The Psychology of Religious Trauma
Sometimes harmful ideas stick with you for decades
I came up in the days of the True Love Waits movement. Consider yourself very fortunate if you have never heard of it.
In a nutshell, it was a misguided effort to encourage teenagers to save their virginity till marriage — virginity assumed to be heterosexual and cis-gendered.
While my parents assured me this was meant for both boys and girls, it seemed much more imperative to the girls. I remember Sunday school teachers using all kinds of unsavory metaphors. Your virginity is like tape, it’ll adhere to everything it touches and gets progressively dirtier as it’s passed around. Your virginity is like chewing gum, no one really wants it pre-chewed or chewed by multiple people.
I even remember my mother’s object lesson of virginity. She cut out a little pink heart and described how each sexual partner takes a little piece of the heart with them. If you have too many partners, you don’t even have a scrap of heart left. Even if you have just one, you’re never complete again.
Some of the more extreme ideations in the True Love Waits movement drew even stricter boundaries around sex and virginity. Heavy petting or making out was tantamount to sex. You’re cheating on your future husband if you let a boy…
