Abstinence: Lies They Told Me
Date Posted: March 7th, 2009
This is part four of a series on abstinence. Check out the first three posts here: My Story, Advantages, Disadvantages
This post is for my younger self who tended to trust the word of her elders to a fault. All of the statements I discuss were told to me by my teachers or by guest speakers while I was in high school, and I wholeheartedly believed for a fairly large number of years. It wasn’t until I gained the courage a few years ago to test them that I realized how untrue they really were for me. If my high school self knew what I know now, I’m sure she would have been quite a bit less uptight about sex and relationships, which would definitely have been a good thing for her.
I’m also writing this for anyone who’s like my younger self and is currently trying to figure out how to lead their love life. If you are like her, know that the following statements are not universally true and could just be a hindrance to your development. Now onto the first statement.
If You’re Cohabiting with your Significant Other You WILL Have Sex
Aaron and I have lived together since May 2007 and we only started having sex after we got engaged last December. If you do the math, that’s 19 months of living together, sleeping in the same bed, and not having sex. To me that indicates that it’s at least possible to live with your SO and remain abstinent for as long as abstinence is important to you. If we still believed that abstinence until marriage was the right thing for us, I have no doubt that we could have waited another year.
Living Together is like “Playing House”
During my senior year of high school, a woman came in to talk to my marriage class–yes, I had to take a marriage class–about the reasons why cohabitation is a bad idea. The main message of her talk was that cohabitation is like playing make-believe. It’s a childish practice. It may feel like marriage, it may look like marriage, but it’s not marriage because there isn’t any commitment attached to it. You and your partner both think and act independently. You don’t share money. You’ll probably put on an act to woo your partner into thinking marriage with you is a good idea. Etc. It’s not real. Better to wait until you get married to start living together so that you don’t go through the disillusionment phase.
The thing is, if you know that those things are risks you can consciously avoid them. You can make sure you act normally while you’re living together and you can take special note of how your partner acts. You can talk about your finances together. You can figure out how you’d want to handle your finances if you do get married. If you acknowledge that the structure (i.e. the logistics of your relationship. Things like who pays for what, how chores are split up, how you share the car, etc.) you have for cohabitation is different than the structure you intend to have for marriage, you can prepare for it. And there’s really no reason that the structures necessarily have to be different. Plenty of people are effectively married but haven’t done the paperwork. Would things be different for them if they did get married?
Granted this “wisdom” is coming from someone who’s cohabiting and not yet married. I’ll revisit this topic after Aaron and I get married so I can determine whether this hypothesis is correct. Until then, the logic seems sound to me.
The Only Reason to Cohabit is that Sex is More Readily Available
Talk about a low standard for relationships between men and women. And if you’re abstaining then… yeah…you’re not going to be getting any more sex than you were before.
There are plenty of other, better reasons to live with your SO. The main one for me was that I really wanted to live with Aaron but neither of us felt ready to commit permanently to the relationship.
You can’t stop yourself
I was told that there’s a very thin, almost invisible line between kissing and sex, and once you’ve started kissing it’s hard to avoid crossing it. From experience I can wholeheartedly say that that’s not true. If you have a great enough fear of pregnancy, it’s quite easy to stop yourself from going too far. In fact you don’t really stop yourself per se, you just channel your feelings into… uh.. “other methods” for gratification. Once you’ve been satisfied you’ll be amazed at how quickly your interest in doing dangerous things diminishes.
Sex is like Duct Tape
The story here is that the more often you have sex the less meaningful it will be. It’s like duct tape in that the more you stick it to something the less sticky it gets.
This is problematic since attachment is really up to you. If you unconsciously go through the motions with your relationship then yes, it is likely that sex will lose its meaning after you’ve done it enough times. Does that mean the solution is to rarely have sex so you can appreciate it? If after 10 years of sex with your spouse it doesn’t feel meaningful anymore is the problem that you’ve had too much sex? I don’t think so.
If you and your partner both regularly put time and effort into developing your sex life then sex can remain meaningful indefinitely. It’s entirely your decision. If you do that the “duct tape” analogy no longer applies
Masturbation is Unhealthy
For those of you who’ve heard this statement and are from the Judeo/Christian tradition, it comes from the Old Testament story of Onan who “spilled his seed” and was struck dead by God as punishment. (Doesn’t say anything about female masturbation, though. 
…at least not that I know of.) Old Testament Jewish society valued large families, and only one step removed from children is semen. Not surprisingly the wasting of semen, a sacred substance, was considered sinful.
Modern society doesn’t really share the belief that bigger families are always better, so it doesn’t really make sense that “spilling seed” should be bad because you aren’t channeling your sexual energy into procreation. As for God killing masturbators, I’ve only heard of one situation where a person has been struck dead because of masturbating, and seriously… if you’re hanging yourself to get aroused you’re asking for it.
But with this sort of mandate you might wonder if there’s some sort of hidden psychological reason for it too. Confession, for instance, was/is a sort of emotional therapy. Prayer can help you live longer. So maybe there’s some truth to the “masturbation is unhealthy” hypothesis. We’ve certainly all heard about people addicted to porn.
When you think about it, though, an addiction to masturbating and/or to porn is really an addiction problem and not a problem with the act itself. At its core it’s the same as a food addiction, or a gambling addiction, or a World of Warcraft addiction. People can eat, gamble, and play MMORPGs without getting addicted and the same goes for masturbation. We don’t think food is sinful, so why should we believe that masturbating is?
I count myself in the non-addicted category, and I’ve found that masturbation very helpful in my sexual development. It enabled me to get used to my body before sharing it with someone else. It enabled me to confront some of my sexual squeamishness. It enabled me to learn more about how sex really works and how to turn myself on. All good things. So I tend to think that pros of masturbation way outweigh the potential con of maybe possibly getting addicted.
After testing all of the statements above I found that none of them were true for me. Living together didn’t cause Aaron and I to have sex unintentionally. We certainly weren’t living together just so sex was more readily available. Sex is something we intend to value indefinitely. And I’m a perfectly healthy masturbator. I haven’t gotten struck dead yet, and I don’t think I will… at least not for masturbating. Now if you’re prone to addiction, masturbation may still not be the best thing ever for you. And if you really want sex but aren’t able to afford potential children or aren’t able to take the right precautions to avoid them, then living with your significant other isn’t exactly a recipe for success. But if you really know what you want, you can probably afford a bit of risk.
This was supposed to be the last article of the series, but I changed my mind, and am extending it to include one more article on my overall thoughts on the abstinence journey. It should be up within the week.
Of course that led to me relaxing my “only kissing” rule to just “not intercourse”, but that, again, was a good thing.
