Free The Big Love by Sarah Dunn

whether or not the stuff inside is safe to eat. And let me tell you, when you’re twenty-five, and a virgin, and you refuse to date anybody but a Christian—and not just any Christian but a
certain kind
of Christian—your options are all dented cans. When Gil and I finally broke up, I took another look around the church basement, and I had the closest thing I’ve ever had to an actual vision. There sat Brian Berryman. Single. Thirty-two. An attorney. Crown prince of the church basement. So morally upright he didn’t believe in dating; he believed in praying. He’d been praying for a wife since he was sixteen. He’d drawn up a list of all the qualities he wanted her to possess, a list which he was continually revising, and then praying about, and then revising some more, and then informally circulating among the single women at the church. A woman of pure heart, the list would go. A gentle and quiet spirit. A submissive nature.
Is this what you want in a husband?
Iheard a voice saying. Well, not an actual voice, but it was as clear as day. I realized that if I kept searching for husbands in church basements I was going to end up with a seriously dented can. And Gil, for all his faults, had at least relieved me of my virginity, which meant that it was now safe for me to venture out into the world and date normal men who would want to—who would
expect
to—sleep with me.
    I ask you, what would you have done if you were me? What would you have done? It’s impossible to convey just what I was up against. Years and years of appalling platitudes that were preached at me as if they were gospel.
No one wants the secondhand garments that have been pawed over on the sale table. No one wants the flower that has been plucked before it has a chance to bloom.
And for a long time this made perfect sense to me. Of course no one would want a pawed-over garment. Of course no one would want a flower that had already been plucked. And then one day it hit me:
but I am not a
flower,
nor am I
clothing. I was not an object. It felt really good to finally see through all of that, and to this day I consider that revelation the beginning of my admittedly somewhat stunted feminist awakening. Tom always said that I was traditional when being traditional suited my purposes and liberated when being liberated did, and while he did not intend this as a compliment, I always took it as one. Still, I’ve often wondered why I’ve never been able to become a full-blown feminist. Sometimes I think it’s because, having left one brand of self-righteous orthodoxy, I haven’t wanted to throw my lot in with another, but it’s entirely possible that I’m just too much of a fucking ninny. Oh well. I am feminist enough to be angry about a few things. I mean, it’s one thing to live in a society that views women as objects, and quite another to go to church as a young girl and have it pounded into your head to look at yourself as one. It made me want to get pawed over just to spite them. So I did, and it was fun, and for a while there I thought I was free of all that. But I wasn’t free of it, not really, not in a way that really counted. Because every time I stopped to think about what happened between Tom and me, a part of me couldn’t help believing that the real problem was simply that Tom had lost interest in the gum he had already chewed. He’d been getting the milk for free, and therefore had not bought the cow, and now he was in the mood for a new cow. What right had I to be surprised? This was, after all, what I’d been warned about my entire life. I’d been told in no uncertain terms just what the fruits of sexual freedom would be—that I’d end up alone and unloved, unmarried and childless, an object of scorn and pity, without even the solace of my faith. And, well, lying in my bed the morning after I’d had sex with Henry, alone (because he’d left), unloved (I think it’s safe to say I felt unloved), I was forced to ask myself—just