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Thoughts on chastity, sex, and self-mastery.

I stumbled recently upon a tweet or a post in which its writer opined on self-mastery.

I don’t remember who it was or exactly what he or she said (I read a lot of things.). I do remember disagreeing. I suspect, then, that the tweet or post in some way decried the quest for self-mastery as bad. Which wouldn’t surprise me. The culture that surrounds us isn’t conducive to it. The culture that surrounds us ultimately says “be governed by your drives” (for sex, for instance).

We are taught to let our drives decide what we’ll do (want sex, get sex) instead of acknowledging our drives as there, and as God-given, but using other guides, like love and critical thought, to decide why and when to act on them.

Regarding drives, chastity says “govern them.” Chastity says use self-mastery to do it. Self-mastery requires discipline, but to get better at discipline isn’t the point. The point is to get better at love.
Self-mastery is self-dominion. It’s possession of self. It’s being the boss of your drives. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, it is “ordered to the gift of self.”Love, for single people and priests and nuns and married or celibate people, regardless of sexual orientation or experience or lack thereof, is a gift of self. When we love, we give ourselves in different ways to different people.

This is why, when love is the goal, self-mastery is important.

We can’t give away what we don’t own.

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Commentary on “My Virginity Mistake.”

In a column Sunday on Salon.com, Jessica Ciencin Henriquez – a fabulous writer, as far as I can tell – called her virginity at marriage a mistake. Wedding night sex was not what the church (nor the purity ring she wore) promised it would be.

Neither was her marriage.

Six months into it, Jessica wrote, “the idea of separating seemed more appealing than feigning headaches for the rest of my life.” She saved sex for marriage, “hoping it would ensure a successful marriage. Instead,” she wrote, “it led to my divorce.”

But did it?

I agree with what Jessica implies: the church camp where people preached premarital abstinence at her probably can be blamed in part for the sour start of what would be a short-term marriage.

But I disagree with what else she implies: That saving sex for marriage is a problem.

Excerpts of Jessica’s essay follow in italics, followed by my commentary:

But that ring! Silver and engraved with entwined hearts – everyone I knew was wearing one and I’d finally been given the opportunity to get my hands on it. And it wasn’t just the ring. This was a movement with T-shirts and hats and the added bonus of superiority over kids in school who couldn’t keep their clothes on, those sinners. 

This points to an important, unfortunate truth. Churches long have promoted premarital abstinence by talking about everything except for sex: the perils of unwed parenthood, the stigma associated with sexually transmitted infections, and how much “better” you are for not having sex than the kids who do. This is fear mongering, a lot of shame-based “why not,” and not a lot of genuine “why.” That is a problem.

The morning of my wedding day, I threw up. Everyone assumed that I was nervous about having sex. I wasn’t.

That everybody assumed Jessica barfed because she was anxious about having sex is indicative of a lie our culture tells us: that “the big moment” is what happens in bed on your wedding night, and not on the altar at your wedding. That is a problem.

When I look back on my wedding day, I remember a passionate kiss at the altar. But after rewatching video footage, I see it was little more than a peck on the corner of my mouth and a long hug. Two years of halting wandering hands as they grazed under blue jeans, and the second we have the permission from God, we hug. These are what red flags look like; my rearview mirror is lined with them.

When a church (or a school or a parent) says “wear this ring” and “sign this pledge” and then stops talking about relationships, girls and boys become women and men who basically only know not to have sex. Otherwise, their concepts of marriage and sex are shaped by their friends or media. That is a problem.

This was not lovemaking. There was no bond, no sanctity – this was not the amazing sex I was promised from the pulpit. This was disappointment three to four times a week.

To all people who preach “amazing sex” from pulpits: Please define amazing. The amazing part is not the sex. The amazing part is what’s implied by the fact that you saved it – your patience, your participation in the destruction of self absorption, your willingness to communicate outside (and eventually in) the bedroom. When you don’t define amazing, the assumption is “pleasurable sex will be intuitive and effortless, beginning with our wedding night” when, for most couples, that is so not true. That is a problem.

These problems plus premarital abstinence do not equal exemption from the consequences of these problems. They equal virgins at marriage who experience the consequences of these problems: not knowing the purpose of marriage or sex, more concern with preparedness for the wedding night than with preparedness for marriage, concepts of relationships and sex shaped by the media, and unrealistic expectations.

It is these consequences (among others, of course) that result in divorce, regardless of whether you’ve saved sex for marriage.

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Click here to read Jessica’s essay in full.

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Sex! And other stuff. | 03.25.13

This post is part of the Sex! And other stuff. series. Click here for more information.

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Love and Responsibility: I am VERY excited to report an advanced copy of Pauline Books and Media‘s new translation of my favorite book arrived last week. Love and Responsibility is a brilliant book written by Pope John Paul II before he was pope. Anybody who ever intends to get married ought to read it. The publisher releases the book for real in April. I’ll try, try, try to read it all before it’s released. Might not happen. But since my hunch is I am gonna love it, click here to pre-order your own copy.

Sex outside marriage v. sex inside marriage: Fellow blogger Jamie the Very Worst Missionary wrote a fabulous post in favor of loving instead of shaming the people who haven’t saved sex for marriage. Best part of the post, though, is this: “Sex matters. It’s the most vulnerable thing you’ll ever do with another human being. Commitment breeds intimacy, and intimacy is what makes sex freaking amazing. I’m not gonna lie, you can have hot sex outside of a committed relationship – but mostly it’s gonna be like… clumsy… and goopy… and ew. The better you know your partner, the better your sex will be. So basically what I’m saying is that wedding night sex is kinda “Meh.”, and five years sex is all “Yes!”, but 18 years sex is like “WOAH!!!” So go ahead and wait. Wait and enjoy the waiting, and then bask in all those learning experiences with your most trusted friend.” Click here to read the whole post.

 Virginity in Tampa: Stumbled upon a story in The Oracle, my university’s student paper (for which I worked for a year while I was an undergrad!). First line says this:  “A recent survey has found that women are choosing to lose their virginity later in life.” By later in life, The Oracle means age 20. Sigh. The study it cites surveyed 77,000+ women, including 4000+ in Tampa. “While a study from the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University says the average age women lose their virginity is 17,” the story says, “Tampa women say the ideal age to lose it is 20.” Click here to read the story.

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Why “The Bachelor” Sean Lowe’s marriage isn’t doomed.

The blogosphere has been abuzz about all the sex The Bachelor isn’t having.

This started when America discovered that Sean Lowe, this season’s star of ABC’s The Bachelor, is a “born again virgin” – somebody who is saving sex from now on for marriage. And Lowe’s marriage, according to blogger Mary Fischer, is doomed because of it.

His nonmarital abstinence is “pretty much a major buzz kill,” she wrote. Not sleeping with the people you date is a big risk, she implied, and Lowe should have premarital sex for the sake of his marriage.

“If two people don’t have good sexual chemistry and aren’t at all compatible between the sheets, then odds are good there will be some other aspect of their lives where they don’t mesh, which will lead to a whole host of problems that potentially could have been avoided if only they’d done the deed beforehand,” Fischer wrote. “Seriously, how bad would it suck to finally give in to temptation on your wedding night only to find that your spouse doesn’t exactly know how to (ahem) press your buttons? Talk about ruining the big moment entirely.”

To which I write this:

  • Odds are good that characteristics of a successful relationship far more fundamental than “good sex” are missing if a couple is unwilling to work for compatibility between the sheets if compatibility between the sheets isn’t intuitive.
  • Working for compatibility requires patience. Chastity, “a decision to die to self and to selflessly love (or to die trying),” is great practice.
  • How bad would it suck if wedding night sex was about “giving in to temptation?”
  • That your brand new spouse doesn’t know how to “press your buttons” isn’t a problem if you and he or she are willing to communicate, to learn, and to practice.
  • The big moment isn’t what happens in bed on your wedding night. It’s what happens on the altar at your wedding.
And if Lowe agrees, his marriage isn’t doomed because of it.

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Click here to read what Fischer wrote about Sean Lowe’s doomed marriage.

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[Love and Responsibility] Part 2: People who hate chastity secretly like chastity.

This post is part 2 in a sex and love series based on what I learned from my favorite parts of the brilliant book Love and Responsibility by Blessed Pope John Paul II. All quotes, unless otherwise noted or used for emphasis, come from the book.

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I used to have a big yellow bumper sticker stuck to the Spence-Mobile’s* rear windshield. In red letters, it said CHASTITY IS FOR LOVERS.

I’m fairly certain our culture begs to differ, as evidenced by various statistics (88 percent of unmarried people between the ages 18 and 29 are sexually active**) and by the reader who posited in a letter to the paper’s editor that I am a virgin not because I’m chaste, but because I’m “probably not a hot babe.”

Resistance to chastity, according to Blessed Pope John Paul II in Love and Responsibility, is a result of resentment.

The reason people don’t practice chastity is because they resent it.

“Resentment arises from an erroneous and distorted sense of values,” wrote JP2 in a chapter called The Rehabilitation of Chastity. “It is a lack of objectivity in judgment and evaluation, and has its origin in weakness of the will. The fact is that attaining or realizing a higher value demands a greater effort of will. So in order to spare ourselves the effort, to excuse our failure to obtain this value, we minimize its significance, deny it the respect it deserves, even see it as in some way evil …“

But this resentment backfires. It uncovers what people who hate chastity might not realize themselves:

They totally secretly like it.

JP2 connects resentment to the cardinal sin called sloth. “St. Thomas defines sloth (acedia) as ‘a sadness arising from the fact that the good is difficult.’ This sadness, far from denying the good, indirectly helps to keep respect for it alive in the soul.”

People don’t resent chastity because they don’t want to be chaste. They resent it because it’s hard to be chaste. 

“Resentment,” wrote JP2, “does not stop at this: it not only distorts the features of the good but devalues that which rightly deserves respect, so that man need not struggle to raise himself to the level of the true good, but can ‘light-heartedly’ recognize as good only what suits him, what is convenient and comfortable for him. Resentment is a feature of the subjective mentality: pleasure takes the place of superior values.”

Our culture buys into this subjective mentality; it tells us that ‘hard’ negates ‘good.’

Thank God that in truth, it doesn’t.

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Click here to read all the posts in this series.

*Just one of my car’s two names. The other is the Motha Ship. Long story.

**According to the The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.