I Kissed Dating Goodbye

I Kissed Dating Goodbye is a 1997 book by Joshua Harris that told young Christians to give up dating entirely in favor of parent-guided courtship. Harris wrote it at 21, it sold about a million copies, and in 2018 he asked his publisher to stop printing it, saying he no longer agreed with its central idea.^[1][3] For Christian homeschoolers of my generation, this was not just a book on the shelf. It was the rulebook for how relationships were supposed to work.

Key points

• Published in 1997, when Harris was 21 years old, and it became a fixture in evangelical and homeschool households (I get into the history here).
• It taught courtship in place of dating: romantic relationships pursued only with marriage in view, usually under parental oversight.
• NPR called it a defining text of the evangelical purity movement.^[2]
• In 2018 Harris discontinued the book, apologized to readers hurt by it, and released a documentary revisiting its impact.^[1][2]
• I spent a four-part series on the show reading it cover to cover as a homeschool alum.

What the book actually taught

The core idea was that dating itself was the problem. In its place the book promoted courtship: no casual relationships, emotional and physical restraint, and parents closely involved from the first conversation (what courtship meant in practice). Purity was framed as something you could permanently damage, which left many readers carrying shame into adulthood and marriage. Harris has said as much himself: in later interviews he described regretting the way the book taught people to fear relationships and their own feelings.^[4]

Why it hit homeschool culture so hard

The book landed hardest in the conservative Christian homeschool world, where families had the latitude to actually enforce it. Plenty of families in the community did courtship by the book (as I talk about here). I was born in 1996, so the book is almost exactly my age, and its ideas were simply the water we swam in. I told my own version of that story in an early episode, I Survived Purity Culture and Lived to Tell the Tale.

The author took it back

Harris spent years re-examining the book after readers described the harm it caused. In 2018 he and his publisher discontinued it, and his public statement says he no longer agrees with its central idea and apologizes to people the book misdirected.^[1][3] That same year he collaborated on a documentary, I Survived I Kissed Dating Goodbye, built around conversations with people whose relationships the book had shaped.^[2]

A year later he announced that he was no longer a Christian, a turn that made national news and reopened the whole conversation about what purity culture did to the generation raised on it.^[5][6]

The four-part series on the show

I read the book so you do not have to, one section at a time:

• Part 1: Breaking down the book that shaped purity culture
• Part 2: The harmful heart of purity culture
• Part 3: Purity culture's 4-step plan for control
• Part 4: Purity culture almost ruined my marriage

More from the show: browse all the news and stories.

Sources

1. Joshua Harris, A Statement on I Kissed Dating Goodbye
2. NPR, Evangelical Writer Kisses An Old Idea Goodbye
3. The Christian Post, Joshua Harris says I Kissed Dating Goodbye will be discontinued
4. Premier Christianity, Joshua Harris: Why I regret writing I Kissed Dating Goodbye
5. Christianity Today, I Kissed Christianity Goodbye
6. Sojourners, What Happened After Evangelicals Kissed Dating Goodbye