Purity culture marriages tend to break down in a specific sequence, and once you see the pattern it's hard not to see it everywhere.
Marriage is presented, inside purity culture, as the resolution. The waiting, the managing, the suppression — all of it ends at the wedding. After years of being told that desire is dangerous and must be controlled, the ceremony functions as a kind of switch: now it's permitted, now you're free, now the thing you were trained to fear and suppress becomes the thing you're expected to pursue and enjoy. The gap between those two instructions is enormous, and purity culture provides no bridge across it.
What people actually bring into purity culture marriages is the conditioning. Both people — in different ways, shaped differently by the gendered structure of the doctrine — arrive having spent years learning that their desire is a problem. He has learned to manage and suppress. She has learned that her body is a gatekeeper and a liability. Neither has had any real practice with desire as something to be present to, explored, or communicated about. The marriage ceremony doesn't change that. The honeymoon doesn't change that.
What follows, in the pattern that shows up again and again, is a sexual relationship that is either absent, obligatory, or quietly miserable — and neither person has the language or the framework to talk about it, because the only framework they were given was the purity one, and that framework said the wedding fixed it. If it isn't fixed, the available explanations are: not praying enough, not committed enough, something is wrong with one of you. The idea that the doctrine itself created the problem doesn't exist as an option inside the doctrine.
The marriages that survive purity culture intact are the ones where both people, usually after years and often with significant outside help, manage to build a different relationship to desire from scratch — inside a marriage, while also managing everything else a marriage involves. That's not impossible. It's just significantly harder than it should be, and it requires both people to be willing to name what the doctrine actually did, which the doctrine actively discourages.
The marriages that end tend to end at a predictable point: when one person begins the deconstruction process and the other doesn't, or when the sexual distance becomes large enough that one or both people begin to question whether the relationship is real, or when someone finally names what's been wrong and the naming opens something that was easier to leave closed.
The religious trauma work that involves purity culture marriages is some of the most specific and practical work I do. It's less about the theology and more about the specific relational damage: the things that were never said, the desire that was never named, the distance that built slowly and silently because neither person had a word for what was happening. Getting those things into language is where the actual work starts.
Purity culture told you the marriage would fix it. The marriage didn't get that memo either.