The Hard

Exercise Please?

I didn’t bike to work on Wednesday or Thursday, and felt gross because of it. Brain fuzzy, can’t think straight, gross.

Nique needs to exercise consistently. Sewiously.

Not Enough Time

I want more time. I want energy to use said time. I don’t want to give up things I love doing. Can’t I have my cake and eat it too?

The Promise Breaking

I promised myself I’d get up with the kitty and either read (if the weather was nice) or use the exercise bike (if the weather was crummy). This didn’t happen. If the weather is nice I still bike to work, but getting up with the cat is hard. Especially when Rorschach decides that 4AM is a good time to start caterwauling. Rawr.

Maybe I need to face the fact that 8 hours of sleep is what I need. Getting up at 7 isn’t so bad…

Maybe I need to find some other time to exercise. Or something.

Also didn’t do as much writing as I would have liked to. (And I did want to do writing.)

Guilt Guilt Guilt

Not keeping promises to myself brings on the guilt.

Unfortunately while guilt will get me to sit on the bike or open the journal, it won’t make me want to exercise or want to write. Bleh.

The Good

Books!

Finished World Without End. Started Voluntary Simplicity. WWE was very good. I’m kinda sad it’s over. Voluntary Simplicity is looking like it’s going to be good too.

Finishing books is definitely a good thing. It makes me feel like I can accomplish something.

Meetings can be useful

I run a weekly progress meeting for one of my projects at work. Normally when I hear about meetings it’s about how long they are and how they take away from actual productive time. These meetings are different.

For one thing these meetings are short. This last one was 15 minutes? Maybe?

For another stuff gets done in the 10 – 20 minutes before the meeting. On both sides. No one likes to hear that they’re part isn’t done.

Happiness.

Crêpes at the Farmer’s Market

On Wednesday Aaron and I went to the Farmer’s Market on our way to work, and in one of the stalls was a crêpe stand. Very unexpected. Very tasty. I would have them again, though not every week.

It was nice to do something spontaneous and not feel guilty about it afterward.

Improving at Recorder

On Wednesday evenings I’ve been spending some time honing my music skills. Recorder has been my primary instrument for about 4 years now, so unsurprisingly I’ve been using some of that time to focus on it.

I’m happy to say that improvement is being made. I’m able to play more of the notes the recorder is capable of and I’ve discovered that the alto is better suited for many pieces I have until now usually played on the soprano.

I’m really glad I decided to block out one evening a week for practice.

The Learning

I feel terrible if I don’t exercise

*Writes note to self.*

Breathing is Good

Yep.

My Self-Worth is tied up in silly things

Like how productive I am and how well I keep promises to myself.

I need to remind myself that me not keeping promises to myself doesn’t mean I’m a bad person. It means something’s misaligned.

I need to remind myself to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

If you live like no one else, later you can live like no one else. ~ Dave Ramsey

Life is a journey, not a destination. Enjoy the Journey. ~ Anonymous

Sacrifice now; Enjoy later.

Life’s too short to not enjoy every moment.

These ideas are puzzling. How can you enjoy the journey if you’re in the sacrificing phase? Isn’t the first quote all about focusing on the destination? Is it possible to live both ideas simultaneously? Are they mutually exclusive paths?

To the last question, I think the answer is no, they aren’t mutually exclusive. The contradiction only occurs on the extreme ends of each idea.

If you’re sacrificing to the point where your life no longer has any joy, you by definition aren’t enjoying the journey. If you’re focusing so intently on the future goal that you’ve lost sight of where you are right now, you’re seeing life as a destination, not a journey.

If you over focus on the journey and have no goals, you’ll be happy–maybe–but you won’t amount to much. And if you over focus on the present moment you may develop a tendency toward reckless behavior: spending beyond your means, jumping impulsively into and out of relationships, living dangerously. It’s all about now, right?

Neither idea in the extreme is good. Ideally you want both. You want to enjoy the journey to achieving great things. You want to live in the moment AND look forward to the future. Let’s look at some examples of how to do that.

Example: Getting Out of Debt

The sacrifice here is money. If you want to get out of debt you have to spend less than you earn. You have to give up buying stuff. You have to sacrifice.

You could do this the hard way by focusing on the end goal of no more debt, trim everything away, have no life, no friends, no joy. Your life is all about getting rid of debt. If you manage to keep this up, yes, you’ll get out of debt, but it’ll be at a cost higher than the money you paid to the credit card company. You’ll probably have accumulated quite a bit of resentment for the months (years?) you spend over-sacrificing. With resentment you run the risk of overspending again because “you deserve to have fun now”. You could also go the other extreme and become a scrooge-like miser. You have no friends and no fun, but you’ve got money…

You could also do this the better way by learning to enjoy being frugal. Get the most out of every dollar you spend. Fully enjoy a single orange instead of eating 5 while watching TV. Enjoy cutting out the stuff that makes you feel guilty. Eventually you’ll get out of debt, and when you do you won’t have any resentment. The time you spent trimming your spending improved your quality of life. Why would you go back to your wanton ways?

Example: Getting to a Healthy Weight

The sacrifice here is tasty unhealthy food and a sedentary lifestyle. You have to eat healthier. You have to eat less. You have to exercise.

You could do this the hard way by going on an extreme diet. You will lose weight that way if you stick to it. But it’s not sustainable. You might get to your goal weight, but do you really want to live that way? Probably not. Do you want to spend your life doing exercise you don’t enjoy? Probably not. Not surprisingly when most of try such a lifestyle change we usually give up after a few weeks days.

The better way is to pick healthy foods you like. Slowly change your diet. Slowly change your lifestyle. Do the kind of exercise you like to do. Over time you’ll get to where you want to be. You’re still sacrificing. You still have a goal. But it’s not suffering. There’s no resentment.

Example: Starting a Side Business

The sacrifice here is time. Time for friends and family. Time for hobbies. Time for sitting around. It’s really easy to fall into the “focus too much on the destination” trap here.

There are several components to doing this while enjoying the journey.

First, love what you’re doing. If you love your work, you’ll almost automatically enjoy the journey.

Second, remind yourself that it’s temporary and enjoy the imbalance. Imbalance can be fun! Ask anyone who’s gone to a convention.

Third, figure out what’s essential to your life and keep doing those things. For me that’s family and friends, music, and deep thinking. Focus on maximizing the value you get out of the time you put in. As in, skip the chit chat about the weather when talking to your Significant Other. Don’t zone out when playing music. Don’t read feeds while attempting to write a blog post.

So yeah, you can definitely do both if you want to. And when you do try to do both, you get the benefit of sustainability (i.e. you’ll be able to maintain your destination state when you get there) and avoiding resentment. Is it easy? Not usually. Most of the time it’s a lot easier to think of the extreme way to get something done or to not do anything at all. Is it worth the soul searching to try? Absolutely. Don’t we all want to make and keep our goals and enjoy life the whole way? That’s why enjoying sacrifice is on the path less traveled.

6:30 AM: Alarm goes off.
6:30:01 AM: Kitty starts meowing because he either wants food or attention. It’s hard to tell which.
6:31 AM: Take my temperature. (Aaron and I use Fertility Awareness as birth control, so…)
6:35 AM: Get out of bed. Go downstairs to the kitchen to feed the cat.
6:37 AM: Almost trip down the stairs because of kitty.
6:40 AM: Actually feed cat. Look toward the basement and think about how good it will feel to use the exercise bike.
6:41 AM: Grab a glass of water and a book.
6:45 AM: Go downstairs and use exercise bike.

With this routine I can, with minimum resistance, accomplish two goals: get out of bed at 6:30AM and use the exercise bike daily. The reason this routine works is that my environment is well aligned with my goals.

Kitty acts as a cute, pitiful sounding alarm clock that sits outside the bedroom door and can’t be turned off unless I both get up and feed him. This is a huge incentive to complete the first goal: get out of bed at 6:30AM.

The location of the exercise bike helps me complete the second goal. It’s in the basement, and the stairs to the basement are in the kitchen. The kitchen is where I feed kitty, so the exercise bike is only down one flight of stairs. It’s easier to go there than it is to go back to bed.

Change these two things and the chances that I complete my goals drastically goes down.

If I fed kitty in the evening instead of in the morning he probably wouldn’t bother us at 6:30 AM, meaning I wouldn’t have my incentive to get up early in the morning. On the off chance that he did still bother us, that wouldn’t give me much incentive either. There’d be no specific task for me to do. He’d just be wanting attention. I don’t need to go downstairs to give him attention. Also attention is active. I can’t use the exercise bike while kitty’s wanting to be petted and played with. Feeding kitty in the morning is well aligned with my goals. Feeding him in the evening is not.

If the exercise bike was in one of the spare bedrooms (a legitimate place to put it) it’d be much harder to get me to use it. I’d no longer be choosing between an upward and downward stair-climb. The warm bed would be just as close as the bike. It’d be difficult to choose the bike.

Action for You! If there’s some goal you’d like to achieve, ask yourself if there’s any way you can rearrange your environment to make it easier for you to achieve it.

Chances are the first time you make a change it won’t work for very long. That’s OK. Just try something else until you find an arrangement that works for you. Eventually you will, and doing the things you want to do will be easy.

Monique’s Vague Instant Oatmeal Recipe

The benefits of this recipe is that it’s easy to prepare at work, and you can keep the main ingredients in your cube without worrying about them going bad. Oh and it’s healthy and less work than deciding what you want to have at the cafe.

• An amount of oatmeal
• An amount of dried fruit
• A small-ish amount of brown sugar (1 spoonful of sugar for every cup or so of oats maybe?)
• An even smaller amount of salt (1 pinch per two cups maybe)

Put oatmeal in food processor. Use the chopping blade. Press pulse a few times. Don’t turn the whole thing to dust, though.

Combine all the other ingredients. Put as much or as little of everything as you like. Experiment!

Put contents in container for future use.

To prepare a bowl of oatmeal, use a ratio of 2 parts water to 1 part oatmeal. Put in microwave for 1.5 – 2 minutes. Stop and stir if it starts to overflow.

Monique’s Dad’s Spartan Lunch

My dad’s been using this recipe for a couple of years now, and he likes to call it his spartan lunch (in honor of the Grecians not the Michigan State team ), so I’ve kept the name as that. Benefits are health, easy cube storage, and ease of use.

• 1 cup of mixed nuts (I like walnuts and almonds)
• Some easy to handle, no-need to refrigerate fruit (e.g. apples, bananas, oranges)

Enjoy.

Variation: Take some more perishable fruit to work if you feel like it. You’ll still probably want to stay away from messy fruit, though. Raspberry juice on the keyboard is no fun for anyone.

Oh, and in case you don’t believe I actually do this, here’s a picture of my healthy food stash:

Enjoy!

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.

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.

It’s a shame that the disadvantages of abstinence (and yes there’re more than one) aren’t really discussed when the abstinence ideology is being sold to teens. The only disadvantage I remember being warned about was that abstinence is really hard to practice. “…” I think most of us already figured that out, thanks. Plus, in my mind the challenge was an advantage. (The whole positive exception, thing.) But besides the fact that it’s an ambiguous negative at best, there’s another more insidious problem: by only mentioning the one, obvious disadvantage you may think that there really aren’t any other disadvantages. Definitely not cool, since there are some good reasons to not abstain until marriage. So here are a list of disadvantages I discovered whilst practicing abstinence.

Blinding

If you’re serious about abstaining until marriage, and you don’t plan to get married right out of high school, you’ve got a lot of years of waiting ahead of you. Chances are somewhere during those years you’ll develop an interest in intercourse that can’t be fulfilled until rings have been exchanged.

So lets say you’ve been dating someone for a year or two, things are getting serious, it looks like marriage is a real possibility, and you still haven’t had sex yet even though both of you really want it. If you had the opportunity to get married would you rather do it sooner or later?

I think that in a healthy relationship, if you’re already living together, it really shouldn’t matter when you get married. Not much should change except that you’ve promised that to stay together forever. Of course, that’s a big promise that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Why rush it? And yet, with the promise of sex, marriage will likely seem like a better idea sooner rather than later if you’re waiting until marriage to consummate. Moreover, if you’re not sure about the relationship, you may be tempted to stay lest you have to wait another two years or more to find someone else you’re more fit to marry. (Meaning another two or more years to maybe get the chance to lose your virginity.)

Aaron and I faced this issue last year. We’d been planning to get married early summer 2009, but with the engagement not happening until December, me trying to graduate this year, and a lot of other people getting married in 2009, 2010 looked like a much better time to get married. But the prospect of having to wait another year to consummate our relationship seemed a high price to pay. When we realized that we weren’t getting married in 2009, we decided to just wait until engagement to avoid resentment.

It was an excellent decision, since my blinders came off soon after we consummated. I saw our relationship and our future in a whole new light… a light that was not entirely rosy. It felt like I achieved my goal with our relationship–abstinence until engagement and actually got engaged–and now the weight of marriage hit me. I’m mostly past that part now, but I am so glad I faced this before the ceremony. If we’d waited until our wedding night to consummate, I think I’d have effectively said my vows unconsciously since I wouldn’t be fully aware of what I was doing.

Usually you hear a lot about how having sex blinds you. I can honestly say that not having sex can blind you just as much. It was something I totally didn’t expect.

Is it a deal breaker? Well, sort of. I think waiting until marriage is probably a bad idea since by having sex only after you’ve made your vows, the focus of your wedding may be more on sex than on your commitment. Now, if you believe sex is more important than the wedding commitment, by all means, wait. And if you can honestly say that having sex wouldn’t change your feelings one way or the other, then waiting until marriage might not be a bad idea.

Lack of Connection

Now that I’ve had intercourse I can honestly say that there is a special connection in intercourse that you don’t get with other forms of intimacy. If you’re waiting years and years to have sex, that’s a whole lot of time to go without that experience.

Is this a deal breaker? It depends on what kind of life you want to lead. If having kids outside of marriage isn’t the worst thing ever, then waiting until marriage may be a bit silly. If you’d like to have intimate connections with many people, this could very well be a compelling reason not only to not abstain, but to not limit sex to one partner for life. For me, lack of connection wasn’t a good enough reason not to abstain, plus it’s one of those things I only realized after I had sex.

Lack of Experience

Intercourse, from what I’ve heard, is kinda like social dancing. That is, in social dancing you become a better dancer by dancing a lot and with lots of people. If you’re only dancing with your SO you’ll probably only be a marginal dancer unless you’re both really committed to honing your skills. And even then, your only feedback is each other so you’ll never really know how you stand.

At the same time, sex isn’t like dancing at all. Dancing is something you do in front of other people so you have some idea of what good dancing looks like even if you’re only dancing with your SO. With sex, you presumably don’t know what great sex looks like, and because of that it can be easier to feel fulfilled. (Porn doesn’t count, since it’s optimized for cameras, not for pleasure. ) Feeling fulfilled is, of course, the important part. If you feel fulfilled you are effectively fulfilled. Not to mention that the goal with sex is to please your partner and yourself. What works with one person won’t necessarily work with another… so yeah.

Is experience a deal breaker? For me, not really. I’m pretty good at teaching myself from books.

Partner Could be In the Closet

This is something abstinence preachers definitely don’t tell you about, but it’s something to be on the lookout for. My first boyfriend turned out to be gay, and while we were dating all the signs that should have led me to question his interest in girls instead signaled to me that he cared more about me than my body. “…” If I hadn’t believed so strongly in abstinence, I might have picked up on it a lot sooner.

After that experience I decided I wanted a guy that clearly, physically liked women. If he was only interested in the “spiritual aspect” of our relationship he’d be highly suspect. Of course that led to me relaxing my “only kissing” rule to just “not intercourse”, but that, again, was a good thing.

Deal breaker? No, of course not. This could happen even if you and your SO are happily having sex. It’s just something to be more on the lookout for when you’re abstaining since the signs for True Love and signs for Gay may look similar.

Unhealthy Expectations

In my first relationship I made a really big deal about my first kiss. I read a lot of romantic stories that talked about how magical the first kiss was and blah blah blah. Needless to say, when just a couple weeks shy of my 16th birthday I got my first kiss it was awkward and disappointing. Definitely not a happy experience.

I figured the same thing could happen with intercourse, so I consciously decided to avoid that. But even with the mental preparation it’s still hard to make your first time spontaneous and not too awkward when you’ve made such a big deal about waiting.

Is it a deal breaker? Not really. Methinks spontaneous excellent sex is virtually impossible your first time. It’s the dancing analogy again. The first time you dance will in all likelihood be awkward. At best you can hope to laugh and have a good time in spite of your inexperience.

So now you know the major pros and cons I’ve experienced with waiting to have sex. All the advantages I wrote about I remember hearing in the “abstinence only” propaganda I received. I don’t remember hearing about any of the disadvantages, but to be fair, they may have been mentioned and I didn’t really consider them. It just seems likely that they weren’t. But that’s not all I have to say on the subject. There were some other alleged pros tooted by the abstinence only people that reflected an unwarranted low judgment of human self-control. I’ll discuss those in my next (and last) post on abstinence.

As with many things, attitude matters a lot. If you believe that sex ought to be restricted to marriage, you’ll probably have a good experience with abstinence. If you’re abstaining out of guilt or duty or something else like that chances are you won’t feel quite so warm and fuzzy about it. I decided to abstain with the sincere believe that waiting was the right thing for me, so my experience with it has been fairly positive. Below are some of the things I found to be particularly good about abstaining.

Forced to Talk about Sex

Sex was never something I wanted to talk about at 15 or 16 (or 23). I remember getting so anxious while merely thinking about talking about it, my stomach would start hurting. I’d always imagine the talk being a combination of really awkward, really intimate with a good bit of uncomfortable thrown in for good measure. Not exactly something I was looking forward to. And yet, when you’ve decided to abstain there’s no getting around having the talk if you want to start your relationship on the right foot. You definitely want to state the non-negotiable boundaries at the start when it’s less painful for either party to walk away. You want your partner to be as free as possible to make his/her decision otherwise you’re setting your relationship up for highly probable pain and resentment later. So I ended up initiating the conversation for both of the relationships I’ve had, and, not surprisingly it turned out to be a very good thing aside from the fact that I wouldn’t have to worry about trouble later.

• Affirmation that your SO respects your beliefs: By having the talk early, you know right away that your new SO is OK with your decision to abstain. Before having the talk I always had a worry in the back of my mind that maybe he’d leave me if he knew. After the talk I knew that wasn’t the case.
• Supercharged Intimacy: Intimacy is developed by having intimate experiences, and the sex-talk is practically inherently an intimate conversation. Chances are you’ll feel a lot closer to your SO faster than you would if you put off talking about sex until later.
• Screening: Guys who are primarily interested in sex will be filtered out immediately. (I suppose beliefs on abstinence could be taken as a challenge (see Cruel Intentions), but I imagine that’d be a pretty rare occurrence.)

Find Imaginative Ways to be Affectionate

Without intercourse, you’ll need to find other ways to show that your relationship isn’t platonic. In a few months you’ll have an entire arsenal of techniques to express your affection that other couples aren’t as intrinsically motivated to develop.

Sex, Children, and Marriage Fit Neatly Together

If you believe that children ought to be created within the institution of marriage, waiting until marriage to have sex is the best way to express that since you’re giving your body an unambiguous message. Waiting says, “Children belong in marriage and therefore intercourse belongs in marriage so I’m not going to have intercourse until I’m married.” Not waiting but using contraceptives says, “I’m open to a certain amount of risk.” Not waiting and not using contraceptives says, “I’m open to having children.” No matter what form of contraception you use, there’s always some amount of risk.

The question of whether or not children should only be conceived within marriage is, of course, open to debate. Methinks children can be raised well when conceived within marriage or outside of marriage. There isn’t one true way. But if in your heart of hearts you’d like your children to be conceived in marriage, why do the procreation act outside of it? (Especially when there are so many ways to physically show affection!)

No Pregnancy and No Disease

This should be fairly obvious.

I’ll note that STIs can be transmitted through oral and anal sex, so avoiding intercourse alone won’t provide you with complete protection. Similarly there’s a slight chance of getting pregnant if you’re fooling around while the woman’s particularly fertile.

Trust

If both of you take the promise seriously, abstinence is pretty easy to maintain even if you’re both really into each other. Simply put, your respect for your partner combined with your belief that your partner wants to wait serves as strong encouragement not to test the issue even when intercourse starts to feel like a really really good idea. Over time it’s practically impossible for trust not to develop since you’re renewing your promise to each other over and over again. Trusting your partner in other areas is practically a given.

Self Discipline

If you’ve successfully been waiting to have sex you have an excellent reference point for your ability to keep promises to yourself.

People Tend to be Impressed

When I’ve told people that I was abstaining until marriage (or even until engagement), the reaction has been almost universally positive. Granted, I don’t proclaim my life choices to everyone I meet, so that may affect the reaction. But, I dunno, seeing someone consciously abstaining until marriage maybe gives people a sense of hope or something? In any case it’s a nice ego boost.

It’s pretty easy to see why attitude matters when deciding to abstain. Several of the advantages listed here can easily be seen as disadvantages. (Having to talk to your SO about sex and having to find other ways to show your affection stand out in particular.) And if you don’t really believe that it matters whether or not your children are conceived in marriage, then that “advantage” is effectively negated. So yeah, whether or not you see all of these things as advantages is in large part a matter of attitude.

There are quite a few disadvantages, though, that are bad even for those who want to abstain. Those will be discussed in the next post.

My High-School Self

My family is Roman Catholic. We went to Church every Sunday and my brother and I attended Catholic schools from kindergarten until 12th grade. Religion was a constant presence in our lives, and I took it very seriously. I wanted to be a “positive exception” (I wanted to stand out from my peers for the good way I was leading my life) and I think semi-consciously I wanted to be a saint. I also believed wholeheartedly that the Church, with its 2000 years of accumulated experience, had more knowledge than me about how to lead a happy, fulfilling, virtuous life. I believed I should generally give the Church the benefit of the doubt, and if I felt I needed to reject a Church tenet, I figured that should only occur after thoroughly examining my conscience.[1] For a couple of issues I did calmly disagree with the Church’s teachings, so it wasn’t just an empty belief.[2]

It’s not surprising then that I considered abstinence before I considered any other option. Abstinence is what unmarried Catholics are supposed to practice, after all. But it wasn’t something I did grudgingly. The reasons given for practicing abstinence really resonated with me: no chance of pregnancy or disease, stronger relationships, respect for relationship between sex and procreation, and several others. And not only that, I was fairly asexual in high school. Yes, I had a boyfriend while I was 15 and 16, but our relationship was way more cerebral than sexual. I think I can count on one hand the number of times I actually felt aroused in high school, and most of those times were when I was by myself. So between the strong philosophical resonance I had with abstinence and my lack of sexual maturity, abstinence seemed like a very realistic, even natural choice.

Shifting Beliefs

During my second year of college I started to feel detached from the Church. I didn’t really resonate with the people at St. Mary’s, U of M’s student parish, and I started to feel secure in my morality. I didn’t need the Church or any other authority figure to tell me what was right or wrong in order for me to act well. I started feeling detached metaphysically too. I didn’t trust that other living humans had the inside scoop on what happens after we die or that the Bible was necessarily a divine work. And more often than not, I found myself disagreeing with the weekly readings and the homilies at Church.

This change didn’t fundamentally affect my beliefs concerning abstinence, though, since I never did it just because “God says fornication is sinful” or something like that. The advantages of abstinence remained firmly planted in my mind independent of whether or not the Church was a major part of my life. I did, however, start experimenting with masturbation since I was concerned with my lack of libido. I was afraid that if I didn’t get some practice and work out the awkwardness, my wedding night would be pretty terrible. (That turned out to be a very good idea, by the way.)

New Guy

When I started dating Aaron during the second half of my third year of college (April 2006), we relaxed the rules I’d set up when I was a mostly asexual highschooler . We decided we’d still abstain, but instead of abstaining from everything except kissing, we’d just abstain from intercourse. Everything in between was fair game. Intercourse is what’s associated with children, so we decided that ought to be saved until marriage or at least until we could handle the possibility of having kids. Two and a half years later we decided to just wait until engagement. We got engaged last December.

Reflections on the Journey

I’ve learned a lot of valuable lessons from the abstinence experience, all of which I’ll share in the next three four posts. (Edit: Added an extra Q&A post to the end.) The first post will be on the advantages of choosing abstinence. Admittedly most of them were advertised, but there were a couple I didn’t expect. The second will be on the under-advertised disadvantages I experienced. The third will be on the “lies I was told“, i.e. the arguments made in defense of abstinence and other related Catholic beliefs that didn’t hold up to my experience. The last post will be a Q&A on my overall thoughts of the experience.

Hopefully this series will be interesting and informative to you. I know I would have appreciated reading this when I was 15.

[1] The Catechism is amusing on this point. On the one hand not acting on your conscience is to condemn yourself. On the other hand if your conscience isn’t aligned with the Church you’re in trouble. At least, I think that’s what it means. Ah, absolute laws…

[2] Issue 1: Gay marriage is a good thing. Issue 2: Women are just as worthy as men to be priests. The Church disagrees with both of these beliefs.

Here are links to the other posts in this series:

The Advantages
The Disadvantages
Lies They Told Me
Q&A

Another excuse is that cooking daily is time consuming. You have to buy the ingredients, prepare them, cook them, eat, and then you still have to clean up. When you add up the time it takes to do all this (not to mention picking out the recipe), it ends up being fairly significant. For the busy adult, this may seem like time not well spent.

And yet another excuse for not cooking is that healthy food is expensive.

All of this is nonsense.

The Secret: Bulk Cooking

The secret to cooking healthfully, cheaply, quickly, and for small groups of people is to cook a large batch of food and then freeze the rest. Aaron and I have been doing this for a couple of years and it’s worked incredibly well for us. We eat home-cooked food almost every day, but aren’t tied to the kitchen. Now we have a chest freezer, which makes storage easier, but we used this method when we had a tiny freezer too. It’s really not that dependent on freezer size. Also we have enough different food to choose from that dinnertime doesn’t get monotonous.

The advantages are many:

• Can cook the recipes that serve six or eight people and not waste anything
• No worries about having too many left-over perishables in the fridge
• Serving sizes for frozen dinners are picked ahead of time so you aren’t likely to eat more than you need
• Spend a greatly reduced time at the grocery store and in the kitchen

The cons are few:

• Have to eat reheated food
• Not all meals are conducive to freezing

If this method resonates with you, read on.

Step 1: Pick a Method

If you’re just starting out, chances are your freezer isn’t already stocked with meals that just require heat. To get the full effect of this method you should have several different meals already in the freezer in order to have a variety to choose from at dinnertime. So you have a choice: you can cook several recipes all in one day or you can spend a week cooking a different recipe every day. When Aaron and I started doing this we did the “cook for a day eat for a month” method. Now we tend toward the latter.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both methods. When you’re doing the “cook for a day eat for a month” you only sacrifice one day a month to the kitchen. Plus you can take advantage of buying fresh food in bulk. 10 pounds of tomatoes don’t go bad if you use them right away. It can be fun too. The disadvantages of this method is that it’s really taxing since it’s an all-day affair and it doesn’t work all that well with a small kitchen. Mind you it’s still possible to do with two people in a small kitchen–we did it for months–but you’ll end up using some non-kitchen space and bumping into each other a lot. Also with this method you have to use a cooler to chill the food otherwise you’ll over heat the fridge or the freezer. (We did this once… I don’t remember if any food got ruined, though.) And one more con: it’s not as good for making use of seasonal produce. Some fruits and veggies are in season for less than a month. If you’re cooking only once per month you’ll be missing out of local food at its best.

The more laid back method is great for making use of local food while avoiding burn-out. We started doing it this summer. You can still buy food in bulk, you just do it for one or two recipes instead of five or six. The one con is that you have to cook more often… but eventually your freezer will be so full that you can take a vacation from cooking.

Step 2: Pick Freezer-friendly Recipes

Once you’ve picked a method, you need to pick some recipes. There are several books on this subject already, but I can’t really recommend them. The one that I bought, “Frozen Assets Lite and Easy: How to Cook for a Day and Eat for a Month” was only OK. The advice at the beginning was good, but the recipes (the bulk of the book) were bland and not very appetizing. After a few weeks we started calling it mush. I think perhaps this kind of “lite cooking” is where people got the mistaken notion that The Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen by Donna Klein. Virtually all of the recipes in this book are delicious, and make use of the produce grown in the Midwest. Also unlike a lot of vegan books tofu isn’t used as a meat substitute or as a way to make non-vegan food vegan.

As an aside, you may be wondering “Why vegan at all?” The reason is that most cookbooks tend to think of meals as “meat, side dish, side dish”, and this didn’t really appeal to me. I wanted more fruits and vegetables in my diet and vegan (unlike vegetarian which would up my egg and dairy quota more than veggies) would guarantee that I could have plants as my main course.

I can tentatively recommend The Tropical Vegan Kitchen by the same author. I say tentatively because I’ve only cooked a few of the recipes so far. Not enough to form a decided opinion, although so far everything’s been delicious. Also this book uses quite a bit of tofu since much Asian cuisine specifically requires tofu, but this is fine by me since it’s not being used as substitute.

For those who have no interest in trying vegan food I recommend spending some quality time with Alton Brown. You’ll actually learn about how to use different ingredients and how to cook by watching his show, Good Eats, and reading his books. If you’re interested in an objective theory of cooking, this is the place to go.

Some things to keep in mind while picking recipes:

• Potatoes don’t freeze well
• It’s better to cook pasta at the time of serving than to cook it beforehand and freeze it
• Same goes for rice
• Soups are great
• Casseroles too
• Stuffed tomatoes are not so good (bulky and time consuming to prepare)

For more information on how to store different foods check out this book: Stocking Up: The Third Edition of America’s Classic Preserving Guide

Step 3: Double the Recipes

A simple rule of thumb: doubling a recipe isn’t too hard to do, but any more than that and things get tricky. You’ll either need bigger pots or more pots and the chance of burning the food is much greater. And even with doubling it’s good to have a big stock-pot and a big pan or two smaller ones.

Step 4: Freeze the Food

You have a few options for storing the food. You can put them in Tupperware containers or you can put them in freezer bags. Of the two, my favorite method is freezer bags. They stack nicely, are easy to label, are inexpensive, and don’t crack if you leave them in the freezer too long. Believe it or not, they’re great for soups too. Just be sure to get freezer bags instead of storage bags. Storage bags leak, and if you use the reheating method below the food will be watery. The size of the bags matter too. Since there’s only two of us we use the 1 quart bags. That usually is enough food for both of us, often times with a little left over. If you’ve got a large family the gallon bags might make more sense.

We label the bags with the name of the food and the date. Some books tell you to include instructions on how to reheat, but having the name alone is usually enough for.

Once you’ve put the food in the freezer bag the next step is to chill the food. If you’re doing many recipes in one day you’ll DEFINITELY want to use a cooler… filled with ice. Dry-ice is unnecessary. So either put your finished food in the fridge or in the cooler and leave it there until it’s cooled down. Then transfer it to the freezer.

The extent of our freezer organization is that we keep a running tally of what’s in the freezer at any given time. We still have to hunt through the many frozen items, but at least we know that what we’re looking for is in there. It’s really simple to do if you tape a piece of paper and a pencil on a string to the freezer.

Step 5: Reheating

The books will tell you that the best way to reheat is to stick the frozen food you want to eat tomorrow into the fridge today and let it thaw overnight. From my experience this doesn’t work. You have to put it in several days in advance, and then maybe it’ll be thawed by the time you eat it. If you’re anything like me, though, even if putting it in overnight actually worked that’s thinking too far ahead. I want to pick my food now and eat it now.

The solution: microwave. Put the bag of frozen food into a two quarter Tupperware container filled with water and stick it in the microwave for a few minutes. (Why water? Because microwaves work by making liquid water molecules vibrate. Ice crystals don’t vibrate that readily, so surrounding them with vibrating water molecules makes the crystals melt faster.) Once there’s some liquid in the bag empty the water and dump the food into the container. Then stick it in the microwave again stopping periodically the break up the frozen chunks. Yes, the food is in the “danger zone”…. but seriously it’s only for a few minutes. I’ve never gotten even mildly sick from doing this.

And that’s it. Is it more efficient? Yes definitely. You spend less time in the kitchen and at the grocery store than if you’re cooking on a day to day basis. Also you don’t have the problem with spoiling leftovers since the portions in each bag are small enough to be eaten in only one or two days. Is it less expensive? It depends on what your habits are, I suppose. If you’re eating out a lot then it’s definitely less expensive. If you’re buying processed food a lot I imagine it’s also less expensive, but I’m not sure I haven’t done the math. Is it healthier? Most likely. Most of us don’t add things like soy-lecithin or high-fructose corn syrup or all that much salt directly to our food… so it’s probably healthier. Is it practical for one or two people? Absolutely.

… Something doesn’t add up here. The road to health can’t actually be painful. That just doesn’t make any sense. It should be the path of least resistance, since our bodies presumably prefer to be healthy, right?

Myth 1: Healthy Food Doesn’t Taste Good

All other things being equal, if we have to choose between a salad and slice of cheesecake, we’d feel deprived if we chose the salad. This isn’t always the case, though. Let’s say for the holidays you ate lots and lots of rich food: spiral ham, prime rib, mashed potatoes, cake, cookies, and other delicious but not all that healthy food. Oh and no vegetables either because it’s a special feast. Why would we want to torture ourselves with vegetables? After three days of feasting you’re offered the same choice: cheesecake or salad. Which would you choose? I know I’d pick the salad. My body can only tolerate so many days of rich food before it rebels. By this time I’m probably feeling groggy and disgusting, not exactly a state I want to stay in. So the salad is the obvious choice.

But I’d go as far as to say that in general healthy food is more appetizing. Take a look at these comparisons:

Which would you prefer?:

• McDonald’s Hamburger or Stir-fried veggies
• Keebler Cookies or Home-made cookies
• Edy’s Highly Processed Ice-cream or Home-made ice-cream
• Highly Processed TV Dinner or a dinner cooked from scratch

These should be fairly easy to answer. Even if the home-made stuff is “fattening” it’s still a hell of a lot better for you than the processed stuff. People have been eating lard for hundreds of years but most additives for only 50 or so. Which do you think we’re more adapted to eat?

If you define healthy as all-natural (which many nutritionists wouldn’t), then healthy clearly doesn’t imply tastelessness. In fact, the main reason to choose the unhealthy options is just a combination of convenience (it’s a lot easier to get a hamburger than to make stir-fry) and ignorance (I don’t know how to make ice-cream).

Myth 2: Diets are Punishment

Diets don’t have to be (and probably shouldn’t be) punishment. If they are then you’re looking at spending months and months feeling deprived, with the illusive state of health as your only incentive. And on week three when you notice you’ve actually gained a pound and you’re feeling hungry, it’ll seem like an awfully high price to pay.

Now you may be asking, what does a wonder diet like this look like? Here’s one: a diet of real food. The only ingredients allowed are ones that were used as food before the 20th century. No calorie counting. No cutting of tasty food. Just a removal of processed foods. This isn’t a diet about depriving yourself of what you love it’s about becoming more aware of what you put in your body.

As long as you’re somewhat lazy, you’ll find that you’ll mostly be eating fresh fruits and veggies because they’re easy to prepare. No cooking involved. Sheer laziness leads you to eat healthier.

This is essentially how I eat now, and I don’t feel any deprivation whatsoever. I get to eat really awesome food on a daily basis, and the idea of eating fast-food for the most part sickens me.

Yes, technically you’re depriving yourself of highly processed, highly marketed, convenience food… but is depriving yourself of poison really deprivation?

You may be thinking that this sort of diet is either too expensive or too time consuming, but both of these assumptions truly are myths too, and I’ll cover them in my next post.