The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish for Our Daughters

by Jeffrey Zaslow

  Shelley asks Erika what kind of bustle she’d like, and Erika chooses the French bustle, which requires numbered ribbons that tie together. “Is it complicated?” Erika asks.

  “Not really,” Shelley says, “Once I’m finished, I’ll enroll your mom in bustling school for five minutes. Then she can help your bridesmaids do it at the wedding.”

  Erika stands patiently on the pedestal—it’s been about a half hour now—as Shelley continues fidgeting with the dress. After a while, Shelley decides she’ll need to do a traditional bustle because there aren’t enough sturdy points on the fabric to hang a French bustle. “The skirts hang differently on each dress, and brides’ torsos are different too,” she explains. “So I have to get it right. Thanks for being patient.”

  “I’m in no rush,” Erika tells her. “I love standing here. The longer you take, the more time I have in the dress.”

  Patience is a virtue not all brides display, but Erika has had practice. After all, she patiently waited a lifetime for that first kiss.

  When Erika was in second grade, in 1994, she naturally looked up to her oldest sister, Leanne, who was a fifth-grader. That was the year when Leanne read a Christian young adult novel in the Sierra Jensen series titled With This Ring. In the book, written by Robin Jones Gunn, the teenage main character, Sierra, told her father that she had written down her personal creed.

  “It says that my body is a gift and that God gets to decide who to give the gift to, not me,” Sierra explains. “And the best presents are the ones that are all wrapped up, not the ones that have been opened and rewrapped and now the paper is torn or the bow is squished. I believe God’s best plan is for me to be like a wrapped present. Then, when I get married, my husband will know that I’m a special gift just for him.”

  A young couple in the book had pledged not to kiss each other until their wedding day. When they were rehearsing in the chapel the afternoon before the ceremony, the pastor came to the “you may kiss the bride” moment, and the groom-to-be just looked into the bride-to-be’s eyes. As one of the characters later described it: “He was an inch away from her face. It was about the most romantic, totally make-you-melt scene in the world. Then I heard him whisper to her, ‘Tomorrow my love. Tomorrow.’” (On the day of the wedding, when the kiss finally happened, the couple’s friends held up cardboard cards, all with the number 10 on them, rating the kiss as if it were the Olympics.)

  For young Christian readers such as Leanne, this story felt thrilling. “I wonder what it would be like to save my kisses,” she said to her sisters.

  “The more I think about it, the more I want to do it.” Leanne started telling everybody about her vow—teachers, family friends, other kids. She thought this would hold her more accountable, because she’d be embarrassed if she broke her pledge.

  Soon enough, Erika decided to make the same promise, as did her two other sisters. It would not be easy for them.

  When Erika reached her teen years, her peers often gave her a hard time. Girlfriends debated the issue with her: How could she know a man was right for her if she didn’t know if he was right for her physically? Her answer: It’s too selfish to focus on measuring how a future husband might please her physically. The marriage bonds have to be about so much more than that. If the love and sense of duty to each other is there, the physical relationship will follow—and be even stronger. She was sure of that.

  When adults asked her, she’d maturely explain herself: “Some people say your purity isn’t worth saving anymore, that the whole message of being physical is different today. But I see it as a blessing for a husband and wife. You have a physical aspect to share that you haven’t shared with anyone before.”

  Erika admits that the teen years were often lonely for her and her sisters. Their mother’s heart sometimes ached for them. “If you were a Hansen girl, a lot of the boys stayed clear,” says Lynn. “Some people mocked them.”

  Their father, Vic, told them he admired their decisions “even though your mom and I did our share of kissing before we got married.” The girls’ embrace of purity fit with the things he was trying to teach them, about both faith in God and a plan for life.

  And actually, the Hansen girls are not as rare as they might seem. Robin Gunn has sold three million copies of her forty young-adult books. She estimates that more than a half-million young women today have been influenced by their churches, parents, and Christian authors such as her “to direct their futures toward purity, rather than going along with what they see on TV.” Of course, they’re a clear minority. Just 16 percent of young couples actually end up putting off sex until after marriage, and more than a third of high school kids today already have had intercourse, research shows. Still, new data from the National Center for Health Statistics suggests that a growing segment of young people are willing to admit to a yearning for more traditional values. The US government’s 2011 report shows that among people ages fifteen to twenty-four, 29 percent of women and 27 percent of men say they’ve never had a sexual encounter. That’s up from 22 percent for both sexes in a 2005 survey. The percentage of women ages twenty to twenty-four who say they’ve never had sexual contact with another person has risen to 12 percent from 8 percent. (The media dubbed the results as “a trend toward postponement,” with headlines announcing “Virginity’s making a comeback.”)

  Gunn knows that most young people have not embraced the Christian philosophy espoused in her books, but she’s gratified when she hears from those who have. “I hear daily from girls who say, ‘I want to hold out for a hero.’ It’s almost like the alternative lifestyle today is purity. Girls are saying, ‘We’ve seen it all. We’ve watched our parents. How can we be different?’”

  Gunn dismisses the notion that our daughters need to make certain that they’re sexually compatible with a man before marrying him. “It’s beautiful if you can enter a marriage at the level of inexperience and innocence that gives you the space to grow up together,” she says. A 2010 study of 2,035 married couples, reported in the Journal of Family Psychology, found that those who delay sex until marriage often have stronger marriages and better sex lives, in part because early in their relationships, they focused on communicating rather than having sex.

  Critics say the modesty movement with daddy-daughter “purity balls,” gives girls the message that they are property traded from their fathers to their husbands, and that their bodies and their sexuality need to be guarded and monitored by men. They also argue that programs touting abstinence don’t work. While teen pregnancy rates are down, researchers say the credit is mostly due to safe-sex education and better use of contraceptives. Some argue that girls who take purity vows and then break them are more apt to engage in risky behaviors, because they haven’t been educated about contraceptives.

  Vic and Lynn Hansen are aware of all the arguments. And in their efforts to give their four daughters a more sheltered upbringing than they had, they did have some pushback over the years.

  When Erika and her sisters were younger, they weren’t allowed to watch certain popular television shows, including Friends, which Vic didn’t like because, as he put it, “That show has a tone of approval about premarital sex. The message is, It’s OK to sleep with multiple partners and it’s all funny.”

  Lynn told the girls: “Yes, the show is fun to watch. But I’m struggling with exposing you to something I don’t believe is appropriate.”

  The girls fought back. A vow of purity—that they could handle. But going to school, where all their friends were talking about Friends, and having to admit they weren’t allowed to watch it—that was unacceptable to the girls. They challenged their parents, saying they were being overprotective. “We’re smart enough to judge things ourselves, to make our own observations of what’s right and wrong,” argued Leanne.

  And so the girls were allowed to watch Friends and a few other shows their parents didn’t like. Mostly, however, the dominant culture was kept at bay.

  Fathers like Vic Hansen
, who only have daughters, often feel blessed. But they also can feel conflicted. Gallup polls have repeatedly shown that about 45 percent of men would prefer having a son if they had only one child, compared with 19 percent who’d prefer a daughter—a ratio little changed since 1941.

  Once a daughter arrives, her parents are 6 percent more likely to get divorced than if she were a boy, according to a study of “boy bias” by researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Rochester. Parents with three daughters are about 10 percent more likely to get divorced than parents of three sons. Meanwhile, divorced mothers of daughters remarry at higher rates than divorced mothers of sons. And the researchers even found that when unmarried couples have an ultrasound to determine the sex of their child, men are more likely to marry their partners after learning the child will be male.

  Dads with sons are more likely to stick around in part because they feel a greater need to serve as male role models, and they’re usually more comfortable around boys, the researchers say. In their hearts, a lot of men know themselves: They want a child in their image, a pal to share their love of sports, or a testosterone-fueled partner to join them someday in business. They want someone to carry on their family name. They want sons.

  For his part, Vic Hansen never felt this way. From the start, he embraced his role as a father of girls, and his daughters confided in him easily. In fact, Erika now sees her dad every day because she works in customer service at Display Pack, Vic’s packaging company in Grand Rapids, a second-generation family business with four hundred employees. (Display Pack makes the small plastic and cardboard boxes that computer ink-cartridges and cell phones come in. Vic’s dad started the business in a one-stall garage. “If you ever need a machete to open plastic packaging,” Vic jokes, “it’s our fault. But the companies we supply worry about shoplifting, and they want us to make their products difficult to open.”)

  Vic is consumed by the business at times, but as a father, he has always believed that it’s vital to carve out individual time for his daughters. And so when each of the girls turned sixteen, he took them on a one-on-one father/daughter trip. Erika’s trip was to Hawaii, and while they were there, Vic set aside time for some very direct conversations. He asked Erika about her goals and dreams. He talked to her from his heart, speaking about the risks of dressing provocatively, and about the urges teenage boys have.

  Erika and her dad talked about how our culture has changed, how a lot of men these days are no longer the pursuers in relationships. Too many young women are throwing themselves at men; their role models are trashy characters on TV shows such as Jersey Shore. “That’s not the way it should be,” Vic told Erika. “I ask you and your sisters to be a little mysterious. Make it so boys want to learn more about you.”

  He warned Erika about the limitations of courtship by computer. Young people today are too often alone in their bedrooms, texting and trading Facebook chatter. As Vic sees it, real love is discovered face-to-face, and so he urged Erika to spend time with a boy, talking. “When you’re sitting behind a computer, there’s a veil of security,” he said. “Face-to-face, there’s more vulnerability. If a guy is only pursuing you electronically, and doesn’t want face time with you, ask yourself if this is really a full relationship.”

  On Erika’s sixteenth birthday trip, Victor pulled out a passage from Psalm 45, which touches on matters of love and marriage. “When it’s time for you to pick a partner,” Vic said to Erika, “what qualities do you think are nonnegotiable?”

  He encouraged her to write down ten character traits she sought in a husband, asking that she look beyond tall, dark, and handsome. (Among the qualities her sisters came up with on their birthday trips: “joyful,” “loves what’s right, hates wrong,” “thinks before he speaks,” and “set apart.”) Erika gave her dad’s request a good deal of thought, and her list included “virtuous in character,” “blessed by God,” “truthful,” “humble,” and “displays awesome deeds.” She ended with “most excellent,” which made her dad smile. “That’s a terrific list,” he told her. “When you date, you can use it as a filter.”

  Victor had a rule. If a boy wanted to date one of his daughters, he needed to first come to the house to introduce himself. More than a few boys saw that as a deal-breaker. It wasn’t just the lack of kissing that kept boys away: It was having to meet Mr. Hansen.

  That turned out to be a great filter too. “The guys who weren’t willing to wait for that kiss, the guys who weren’t willing to come talk to me—they didn’t pursue our girls,” Vic says. “But the ones willing to take a risk, to come and introduce themselves to me—I found that they were much more self-sufficient and confident men. And I think that has led us to have terrific sons-in-law.”

  The Hansen women: Kayla, mother Lynn, Leanne, Erika, and Aleece

  Lynn Hansen is very proud of her daughters, of their decisions over the years, and the way they chose the men they’d marry. But the truth is, along the way, there were great worries. Would the girls grow up to be so sheltered that they’d be terribly naïve and vulnerable to others? She’d ask Vic: “Have we been overprotective to the point where we’ve done them a disservice?” (The Hansen girls are certainly outliers. In a 2011 survey by OneHope, a Christian youth outreach group, 96 percent of 5,100 teens polled said premarital kissing is acceptable.)

  And Lynn wondered: How have the girls been affected by the scars she has carried with her through her life?

  Born in 1960, Lynn grew up in Muskegon, Michigan, in a family she describes as “the Brady Bunch without the happy faces.” There were nine children total. Before her parents married, her dad already had four sons and her mom had two daughters and a son. They then had two children together: Lynn and her brother.

  It is hard to even contemplate the degree of untreated dysfunction in that home. For starters, there was easy access to hard-core pornography. “It was in almost every room,” Lynn recalls. As a girl, she’d come upon these images, nonchalantly tucked in a magazine rack or in a drawer. “My mother was aware we were finding this stuff. If we were caught looking at it, we’d be reprimanded and shamed.”

  “But you look at it,” Lynn once said to her mother.

  The answer her mother gave her was a variation of “do as I say, not as I do.”

  At times, Lynn’s mother was physically abusive. Her dad did even more harm. When Lynn was three years old, in 1963, her father was charged with sexually abusing Lynn’s older sisters. It was a different era, and after Lynn’s mom asked that the charges be dropped, the authorities barely slapped his wrists. He was told to go to three counseling sessions. His abuses continued, and eventually, Lynn was also a victim. Her father’s abuses lasted from when she was a toddler until she was a preteen.

  “He made it seem as if this was his way of showing love,” says Lynn. “He never touched us any other time. And so it messed with our ability to understand a father’s affection.”

  As a girl, Lynn would watch The Brady Bunch and think, “That’s the way it’s supposed to be. That’s what a mom should be like. That’s what a dad should be like.” She became obsessed with the show, and with Mrs. Brady.

  Actress Florence Henderson, who played Carol Brady, often heard from young girls in troubled families who yearned to be a part of a bunch like the Bradys. In the late 1960s, she’d receive letters from girls asking her to please come and get them. One Iowa girl even included directions to the street corner where she’d be waiting with her suitcase.

  Yes, the show was idealized and syrupy, but to young girls like Lynn it felt like a balm, a window into what a loving family could be. Lynn never wrote to Henderson, asking to be rescued, but she understood the urges of those who did. “Given the chaos in my family, my heart was so hungry for good parenting,” she says. She’d sit in her room, writing stories about girls in functional, loving families—her own Brady-like storylines.

  Though there was no faith to speak of in her house growing up, there was a Bapt
ist church down the street. From the time she was five years old, Lynn would go there by herself. She found solace there.

  A few times, Lynn would actually say, “I don’t feel loved in this family.” Her father answered: “I put a roof over your head, clothes on your back, food in your belly. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.” One time when she was older, Lynn asked her mother why her father abused his daughters. “He did those things because he hadn’t been loved as a child,” her mother answered.

  Given her upbringing, and the unfortunate choices her parents made, it would be almost impossible for Lynn not to have residual issues.

  Early in her marriage, she’d have nightmares and she’d wake up, scrambling across Vic, “as if she was trying to get away from something,” he recalls. At age thirty, she spent six weeks in the hospital being treated for depression. Vic understood Lynn’s childhood traumas had cast a cloud over their marriage, but he didn’t know how to enter that part of her life. At times Lynn resented him and felt urges to abandon the marriage. She was a yeller, and the more she yelled, the more passive he got. Some mornings, she’d wake up, look at Vic, and think, “What have I done? Why did I marry him?”

  But through it all, Vic dug in. “We’re never getting divorced,” he’d say. He was raised in a Christian family, and he suggested they attend a faith-based marriage conference called Intimate Allies. It was an eye-opening weekend for Lynn.

  At one point, the discussion leader told the couples in attendance: “Look at the person next to you. That’s the person God has given you to accompany you through life. He’s not your enemy. He’s your ally.”