This post is in Question and Answer format. (It’s like I’m interviewing myself!)

Enjoy!

Are you happy you decided to be abstinent?

Yes. Very much so. It was definitely the right decision for me at the time. Allow me to list the reasons:

• I was a late bloomer. It wasn’t until I was 19 that I was sure I wasn’t asexual.
• I wholehearted believed that children ought to be created within marriage. I certainly wanted that for my own life, anyway.
• I resonated strongly with all of the advantages of abstinence.

To have done anything else would simply have been wrong for me.

My life’s turned out quite well because of it too. I didn’t get pregnant too early or contract any diseases, and I didn’t have to spend any energy worrying about those things either. I have a great fiance, so clearly abstaining hasn’t affected my ability to get a mate. (In fact, it’s never been an issue for me.) I learned how to be patient. I learned how to be assertive. I have an excellent reference point for keeping promises to myself. There’ve simply been a lot of good things that came into my life because I took the abstinence path.

Knowing what you know now, if you could go back in time and change your decision to be abstinent until marriage, would you?

Sort of. I wouldn’t change my actions in any way (I’m glad I took my time to get physical), but I would change my promise from “no sex until marriage” to “no sex until engagement and/or I feel ready to have and can afford kids”. If I had held that belief I might have been a little less judgmental of my more adventurous classmates.

If you suddenly found yourself single would you go back to being abstinent?

If it happened right now I’d probably do a variation on the abstinence thing. Like wait a year or two before having intercourse. Even with contraception, sex still means potential children to me, so I’d want to make sure the potential father is a good guy. A year or so of waiting is a good mark for that, in my opinion.

However, I probably wouldn’t wait quite as long to do other non-intercourse sexual activities. I’m over the “first-time” squeamishness, and I don’t associate those things with children-creation, so waiting  for those things really isn’t necessary.

What advice would you give teenagers who are struggling with whether or not to abstain?

There’s only one essential thing you need to do: figure out what your beliefs are about relationships, sex, and children. Do you think it’s OK for sex and children to be separated? Do you think it’s OK for kids to be conceived outside of marriage? Once you’ve figured that out, the rest is straightforward. Not necessarily easy, but straightforward.

It may take a while to figure that out, though, so you’ll need to have a plan for what to do until then. The best thing you can do is avoid getting into a relationship until you’ve determined what you believe. Why? Because you’re figuring out what you believe independent of your partner and because you don’t have to negotiate temporary rules until you know what you want.

That’s all fine and good, of course, unless you’re already in a relationship. If you are you’ll already have some rules in place–whether you’ve consciously set them or not–so keep going by them but make sure you’re staying safe. Unprotected sex is not a good idea for people who don’t have the resources to deal with the consequences! And still try to figure out what your beliefs are. If you feel comfortable, talk to your SO about it. It’ll probably be an intimacy increasing conversation. (Yay intimacy!)

When you figure out what you want you’ll find the strength to uphold your beliefs. Anything else will just make you feel sick.

Final thoughts?

I’m really glad I waited until just a few months ago to have sex. I’m also really really really glad we didn’t wait until we got married, since I’d have lost my blinders after I’d just made a lifelong commitment. Definitely not good.

I hope you all enjoyed this series. I know I would have appreciated it when I was a sophomore in high school. If you have any questions or comments feel free to comment or send me a message. I’d love to hear from you!

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