Christian NFL star Russell Wilson and his girlfriend, pop singer Ciara, made headlines in 2015 after revealing they decided to abstain from premarital sexual relations.
Nearly a year later, the 30-year-old "I Bet" singer revealed that she and Wilson are staying true to their decision -- but it isn't easy.
"We're hanging in there. I'm not gonna lie," she told the publication. "I'm human, so it is not easy, especially when I look at him and I think he is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen - that I've ever laid my eyes on, to be honest. I'm like, Look the other way!"
Wilson first made the announcement during a July 2014 apperance at The Rock Church in San Diego, where he revealed that the decision was based on his Christian values.
"I'll never forget: She was on tour, she was traveling, and I was looking at her in the mirror," Wilson said. "I was sitting in the dressing room, and she was getting ready to go, about 15 minutes before she went on stage. And she was sitting there, and God spoke to me and said, 'I need you to lead her.' And I was like, 'Really? Right now?'"
According to Wilson, God told him "to lead her."
"So I told her right then and there, what would you do if we took all that extra stuff off the table and just did it Jesus' way?"
Life's not perfect," Wilson said. "Nobody's perfect, but he's anointed both of us, and I know that he's calling for us to do something miraculous, something special."
The NFL star expressed relief that Ciara agreed to practicing abstinence with him, stating, "I said to her, and she completely agreed: 'Could we love each other without that?'"
He added, "If you can really love somebody without that, then you can really love somebody."
The quarterback admitted that staying abstinent with the pop star will have its own challenges. "I ain't gonna lie to y'all now," Wilson quipped. "I need y'all to pray for us."
In turn, Ciara told E! News that she's completely on board with the decision to abstain from sex.
"I run into different people and they'll talk to me about their journey and their relationships, so I think that's been really cool and it's a healthy thing," she said. "It's a healthy conversation we all get to have as adults. I'm not sweating it at all."
Another prominent Hollywood couple, "Miracles from Heaven" producer DeVon Franklin and actress Meagan Good, also chose to abstain from sexual activity until marriage, a decision they discuss in detail in their new book, "The Wait."
In an interview with The Gospel Herald earlier this month, Franklin explained that he and his wife felt compelled to obey God's commandments regarding dating relationships and encouraged other couples to do likewise.
"It was very hard, definitely not easy for me at all," he said of the decision. "As I endured in the sacrifice of practicing it, it gave me a lot of discipline and clarity and focus. I had no idea that years later, when I met Meagan and we began to date, she was also practicing the wait. So, it was a real, true blessing, and what happened was that as we began to date, we began to see each other for who we really were and didn't have the cloudiness and blurriness of sex. We felt like God was bringing us together, we felt like it was a relationship that was leading to marriage, and we wanted our foundation to be strong and clear and powerful."
