A Ring By Spring…Or Your Money Back

Every year, my university, Abilene Christian, hosts Welcome Week during freshman orientation week. My memories of my freshmen year Welcome Week include:

• All of the freshmen shouting “You’re killing me Smalls!” in unison with Ham in The Sandlot upon Smalls’ lack of knowledge about s’mores.

• A game night that involved numerous Fear Factor-themed activities, from the gallon challenge to Happy Meal in a Blender as well as my introduction to a novel concept…

• Ring by Spring!

The co-chairs of Welcome Week invited a few freshmen to the stage to ask an assortment of questions. What are you majoring in? What are you most looking forward to? And ultimately, why did you come?

They asked one woman—we’ll call her Alexis, because in my mind, she’s a spitting image of Alexis from Schitt’s Creek—these questions, to which she responded:

“I’m from Houston. I’m a communications major. And I’m here to get my RING BY SPRING!”

About a third of the crowd cheered along with her, a third of the crowd laughed uncomfortably, and a third of the crowd released an audible groan.

But prototype Alexis Rose did get married before she graduated.

A lot of us did.

Marriage as a Rite of Passage

While the Church of Christ didn’t participate as openly in the business of Purity Culture, its values and principles were still heavily involved in social engagements. Guys weren’t allowed in the girls’ dorms, or vice versa. All freshmen and sophomores were required to live on campus. Women had a strictly enforced curfew that men didn’t have; after all, we’ve gotta lock up protect the virgins.

And the only way to have the institution—both the university and the larger religious structures—acknowledge our adultness?

Get married.

Marriage was the rite of passage into adulthood, most notably celebrated through church-sanctioned sexuality.

However, at Christian universities, participation in the institution of marriage supersedes the quality of human relationships and the provision of communication skills, conflict management, and negotiation strategies required to have quality relationships.

My ex and I considered ourselves Ring by Spring rebels; we waited until the ripe old age of 24. Never mind that we started dating at 19 and exposed ourselves to five years of a horrific cycle of sexual desire, shame, and panic. Sadly, we never discovered an exit strategy from this psychological and relational damage.

I sometimes wonder if the only reason we remained married as long as we did was because we learned that relational success and marital longevity are the same thing.

Relational Success ≠ Martial Longevity

Whenever I hear about the upcoming marriages of teenagers and early 20-somethings, I grieve.

I grieve that shame-free sex is often the primary reason for getting married young. I grieve that for many of these folks, shame will manifest in different ways three years, five years, and ten years after the wedding day.

I grieve because marriage is an expectation for adulthood in the culture that I grew up in, rather than a choice that people make without outside pressures.

I grieve that our country has continued to fund abstinence-only education in public schools, as well as many private schools, so that the only universally sanctioned way to engage in sexuality is through a marital (and thus monogamous and straight) context.

I grieve that the values of our strongest moral and ethical systems, most notably the church, has equated relational longevity with relational success, at the expense of creating structures that teach healthy communication and negotiation skills.

Julia and I are committed, through our podcast Sexvangelicals and the Relationship 101 Substack, to discussing how to have healthy relationships, focusing on processes of communication that work for both people, rather than the status of one’s relationship (i.e. married).

Let’s heal together!