True Love Waits: How “Saving Myself” Made Me Lose My Faith
To your church and to the world, there is nothing more dangerous than a woman wanting.
True Love Waits I will keep myself pure until marriage. not A basket is passed. You put your slips of paper in like an offering, while the band plays some sort of somber, ambiguously romantic contemporary Christian song.
true love waits,I’ll drown my beliefs.
allowed
You’ll never forget the scene from her dad’s hidden porn stash: grainy ’70s sex on a floral daybed; faces red with the sheen of exertion and bad makeup and lighting.
You pretend to laugh with your friend, even though you’re turned on. Suddenly it all makes sense, like a rabbit ear antenna wiggled around until the station came in clear. Your brain becomes a television you can not turn off. Before, you had pictured kissing: kissing with tongues, kissing breasts. But now that you know what sex is, you think about it beyond kissing and roaming hands. Beyond two naked bodies rubbing together indiscriminately beneath sheets, the way it was in the movies.
sin
dissolve
Amanda Miska is Publisher of Split Lip Press. She lives and writes in the Philly suburbs. You can find her on Twitter @akmiska or read more of her work online at amandamiska.com.
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More in this series
Breaking the Horse
God has given you a special task, they said. Save your mother’s soul.
A Heathen’s Love Affair with Churches
Most of my formative adolescent experiences took place in churches, but it was never about god. What drove me was a feverish desire to belong.
Becoming My Own Woman, Without the Faith of My Childhood
I had always found a gathering of women sharing their stories and wisdom an effective way to touch the divine.