There are two billboards that I drive by regularly which have achieved their goal of raising (at least my) awareness of colon cancer and the need to screen.
I’d be curious to see studies into the success of these campaigns, since I find that while they make me think about screening, they’re sort of strengthening my resolve to hold out until the last minute.
Mind you, I’m not endorsing that. I’m just saying. At some point in the next several years the original integrity of the posterior opening to my alimentary canal will be violated by a beneficent finger. I do not look forward to that day, but like so many unpleasant tasks that I can do little to plan for or affect, I do better just waking up one morning and deciding to do it.
The longer I have to think about it, the more likely I am to chicken out. I’d be more likely to respond positively if the doctor said, “Hey, while you’re here, why not give this a go?” than to a cheerful receptionist saying “Mr. Swait, why don’t we schedule a screening for three months from now?”
And I have years to stew over this.
The billboards feature two scary things. The scary slogan: “Colon Screening: Get Behind It”. “Get Behind It”?!??! Are you serious?! I mean, that’s cute and all, but I imagine that this sort of campaign would do better to stop short of creating in men “bend over” visualizations.
And then there’s the scary logo: an upside down heart…a butt. Love your colon.
Oh, man. All that innocuous-looking little blue butt makes me think of is uncomfortable fingers. I don’t think I will talk to my doctor.
Of course, that’s easy to say now. We’ll see what’s up in a few years.
This past weekend I listened to a Greenville Country sheriff’s deputy talk about his trips to a local place to wax his chest. I was dismayed to hear this; I’d had no warning, it wasn’t like this guy was a body-builder. And did you know that there’s perfume specifically designed for the male groin area?
How much grooming does “mansome” allow for? Does this count as mansome?
This is my pops. He’s a pretty impressive dude. He’s the life of the party. He drinks great wine, and brings plenty for all. He tells terrible jokes and everyone thinks they’re hilarious. He smokes great cigars, and brings plenty for all. His beard is white. The Most Interesting Man In The World modeled his look on my dad’s.
People, he got his doctorate at M. I. freakin’ T. Do you hear what I’m saying?
My dad rocked the beard hard when he was at M.I.T. He was no baby-faced undergrad, so his situation was different from that of most young men who come into M.I.T. But surely he will be concerned to hear this news: beards at M.I.T. are under attack!
Thankfully Naveen Sunkavally has come to the rescue. Thank you Mr. Sunkavally.
Typically those who complain against beards are the very people who can’t grow them in the first place.
A beard (for men) is like a well-endowed midsection: You’ve either got it or you don’t. And those who don’t have it sometimes descend into furious, animated mudslinging that masks an inner frustration.
You’ve probably known these types of people. These always paw their chin insistently and consistently trying to eke out of their peach-fuzz a semblance of the real thing. At night, they probably take a magnifying glass to their faces and look in the mirror trying to spot and nourish the slightest bit of growth. And then in the morning, after a night of frustration, they awake fresh and ready for a new day of mudslinging.
The rest of the article is a wonderful exposition of the virtues and applications of beard in daily life. Read it to see how helpful to individual and society the beard can be.
At the end Mr. Sunkavally tosses in a completely gratuitous slam which I here include, because I also enjoy talking trash about white people: “Extremely light-skinned males may, however, look ridiculous with beards.”
“During my 18 years I came to bat almost 10,000 times. I struck out about 1,700 times and walked maybe 1,800 times. You figure a ballplayer will average about 500 at-bats a season. That means I played 7 years without ever hitting the ball.”
Mickey Mantle (October 1931- August 1995)
(photo: Mantle flings his batting helmet after terrible at-bat in 1965)
This post is part of a week-long series of first-person guest posts on male virginity amongst Christians. I know I said we were done, but this one was handed in a little late…but with an excellent perspective, particularly because this is the first post to directly address pornography.
There will be another post in this series from a young man who is still unmarried, and a final closing post from me. So our chaste voyage is not quite over yet.
Mike Wilson is a seminarian in New Zealand. He loves cricket and his woman, to whom he is newly married.
You were a virgin until you married. How old were you at that time?
I was 25 when I married my wife.
If a [Christian] man is not a virgin when he marries, how big a deal is that?
It is serious in a very real sense. Sin is perceived in popular culture as simply a breaking of mostly arbitrary rules – however the Christian understanding of sin is as a force unleashed upon the world that divides and destroys. Sin tarnishes our person, it wounds us and affects our ability to reflect the glory and grace of God, but more than that it affects our relationships with others and with God. Sexual sin is especially damaging in this sense as it directly harms our relationships with others.
I’ve noticed that people have a hard time believing a young man could stay a virgin by choice. That is, that sex is impossible to resist for any length of time. I’m sure that it was difficult, but how difficult was it, really? What kind of struggle was it?
I’ve found that this was more of an issue at high school than later in life. And, really, it only seemed to be an issue for certain groups – the popular kids. I skirted around the edges of most groups and never really belonged to any, although I had friends in most. I can’t remember ever experiencing ridicule for my celibacy, but I think that, in hindsight, the popular kids were probably all busy patting each other on the back for being awesome.
As an adult I’ve found the reaction to be a mix of embarrassment and disbelief. But, because my passions lie in the realm of church leadership and teaching theology, a Christian sexual ethic has largely been the norm for those around me (and certainly for those whose voices I trust enough to speak into my life). However, I also work as a support worker for people with intellectual disabilities and so a large portion of my week is spent with co-workers who have different opinions on pretty much everything. In this setting the most common reaction upon learning I was waiting until marriage was that I had made a great mistake as after marriage the sex stops. As an advertisement for casual sex I think it’s a pretty shitty one.
As far as the kind of struggle remaining celibate was, well I struggled with the allure of pornography as a young man. Pornography lies to you and says it’s harmless, it doesn’t hurt anyone. But perhaps the biggest lie is one we tell ourselves: that we aren’t what we do. We have a picture in our heads of who we are and that is us, the things we do will sometimes reflect that picture and sometimes not but the picture itself is the important thing. When we confront that lie and realize the things we do flow from ourselves and form who we are, its a terrifying moment and we have no place to hide. When I realised this I realised that there’s only one woman that I want to have sex with: my wife.
What good did staying a virgin until marriage do you?
We are not born as fully formed persons. We develop in our early years and begin to etch out for ourselves a picture of the people we might become. If we attach ourselves too closely with one or more people as we grow (in relationships that are sexual or even just overly intimate), it is my experience, that we begin to form our identity as a person-in-relationship. Of course, as creatures who should reflect the social trinity we are born to crave union with others and that is well and good, but if we have developed our identity in relationship with others we don’t learn how to be alone. Our identity, then, exists outside ourselves – tied up in another person, or in the idea of couple-ness – we never have to grapple with who we are because we are always grappling with who they are and who we are with them. By staying a virgin until marriage I believe I have entered this union with my wife as a more fully whole and self-aware person than I could have been had I had the help of others in forming who I am.
If you haven’t already answered this question, how would you say it impacted your marriage? your sex life?
Casual sex is a “forbidden fruit” – it is desirable (and maybe more so because we are told it is untouchable), it promises a lot but delivers far less. Sex within the bounds of a marriage, free of past tainted experiences, is a chance to explore yourself and another in trust and intimacy – and my experience is that this only grows with time! That this journey will begin and end for me with my wife alone means I am not scared of being vulnerable – I don’t need to pretend that I have all the answers. It means that it’s all exploration – this is not ground I have trekked before – and I know that I will never exhaust her mysteries.
Boilerplate reminder: there has been a good bit of chatter about this series going on, through email, facebook, etc. The overwhelming majority of the responses have been positive. However, agree or disagree with me or the guest posters, I do want to repeat a point I made in the original post for this series. We’re talking about what these Christians believe is best. How many Christians actually manage to do what is best? By the very nature of the way I’ve asked the questions, these men have succeeded (to one degree or another) where others have failed. Not one of them will not confess that this is by God’s grace alone. Nobody’s is saying anybody here is better than anybody else. They are saying that obeying God is better than disobeying, and they’re sorting that out. But without any of the wishy-washiness that masquerades as piety these days. So please don’t be offended.
This post is part of a week-long series of first-person guest posts on male virginity amongst Christians. This post is by a pastor known simply as “one pastor I interviewed”. One of the most interesting parts of his story is how long he waited before getting married. All the other men posting this week married in their early twenties, including me. Not this stalwart.
Q:You were a virgin until you married. How old were you at that time?
I was in my mid-thirties when I got married.
Q: If a [Christian] man is not a virgin when he marries, how big a deal is that?
It’s a very big deal.
If the man’s sexual experiences include someone other than his wife, that means he has a lot of other women — and a lot of other experiences — he can compare his wife to. It’s entirely possible that in some way his wife will not measure up to one or more of these other women.
If he’s had sex with a bunch of women, chances are, too, that he’s “learned” some “lessons” about sex — and they may be entirely the wrong ones.
A Casanova doesn’t have to be a great lover. He isn’t interested in sticking around after the sexual act. He’s interested in his own pleasure and then he moves on. That is to say, so long as he has his orgasm, he doesn’t care about the woman — though chances are that in the hope he will stick around, she might even pretend that he was a great lover. So widespread promiscuity is horrible training for marriage.
But even if the man has had sex with only one woman, the one he eventually married, it still means that his sexual life was divided into two phases, illicit and licit — and the illicit phase had certain thrills that came from the very fact that the act was sinful at the time. Once married, however, not only is there all the guilt of the past relationship to carry into the marriage, but there’s also a training of sorts that gets carried over — good sex, exciting sex, is illicit sex. But when you’re married, your sexual relations are lawful and therefore they lose the excitement, the adreniline rush, the “will she or won’t she” that characterized premarital sexual experience. And the only way to get that back is to have an affair.
Now having said all of that (and I could say more about guilt and how it affects men long after the sin), I should also add that God is very gracious, that a man who has fallen can be restored, and that if a woman finds a godly man who did fall prior to marriage but who is now walking in repentance, that previous sin shouldn’t necessarily be a deal-breaker. What he’s doing with the sin is more important than the sin itself.
Q: I’ve noticed that people have a hard time believing a young man could stay a virgin by choice. That is, that sex is impossible to resist for any length of time. I’m sure that it was difficult, but how difficult was it, really? What kind of struggle was it?
Sex is certainly possible to resist. The difficulty, though, is not just resisting having sex. You can set up boundaries, refuse to be alone with a woman or guard the circumstances in which you’d ever be alone with her, etc. You might just not be around anyone whom you find attractive. There are a number of factors.
But what’s harder, I think, is dealing with other sexual temptations (lust, sexual fantasies, pornography). A guy can be committed to not having sex with a woman and may not have a girlfriend or whatever, but at the same time be bombarded with other sexual temptations which he finds very difficult to resist — all of which could also make it very difficult to resist if, say, a sexy woman came on to the guy. That is, the sexual fantasies are training in infidelity.
Q: You must be some kind of wuss. So must other “wait ’til we’re married” guys. What do you say to that?
Nope. A lot of guys say they want to go all the way with a girl, but they really want to go only about six to eight inches. If they wanted to go all the way, they’d woo her and wed her and have babies with her and provide for her and get up in the night to take care of her and those babies and eventually, if they don’t die first, bury her.
And it takes more of a man to do that than to simply have sex with a woman.
Q: How would you compare the dynamic of being a virgin until 35 to that of a man who marries in his mid-twenties?
I’m not sure I can answer that well, given that I have experience of the former but not of the latter. But I would think that a guy who marries earlier would have less of a struggle in some ways. But it’s hard for me to put into words….
In general, though, Don Miller is correct in his Blue Like Jazz (which I found to be a mixed bag: some good stuff, some bad stuff, and some squishy stuff down at the bottom).
He has some excellent chapters on being single, and he points out how when you’re single for a long time, your personal bubble expands to fill your whole house, even your whole existence. His mind, he says, was like a radio station stuck on one channel: “K-Don: All Don, all the time.”
The longer a guy is single — unless he’s deliberately squelching his self-centeredness — the more and more selfish he’ll become.
Sex is pleasurable, but it’s also (in a sense) work. It is supposed to involve putting someone else ahead of your self. But if you’ve been training yourself in selfishness over the course of years and years and in every sphere of your life, then you’re likely to be selfish here, too.
Boilerplate reminder: there has been a good bit of chatter about this series going on, through email, facebook, etc. The overwhelming majority of the responses have been positive. However, agree or disagree with me or the guest posters, I do want to repeat a point I made in the original post for this series. We’re talking about what these Christians believe is best. How many Christians actually manage to do what is best? By the very nature of the way I’ve asked the questions, these men have succeeded (to one degree or another) where others have failed. Not one of them will not confess that this is by God’s grace alone. Nobody is saying anybody here is better than anybody else. They are saying that obeying God is better than disobeying, and they’re sorting that out. But without any of the wishy-washiness that masquerades as piety these days. So please don’t be offended.
This post is part of an ongoing series of guest posts on being Christian, and male, and virgin.
Q. You were a virgin until you married. How old were you at that time?
If by “virgin” you mean “someone who has not had sexual intercourse,” then yes, I was a virgin until I was married at age 25. However, if I was to list for you two or three of the biggest regrets of my life, number one would probably be a relationship than I had with a girl my freshman year of college. There was no love in it and probably no chemistry. We were friends with benefits in the purest sense of the term. We just liked the idea of physicality. In this specific relationship, I crossed boundaries that I knew were wrong deep in my gut even if they weren’t spelled out word-for-word in Scripture.
Q. If a [Christian] man is not a virgin when he marries, how big a deal is that?
In some senses it is a big deal for a brother in the Lord not to be a virgin when he marries. In other senses, it’s not. For example… Eternally, there is no sin or stumbling that can cause our feet to slip on the sure rock that is Jesus, Israel’s Messiah. Our right-standing before God hinges on his person and work and not ours. Emotionally, however, it could be a big deal if it was a habitual sexual relationship because it could cause difficulty in being able to emotionally connect with your spouse. Biologically, it could be problematic if there were any STDs contracted. Spiritually, there could be some left over guilt from past relationships even if the individual knows that they’re forgiven. Healthy spouse-to-spouse dialogue and immersion in a community of faith that emphasizes grace are both remedies to this possible spiritual side effect.
Q. I’ve noticed that people have a hard time believing a young man could stay a virgin by choice. That is, that sex is impossible to resist for any length of time. I’m sure that it was difficult, but how difficult was it, really? What kind of struggle was it?
While resisting sex was formidable at times, I grew up as a pastor’s kid. Sex before marriage was sinning with a high hand. It was like shooting the pope or blaspheming the Holy Spirit. So, my mindset was always about how much I could get away with without actually reaching intercourse. Resisting intercourse was easy compared to resisting everything that leads up to it.
Q. You must be some kind of wuss. So must other “wait ’til we’re married” guys. What do you say to that?
I would say that real men ought to have a spine enough to think long term and not just about immediate gratification. Also, the last time I checked, patience and self-control were both fruits of the Spirit. I’d rather yield to his promptings than grieve him. Additionally, if I was having this conversation with someone who didn’t hold to my same values and/or worldview, I would convince them that patience and self-control are virtues that are respected in the most arenas of life. To cultivate them is to cultivate success. Those who have given up their virginity to one who is not their spouse can never have the freedom and joy of giving themselves away without guilt and reservation. Lastly, it is a scientific fact that having only one sexual partner in your lifetime increases sexual pleasure. Whenever two people engage in intercourse with one another, the hormone oxytocin is released by each party. The releasing of this hormone from the same two people again and again heightens orgasmic satisfaction. (Side note… I am far from being a biologist, but read some stuff about this a while back and have had some discussion with others who studied it more thoroughly. So, I might have worded it a bit awkwardly in a technical sense.)
Q. What good did staying a virgin until marriage do you? How would you say it impacted your marriage? your sex life?
On a positive note, my virginity until marriage did teach me patience and self-control. I really do feel like it was a small variable that helped me to pray for my future wife. I think it also aided me to cultivate general intentionality in my life. It also taught me a lot about healthy boundaries. It gave me the honor of telling my wife that I was hers in a way that I was no one else’s. Along those same lines (and concerning my virginity’s impact of my present sex life), I don’t have to worry about closing my eyes during sex and picturing another girl’s face. What a relief. Lastly, and hopefully, it has been a positive example to the hundreds of students I’ve worked with, and I think it will also be a good example to my kids in the future.
The other day a couple of the lads from my rugby club and I were sitting on the bleachers having a pre-practice pint and talking about phasing it back a little bit. My two compatriots were right at the 40-year mark and were talking about coaching more and playing less; I knew I wasn’t too far behind. I’ve got a few more good years in me, but I’m not confident my knees can carry my weight around for as long as I’d like.
I guess that with that defeatist attitude I’m toast already. Because this hardcore dude pictured to the left, a 66-year-old truck driver who plays flanker for a club in New Zealand at a similar level to mine, is thinking that maybe it might be time to hang it up. Maybe.
After 48 seasons of senior rugby, sometimes playing with the grandsons of old team-mates, the 66-year-old reckons he has had a reasonable trot in the game and is considering making this his last season as a flanker for the Southern United Cavaliers, who sit mid-table in the Waikato senior second division (senior reserve) competition.
“It’s starting to get to the stage now where the pain for the rest of the week is not worth the 80 minutes. It must be coming to a close soon but I wouldn’t like to say exactly when.”
Boilerplate reminder: there has been a good bit of chatter about this series going on, through email, facebook, etc. The overwhelming majority of the responses have been positive. However, agree or disagree with me or the guest posters, I do want to repeat a point I made in the original post for this series. We’re talking about what these Christians believe is best. How many Christians actually manage to do what is best? By the very nature of the way I’ve asked the questions, these men have succeeded (to one degree or another) where others have failed. Not one of them will not confess that this is by God’s grace alone. Nobody’s is saying anybody here is better than anybody else. They are saying that obeying God is better than disobeying, and they’re sorting that out. But without any of the wishy-washiness that masquerades as piety these days. So please don’t be offended.
Robert Privette is a web-developer at Footstone, and lead singer for Six Days From Sunday. He was also Joffre’s best man.
Q: You were a virgin until you married. How old were you at that time?
I was twenty.
Q: If a [Christian] man is not a virgin when he marries, how big a deal is that?
As many issues as my wife and I worked through early in our marriage, I don’t think that non-virginity would have been an insurmountable hurdle. As many things as I have been forgiven for, I also don’t think that it would have been a spiritual death blow. That said, in our relationship, trust has been paramount. I’m thankful that we weren’t faced with the additional challenge of working through past sexual relationships. I imagine it’s tough.
Q: I’ve noticed that people have a hard time believing a young man could stay a virgin by choice. That is, that sex is impossible to resist for any length of time. I’m sure that it was difficult, but how difficult was it, really? What kind of struggle was it?
I think it would have been more difficult to only have sex once. Naivety isn’t generally considered a desired trait, but happy ignorance is a great friend of virginity (you can’t miss what you don’t know). The challenge was to stay away from the boundaries instead of getting as close as possible. Fences are no match for speeding cars. I’ve never been good at saying no in the heat of the moment.
Q: You must be some kind of wuss. So must other “wait ’til we’re married” guys. What do you say to that?
I’m hot. Ask my wife.
Q: What good did staying a virgin until marriage do you?
There’s something wonderful about the pursuit. Heart-stopping romantic love flourishes before the conquest. I got really good at loving my wife. We’re each other’s first, best and only. There is no comparison, no guilt, no secret, no wondering. She knows that the Voice I heeded before our marriage is the same one that now tells me to keep our bed holy and to lay down my life for my wife.
Q: How would you say it impacted your marriage? your sex life?
Marriage is great! Sex is great! (t-shirt anyone?) It’s hard to imagine the intimacy, the oneness, I have with my wife if I had given little bits of my heart and body to other girls along the way.
UPDATE: You can click on this link to follow the guest posts as they are written this week.
This week The Giant is featuring several guest posts on a topic near and dear to me: sweet virginity.
Okay, well, maybe not sweet virginity. The posts are on male virginity until marriage.
There is an ocean of articles, stories, and opinions on American sexual behavior we could explore together. These works are largely untrustworthy, given the nature of the subject, the biases of sociologists, and the straight freakiness one would never be far from (Alfred Kinsey preferred to masturbate by inserting a toothbrush into his urethra; this was the least of his perversions, yet he was trusted as the defining word on American sexual behavior). Still, many trends and tendencies are obvious even to those of us who only use toothbrushes for toothbrushing.
Many many most Americans have sex before they marry (I’ve seen numbers as high as 95%), and most of them not with the person they end up marrying. I’m not going to link to any reports. As I said, I am very skeptical of such reports, but they’re very easy to find online, and even if they’re not factually accurate, they tell an accurate story.
So most people have sex before they marry, which we are told is natural and healthy. We hear of the existence of strange people who fall outside the pale of normal behavior, and we raise our eyebrows but affirm their right to healthy alternativity; strange creatures such as asexuals and nonsexuals who prefer not to have or never have had sex but are distinct from virgins. Strange, perhaps, not normal, but since they claim to lack the appetites the rest of us have, how can we expect them to need to satisfy them?
The true perversion is evident in people who claim to have sexual appetites, but wait an unhealthy amount of time, until they’re all grown up and married.
In a fun little twist on top of that little idea is a touch of misogyny. We say it’s unhealthy to suppress overmuch our sexual drive, and we include women in that statement. After all we, unlike those stupid Victorians, know that women have robust sexual appetites. Yet if we hear a woman claim that she was virgin until she married, we might feel a touch of condescension and pity, but we’ll believe her. We don’t believe men when they make the same claim.
I was a virgin when I married at twenty-two. When people hear this they are absolutely blown away. Seriously. They are blown away; they look as if they cannot believe it. Some have outright claimed to not believe me. The only way I can think to explain it is that I am a handsome healthy male free of any crippling social handicaps. Many people firmly believe that the only way a male would make it into early adulthood without having had sex would be if it had been against his will.
This is the dominant view of sexual development in the young American male: a single-minded obsession with mating grows with each passing post-pubescent moment until the subject is in agony, an agony which is only relieved when the male find a female to mate with. Countless stupid movies testify to this.
This has always offended me. It makes men seem like animals. Sadly, the longer we portray men as animals, the more they actually behave as if they were.
I don’t claim that I was absolutely “pure” before I married. I got involved in some situations that in a different cultural context would have placed me in serious trouble, regardless of whether I was “technically” a virgin or not. And I don’t get hung up on being a virgin. What I do get hung up on is the disbelief and condescension that accompanies claims by Christian males to be virgin. And this is because I was far from unique. My wife and I met at a Christian student union in college. I knew lots of guys who were virgins, I knew guys who weren’t virgins but were celibate, and I knew guys who were almost certainly not virgining, if you’ll allow the term.
The point is, I grew up in a milieu in which it was not crazy that a male might be a virgin by choice. And I didn’t grow up Prairie Muffin or King James-only fundamentalist. Nor did I grow up at 1st Mainstream Baptist or Megachurch 3000.
When I thought of doing this series of guest posts I thought I’d ask a few guys who met these criteria to contribute:
Christian
married
cool guy (to be free of the dismissive “he couldn’t get laid if he tried” charge)
had been a virgin until marriage (obviously)
good writer
different perspective from the other guest bloggers
Believe it or not, I don’t go around asking my friends and acquaintances whether they were virgins when they married. Now if a friend of mine spent time, say, as an actor and a drug fiend (I don’t know which is worse), I assume he wasn’t. So take that into account. But I just asked a half-dozen guys I knew who I thought were good writers, and only one responded back that he wasn’t “qualified”.
There’s nothing scientific about that. I’m just illustrating that there are entire communities out there where being a young male virgin is pretty normal. These are not freaky little cult communities, just Christian cultures full of people who study civil engineering or play football or listen to Neutral Milk Hotel or love history or watch too much TV. I’m not surprised to know lots of men who were virgins until they married.
Some of my Christian friends grew up in the church and couldn’t wait to get out from under. They hated the notion that as youngsters they couldn’t have sex, or that the price they’d have to pay was so high. But the truth is, at the time those young men hated Christ. They didn’t want anything to do with Jesus and his Church, but they were too scared to up and leave, so they were full of resentment. When I was in high school I knew plenty of guys like that. What was normal for me, however, was hanging with a bunch of virgins who expected to be virgins until they married, and while it might have been a struggle, it only made them look forward to marriage, not resent their situation.
Today I had a conversation with wifey that is tangentially connected to all this.
Me: “We’re pals.”
Wifey: “Don’t call me ‘pal’. We’re not pals. We’re…”
Me: “Lovers?” *suggestive eyebrow waggle*
Wifey: “No! ‘Lovers’ isn’t enough! We’re husband and wife.”
That is correct. You will notice, if you choose to read the guest posts throughout this week, that intimacy is a big part of what is being discussed. It’s not just popular Christian “mean girls” played by Mandy Moore who believe that premarital sex can make intimacy in a marriage more difficult. It’s also dudes with beards and plaid shirts.
I hope that no one will be offended for the wrong reasons during this series. That is to say, I don’t mind if you’re offended, but don’t be offended because you or someone you love isn’t a virgin. Love covers a multitude of sins. I don’t care if you’re not a virgin; I do care if you’re faithful to Christ. And I’m not going to write a million myriads of posts to preserve everyone’s feelings. We’re talking about this thing right here. Pose your what-ifs, but don’t get pissed about it.
Below are the questions I asked of these guys, and I hope you’ll find their responses interesting. Expect one or two a day for the rest of the week.
You were a virgin until you married. How old were you at that time?
If a [Christian] man is not a virgin when he marries, how big a deal is that?
I’ve noticed that people have a hard time believing a young man could stay a virgin by choice. That is, that sex is impossible to resist for any length of time. I’m sure that it was difficult, but how difficult was it, really? What kind of struggle was it?
You must be some kind of wuss. So must other “wait ’til we’re married” guys. What do you say to that?
What good did staying a virgin until marriage do you?
If you haven’t already answered this question, how would you say it impacted your marriage? your sex life?
There it is. Hopefully this will be theologically, sociologically, and phenomenologically interesting. And yes, I know the preceding sentence sounded douchey. Enjoy the posts. If you want to send in feedback without using the comment form, email me here.
