How I Escaped Purity Culture: Mom Life, Virgin First Love, And Moral Betrayal: Ruby Hour Podcast
Being raised on "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" to Kris Vallotton's "Purity: The New Moral Revolution," -- here's my story as a Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry graduate of the damaging effects of purity culture.
…following reckless dogma, growing up in cult evangelical purity culture, getting married as a virgin, and the moral betrayal against myself in purity culture.
A tale of two moms + polar opposite homes, first love and sexual purity in an evangelical/charismatic Christian culture, and the first time I ever morally betrayed myself
Escaping Purity Culture: Mom Life, Virgin First Love, And Moral Betrayal: The Ruby Hour Podcast: S2E1 The Ruby Hour Podcast
This episode is part of our limited series sound-scored intimate short-story sessions for this season of The Ruby Hour.
If you're fed up with purity culture damage or are recognizing the damaging effects of purity culture in your life, then you need to listen to this podcast! Being raised on "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" to Kris Vallotton's "Purity: The New Moral Revolution," -- here's my story as a Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry graduate of the damaging effects of young and impressionable teens (both young men and women) following reckless dogma, growing up in cult evangelical purity culture, getting married as a virgin, and the moral betrayal against myself in purity culture. This podcast is a MUST-LISTEN if you want to learn about the damage purity culture does, and how to escape it! This episode is part of our new sound-scored intimate short-story sessions for this season of The Ruby Hour.
Browse all three seasons of our podcast, The Ruby Hour: • The Ruby Hour Archives
Season 2 Overview: Season 2: Stories around the inner workings of spirituality, emotional resilience, and sexuality and self-image in times of uncertainty and unknown.
A Box Of Sharp Objects Not-So-Bedtime-Story: My Self-Mutilation Story: Turbulent Homelife & Making Childhood Trauma Your Medicine | The Ruby Hour
The Mountain People: Saba and Asheville ASMR Story: Mountain Dwellers: Saba & Asheville on The Ruby Hour Podcast
Or if you have slow internet and just want to listen, click the player below, or find the episode under The Ruby Hour on your favorite podcast platform (and subscribe, yo!!)
Pick your pois— I mean, your preferred podcast platform of choice:
During this time of social-distancing - free-writing and conversation with those we love can be one of our greatest forms of connection and community. Here’s some prompts or conversation starters for you and a friend, family member, or lover:
Who was the person you consider to be the first love in your life?
What’s one of your favorite summer time memories as a teenager?
What was a time in your life when you felt pressure to do something to fit in that severely backfired?
Tell me about friends you grew up with who feel like family.
This story is filled with a lot of roots in fundamental evangelical/charismatic Christianity — can you relate? Have you ever been a part of an organization that had rather rigid rules around morality, and purity?
What’s one thing you wish you could have told your fourteen or seventeen-year-old self?
If you enjoyed this, can relate to it, or have your own story that these tales stuck a nerve with, I would love to hear about it. PLEASE email me — I would love to schedule a time to talk.
Episode Street Cred
This episode was recorded and produced in our dear friends' Davíd’s AirBnB tree-top getaway in West Asheville -- if you're looking for an amazing mountain getaway - check out their sweet place: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/8362668
To the family I mention in this episode, you know who you are, I love you, thank you for the beauty you've added to my life.
The Ruby Hour Podcast is produced and sound scored by our company, Ruby Riot Creatives, a video production and storytelling studio based out of Charleston, South Carolina.
Music featured in this episode is used under commercial license and included songs by Muted, Benj Heard, Max-H, Anthony Lazaro, Paper Planes, and Jamie Bathgate, Skrxlla, Shtriker Big band, a sample from Death Cab for cutie, a sample I sang from a Misty Edwards song, and Jay himself.
Mom Life, First Love, & Moral Betrayal Episode Transcript
The thought of being a stay-at-home mom used to make me cringe. Even a year ago, I would have cringed. But something inside of me has changed. Maybe it’s because I’m in the last year of my twenties and I’m looking down the barrel of my thirties. Maybe it’s because my purely proverbial biological clock is for the first time actually ticking. Maybe I’ve finally come to a place of peace within who I am that I feel a grace to slow down.
I have begun pondering the raising of a family... home-life world. Envisioning things like how your entire world from 2 PM on becomes dedicated to practical, tangible concerns: driving, Coordinating, and seeing childcare peeps, seeing other moms, focusing on making dinner — having these rituals set for your family…
…And it sounds fantastic!!
Isn't that hilarious? For my thirty-something career-oriented girlfriends, maybe you can catch why this is so humorous to me.
Part of me is just shocked within myself and how full my heart gets thinking of that side of normal conventionalism that the majority of humans do, that I resisted for SO LONG.
I'm curious about this new part of myself. Kind of this sense of,
“Well, where the heck did this person come from?”
I mean, even a year ago – a snapshot of my life looks like I just brought on my first stateside full-time salaried employee of my company, I had two women salaried and working remotely full-time with me from the Philippines, my pulse/heartbeat goal was building a business up to X amount a month in revenue so I could have a family and afford "the things I needed” to raise a child the way I wanted to: have a full-time nanny so I could effectively be CEO and mom, make sure we can go on lavish high-end vacations where my priority was that I could still be "glamorous" as this successful executive what-can’t-she-do mom.
Do you know what I was doing right? I was modeling "success "after one of my old mentors from who owns a trendy franchise in town – – will refer to her as Mia. The most ruthlessly ambitious, power/significance hungry person I know, highly insecure, I worked and helped promote her for years, and I considered her a dear confidant and mentor to me.
But what I didn't realize (or was to in denial/desperate to see) was for her – this was a one-sided exchange.
The GIFT of eventually me getting sick and tired of being pushed off and rescheduled 7 times in nine months by her, finally speaking up, and then doing my self-reflection and owning the role I put myself in and taking inventory of the gold and absolute Life-changing treasure I found in the fall out is perfectly summed up in this memory I have with her:
We are sitting in her kitchen, or rather, I'm sitting, she's flittering around cabinets, appeasing her several young children who are screaming, who she went through hell and back through YEARS of fertility treatments to bring into the world, all of it, so these humans could be in that room with us.
We just came home from an all-day shoot, and the full-time nanny left less than 30 minutes before. As if you hadn't already deduced yet– we’re in her million-dollar home, with a beautiful family, her infants in their highchairs, and she says, "look, I've had my family, I'm done with the whole having kids thing starting a family chapter of my life. Now it's time to go full throttle in building my brand. "
The statement shocked me some then, but it took me looking back to realize the gravity of that headspace.
My mind goes to—“what's a person in that headspace trying to prove, get, or avoid?” For Mia those children weren't about love in her marriage in building beautiful lives in the world – they were props. Sidenotes, footnotes, in the Mia story she wanted to read like,
"Trendsetter Mogul – what can't she do? Beautiful husband, x amount of kids, multiple franchises, 25 employees #Unstoppable.”
But when I reflect back to all of our coffee dates (based around upcoming shoot logistics) and those moments when I was seeking guidance and counsel in my life – the woman who sat across from me couldn't keep her gaze locked on mine (or anyone’s for that matter) -frantically texting back to more important scheduling's with high-end clients or ambition feeding opportunities.
“I see a woman that is terrified that if she slows down, and doesn’t have a fury of texts waiting, that her greatest fear will be true. At the end of the day, she’s just her. She’s not Gwyneth Paltrow, she’s the same woman she’s always been. And that terrifies her to no end.”
She's just a scared woman like the rest of us, like ME, and she does everything she can to avoid sitting with the anxious woman inside herself. And I will be the first person to admit that it takes one to no one and I, too, have that part of myself.
I shared this big snapshot because this time a year ago – I wanted to build up and hide behind a big daunting fancy empire of my own making, go a million miles an hour, spinning aimlessly, so I could prove to myself that, “see, look at all this activity, to-do’s, drama, you must be important— you're so busy. "
I think from evaluating and getting a clear inventory / debunking the “Glamour” of this supposed mentor; I was given the gift of remembering a real role-model woman I loved and who loved and still loves me deeply — Magdalene.
Magdelene’s Home
Mother of NINE kids – my first love in this life with her second oldest son who will call Jay. He was 14, I was 17, and my summer before I went to ministry school after I graduated I spent every single day that summer out at their house, or on an adventure at Barton Springs, or at Mozarts or Spider House coffee shop in downtown Austin.
Before that summer, I've never been around a newborn baby. I was in the room when Magdalene gave birth to child number nine, and Jay taught me how to hold a newborn. He taught me how to have boundaries with enthusiastic two-year-old, four-year-old, six-year-olds, and nine-year-olds.
I learned how to be a part of a family that summer.
Every room in their house was filled with some concoction of adventure, belly-laughter, momentary emotional upheaval, humor, and impromptu stand up skits.
Love was absolutely everywhere.
“I learned love can coexist with sticky countertops, can transform generic off-brand Bisquick into the best pancakes of your life. I learned that love can be found on noodle laden kitchen floors, that love lived amidst hideously deformed Barbie dolls – mutilated through the extreme terrain of an indoor/outdoor mission-operative, and love lived within two-year-olds running wild in nothing but a diaper and his father’s motorcycle helmet.”
Generic laundry detergent, clothes left a little too long in the washing machine, warm pasta water, and dusty dry Texas dirt is the smell I will forever associate with the first love of my life.
“Jay and I mutually fantasized about our first kiss being at the altar.”
I got to know Jay through singing with him and his mom on the worship team together on Tuesday nights.
He’s used to hold my hands in his like they were the most sacred things he's ever found, and when I went away to ministry school that fall, I would run my 10-mile loop around the Sacramento River, listening to Death Cab for Cutie over and over, and I would imagine Jay was singing the words over me.
"I will protect your heart. "
I used to draw pregnant women eating avocados from a runners world magazine, and imagine that was my full belly carrying his child, one of the many we’d create together.
“I gave no thought to money, or provision – I was in love with this man. I knew that in poverty, in waiting tables, being a barista, or being a poor worship leader’s wife – we would be rich in love, and home, and life.”
The first time I morally and unequivocally betrayed myself as an adult was right after my winter break visiting home. My mom and dad told me I needed to break up with Jay.
"He's too young. He's 15. You're 18. He can't even drive yet, Shelby. "
I don't remember anything I said on that phone call with him, but I know I was in my living room of my four-Plex apartment I shared with my three roommates. No one was home.
I remember my two nineteen-year-old Oregonian roommates attempting to console me.
"It's probably for the better,” I remember attempting to reason with myself.
I always felt foolish or misunderstood telling people I met at school that detail about him being 15. But they didn’t the person I knew.
That was the first overt time I let the fear of public opinion, fear of man, and "what will people say,” run the show and stab my intuition and inner wisdom through the heart.
They say hindsight is 20/20, but I confidently believe we would have figured it out.
Knowing what I know now, that three-year gap seems so vast then, yet laughable now.
That was the first glimpse of when I began betraying my truth and giving my ego the reins to my life.
And where did that take me?
Three months later, returning home for the summer break, and entering the mundane world without Jay or his family in my life, I came home to desperation and isolation.
“When you go to a school that has supernatural in the title, it’s a little challenging to find common ground with peers who aren’t in that very specific niche of lifestyle. ”
I met a bottom feeder that for the sake of this story we’ll call Saul. A graduate from the school of supernatural ministry from a few years earlier, disillusioned by a former relationship with an affluent heiress, he was skeletal, and his talk of politics bored me and I found him dull.
Yet his talk of power and wealth beguiled me into mistaking little-man-syndrome-fueled political mind games as flirting and genuine care, and this ego-driven behavior catered to my new logic-centered, dispassionate, ego-driven way of life.
I remember him asking me questions like, ‘Would you be comfortable flying on a private jet? How would you feel about owning one?”
He didn’t make me laugh, I felt self-conscious around him, and I didn’t him attractive. But those are disillusioned characteristics, I’m supposed to look for a sensible, responsible mate, after all.
He's intelligent, his family has a big fancy house on the lake, and they all drive Beamers. He's older than me, so that must work for the whole "more suitable mate" complex my parents introduced me to.
He broke my heart and left me to go promiscuously romp around in the Caribbean, only after taking me down a road of sexual promiscuity first, something that went against every hope and dream I protected and fought for since I became a Christian at 14, up until “wising up” and walking away from my hope-filled life with Jay.
Sexual promiscuity was a major sin in my charismatic-evangelical Christian culture and the moral code I honored in my heart.
…But, I’d already betrayed my truth and a young man I loved, so what’s a little sexual immorality, anyway?
Eight months later, after I got back on my feet emotionally and recovered from being rejected by Saul, he showed up at my doorstep on Valentine's Day unannounced in Northern California, and we got married four months after I graduated ministry school.
We were 19 and 22 and struggled with wanting to have sex (like every normal 19 and 22-year-old on the planet) but also wanted to honor God. We planned our wedding. In six weeks.
The saddest thing is – I saw Jay all the time during all of that. He was one of Saul’s younger brother's good friends. Both musicians, Jay would be at the house rehearsing while I was dating and then married Saul.
At first, we'd avoid each other's eyes as much as possible. He always had his head hung, eyes downcast.
Every now and then we catch each other's eyes for a brief moment, and I’d see reflected in his eyes— fragments of the full, vibrant person I once was.
The joy and uninhibited smile I used to greet the world with. The ever-present blush of my cheeks from how seen and loved Jay would make me feel. The warmth that used to fill my palms when they were nestled under cover of his.
This man. My beloved. Who absolutely worshiped and adored me. I lied to myself so hard. I had to. How else could I rationalize perpetually being in the same room with the love of my life, while being married to someone else?
Jay’s around 27 now. He has a five-year-old son now, and he just celebrated his two-year anniversary with a beautiful artist.
It seems as though Jay’s done the same thing I have through all these years —date people who have fragments of what we had together.
I’d look for guys who can make me laugh and do a great Jim Carrey pet detective and personation.
He dated lingerie models.
I looked for a partner who could sing to me.
He looked for artists.
I look for someone who holds my hands the way he used to, and kiss me on the top of my head.
He looked for someone who is his greatest champion and wants to stay up until two in the morning watching dumb YouTube videos of men ballet dancing in tights and making funny voiceovers and dying laughing together.
I know I texted him 2 1/2 years ago saying some terrible off-color comment about the guy I was dating at the time reminded me of how we used to laugh, and something around how I envisioned Jay would make love to me like Wolverine, my Hollywood crush, or something horrific like that... Not one of my best moments.
“We keep in touch via the occasional like or girlfriend-non-threatening comment on Instagram, but the truth is he still is one of the most beautiful humans I have ever laid eyes on. ”
He has an entirely different universe now than the one we shared together sitting on the roof of his house, watching shooting stars, but it seems in our own ways we’ve found our own shooting stars— loves in our lives with their own unique magic.
I have this love that coarses through the veins of my memories that I wouldn't trade for the world.
The love I shared with Jay is one of the greatest gifts in my life; those memories help me recognize my true north in priorities in a mate.
I hope that our small chapter of life together may have had that effect on him, too.
So I find my heart and mind are so softening, opening to being in love with creating a world around me like Magdalene made: moments rich with messy, boisterous, belly-laughter love and family.
Not a nice and tidy prop-set for my perfectly color-coordinated ad-sponsored life, but a life immersed in the sweetness of a vibrant home life, and my work supports this wealth.
Real wealth.
“Not the lavish-vacation-with-a-nanny wealth, the kind of wealth money, status, and branding can’t buy; the treasure discovered in the depths of time we spend in the presence of our most beloved ones.”
That’s today’s story, wow it’s a raw one, isn’t it?
During this time of social distancing - free writing and conversation with those we love can be one of our greatest forms of connection and community. Here are some prompts or conversation starters for you and a friend, family member, or lover:
Who was the person you consider to be the first love in your life?
What’s one of your favorite summer time memories as a teenager?
What was a time in your life when you felt pressure to do something to fit in that severely backfired?
Tell me about friends you grew up with who feel like family.
This story is filled with a lot of roots in fundamental evangelical/charismatic Christianity — can you relate? Have you ever been a part of an organization that had rather rigid rules around morality, and purity?
What’s one thing you wish you could have told your fourteen or seventeen-year-old self?
That’s it for today’s episode of The Ruby Hour. If you enjoyed this, can relate to it, or have your own story that these tales stuck a nerve with, I would love to hear about it. PLEASE email me — I would love to schedule a time to talk.