Sometimes I wish there were a Christian Cosmopolitan magazine. I know – it’s an oxymoron. But bear with me.

What if there were a magazine for Christian young women that had articles not only about being your best at work, how to wake up in the morning, modesty and fashion – but also about birth control options other than the pill? About what sex looks like in marriage? Articles about the questions young women are asking that the church and family refuse to answer in a Christian context?

While plenty of books have been written, I know there are many young women who have questions they didn’t dare ask, and those questions were eventually answered by an eager world of Cosmo, Self, and Elle. The girls find their answers – but from the wrong people, and in the wrong places, with the wrong worldview.

So we find girls who started out with every tool necessary to build a future bright with hope and blessing, and watch them throw it away to prove nothing to nobody. We see little daughters grow up into young women, their innocent eyes now lined with anger because they believe the purity ring prevented them from experiencing real life. But as they go about experiencing, experimenting, and finding themselves, they lose something far more precious.

In the grocery store check out line we’re told that sexual freedom is being in control of your own body and giving it to whoever you please, whenever you please, and in as many small pieces as you choose to meter out at a time. But Cosmo only tells girls about the night before, not the morning after…

In my early teens, my bookshelf included such titles as:

Before You Meet Prince Charming by Sarah Mally
Becoming a Young Woman After God’s Own Heart by Elizabeth George
Beautiful Girlhood
When Dreams Come True by Eric and Leslie Ludy
Why I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Josh Harris

I liked to read about relationships (in that sense, nothing has changed; I’ve just developed a more grown-up taste of biographies of famous married couples) and read all the above titles, plus more. I grew up at the height of the purity movement: a church-led initiative encouraging commitments to abstinence, intentional relationships, courtship and purity rings. My dad gave me my ring at age 13, and most of my friends had one, too. I thought I had relationships figured out.

And then I got into a relationship, and I discovered that not only did I not have it figured out, but there were capabilities within me directly contrary to all I had ever learned…