True Love Waits… And The Rest Of Us Get On With Our Sex Lives: The Blowfish Blog

I have a new piece up on the Blowfish blog -- True Love Waits... And The Rest Of Us Get On With Our Sex Lives -- about the not-so-joyful joys of waiting until you get married to have sex. The jumping-off point is a letter I saw on Scarleteen (the sex ed for teenagers website), about a couple who had decided for religious reasons not to have sex until after they got married... and found themselves stuck in a marriage with a seriously disappointing, incompatible sex life. Here's the teaser:

There are so many directions I could go with this. I could talk about the ridiculous over-emphasis our society places on marriage: the absurdly high expectations we place on it, the idealistic glow we place around it, the assumption that it will magically transform everything, including and especially sex. (And that’s speaking as someone who is herself married -- ritually, if not legally -- and who does think that her marriage has changed both the relationship and the sex for the better.)

And of course, I could get on my atheist high horse, and talk about the fucked-up effect religion so often has on sexual happiness. That would certainly be a fruitful direction. Of all the dreadful sources of sexual misinformation and general bad sex advice in the world, religion has to take the cake -- because it can't be argued with. It isn't based on evidence, it's based on scripture and religious authority and personal faith... and it's therefore singularly resistant to change, to adaptation in response to evidence or data. About sex, or anything else.

But I want to go in a different direction here.

I want to express my gratitude for the fact that I -- and most of us -- don't live in that world anymore.

To find out why exactly the whole "waiting for marriage" thing makes me kind of sad -- and why exactly I'm grateful for the sexual world I live in -- read the rest of the piece. Enjoy!

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[Kenneth Purdom]

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Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their hard work. 10 For if one of them should fall, the other one can raise his partner up. But how will it be with just the one who falls when there is not another to raise him up? - Ecclesiastes 4:9,10