Epiphanies 2022: Victim of True Love Waits - 41 year old female virgin
Hi everyone,
I became a Christian in the late 1990's when I was a teenager. Around the same time, I read an article on the True Love Waits movement in the USA (I'm in the UK) and I rather liked what I read. It seemed that all I needed to do was keep my legs closed and I would be rewarded with a lovely husband and a trouble free life.
Well, Mr right never showed up and now I'm a 41 year old virgin. The years of waiting, and waiting, and waiting, have proved ruinous in my life. I expended resources which I don't have on all the Christian dating sites, private introduction agencies, etc. but all to no avail. For the benefit of non - UK readers, most of the Christian women in the UK will not be getting married, because there are hardly any Christian men. But when you are young and just starting out, you believe that things will eventually work out and God has got it all sorted. But He hasn't. I'm still waiting.
The unwanted celibacy lead me to depression and alcoholism, and it is only due to antidepressants and being able to pay for counselling that I started to turn a corner. I have accepted that Mr Right isn't coming, and I won't be having any kids. I just want to ask if anyone else on here has been through something similar? Or perhaps not, nobody else would be so stupid as to stick to that stupid old rule LOL.
Admin, if this post is in any way inappropriate, please delete and accept my apologies.
I became a Christian in the late 1990's when I was a teenager. Around the same time, I read an article on the True Love Waits movement in the USA (I'm in the UK) and I rather liked what I read. It seemed that all I needed to do was keep my legs closed and I would be rewarded with a lovely husband and a trouble free life.
Well, Mr right never showed up and now I'm a 41 year old virgin. The years of waiting, and waiting, and waiting, have proved ruinous in my life. I expended resources which I don't have on all the Christian dating sites, private introduction agencies, etc. but all to no avail. For the benefit of non - UK readers, most of the Christian women in the UK will not be getting married, because there are hardly any Christian men. But when you are young and just starting out, you believe that things will eventually work out and God has got it all sorted. But He hasn't. I'm still waiting.
The unwanted celibacy lead me to depression and alcoholism, and it is only due to antidepressants and being able to pay for counselling that I started to turn a corner. I have accepted that Mr Right isn't coming, and I won't be having any kids. I just want to ask if anyone else on here has been through something similar? Or perhaps not, nobody else would be so stupid as to stick to that stupid old rule LOL.
Admin, if this post is in any way inappropriate, please delete and accept my apologies.
Comments
I'm 3 years younger than you and have been married for 18 years, though my wife is not a Christian. I can't say that it wouldn't have been easier had we shared the same faith, but my wife is generous in accommodating my religious commitments so we manage. I hope that your concern about Christian women in the UK not being able to marry will be unfounded as most will not limit themselves only to Christian partners. Bear in mind, also, that a percentage of Christian women will be lesbian or bi and will find joy in married life with another woman.
Still enraged that the fallout from this crap lingers on and that you & so many others feel that marriage/ kids have passed you by.
Not going to talk about me except that one has to kiss a lot of frogs, and nothing the matter with frogs.
Best of luck; you are a whole lot more than your virginity. Give the fundies the flick. Life is full of non Xtian surprises.
About age 30 I crashed and burned - with the help of a Christian man whom I naively thought was on the same page - the one that said sex was a meaningful transaction indicating affection/commitment. Since his professed closeness to God didn't include any Divine Revelation on what a shit he was, I gave up on both of them.
Got back together with the aid of Jung and an interest in the ancient goddesses of the Near East for whom the designation 'virgin' meant 'not belonging to a man'.
I realise I never had the makings of a Lovely Christian Girl. The concept is an infantilising one. Aphrodite is a bitch (I can totally see why the impulse to mate seems supra-human). And I have the maternal instincts of a cuckoo.
Fortunately I met someone equally uninterested in the nuclear family and we have been together going on 40 years.
From which you may infer that to me 41 is Young, and by no means time to give up the life of the senses and emotions.
I don’t happen to believe in Hell but if I did there’d be a special nook there for the True Love Waits pushers.
A year before we met, she applied to a well-respected Christian dating agency in Cambridge (thinking, surely, surely ... well, worth a punt!). She filled in the extensive questionaire and character profile box-ticking exercise and sent it off, with a large fee.
A week later she had a envelope from them, containing her cheque and a letter regretting that they couldn't help her!
Married 24 plus years and counting ....
I would say being single is far better than an unhappy marriage. My mother, then 81 when we got together commented, "well at your age at least you know your own mind!" A good relationship is worth waiting for.
Sorry if this posting comes over as twee or patronising. It's not meant to be. I suppose Mrs RR never gave up hope ....
One of the more popular books promoted by this movement was I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Josh Harris. Harris eventually issued a half-hearted apology that demonstrated he didn't really understand the level of harm his teachings had caused, so a bunch of people submitted their own stories about how his book (or general contact with the purity movement) had really messed up their lives. The website is no longer active, but since nothing on the internet ever truly dies here's an archival link. I can't guarantee all the links will work.
First, consider what you seem to be abandoning: hope for a certain kind of future. That's hard, and it hurts. But there are other kinds of futures. Put your imagination to work: what do you really want for yourself (toss away considerations of practicality). Also toss away the blinders and constrictions which TLW have saddled you with. Who were you before TLW? Who did you want to be? That being is still there; bring her forth.
This often seems like a more intense problem in Christian circles, but just as many non-Christians end up in a similar position - please don't see it as a failure on your part, it happens to all kinds of people for no particular reason.
It was another way in which you were separated from real self-knowledge - who am I? What do I want? and into a bewildered passivity waiting for a ‘leading’.
I think that idea still has a lot of currency in both charismatic and some evangelical circles.
Unsurprisingly, Reformed Evangelical circles are pretty fond of it - the extent to which you're supposed to know God's plan for your life varies, mind.
Yeah, but the Reformed - to their credit - seem to put much less store on trying to work out whether a particular person is 'The One' or not.
While this may be true on paper...when it comes to the reality of being a single woman in a Reformed Evangelical church, it's a lot less true. I think part of it is due to the enormous influence that other Evangelicals have on generic Evangelical Christian culture. The Evangelical Publishing Industrial Complex is dominated by non-Reformed types, for instance.
In fairness, she may also just prefer to be single - it's not the same thing as 'giving up' on the idea of finding a partner if you actively enjoy singleness.
I'd believe in that sorrow a great deal more if he hadn't kept the money and those books weren't still in print.
Anyhow ... I read all that stuff, tried to live it out and decided fairly early on it wasn't really going to work. [ETA: Bad enough if you were straight, but even worse if you weren't]
Having decided that I had one life and I was going to live it to the full, I got on with it. I kept God / Christianity and threw the books away. Much of this isn't his fault - it's yet more manmade constructs and twisted scripture.
Good luck!
I'm pretty sure he had I Kissed Dating Goodbye unpublished. The information appears to be from 2018 and Harris has since renounced many of his former ideas and no longer identifies as a Christian.
I'm going to hidden text that as it comes under therapeutic advice which we don't do. The poster is asking if other people had similar experiences - so please could people stick to their experiences?
Thanks very much!
Louise
Epiphanies Host
A few years later when the older sister of a schoolfriend became pregnant and was thrown out of the house mum made it clear that she wouldn't do that and we would find a way of keeping any such child.
As it happened I didn't wait that long, but never had a child or got married either,
That was the line taken by my Godfather with his daughters, and roundly seen off by the youngest with the unanswerable Would you buy a car, the only one you'd ever have, without giving it a test drive? It still seems to me a very reasonable line to take.
Of course what all of the TLW nonsense ignores is that some of us really enjoy sex 😈
Divorce was around but notoriously difficult to obtain. You had to have specific "grounds for divorce" which were few and difficult to prove, at least for the woman.
This may not have been applicable to their location, but in the UK at least divorce was further liberalised in the 1920s.
Until then, outside raffish circles divorce was still regarded as scandalous, viz Mrs Simpson and the Duke of Windsor.
I think that's a bit like saying that logically, children from socially deprived areas must have known that if they worked hard and passed all their exams they could go to university.
45 years later I have to say she is even more of a practicing Christian than I am.
Maybe there aren't any Christian men out there, but there might be men who will allow for you to pursue your spiritual life. Don't give up.
I think the word you're after is dissoluble.
I've been single/celibate all my life. Bits have been happy, bits have been lonely and there have been bits about which I want words with God about his plan. It's do-able.
I blame the Kaiser in my case. WWI reduced the supply of men for that generation, and also for the generation that would have followed. It also gassed my friend's grandfather, which interfered with his mother's various healths, and so with his. WWII ensured that there was a shortage of boys born between '39 and '45, the cohort I would have looked among - it wasn't there. TLW just replaces that sort of demographic thing.
We just have to get on with it. We aren't like those monkeys brought up without either bodily contact or anything better than chicken wire to hug. We've got brains to engage with stuff.
And as for the book on the single life, aimed at women, I spotted at Durham Cathedral bookshop, which suggested that a) such people should volunteer to run the Sunday School to allow parents to take a full part in worship, and b) as women need male headship, they should look for a family where the husband would take that function......if you find anything like that, know it isn't written by anyone who knows what it's like, and ignore it.
Pity evangelical Christianity doesn't have room for nuns or Beguines or such like.
Alas! We committed the cardinal sin of Separating after about 10 years, and were instantly ostracised by the church, a few good friends excepted. Oddly, the same thing happened to a couple of about the same age as us, but based at the other (likewise evangelical) C of E church in town. I hasten to add that there was no connection between the two cases, neither (in the case of Mrs BF and I) was a third party involved!
I left off going to any church regularly for some 25 years, having, as I was informed, transgressed against God's Laws. I really didn't want anything to do with such a *God*.
Divorce being theoretically possible and divorce being socially acceptable aren't the same thing.
Yes, and how often some of them seem to get caught out in sexual misdemeanours...
TLW was very much the theme at the church I attended all those lustra ago, but IIRC the clergy were all Happily Married to Lovely Wives (one each, that is).
The worst ones are the ones who had a wild time of wine, women and more women themselves, then repented, and are urging young people not to make the same mistakes they did.
Win-win for them - lots of youthful sex AND a good testimony to trot out.
Not such a win-win for anyone who listens to them and ends up with neither sex nor a juicy "Jesus Saved Me from My Life of Sin and Debauchery" story and all the Good Christian Brownie points that accrue from their testimony.
I think amongst Evangelicalism a lot of it is down to very rigid gender roles and also an absolute terror of single people being secretly gay. Certainly there are plenty of churches that would never even contemplate a single man as clergy or a senior member of staff for that reason.
'Cause there's no history of evangelical gay men entering opposite sex marriages and then getting caught in flagrante with the pool boy [other young hunky men are available].
Religious groups can find it difficult to have social activities which draw in the unattached. Until they are much older.
Which reminds me I have to go and pay some bills, see if I can get the dashcam to work, and set up the dishwasher.
*It was a party. There was a drink in a bowl. Someone had been somewhere where it wasn't monitored properly!.