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Jeni Ananda 3 months, 2 weeks ago.
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The following link is to an article, which I am pretty sure is satire. http://www.larknews.com/archives/217
Question: Why is so much of christianity about denying ones self of the natural urges? It seems like the rate of unfaithfulness may be related to the level of “holiness” a couple is striving to achieve. I know that when my husband and I were first in love, it was very difficult not to want to “go there” and my husband’s parents were obsessed with keeping us from doing it. So much so that they moved the wedding date up by a full YEAR. Wow. To this day, I sometimes wish I would have just lived and learned from experience, and had sex before I was married…
If I can be so bold @moxierocks… why do you wish that? I’m wondering what you feel you might have learned if you did or how it might have changed your life. Could you go there with us? Or is that too personal?
@admin Nah, I don’t mind answering your question..although it does get a bit emotionally charged for me, the topic of sex. I am not sure I can give an extremely succinct answer, since the very reason I DID NOT have sex before marriage was because I was just so incredibly afraid I’d go to Hell if I did. So, I guess by wishing that I had just been sexually active before I was married, I’m also wishing I hadn’t been brainwashed into believing that God was going to punish me eternally for doing so. In a more currently relevant sense, I wish I had not been a virgin because my husband wasn’t a virgin when we got married, and I’ve felt so very out of sync with him on every level sexually, and that feeling has permeated other areas of our relationship as well. I figure, if I had been experienced beforehand like he was, maybe I wouldn’t feel this way. I used to wish that he had been a virgin, instead of what I wish now..I guess that just reflects the changes in my thought processes… Now that my hubby and I are on different pages spiritually as well, things are feeling even more tricky…
ya i get that. do you see “getting the official paper” as a real dividing line between before and after? and would you have waited longer to get married if you’d had sex before? tell me to stop if i’m going to far my friend. i appreciate your honesty and your story resonates with so many i’m sure.
I am a monogamous relationship type person to my very core. So, yeah, there’s a line, but not really because of the paper..The piece of paper (IMO) is just a government thing. Anyone can choose to live in a committed relationship with another person, but the government doesn’t have to know about it. I only had one serious boyfriend before I met my husband, and we were together for 18 months (3 months under the same roof at his parents’ house). Yes, I think I would have waited longer to get married if I hadn’t been a slave to my religion, and by default, to my husband’s parents and their ideas about what would be godly and right. If I had been who I am today, I would probably have chosen to have a nice long dating relationship (if it lasted) and then the engagement and marriage could have happened when they would (when WE decided). In reality, I met and married my husband in 6 months. I do not regret my marriage and children…but I do think that the REASONS I was married when I was were wrong and contributed greatly to some of the most difficult woes my marriage has suffered, and is still affected by. It’s tough stuff. Deeply scarring, difficult stuff.
yep. you wonder probably what it would have been like if you had chosen.
Moxie I love your comments. Though it might sound strange considering we are a poly quad…we are all very monogamous (our version at least) to our relationship. My wife and I also married early for the very same reasons you did and, like you, if we had it to do again we would simply have enjoyed a sexual relationship while we were dating and married when we were ready. We are 30 years married next month so it has been good. But many of our early struggles were directly related to the religious bullshit we were attempting to wade through.
I have so many times in the last couple of years wished I had been healthier–emotionally, spiritually, socially–as a teenager. I was made so socially inept by my upbringing, and never dated until I met the guy I married. I used to thank God for keeping me for him. Now I just see my young self as a rather pathetic mess.
I admire your honesty with this moxie, its an important insight to have here I think. I have often speculated that the church’s emphasis on marriage is a lot more damaging than good, especially coupled with its hatred of sex before marriage. I think its important for a relationship to just enjoy being one for as long as they want, enjoy being with each other, explore each other spiritually, sexually, emotionally, before the concept of marriage should even be brought up. As you rightly said, why does the government have to know about it, it is just a piece of paper, but for some reason this piece of paper is HOLY PAPER! Me and my partner have decided that we do want to spend the rest of our lives together, but we will not get married, despite the fact that we hold Christian beliefs and despite the fact that my partner’s conservative parents would eventually expect us to. I’m not saying that marriage in general is wrong and destructive, I’m sure its been great for a great many people, but for me and my partner at least, it is a detrimental thing, and the looming possibility of it was starting to cause us problems, so we decided that we just wouldn’t do it and all was well.
Its just annoying though, because the church, and my partner’s parents, will not fully recognize that we are together until we are married, I remember someone once saying that for Christians, a relationship is just a friendship until marriage, I was like… huh?! That means just simply wanting to live together is going to prove incredibly difficult. I just hate having some outsider institution having that kind of control over our lives.. especially when the ‘requirements’ dictated to us have less to do with Jesus and loving Christian faith, and more to do with out-dated traditions.
@moxierocks what you say resonates so strongly for me. I would have waited to get married too if we’d had sex. I think I’d still have married my husband–we will hit 16 years in July, and I wouldn’t trade my family for the world. But the early years were so hard because I had been led to believe that we would lose respect for each other, that it wouldn’t be “good,” etc. (I’m not young enough to have been part of the purity movement where my value was attached to the state of my vagina.) We actually really pushed the limits of what was “allowed” before marriage (that is to say, we did everything short of actually having intercourse), and it led to a lot of guilt. Also, I really didn’t enjoy p in v sex for a long, long time, and I am not sure if that’s due to guilt or because I was expecting some kind of “magic” on the wedding night that didn’t happen. Plus, there was so much pressure to “consummate” the marriage on the wedding night that I’m sure being exhausted from the long day, the long flight, and the late hour when we were finally settled in. I felt at that point like I couldn’t ask to wait until we’d rested because the expectation was so high.
My husband & I had this convo the other night, because he commented that my spiritual awakening/crisis of faith coincided with a much better physical relationship for us and he asked if they were related. I said yes, because in feeling more free in one way, I was left to be free in so many others. I’m still working out what I think is a healthy sexual ethic, but at least I’m not so closed off anymore.
That article is pretty funny. This is related to the teaching of Jesus who states that if you even think about lusting after a woman you have committed adultery. That means every straight male from the age of puberty on has committed adultery thousands of times. I felt guilty constantly in high school. It’s crazy making.
My response now is, well if I can sin by thinking about it, I must be able to pay tithe by thinking about it, because it’s the thought that counts.
AnonymousNeither of us were celibate b4 marriage. We’d both had relationships before.
Hubby lost his job before we got married and we wanted to move the wedding date up by a few months so he could move in. His parents would have none of it..(“gasp! how would it look?” ) They were probably thinking everyone would think I was pregnant.
We should have just lived together before our marriage and have said that many times.
@Richard I LOVE this, gonna use it next time someone @ church gets on my ass about titheing!
“My response now is, well if I can sin by thinking about it, I must be able to pay tithe by thinking about it, because it’s the thought that counts.”
Richard this is a good point. We all stood condemned according to the teaching of the church. Crazy indeed.
The problem with such a narrow understanding is that it is almost always unfaithful to the actual scripture used to support it. In the instance of Jesus statement for example. Jesus equated “lust” with “adultery”. Biblical adultery (from a marital standpoint) was actually taking the wife which belonged to another man and possessing her for himself. I.E., King David with Bathsheba. There is actually no place in scripture where adultery is defined as sexual thought, therefor it cannot be sexual thought Jesus was referring to. In fact…the act of sex was not adultery, but rather the act of breaking up a marriage was. Sex may or may not be involved at all. Our modern translations and understanding of these terms adultery and lust have no bearing on what Jesus would have meant when He made this statement. For that we need to study the greek word used in the scripture for lust.
“The word “lust” has become more narrow in meaning since the time of KJV; the RSV generally reserves the terms for passionate evil desires, usually sexual. As in English, the Greek term is of wide meaning, with particular meaning dependent on the context. It can represent any strong desire, including those that are sinful and those that are not (Lk. 22:15; Phil. 1:23; 1Thess. 2:17) and can be as broad as ‘materialism’ (Mk. 4:19; Rev. 18:14) or as specific as sexual passion or obsession (Mt. 5:28; Rom. 1:24; 1 Thess. 4:5).” Eerdman’s Bible Dictionary, pg. 668
In the context of Jesus statement the word lust cannot refer to simple sexual attraction since sexual attraction, and even sexual thought, does not fit the example of adultery. It would have to mean instead the desire to possess the woman as one’s own in a covetous way. When looking at Jesus statement with the integrity of contextual honesty, Jesus was pointing out that if you have the desire to steal another man’s wife…you are guilty of sinful thought. This is a teaching I would agree with. But believing that being stimulated by the very thing which we were designed by our creator to be stimulated by is sinful (as the church declares) is utter nonsense. This was certainly not what Jesus meant or he would not have chosen the words he did. Pretty much all of the fundamental church’s teaching on sexuality is based on such sloppy exegesis that it is difficult to refrain from calling it the eisegesis it so often is.
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