I grew up in Christian purity culture. Even after I got married, the idea that sex is wrong didn’t go away.

Courtesy of Rachel Garlinghouse My husband and I grew up going to church and following the True Love Waits movement. We were to fully abstain from sex until we were married; otherwise, sex was a sin. But the silver bands with “True Love Waits” on our fingers didn’t stop us from messing around.

Like many 30- and 40-somethings, my husband and I grew up in church during the True Love Waits movement. We were teenagers when we met, fell in love, and got on the “good” Christian fast track to marriage. We were doing what was holy, or so we thought.

We’ve been married for almost 20 years, and we’re just now realizing just how damaging purity culture was — and still is. Purity culture meant abstaining from sex until marriage. Corinthians 7:9, from the Bible, was drilled into us: that it’s better to marry someone than to burn with passion.

This meant that we shouldn’t sin in a sexual manner and that if we couldn’t keep it PG, we should get hitched. This cherry-picked verse was paired with the very powerful message of “don’t do it. ” Our virginity was a sacred gift we were to give our spouse on our wedding night.

It wasn’t something to be tampered with, because that was a sin. But that didn’t stop us from fooling around — and it made us think sex is a bad thing. We had no sex educationWe were never taught about the actual mechanics of sex, or anything about consent, healthy boundaries, personal pleasure, or gender identities outside the “norm.

” Being gay was not only taboo but sinful. God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, youth church leaders chuckled. The only right way to have sex was to do it once the couple — a man and a woman — vowed “until death do us part.

“Leadership insinuated that married sex was really, really good sex. This zero-to-60 approach — no sex, and then lots of sex — should absolutely result in babies as soon as possible. Forget about getting an education, plugging into a job we were good at, delaying parenthood in order to travel or kick back on the weekends, or anything else; our job was to get hitched, go to town like rabbits, and procreate.

I remember when two of our youth leaders who had dated for several years found themselves in a “situation. ” She was pregnant. Our church leaders forced the young couple to stand in front of the youth group and apologize for their sins.

I was devastated because I felt like our leaders should be living by the word they preached. If they couldn’t manage to keep their hands off each other until they got married, how could we?I confessed my sins every time I did something with my boyfriendEvery time my then-boyfriend and I would “mess around,” I would go to my room, grab my Bible, and confess my sins to God. This was the last time, I promised the empty air in my bedroom.

We wore silver bands on our left ring fingers that had “True Love Waits” engraved on them, serving as a reminder not to slip up. It didn’t actually work. The intent was to honor God with our bodies, but what ended up happening is we learned that anything sexual was shameful.

It was impossible to shake this once we were married. Even though we had permission to go “all the way,” the indoctrination that sex is bad didn’t disappear. Even writing this, I feel an odd sense of betrayal of my religious upbringing.

Am I offending God by speaking out on how damaging I feel purity culture was and is?I have to remind myself that this is exactly why those of us who were victims of the True Love Waits movement must speak up. I cannot keep feeding into purity culture’s power that can destroy a person’s sex life and sexual identity. Read the original article on Insider.