Prior to getting married, I was an overzealous advocate of abstinence. This did not mean that I organized True Love Waits rallies, attended purity balls or brandished a purity ring (mine was placed in a "safe" location in my room never to be seen again after my 13th birthday). But it did mean that I took the decision to save sex for marriage very seriously.
For one, I was determined to heed my mother's early admonishments not to "make the same mistakes she did." I would learn from the heartache of her unwanted pregnancy at 19. I would protect my heart and my body.
My commitment to chastity also became entrenched due to the highly sexualized nature of North American youth culture. It disturbed me to my deepest core that remaining a virgin past the age of 16 was deemed an unrealistic goal. So I took it upon myself to be the exception. I would show that it was possible to remain "pure." It is here that the seeds of pride were sown in the fertile ground of good intentions.
I embraced the image of myself as the radical abstinence practitioner until I became engaged at the age of 24. Up to this point, my pride had deluded me into thinking that I had a balanced, Godly view of sexuality. I assumed that because I had "fought the good fight" to remain chaste, I would be able to seamlessly transition into a healthy sexual relationship with my husband.
However, as the wedding night approached, I found myself reluctant to have sex and growing ever resentful at the idea that I had to surrender 24 years of hard-won virginity. I did not see sexual intercourse as a gift from God or a wonderful way to gain intimacy with my husband. Instead, sex signified a loss. To me, it meant nothing more than deflowerment. The fact that I would even view my husband as a "deflowerer" should have been the sign that something was seriously wrong about my attitude toward sex. But my pride did not allow me to challenge this viewpoint.
And so I spent a very disappointing honeymoon trying to have awesome sex but just feeling empty. I tried to be sexy (wear lingerie, etc.) but it felt extremely hollow. I was going through the motions but not owning my sexuality. I knew that I was blocked inside somehow. I couldn't recognize that it was my own pride that had twisted my commitment to chastity into chains that confined my married sexuality.
You see rather than let God shape my sexuality; I made it all about me. My dedication to chastity was egocentric -- it centered on the steeling of my will, and the impressiveness of my ability to have a serious relationship without physical intercourse.
I loved the respect I got from being a virgin and I did not see how being a wife gave me any honor. As often goes with pride, the more I made my commitment to abstinence about me, the more I became distanced from the real me -- a sexual being God created for pleasure. I did not want to be sexual and I divorced myself from that identity. I refused to make peace with my vagina (you just stay down there and do your thing -- I'll do mine), and I viewed biblical examples of sexual pleasure as embarrassingly crass ("Breasts like ripe melons"?! Keep your mind out of the gutter, Solomon!).
Ultimately, the squelching of my sexuality only led to heartache and frustration for me and my husband.
It can be very hard for a dedicated virgin to "switch gears" into passionate married sexuality. If the transition is difficult for you, you are not alone. But God can heal you and help you realize that your chaste self is not that far removed from your sexual self. After all, chastity is meant to prepare you for intimacy, be it with God through bodily purity or with your husband through the physical act of sex.
I would like to encourage others to embrace chastity but not to do so at the expense of their own God given sexuality.
It is possible to turn chastity -- one's virginity -- into an idol. By prizing our own purity too highly, it is possible to hurt married sexuality.
Do not let abstinence become an idol in your life, like I did.
Written by Prisca Bird for GoodWomenProject.com
Follow The Good Women Project on Twitter: www.twitter.com/goodwomenproj
Andrew Z. Cohen: I Learned More About Sex When I Gave It Up
Shira Dicker: Hook Up vs. Shut Up: Yeshiva University's Sex Story Controversy
Dr. Wendy Walsh: Are You Fearless Enough To Say No To Sex?
Soraya Chemaly: A Message to Girls About Religious Men Who Fear You
Sex is a beautiful thing, but it loses its beauty when people have sex outside of the context it is intended for—marriage. Lifelong commitment.
http://chastity.com/
As a result...
Remaining a virgin for your entire life has great resonance with the practice of the ancient ascetic Church, monks and nuns have abounded throughout history and achieved great spiritual heights.
However salvation is not limited to those who are celibate and many married Christians have been recognized as Saints by the Church.
The reason I point these facts out, is in a disturbing number of comments to this article - people view celibacy (even a temporary abstinence prior to marriage) as impossible or unhealthy - when the opposite is true.
Those of us in America enjoyed a good laugh, when we saw the Seinfeld character 'George' become driven and focused (where previously he was aimless and feckless) though a voluntary sexual abstinence. Why did we laugh ... was there some truth behind the joke that we all recognized?
Jokes aside - when we give something to God - we get something precious in return.
BOTTOM LINE: Just because something feels good, doesn't mean it is good for you. This includes pre-marital sex, drug/alcohol abuse, over-eating, etc.
But the problems are more than that. It takes experience to differentiate lust and love. Young lust is particularly strong and young lusters almost always believe that what they are feeling is love. One in a million times it actually is too, so we can't categorically dismiss the possibility and each young couple is certain that they are true star crossed lovers who feel about each other as no couple has ever felt about any couple blah blah blah blah ...
Fighting young lust is a losing proposition. Teenagers by nature are trying to transition from dependent to independent and part of that process seems to be picking fights with their parents to make it easier to kick them out of the nest =D. Nothing will make young lusters more devoted to their relationship than parental opposition ... even though it is so obvious from our point of view that there is no real relationship there.
Yes what they have *is* empty.
But you know the best way to get them to realize it?
Let them get it out of their systems. Let them experience the emptiness. Make sure they know how to go about things safely, describe what real love is like, and let them figure out that what they have falls short.
Works way better and keeps the drama to a minimum.
There was an NPR bit .. this American Life? I can't find it. But it as about a guy who was so focused on maintaining chastity that he was a mess. He couldn't get the mail because a catalog might cause "impure thoughts" so his mom had to get it for him.
He sought help at a support group for sex addicts who laughed at him because he was a mid - 20's **virgin**. How could he possibly be a sex addict?
Because he couldn't stop thinking about sex. He was a cartoonist by hobby and when he looks at his work from that time the women are all floating heads. He didn't know what women looked like from the neck down because he wouldn't look at us. He was unable to hold a conversation with half the human species because proximity of a woman threatened his hold on chastity ( impure thoughts ).
Finally a friend slipped him a victoria's secret catalog out of sheer frustration and urged him to just look. Nothing that could happen from looking could be worse than what he was doing to himself by not looking.
I'll see if I can find the link to the podcast later. If anyone has it could you post?
Instead of focusing on the negative (don't have sex!), I was fortunate enough to learn the positive version of that message, that relationships work best when sex is confined to a monogamous, life-time commitment (marriage) as the fullest gift of self. Sex was beautiful. It was not a shameful thing to be guarded against, but rather to be given freely and fully in the right context.
It makes me sad that the only two options presented these days seem to be polar opposite ends of the spectrum 1) deny, restrict, deny...sex is bad! or 2) sex feels so good that we could never expect anyone to wait, so do whatever you want and pray (and contracept and pray) that you don't wind up with one of those natural consequences of having sex. Both sides (deniers and do-whateverers) place far too little value on sex. That middle ground needs to get more airtime.
Nobody has ever, in the history of our species, expected chastity for over a decade of sexual maturity. Expecting it is not the "middle ground". It is an extreme. You are trying to drag the middle ground to an unhealthy extreme.
Not expecting it is the normal. The expectation that our parents had and their parents and their parents before them on and on to the beginning of our kind.
The only difference is that we are reaching sexual maturity much earlier than ever before thanks to our diets and delaying marriage much longer than every before thanks to an assortment of things but mostly due to economics.
You are ( deliberately? ) treating all sex outside of marriage as the same. As if the serial monogamist and the nymphomaniac were equivalent, both "option 2".
No.
Not even remotely close. There is a huge gradient in your "option 2" that you are ignoring. It is there you will find your middle ground.
It's understandable because that's exactly what the Abrahamic religions teach men and women, that a woman's only value is her virginity. Once virginity is loss, a woman's actual cash price in the desert drops to nearly zero. If virginity is a woman's only value to herself, her family and the community, of course it's something to be grieved once lost.
Our biggest mistake is having a concept of human purity at all. When the body is viewed as pure or impure, when the body can be judged as tainted, stained and impure by any activity, the body becomes a slave to an imaginary value that simply isn't real.
A fascinating insight into the male mind about females is the Malleus Maleficarum written in 1486 by the Catholic Inquisition, and available free to read in English with a quick Google.
On reading what male leadership of the church thinks and teaches other men about women's inherent evil, how to find it and how to crush it, one understands completely why women have been persecuted, enslaved, bought, sold, oppressed and silenced to this day.
It's deeply depressing and frightening to read what men feared about women and how they planned to "protect" themselves from the evil of women, and is a must-read.
Church leaders don't say what they actually feel. They have always been about propaganda. There is the internal communications where they are more-or-less honest about their positions then the process of deciding how best to "sell" their decisions to the public and then the "official" positions/arguments.
Several people I know who attended seminaries and such have told me that they were told there are two truths, the truths we know and the truths we tell the flock to lead them on the right path.
This is a very fancy way of saying that when they think speaking their minds would make them unpopular they find a way to dress their sentiments up in something more palatable.
So when unpublished internal documents get leaked they are particularly interesting.
My relationship to sex has been permanently altered thanks to religion, and not for the better. I've turned down liasons in my younger days out of a misplaced pride in 'purity'. What I should have done is slipped on a condom, explored what intimacy, both emotional and physical was all about, and grown into a much more normalized and happy individual. But instead, I ostracized anyone who had sex as unclean or whorish, seperated myself from the world of dating, and have grown into a very sexually frustrated young man.
Fingers crossed things get better.
But what I mean is, you have to find out what makes you happy. You have to ask yourself serious questions and be extremely honest. I don't see how such introspection can be done if someone continues to be unhappy. They may *feel* they are doing their own thing and all that, but they aren't. Not really.
The extremes -to much or to little - are generally bad.
It is difficult to maintain virginity into your twenties. It goes against human nature profoundly. In order to manage it you have to re-wire your brain to condition yourself to respond negatively to erotic stimuli.
When you eventually get married this conditioning does what she described. It makes you frigid and remote. Unable to participate in physical union normally.
It is a bad thing. Harmful to marriage.
If we just permanently chained them to a wall, the odds would be even better!
I am glad that my article inspired sympathy but I want you to know that this isn't a tale of loss or of sadness. I see it as an account of redemption and a liberating exercise. I am no longer a slave to the personal pride that didn't allow me to see sex as a gift from God. I am able to enjoy marital sex now because I know that God designed it. If I suffered at all in the early days of marriage, it was because I refused to acknowledge that sex was a necessary and wonderful part of marriage. I elevated virginity to a high status that God never intended. Chastity for Christians is important but it is not meant to be a personal idol. I do not regret waiting for marriage to have sex, but merely the fact that I was prideful about it.