship movement bragged with obvious arrogance that he didn’t tell his wife he loved her until their wedding. And I thought “how twisted can we get?” We took something as simple as saying “I love you”, built a strawman rule around it (“saying I love you is defrauding”) then hung it like a trophy on our walls. Job well done, folks.

3. They create skewed views of relationships which lead to dysfunction

This is where I still struggle. Where others see nothing wrong, I am suspicious of every look, every situation, every witty exchange. I am still uncomfortable hugging one of my best friends who is a guy. Because we were never to hug or have physical contact, even innocent, with a guy. Voices in my head scream “defrauder!” just by giving a friend a quick hug. I feel ill at ease sometimes even talking to other men. Oh, they never notice. Because I’m really good at pushing those feelings away and acting “normal”. But I am bothered by my reaction to everyday situations. We were taught never ever ever to be alone with a guy. Because it could look bad. He could be tempted. You might start thinking impure thoughts. You might even *gasp* flirt!

I was trying to explain this to my friend and it came out sounding so….crazy and embarrassing. I told her if she was to walk out of the room, leaving me and her husband in the same room, my first reaction would be one of panic. “This might look bad…. what if he talks to me…what if someone else sees us….what is he thinking…” My second reaction, close on the heels of the first, would be a coping mechanism that I learned long ago: I calmly tell myself that “this is perfectly normal and perfectly innocent…he probably doesn’t even notice me…this is a Godly man I know and trust….the only person who would ever freak out about this is me….to the rest of the world there’s nothing wrong here”. I then calm down, act normal, and hope nobody noticed my crazy internal battle. Cuz they’d probably admit me to a psych ward. Thank you, Josh Harris and Co. I hatethis about myself! I am a strong, confident person. But the idea that I can defraud just by a look, that I could become emotionally impure just by a thought, that I might become damaged goods with pieces of my heart strewn all over tarnation, and that guys “only have one thing on their mind” and we need to help them control themselves, has truly negatively affected what should be normal interactions with my friends. Honestly, I don’t get embarrassed talking about much. But this admission isn’t easy for me.

Guess what? In the real world, men and women can have innocent relationships. They can talk to each other without one of them thinking there’s ulterior motives. They can laugh and exchange wits and, yes, even drive in a car together without anybody thinking anything dubious is happening. They are not naiive but they are not afraid of their own shadows. Purity and integrity in relationships can be there without being unnaturally freaked out about it. The other night, I stuck my tongue out at a guy friend who was teasing me and his wife cracked up laughing. As I laughed, I felt myself looking down on the situation, amazed that nobody thought twice about it, then amazed that I DID…that I had to push away feelings of guilt because what if someone thought I was *gasp* flirting?! This is one dysfunction that I really wish I could be freed from. Maybe time is the only cure and I need to be more patient with myself. These teachings have deep, rotten roots and it takes time to pull them all out.

4. They teach us to make formulas to be safe

1 + 1= 2. Emotional purity + Biblical courtship = Godly marriage. But life doesn’t work that way. You can do everything “right” and your life can still suck. You can do everything “wrong” and still be blessed. Rain falls on the good and evil. Time and chance happen to them all. People who follow the courtship formula still get divorced. Or stuck in terrible marriages. Courtship is not the assurance of a good marriage. Life is too complicated for that. Love involves vulnerability. When you choose to love, you are choosing to accept risking a broken heart. No formula can protect you. Life involves risk. Following God involves risk. He is not a “safe” God. But He is good.

God doesn’t seem to like formulas. Because formula is the opposite of faith. Formula says “I will follow a God that I’ve put neatly in a box, to give me the desired results”. Faith says “I will follow You even when I can’t see where I’m going, even when the world is collapsing around me”. Formula says “I will not risk, I will be in control of my future”. Faith says “I will risk everything, I will trust Whom I cannot see, surrender what I cannot control anyway.” Formula is the assurance of things planned for, the conviction of things seen. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen (Heb. 11:1). But we are afraid. So we control instead of trust. We don’t take a step unless we can see where we’re going. We build neat little formulas and say “THIS will keep me safe!” Then we blame God when our puny formulas fail.

These teachings need to be stopped. They were new in my generation and now I, and others like me, are reaping the fruit of them. And the fruit is rotten to the core. I’m sure those who promoted such ideas had good intentions. But good intentions aren’t enough. Without Truth and Grace they can do more harm than good. Thanks to those good intentions, we are seeing an entire generation of homeschool alumni who have no idea how to have normal relationships. I have talked with literally hundreds of alumni my age, and am not exaggerating the extent of the issue. It’s nice to know I’m not alone in my dysfunction but discouraging as well. What is encouraging is that most of us have determined to stop the insanity. We will not be passing these things to the next generation. Instead we will teach our children to love God with all that they have, all that they are; and to love and respect others as they love themselves.

I leave you with the words of a very wise man:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

~C. S. Lewis

Emotional Purity and Courtship: A Few Years Later

A Tool In Someone Else’s Culture War: Philosophical Perspectives’s Story, Part Two

HA Editorial Team18 Comments

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “PhilosophicalPerspectives” is the author’s chosen pseudonym.

*****

In this series: Part One — We Need Advocates | Part Two — A Tool In Someone Else’s Culture War

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The stories shared so far on HA are rough.  Whenever another story pops up on my blogroll, I take a deep breath before reading – and sometimes I have to cut myself off.  There’s only so much trauma I can read in a day, especially when so much of it triggers my own.

Part of growing up in the homeschool community in the 80’s and 90’s was living defensively.  Our parents felt like they were culture warriors, and everyone and everything in the world was against them and their choice to homeschool. We, their children, were the proof they offered to the world (and each other) that they weren’t screwing up. Not only was it vital that we act like little adults on all occasions, but we had to be well-spoken, articulate, and ourselves advocates for homeschooling. I remember many conversations with my mother at the age of 8, where I agreed with her disapproval of *that* family whose children just couldn’t sit still and be quiet, or walk through a museum and respectful read all the placards. We, on the other hand, were excellent at it – and this meant that we were “good children”.

We visited well-respected leaders in government and business, we politely and persuasively argued the case for our political agenda, all while going through puberty. We were nowhere near normal, but that’s why we appealed to powerful people. Who has ever heard of a 15 year old who argues persuasively in front of the state legislature, instead of hanging out at the mall with her friends? No one.

Except homeschoolers. We sure churn out a lot of teenage spokespeople.

I always cringe when I hear stories like Sarah Merkle’s, because I was one of the kids who spoke before legislatures and guest-lectured in local high schools. I was a tool in someone else’s culture war. I was remarkable for my non-normalcy, and I was praised for it.

My reality check came later. I don’t know Sarah, but when I was in her shoes, I didn’t actually have my own, well researched, well-formed and nuanced thoughts on gun control or any other topic – I had my parents’ thoughts, or my pastor’s thoughts, or the thoughts of another influential adult who told me what the “good arguments” were on the topic in question. I was smart, so I didn’t just take talking points from my handlers – I accumulated a lot of other people’s ideas, and even a couple of dissenting opinions, and synthesized them all so that I could speak from “my own” perspective. The thing is, it didn’t require me to seriously wrestle with dissent, or the complications of policy ideas, it just required me to adopt, reformulate, and regurgitate what I’d heard. What’s worse – I was never really allowed to ask questions about the assumptions that were passed on to me. It wasn’t until I got to college that I was actually free to think and ponder and explore, intellectually as well as personally.

I didn’t have my own thoughts at 15 – they weren’t allowed. As others have noted here, debate is seen as a vital skill for homeschooled offspring – after all, “God’s Harvard” prides itself on the quality of their moot court team (as well as, apparently, soccer…). Debate is important, not because it teaches kids to think, but because it gives us the skill to package propaganda in a convenient, Bill O’Reilly-friendly segment, and makes us appealing politicians and lawyers, ready to be the next generation of culture warriors.

For all our debating, dissent wasn’t allowed. I remember losing debate rounds because an argument that I made sounded something remotely like it could be related to a philosophical principle advocated by Marx. I’m not kidding.

Wait, let me rephrase. Dissent was fine, within a prescribed sphere.

The following topics were open for discussion:

• Infant vs. Adult Baptism

• Predestination vs. Free Will

• The moral weight of a vote for a republican (compared, of course, to a vote for the constitution party)

• The US Farm Bill.

• The failings of other religions and how to prove Christianity was right

• Whether or not it’s morally acceptable to wear a sleeveless dress on your wedding day (the answer: no)

• And, my favorite — the real reasons for the Civil War (slavery or states’ rights?!)

Anyway, the real point — we’ve been parroting a Republican platform and the great things about homeschooling since we were toddlers. Any negative or critical commentary was marked as “rebellious”, and unacceptable, especially when it was directed at homeschooling itself. The options were, repent, or get out. I carried my parents’ defensiveness about the homeschooling movement with me into college, where I had many conversations that started off, “yes, there are some downsides to homeschooling, but…”

It’s taken me a long time away from the homeschooling movement to detox, and come to terms with the pain it inflicted. After eight years away from the movement, I started realizing that I wasn’t just a disobedient, sinful, and rebellious teen. I began naming the things I suffered, and the perpetrators who inflicted them.

I felt totally alone.

None of my non-homeschooled friends had any categories to begin to understand what I was talking about. I was lucky if they’d ever even heard of Josh Harris, and they’d certainly never had personal interaction with his family. They had no concept of a world where it was acceptable for a father to deny a daughter her driver’s license, because her husband might not want her to have that freedom (a position I heard advocated at a young age, at a homeschool conference in my home state). Any time I began a conversation about my own experiences, I ended up answering the same questions. “Did you, like, have a desk in your living room?” “Did you go to school in your pajamas?” “Did you get to sleep in until 10?” Sometimes, we’d get to the real crap, but they were so shocked by the extremes of the movement that they didn’t believe they were real, or that something so blatantly ridiculous had actually impacted my life. I never got to process the things that really changed me.  I never had space to talk about how the patriarchal narrative that reigns uncontested within the homeschooling movement affected my identity as a woman, or how purity and courtship teachings twisted my view of cross-gender relationships, whether platonic or romantic. Two examples spring to mind.

1. I remember telling a prominent female homeschooling leader during my senior year of high school how excited I was to go to the prestigious college to which I’d been accepted. She responded with concern, asking me “whether or not I was planning to pursue a career.”  I think I told her that I didn’t really know, but I was looking forward to all the new opportunities to learn.  The next time I saw her, she gave me a graduation present with a note reading, “with prayers that God will reveal his word and will clearly to you that you might joyfully embrace His ways.” For those not adept at reading between homeschooler lines – my pursuit of a secular education, and potentially a career, she was telling me, was at best based on ignorance of the Word of God, and at worst, on disobedience and rebellion.

With a few swift words and a terrible present, she not only undermined my accomplishments, skills, and personality (I was too ‘leaderly’ for a woman), she questioned my obedience to the God I claimed to follow. I’ve noticed that the thoughts that this woman reinforced (they’d been planted much earlier) have haunted me as I’ve applied for fellowships, talked to recruiters, and pursued career paths.  Despite my (objectively) impressive resume, I find myself wrestling with a toxic combination of shame, insecurity, and guilt whenever I pursue or am offered a prestigious position or set an ambitious goal. Mental accusations of pride, selfishness, or narcissism rush to the forefront. I’m just now learning how to fend them off.

2. I recently came across an Instant Message conversation with the guy I sort of dated in high school (culture notes, for the uninitiated – AIM was a primary source of social interaction for many of us.  I say “sort of dated” because the attraction we felt was taboo, and therefore secret).  It was the conversation where we decided that we “had romantic feelings for each other”.  I was 18 at the time. The exchange went something like this:

Me – “I need to pray about what to tell my parents.”

Him – “What kind of commitment do we have to each other?”

Me – “well, we’re not dating… we can’t”

Him – “just because we haven’t verbalized it doesn’t mean we don’t have one.  I think our commitment should be to prayerfully and cautiously court nine months from now, when you go to college.”

Me – “That sounds great.”

Him – “Shall we state our commitment?”

Me – “I commit to begin a relationship with you for the purpose of exploring a deeper commitment, while bathed in prayer”

Him – “I commit to prayerfully begin a relationship for the purpose of exploring the possibility of a more permanent and concrete commitment, to begin approximately nine months from now.  I intend to ask your father’s blessing when we begin the next phase”.

When I found this conversation, I couldn’t help but laugh. Such contractual language was the model we had for beginning a mature, and godly relationship – and it gave us both the warm fuzzies (I’ll spare you the rest of the conversation). All of this, mind you, was undertaken under much secrecy, because our parents would have objected in a million unimaginable ways.  This doesn’t even begin to cover the number of problematic things about that relationship – but it strikes me how deep courtship culture influenced me.  I saw myself as an object to be negotiated for, between me, my “beau” (as my mom always calls them), my father, and God.  I was “progressive” in that I was willing to strike a deal on my own, at least in the short term.  Thus, this dry, non-salacious exchange between people who were legally adults, via computer, across thousands of miles, was considered both the height of “romance” (because of the bargain we struck) and the height of rebellion (because my dad wasn’t at the negotiating table).

To get back to the point. As I look back at experiences like these, which are far less intense than many others shared on this blog, I realize that I have never had a chance to actually dig into the underlying values I imbibed, and process the pain, anger, and embarrassment that I experienced. I need space to write, and to read, and to be reassured I’m not crazy or alone when I tell stories like mine.

That’s why Homeschoolers Anonymous is so important. We’ve been isolated from each other from a long time. We’ve never had anywhere to share our stories with each other and the world. This is a space for recounting the past and healing from the damage it has done. Trust me, we know the good bits of homeschooling, and we know the ways it’s benefitted us – we’ve been talking about it since we could talk.  What we need now is space to voice the bad.

To be continued.