Reflections on my purity culture marriage
Where I’ve been and some of what I’ve learned
A Note From Megan | Publication Date: October 13th, 2025
This newsletter was originally sent as part of my Monday email series, A Note From Megan, which are only available to my email subscribers.
These Monday emails include more of my personal experiences with religion and how I’m thinking about things on the other side of religious indoctrination as opposed to the more education-focused content of the Friday Religious Harm Recovery Digest Emails.
I decided to include this Note From Megan in the newsletter archive because it pairs really well with this past week’s RHR Digest Email: The Hidden Pain of a Purity Culture Marriage.
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Now… on to the newsletter!
This past weekend I read Jen Hatmaker’s new book Awake.
It was breathtaking in so many ways.
First of all, she’s a very good writer. Funny, engaging, real. You feel like you’re really meeting her on the pages of her book.
But second, she’s describing the story of her purity culture marriage. How it started. How it slowly eroded. And finally, the earth-shattering ending in 2020.
For those of you who don’t know about Jen Hatmaker, she was a pretty big deal in the Evangelical lifestyle influencer, mommy blogger space of the early 2000’s.
She slowly fell out of favor with white evangelicals as she became more politically progressive, as well as outspoken about racism, in the mid 2010’s.
Now, 5 years after her marriage unraveled, she’s not only reflecting on the ending and how she got through it, but on her marriage’s early foundation, which was deeply rooted within the framework of purity culture rules and guidelines.
To name my thoughts about this book in just a few words: I am obsessed.
Jen’s reflections made me want to share more about my own experiences with a purity culture marriage, which was also unraveling right around the same time as hers. (Although, was anything not unraveling in 2020…)
For folks who have followed me for a while, I’ve always cited “sexual incompatibility” as the main reason for the demise of my marriage. We were both “virgins” when we walked down the aisle and had done limited exploring of our sexuality prior to committing to each other for life.
However, to reduce it to that one issue is overlooking so many problematic threads that were woven into our lives from our upbringing in purity culture.
For one, I was wildly codependent when I got married. Apparently this was true for Jen as well.
And the thing I love about Jen Hatmaker’s book is that she’s able to provide narrative richness to what codependency actually is and how it shows up for so many women raised in purity culture.
In a nutshell, codependency is seeking emotional security in relationships through the emotional caretaking of others. “I’m not ok unless you’re ok.” It’s also chronically sacrificing one’s own wants and needs in favor of responding to and managing the wants and needs of others.
For more on this, read Codependent No More by Melody Beattie.
Here’s the thing, even though the sexual incompatibility issues first came into my awareness on our honeymoon (and were certainly waving a giant red flag before the close of our first year of marriage), I couldn’t bring myself to fully consider what that meant for my life or for my future.
It all felt too big, too confusing to deal with. So I doubled-down on other aspects of the relationship.
Essentially, I leaned heavily into my codependent traits and focused, instead, on paying off debt, buying and remodeling a house, advancing my career, etc. etc.
I also leaned into managing his life and his career.
You see, when we got married, he was still active-duty military. But two years later, he got out of the military with a plan to return to school on the GI Bill — a plan that failed several times over. There was also a failed business that we had both heavily invested in with our time, finances, and relational goodwill.
It turns out when you’re completely focused on all these other big life things and trying to manage someone else’s life and the way they experience the world, the issues around sex can just sort of slide into the background.
But all the issues I mentioned above, the managing, the emotional caretaking, the “protecting,” were rooted in my purity culture upbringing just as much as the problems related to sex were.
It’s also glaringly obvious to me now that purity culture harmed him, too. He carried an internalized belief that, in order to have value, he needed to be traditionally educated with a “successful” career.
However, when he struggled to achieve both of these things in his post-military life, his shame and self-loathing became nearly insurmountable.
And even though I was aware of how hard life felt at times, stepping out of the cycle of these unhealthy patterns didn’t even occur to me until I was years into it — drinking way too much wine to cope and finding myself sliding deeper and deeper into self-pity and spousal-loathing.
In the last half of our marriage (granted we were only married a total of 6 years), we began actively deconstructing together.
This was actually a very meaningful time for both of us as we were able to call out and process together the toxic scripts and wild beliefs we had both been indoctrinated with.
But, you know, on the other side of all that deconstructing, I also found myself releasing the internalized belief that the only “good” reason to leave a marriage is in cases of abuse or infidelity.
The evolution that came from fully abandoning the scripts I was handed by purity culture, that I had to make the marriage work and stick with it at all costs, opened me up to considering for the first time that maybe I wanted something different for my one wild and precious life (Mary Oliver).
A relationship that included both friendship and passion. A relationship built on mutual respect rather than managing and caretaking.
I realized that infidelity and abuse were not the only “acceptable” reasons for leaving a marriage. I could leave simply because who I was, who I’d become, and who he was, were fundamentally misaligned, despite being pretty good roommates.
None of it felt that clear at the time, of course. It all felt murky, confusing, and devastatingly painful.
But for the first time, I realized the pain of the ending, and the hope for what could come after, was infinitely more tolerable to bear than the pain of staying.
I want to acknowledge that my situation was so much simpler than it is for many people.
We didn’t have kids, and I was able to be financially independent without him.
Those tend to be the two factors that keep many people tethered. I was lucky that way.
I had access to resources and the ability to walk away without fearing for my safety or my ability to provide for myself.
Also, our lives and our status as a couple wasn’t deeply embedded in a community. Because I moved across the country when we got married and then we moved many states away again during the pandemic, we were able to dissolve the marriage in relative privacy and without significant fallout to a social or family community.
So even though it was extremely difficult at the time, I had virtually no barriers to exit, which I know isn’t the case for many people still existing inside of purity culture marriages that they’d rather not be in.
Here’s the reason I wanted to share a bit more about some of my personal experiences…
The issues that arise from purity culture extend way beyond issues in the bedroom. They affect how we relate to one another, to our community, and to ourselves.
Purity culture causes us to devalue our wants and needs and welcomes ongoing sacrifices at the alter of subservience.
It normalizes a life a hardship and suffering. It disconnects us from our bodies and causes us to be dissociative in relation to pleasure of any kind — even the gentle embrace of something as simple as rest.
So what I want to leave you with is this… If you were to begin caring for yourself with the same nurture and attentiveness you extend to others in your life, what would you need? What would you want? And what’s one thing you can start doing about it — right now, today?
As always, I’m wishing you all the best and so much compassion on this layered and challenging journey.
Please take good care of you.