The 104-year-old virgin?

When it comes to sex before marriage, to wait or not to wait is often the question . . . Karina Simpson explores some of the answers.

Sex. It’s a very small word—but we are told it is not the size of the boat; but the motion in the ocean that matters. Everybody should be doing it. You should have a list of your conquests. It’s fun, it’s natural, it’s exciting. If you aren’t doing it, you are a nobody.

Every day, I feel bombarded with the fact that I should be hooking up. My sister wants nieces and nephews yesterday. Most of my friends are doing it; and those who aren’t are so close to doing it they might as well be. I watch TV and all the ads are selling their products using sex, I mean if you think about it, how does using the right shower cleaner get you the perfect partner? All the shows have sexual content; even cartoons, which at one time were thought kid-safe.

At times, it feels like I might have to lock myself in a convent or go live in a cave to get away from the pressure I feel. It would be nice to be able to tell yourself you don’t know what you are missing; but you do know what you are missing—they make sure of it. One of the most traumatic times of my life was when I was old enough to get "the birds and the bees” talk. It has been seared into my mind forever. Suddenly, you learn about the changes that are going to occur in your body somewhere in the near future. What goes where and what can happen should you place that in this. Seriously gross stuff .
Then your body changes and you start seeing things slightly differently—you start feeling different things, too. For most, this is where the trouble starts.

All those gross things that you quite possibly vowed you would never, ever do suddenly seem appealing. Bit by bit, your friends find partners and soon you feel like the only one not dating. To help matters along, when your friends do have a little time for you, they let you know what you are missing out on by sharing all the gory details of their relationships.
Then you get a partner and rather than satisfying those feelings, they intensify. Just being near them isn’t enough; you reach over and hold their hand.

Not too bad. In fact, that’s kinda nice . . . Then that isn’t enough; you kiss them. Good. Really good. Where do you stop though? I think the movie Virtual Sexuality really shows the attitude of the world toward sex. It is about a 17-year-old girl, who thinks if she doesn’t have sex soon, she will end up a 104- year-old virgin. She wishes men had barcodes tattooed on them so she could scan them (with her laser eyes) and find the right one to do it with. Her initial aim is for sex; and she crosses her fingers and hopes he is Mr Right.

I think the girl is silly—she should have better things to do than just trying to have sex and she has heaps of time.
Yet the world wants us to think we should do it now. The sooner the better.
As a Christian, I think we should be looking for Mr/Miss Right first. Men don’t have barcodes tattooed on them; I checked (which was pointless as I realised I didn’t have a scanner). You can have fun finding Mr/Miss Right without indulging in sex.

If you are planning to build a marriage or even just a dating relationship, it needs to be built on more than sex. There needs to be friendship and compatibility. When it comes time for you to have sex, you need to feel comfortable enough that you can be open and honest with them and know it is not going to phase your partner (much).

I also think that if you have not had sex before marriage you are less likely to go looking for better elsewhere; as the nervous fumbling of your first time will be shared with another nervous fumbler. Together you will find out what is good for you and it will remain something special that just the two of you share.

God made sex. He made a man and a woman and gave them the gift of sex so they could show how intimately they loved the other. It’s also designed for procreation. He did give rules we should follow, though. Very obviously, we should not have sex with family members (this includes anyone marrying into the family and stepfamily members, whether you grew up with them or not). Not with another man’s wife. Not with animals . . . God finds these acts disgusting. He forbids us to do these things and says that if we do, we will be unclean and no longer one of His people (you can read all about it in Leviticus 18).

The Bible doesn’t condemn sex, as long as you use it properly. Like having a car, if you don’t follow the road rules you’ll be in trouble.
Self-control is pivotal when it comes to sex. 1 Corinthians 7:1-3, 5 says it is good for a man not to marry. But since there is so much immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should fulfil his marital duty to his wife and likewise the wife to her husband—"Do not deprive each other, except by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control,” Paul writes.

While Paul was a staunch supporter of bachelorhood, he realised that it was not the life for everyone. He knows Satan will tempt the individual who is unmarried to partake in sexual misconduct. Thus Paul encourages men and women to marry one another, so they can enjoy the act with God’s blessing.

More often than not, self-control is the hardest thing to achieve, as you are denying yourself things you want because they are (usually) bad for you. Sex of itself is not evil or bad for you. Sex is like a blood transfusion (except more fun obviously)—if you get a bad one, you can get other stuff with it (and there are loads of diseases out there. Plus the emotional consequences). Also, if you cannot control your desires while you are dating, what impact will that have on the relationship as it possibly develops further? In the Bible, marriages were all about the party and the sex. Guests would eat while the bride and groom went into their chamber and shared their first time. The Bible says that once you have "lain” with someone, in God’s eyes you are married. Perhaps marriage and sex are the same thing, except hopefully you aren’t paying as much for the sex as you do for a wedding. Sex is the union of two bodies and two minds. Marriage is the public commitment to that union, so the world is aware that these two people are now set aside for each other and are off limits.

Despite the pressures I feel, I am going to wait. I will risk being a 104-year-old virgin, just so I know when I do it, I am doing it with the right person for the right reasons. If I feel the need for the adrenalin rush that I am told comes with it, I will take up an extreme sport, like bungee jumping.
You know what the world thinks you should do. You know what your church thinks you should so. But when it comes down to the crunch, it is really between you and God. You are taking the risk.
God gave it to you as a gift—use it wisely.

To wait . . .
Mrs L says: "From the time I started to realise what sex is, what it can do and how important and special it is, I made a decision. In case you haven’t figured it out, the decision was to wait and have sex when I got married.
"At the time, it was a relatively easy one to make. Trust me, you should have seen the boys in my class.
"It stayed easy, until I got engaged. We had both decided to wait until our wedding day—one year later. That year took a long time, and the wait got harder and harder the closer it came—but we made it.
"I think the main reason we did wait is that, if we hadn’t, we would have felt like we had let ourselves down—sold ourselves short.
"I know it sounds like a cliché but I think it was more special because we waited. Otherwise, the wedding would have been just to get the official marriage certificate and the honeymoon would have just been an ordinary holiday. I often wondered during the time why we didn’t just do it but on the day, I felt great that I had waited.
"If I was going to do it all again, I would wait again. As my friend says, a little extra waiting never hurt anyone (except maybe those waiting to see a doctor in the emergency room).”

Or not to wait . . .
Mrs K says: "There are always horror stories about not waiting for marriage—pregnant the first time, horrible diseases, broken hearts, tangled emotions and as many other problems as you could imagine exist.
"I don’t doubt it happens. I’ve seen it happen to acquaintances, including a girl in high school who was pregnant at 15. But personally, I had no problems or regrets.
"I played smart, used protection and was only ever intimate with people I was in serious, committed long-term relationships with (it wasn’t Californication).
"If you are making the choice to be sexual before you’re married, I believe you must inform yourself about the risks there are and make sure you’re extremely careful—choose the right partner, use protection and remember there are emotional impacts.
When I met the man who became my husband, he talked openly about the importance (to him) of waiting for marriage to have sex. I’ll admit I wasn’t upfront about not having waited—in hindsight, I should have been.
I chose to wait for him out of respect for his choices, as well as his commitment to God and future wife, which was how he viewed it. It was sweet and "old-fashioned” but I respected him for that. We couldn’t pretend temptation didn’t come up. It wasn’t all just chastely holding hands and cheek kisses though.
But our responsibility was to God as well as each other, so I think that carried more weight and kept us in line.
My husband was disappointed I wasn’t a virgin and when you’ve had sex in previous relationships, it’s hard to not want to do it in a new one. Sex is an important part of a relationship but perhaps it’s something that’s so important, it should wait for the relationship you’ll (hopefully) be in for life—and it should definitely be treated with the respect it deserves.