Grateful to fellow blogger Chris Schumerth for the opportunity to talk about chastity, abstinence and sex in a recent interview. Click here to read it.
Virginity: A disadvantage in dating?
Last week, I blogged about author Elna Baker, the woman who wrote an essay for Glamour called “Yes, I’m a 27-Year-Old Virgin.”
She and I would be a couple peas in a pod for that, except what she wrote didn’t explain why she is saving sex for marriage. It explained her decision to “change the rules.” Which is why a couple years later, she wrote a second sex essay for the same magazine, called “Guess What? I’m Not a Virgin Anymore!”
In one of the essays, Baker – who once had planned to save sex for marriage – said “although my virginity was a disadvantage, I stayed hopeful about dating.” She later added that after she changed her mind about saving sex, her “dating life actually improved. By not taking sex off the table right away, I made it past the four-week mark in relationships with several different guys.”
In other words, since more men dated her for longer periods of time after she decided she didn’t have to save sex for marriage, Baker deduced that what made dating difficult for her prior was the saving sex.
I could not disagree with her more, for three reasons:
1. If a person has planned to save sex for marriage and virginity strikes him or her as a disadvantage in dating, he or she perhaps has missed the point of dating.
Lots of guys like virgins. Very few like virgins who aren’t going to sleep with them. So it’s true (and I’ve discovered this by experience): fewer guys in our culture find a girl dateable who isn’t going to have sex with them before marriage.
This is a non-issue if what you intend to accomplish by dating is to meet somebody who would suit you as a spouse. If you are saving sex for marriage, somebody who doesn’t want to save sex is not suitable for you. Suck it up and move along.
The truth is saving sex for marriage while searching for a spouse in a culture of people who mostly won’t marry you if they haven’t had sex with you does, in fact, mean your relationships with most people are going to end shortly after they start. Which, according to Baker, is the disadvantage.
But a disadvantage is “an unfavorable circumstance or condition that reduces the chances of success.” So if virginity and/or saving sex is a disadvantage because it results in few dates and short relationships with people you could never marry anway, I have to ask:
What is it that you’re really trying to accomplish?
2. That people won’t date you for more than a month because you’re saving sex does not mean virginity is a disadvantage. It means you’re dating the wrong kind of people.
3. If you sincerely want to save sex for marriage, virginity is an advantage (“A condition or circumstance that puts one in a favorable position.”). And if you aren’t a virgin but you’re saving sex from now on, being honest about it with the people you meet is an advantage, too. Because realistically, your “taking sex off the table right away” means people will, in fact, walk away just as quickly. And that is not a disadvantage. It’s a quick way to discover what you set out to learn in the first place: whether this person would make a suitable spouse.
[Q&A: Relationships] If our feelings fade, is it real love?
The Q: From a guy, regarding a girl in his life: “I like her. Well, more than that. But I know I’m not ready to date. So, we decided to be friends. … I’m scared if we don’t talk about our feelings and just be friends, our feelings will go away. But, love is stronger than that, right? Like, if this is love, then it will continue to grow naturally, without having to always say, ‘I love ya,’ right?” -James*
The A: What James is really afraid of – or so says my hunch – is not that the feelings will fade. He’s afraid of what it means if they do. And that requires a long answer.
According to the brilliant Pope John Paul II – and as fabulously paraphrased in a book by Edward Sri – there are a couple sets of a couple kinds of love (not a typo). There’s subjective love and objective love and there’s immature love and mature love.
Subjective love is emotional (sentimentality!) and physical (sensuality!). It is the part of love widely described as warm and fuzzy. It’s based on what happens to you, both spontaneously and suddenly. And “no matter how intensely we experience these sensations, it is not necessarily love, but simply ‘a psychological situation.’ In other words, on its own, the subjective aspect of love is no more than a pleasurable experience happening inside of me.” (Men, Women, and the Mystery of Love, page 56)
Objective love is what exists between you and somebody else in reality (not as filtered by the lenses that are clouded by those sudden, spontaneous sensations). It’s a fact, not a feeling. It’s based on a virtuous friendship, the pursuit of a common good, seeking what’s best for your beloved, self-giving, commitment to and a sense of responsibility for the other person (as paraphrased from Men, Women, and the Mystery of Love, page 59).
Immature love looks inward. The immature lover is “absorbed in his own feelings. Here, the subjective aspect of love reigns supreme. He measures his love by the sensual and emotional reactions he experiences in the relationship.” –Men, Women, and the Mystery of Love, page 79
Mature love looks outward, in two ways. First, it isn’t based on feelings, but on the truth about the other person, on commitment to that person (as a result of the truth) and on selflessness. Second, the mature lover “actively seeks what is best for the beloved. The person with a mature love is not focused primarily on what feelings and desires may be stirring inside him. Rather, he is focused on his responsibility to care for his beloved’s good. He actively seeks what is good for her, not just his own pleasure, enjoyment and selfish pursuits.” And the “emotions still play an important part, but they are grounded in the truth of the other person as he or she really is (not my idealization of that person).” –Men, Women, and the Mystery of Love, pages 79-80
And as I gather (from Sri and from JP2), subjective, immature love propels a person into a relationship because of feelings, and it isn’t real love. Objective, mature love compels a person to remain in a relationship when there are feelings and when there aren’t, and it is real love.
Which brings us back to James.
He said he’s afraid his feelings will fade, and asked whether love’s stronger than that, and whether – if it’s love – it’ll grow on its own.
Which I sum up like this: If our feelings fade, is it (objective, mature) love?
You’ll know the answer if and when they do.
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Q&A is an occasional feature. If you have a Q, I can come up with an A (and if I don’t have an A, I’ll find somebody who does). To submit a question, email me at arleenwrites@gmail.com or leave it in the comments. No topic is taboo (although I can’t promise I will answer every question).
Click here to read more about Men, Women, and the Mystery of Love by Edward Sri.
*Real person, fake name.
[Guest Post Series] Relationship Tips: #1 – Define your relationship (with Christ).
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| Mr. and Mrs. Fisher! |
Define The Relationship.
A DTR is the conversation in which you and your date ask the tough questions. Do we want to make this official? Where is this relationship heading? It’s a time to communicate.
It’s the same with God. Before Jesus ascended to heaven, He said that God would “give [us] another Advocate who will never leave [us]. He is the Holy Spirit, who leads into all truth” (John 14:16-17). We can communicate with the Spirit, telling God our hopes, dreams, fears, expectations, concerns, confusion, and doubts. We can speak in absolute honesty, trusting that nothing we say could ever separate us from Him or make Him love us any less.
Read John 14:15-17. Do you feel like you can speak openly with God? Do you feel anything in your past could separate you from His love?
{Excerpt taken from Not Another Dating Book}
About the blogger: Renee Johnson Fisher is a spirited speaker to the 20-somethings and author of Faithbook of Jesus and Not Another Dating Book. She loves her engineering husband and together they rescued a pit bull. She blogs at devotionaldiva.com.
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Relationship Tips is a series of guest posts. Click here to read all the posts in the series.
Virginity in print.
As it turns out, I am not the only woman who has put her virginity in print.
Another is a woman named Elna Baker, who in 2009 wrote an essay for Glamour called “Yes, I’m a 27-Year-Old Virgin.” But her story and mine are very different. In hers, she wrote of frequent close calls in beds with men and the Mormon roots that repeatedly compelled her to stop just short of sex.
And in 2011, Baker wrote a follow-up essay for Glamour. It’s called “Guess What? I’m Not a Virgin Anymore!”
Both essays are charming. Both are well written. And I have a few things to say in response to snippets of both. Read on.
From what Baker wrote before she had sex:
1. …everything I knew about sex I learned in church. I remember a Sunday school class on chastity when I was 13. The teacher walked into the classroom and slammed a tray of cookies onto the table with a loud clank.
“Does anyone want a cookie?” she asked in an aggressive tone. We perked up in our seats. Chastity class was always easier to endure when the teacher brought food, but something was amiss. Upon further inspection, the cookies were half-eaten, broken and sprinkled with dirt. “Anyone?” When no one answered, she nodded emphatically and said, “That’s right, no one wants a dirty, half-eaten cookie.” And that, my friends, is how I learned not to have sex.
For Baker’s Sunday school teacher to call what she taught “chastity” is unfortunate. Chastity is “the successful integration of sexuality within the person and thus the inner unity of man in his bodily and spiritual being. … Chastity includes an apprenticeship in self-mastery which is a training in human freedom. The alternative is clear: either man governs his passions and finds peace, or he lets himself be dominated by them and becomes unhappy. … The virtue of chastity comes under the cardinal virtue of temperance, which seeks to permeate the passions and appetites of the senses with reason.”* Dirty cookies are irrelevant to chastity. They’re frankly irrelevant to abstinence, too.
2. Although my virginity was a disadvantage, I stayed hopeful about dating. … Right there on the floor of the yoga studio, despite everything my parents and religion taught me, I decided to change the rules. I, Elna Baker, could have premarital sex. My criteria were pretty simple: It had to be with someone I trusted (no one-night stands). Most important, I would not cave to pressure from anyone. I had to make the decision for myself.
Over the next year, instead of just kissing sitting up, I started kissing lying down (the gateway drug to sex). And my dating life actually improved. By not taking sex off the table right away, I made it past the four-week mark in relationships with several different guys.
That guys won’t date you for more than a month because you’re saving sex does not mean virginity is a disadvantage. It means you’re dating the wrong guys. (And convinced, perhaps, that no other kind of guy exists.)
From what Baker wrote after she had sex:
1. I thought it would help to go public about my virginity in a magazine; it ended up turning me into a reluctant spokesperson for abstinence. There were perks—the supportive e-mails I got from strangers were moving—but because I was so out there about it, Google soon became my biggest cock block. Guys would look me up and just think, No way. And to be honest, I had grown used to the fascination, disgust and confusion my virginity elicited in men.
So it’s a bad thing that guys who can’t handle your virginity don’t want to date you? Because I prefer that they don’t try.
2. And then it really hit me: I wasn’t a virgin anymore. That part of my identity was gone, and I had to face the fact that, at 28, I had no idea who I was.
This – virginity as part of identity – is a sad side effect of being taught abstinence outside of the context of chastity. Chastity is a way of life livable by people who are single, married or celibate. Chastity as part of identity is safe, because chastity never ends.
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Click here to read what Baker wrote before she had sex.
Click here to read what she wrote afterward.
Click here to read what I most recently put in print about virginity.