I Was Raised In Purity Culture. Then I Began Wearing A Secret Purchase Under My Clothes.

In church circles, I heard about the importance of good wives making themselves available and pleasing to their spouses. I rarely if ever heard the same for husbands. After our first year of marriage, I became pregnant, and then a year later I became pregnant again. In spite of the grace my husband offered me during our sleepless years, my hang-ups over not having enough sex remained and even intensified.

When my children were still young, I took a job teaching at a Bible college in Tennessee. I was surprised at how many of my students married while they were still undergrads. Some of them were barely out of high school.

I frequently overheard these young women discussing their two bridal showers: one thrown by elders to receive housewares and another thrown by friends to receive lingerie. It was a two-pronged preparation for the bride that said: Here is what you will need for your home and for your husband. 

But where was the ritual to prepare a young woman who was not getting married ― but who was still a whole person? I wondered. Does she not still need a cast iron pan? Does she still not deserve beautiful undergarments?   

I tentatively began to look for answers, but most of the books and podcasts I found in the 2010s that spoke to sexuality within monogamy skirted the issue of female desire. I was still hearing sermons about sexual purity as an absolute, and reading blogs by women who endorsed frequent sex as a safeguard against a husband’s infidelity.

Then an unlikely source helped me to course correct. I read an account of an American expatriate in France who discovered that French women reportedly spent 20% of their income on lingerie. At first I couldn’t believe all of these women were forking over so much money on something that most people would never see, but I realized they were doing it for themselves. To please themselves. To feel good about themselves. 

I started to amass my own wardrobe of lingerie. I still wore the modest suits of a professor, but underneath were the reminders that I was more than a teacher with sensible shoes.

In 2018, Joshua Harris denounced I Kissed Dating Goodbye and publicly apologized for the hurt caused by it. The following year, Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber published Shameless, an indictment of the shame-laced ways the church has indoctrinated young people about sexuality.

By this point, I was beginning to lose my footing in my own marriage. My husband and I had moved across the country and were navigating new jobs and life with adolescent children. Natural growing pains were surfacing: We were two people who met before our brains were fully developed — before we knew who we truly were. The strains of our life together were pulling us apart.

I started to visit social media accounts about lingerie as a way to relieve stress. Learning about the materials, the construction, the history, and the style of the pieces was soothing. I also discovered the women running these accounts, like the French women I’d read about years earlier, wore their lingerie not for a partner but for themselves. They were celebrating their own sexuality.

Perhaps this was Victoria’s Secret: not that she used a satin chemise to attract but that she kept a ruffle-trimmed slip in her boudoir to remind her of who she was.

Seventeen years after we wed, my husband and I met in a courtroom, and, with the stroke of a judge’s pen, our relationship was legally dissolved. My marriage was my only significant romantic relationship, and I mourn the familiar rhythms of that life. I am left with countless existential questions about what I do now, what I want… and an expansive wardrobe of lingerie. 

For the first time in over two decades, I am single. I am not afraid of falling in love again, but I am afraid of abandoning myself to someone else’s narrative about who I am. I go on dating apps, sift through pictures of men flexing their muscles and cuddling their dogs, and then I delete the apps.

In therapy, I discuss my hang-ups about all of this.

“What is the purpose of dating? For you?” my therapist asks. I do not have a clear answer, but I know those two words, “for you,” are essential.