Abstinence: The Disadvantages
Date Posted: March 1st, 2009
This is the third post in a series on abstinence. Here are the first two: My Story, The Advantages.
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.
