Abstinence: My Story
Date Posted: February 25th, 2009
For the past decade I’ve lived the non-mainstream path of consciously abstaining from having sex until marriage. It’s been a consciousness-raising experience and I’d like to share what I’ve learned, but in order to do that properly you really need to know who I was when I made the decision and how I’ve changed over the years. So here’s the short(ish) version of my story.
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.
