Purity

You know what I'd rather be doing on a Thursday night? Watching the first female presidential nominee of a major party (though not the first to run for president) give her acceptance speech. What am I actually doing? Watching When Harry Met Sally and sobbing into my Twitter feed. Again.

What led a strong, independent young woman to such a sorry state of affairs? I hear you asking. Well, while the whole story is worth (and has probably been) the plot of a sitcom episode, the short answer is flirting. Intentional, unintentional, begrudgingly offered, misperceived flirting. Or desperately trying not to flirt but ending up doing it anyway. It's difficult to tell.

Oh, and also a perpetual underlying belief that my worthiness is somehow found in both my purity and my potential as a mother. That purity of mine is meant to be in both action and thought, by the way, hence the agonizing over flirtation. If my intentions weren't pure, any innocent conversation is tainted by that undercurrent of what must be unconscionable lust that I should have scourged from my mind long ago. I'm not a teenage boy, after all. Lust isn't an understandable fault in women, much less young women who are far from the throes of puberty. I should have this ish on lockdown already.

It's not that I haven't tried to lock it down though. It's not that I haven't been waiting and waiting for God to put a potential husband in my life. And while I'm waiting, I've done my best to keep myself... chaste? I've removed myself from situations where I thought I might go too far. I police my thoughts. I check my face. I keep my hands to myself. I worry over how much cleavage any given article of clothing shows. I think over and over and over and over and over and over again about how I'm presenting my body and how I think about my body and what others think about my body and what impression I'm giving by existing in my body. I feel in my gut what a disappointment I am when I can't keep my eyes or my words to myself.

On my best days, I recognize that women can be many things, mother and/or engineer, and that I'm not just sitting around waiting for a prince-- I'm looking for a certain spark and I will continue to live my life while that search goes on. All the same, even with all that strength that I'm pretending to, I still feel like it's a bit of scandal when I write about having a crush or having feelings. It's not a new thing for me. I have a whole tag on my college blog for the times when I broke a little under the weight of affections that weren't going anywhere. I present these links not as shameless plugs of previous posts but as evidence (for you and for me) of what might in fact be an obsession in my thought. My default cycle is to deny all feelings until they rupture my heart or to develop feelings for someone I can't have and then to bury myself under the guilt of those feelings. I don't know how to break that cycle. But I am starting to understand where it comes from.

Pre-breakdown on Thursday, I had been talking to a friend about flirting. I was desperately concerned that I was sticking my nose in a place it shouldn't be and sending a guy mixed messages. She told/reminded me that flirting is this whole complex grey area and said, with wonderfully helpful bluntness, that I sometimes mistake talking for flirting. It's okay to have a friendly conversation with a guy. And besides, there is such a thing as innocent flirting. All this brought us back to something we had talked about earlier this week: purity culture.

I know, everything is easier to analyze when you put the word "culture" after it, but my friend sent me this Washington Post article and it's such a great take on the "kissing dating goodbye" movement that my generation of church-goers grew up with because it's not written by someone embittered and single. It removes the gloss of someone who's fallen in faith. As the author says, "On the surface, I am a purity-culture success story: I am a heterosexual woman, a virgin until marriage, now with two small children and a husband I deeply love. We attend church. We believe in God. And yet, for me, the legacy of purity culture is not one of freedom but one of fear." Read the whole thing. She talks through a whole host of issues that I'm not going to cover here but are important to be noted when we're having these discussions over how we should approach love. 

Now, I value my own intelligence and abilities. That's not in question. I've written 15,000 words in a dissertation that I'm immensely proud of, I ran just under 3 miles yesterday, and I've lived on my own in a foreign country for a year and that's just the most recent phase of my life. Almost all those posts I linked to up there combine (sometimes faltering but always present) confidence in myself with the doubts and fears and questions life has placed before me. But even amidst all that girl power, I still feel like my primary purpose in life is to get married and have kids. I feel like I'll only ever be half of a whole until I find someone I want to start a family with. And I feel like any casual interaction I have with a man who isn't going to be that for me is a waste of his time and mine. You can work or volunteer or serve with men, as long as you keep it professional, but that's about it. Interactions outside of those boundaries come with too much temptation.

That's where the worry around flirting comes in. The stakes are so much higher when you phrase every social interaction in terms of "Am I building something here that will last me the rest of my life?" and the guilt is so much greater when the answer to that question is no but you want to continue the relationship anyway. You watch every friendship to be sure that you're not giving any signals or saying anything too untoward or implying via your body posture that you might have even the potential for love in any way other than friendly recompense. Conversations are tightrope walks sixty feet in the air with no safety net and a thousand jeering thoughts as spectators. And so you find yourself in doubt and dread on a Thursday evening, dissecting your words and actions and pulling in every female opinion you can get to assure yourself that you haven't stumbled or caused any of your brothers in Christ to stumble either. It's enough to drive a person to drink.

Listen, I don't want to lay all of my problems at the feet of a couple of "Saving Yourself for Christ" lock-ins. I know that I have a choice in what messages I take to heart and that I have a penchant for the dramatic and the tragic. Of course I would only fall in love with someone I can't have. Of course I would miss the signs of genuine affection. Of course my pride would get in the way of a happy and fulfilling relationship. Of course I would find myself time and again in situations where I can bask in the misery of misplaced feelings. That's always how I steer my ship. It's what I'm good at. And that comes from a variety of cultural sources and an early misreading of Pride and Prejudice and Much Ado About Nothing. Moulin Rouge probably didn't help things either.

But when you pull those cultural planks away, the pointy sticks at the bottom of the pit are still my perceived failure to be pure and my singleness. This should not be. I should not be practiced at patching up puncture wounds and picking out splinters and the church should not be handing me a knife to sharpen the points with. I'm too busy bleeding to build anything like a healthy relationship and you know what, at the core of it, hurts me the most? I've prayed for my future husband more than I've prayed for myself, for my country, for the world, for my friends, for my family. I've held more shouting matches with the ceiling over my loneliness than the problem of evil or the allowance of hate in the world. Every time I come back to God in faithfulness, the discussion ends not with a renewed sense of purpose of the good in the world that can be worked through me but with the overwhelming feeling that I will never be worth anything because I can't be patient in waiting for the right person to come into my life or, worse, that the right person or a person with the potential to be the right person came into my life and I fucked it up somehow. I will never have the house in the suburbs with the 2.5 kids because I'm broken beyond repair and not even worth a minute of God's unlimited time. If God's love is evidenced by God's care for us, how despicably single I am is proof that God must not care for me.

Congratulations, True Love Waits. You've undone the work of salvation with one simple sentence.

No. I don't mean that.

But the constraints that I've built into my life have only been fed by a misunderstanding of romantic relationships rooted in the concept of purity that I took to heart when I was a teenager. I prided myself on my ability to avoid teenage pregnancy and how my heart was never broken by ridiculous relationships that wouldn't matter in the long run. I felt like I was doing the right thing by guarding my heart. But I'm not convinced I was. I've left myself tied at the wrists and wondering why it's so hard to swim.

Still, the clock doesn't really start ticking until you're 36. And I'll know when I've met the person I want to spend the rest of my life with because I'll want the rest of my life to start as soon as possible. Maybe one day I'll be able to frame who I am and who I want to love in terms that are defined neither by the ability of my body to give a man a baby nor romantic speeches made on the tops of buildings on national holidays.

It's a nice dream.