St. Thomas calls the cardinal sin sloth “a sadness arising from the fact that the good is difficult.” Sloth paradoxically affirms a person’s belief that a choice is good simultaneously as it underlies his or her resistance to making the choice.
It’s “chastity is good, but…”
“Prudence is good, but…”
It’s believing in the existence of the merit of a choice, but not making it because making it would require you to transcend an urge, for instance, or to defeat a fear.Continue reading “Virtue is good, but…”
The Q: “With our society as it is today and everyone expecting sex outside of marriage, how (or how soon) do you let somebody you’ve started seeing know that you practice chastity (and that therefore, you abstain from nonmarital sex)? -a reader
The A: How I tell a guy I’m saving sex has varied, and — let’s face it — Google usually beats me to it. But if an interested guy hasn’t Googled me, that I’m saving sex inevitably comes up when he learns that I’m a writer and asks about what I write. How I disclose that I practice chastity, however, has more flexibility than when I do it.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” I said to a man on his couch in a Tampa apartment. He—then in his late twenties and interested in me—nodded, and waited for me to say it. I, then in my early twenties, breathed in before I did: “I’m saving sex for marriage.”
I breathed out while he silently processed what I had said. Then he turned his face toward mine and spoke: “If you want to wait, I’m willing.” But waiting had never been part of his world. He agreed to abstain from sex with me because he knew that if he didn’t, I wouldn’t date him. He agreed to behave as if he practiced chastity, but was only bound to nonmarital abstinence by my prohibition of nonmarital sex.
He respected my boundary, until he didn’t—until he mocked my decision to save sex and chalked it up to “immaturity,” in effort to manipulate me into changing my mind. He said “no guy will wait that long,” and begged me to break my promise to practice chastity. Instead, I broke up with him. I learned a lot in that relationship, including this:
When Lisa Selin Davis told a cabdriver she was going to have an abortion, he pulled the car over on the Brooklyn Bridge in a blizzard. He begged her not to do it. Davis, then a 22-year-old aspiring filmmaker, had conceived the child with a married man she met at a film shoot. But she “didn’t want that baby, with that man,” she wrote in an essay that printed in the Perspective section of the Tampa Bay Times on Sunday.
The story is sad but bold. When Davis resisted the cabdriver’s appeal, he took her to the clinic to which she had asked him to take her, where after it was over, she woke up sobbing in pain and a paper gown. She was sure she would never be a mother. She was wrong. Fifteen years later, she wrote, she gave birth to a daughter and later, to another. And, she added, “I want my daughters to have the option of safe and legal abortion, of course. I just don’t want them to have to use it.”
A few summers ago, I sat in the back of the first session of a secular human sexuality class at the University of South Florida. The class, which was part of the curriculum for my master’s degree in counseling, worried me, at first. I wondered whether how inexperienced I am would come up in conversation, and how my classmates would handle it if it did.
But the class, taught by sex therapist Dae Sheridan, turned out to be one of the best I have ever taken. For a few hours a week, we could toss taboos and talk about sex and related topics. The conversation with Dr. Dae, who became a mentor and friend, continued after I finished the class. When I asked for her insight regarding saving sex for marriage, she graciously agreed to let me share what she said with readers:
Arleen: Rumor has it “nobody saves sex for marriage.” Is that true?
Dr. Dae: I absolutely don’t think that no one does! There might not be as high of a percentage of people who are waiting until marriage, (but) I do see an increase in people who are waiting to be in loving, committed relationships. Sex is everywhere, to sell everything, so it’s perceived that everybody’s doing it, but not really everybody is doing it.
