I’m a mother who wants my children to embrace abstinence until marriage. A mother who wants her children to understand their personal value and the importance of sex and intimacy. I believe God gave it to us for a purpose and that the context He gave it to us in is marriage.
When I encounter stuff from the purity movement, I remember all of the young men and women I know who are trying to break free of the shame and bondage that the teachings from this movement created in them. I feel so incredibly aware of the importance of teaching this correctly. I don’t want my children to have baggage, and I don’t want them to miss the point of purity.
Purity is not supposed to be about some archaic idea that you lose your value if you engage in hand holding. If you have sex before marriage God isn’t going to punish you, and if you go on to have problems in your marriage they are not your fault merely because of that premarital sex. Sex does not define your worth. Your worth is much more than your body or any romantic or sexual act you may have thought about or engaged in.
Sex is important, though. It isn’t something I want my children getting caught up in outside of the context God created for it. Balancing all of this is a challenge - and I hope that the way we’re approaching this will help someone else who has to tackle this issue, or has been harmed by the purity movement.
First, the reality is that very few people marry the first person they find themselves attracted to. Yes, we have friends who are rounding out their second decade of marriage and they were high school sweethearts - first love for each of them and still together. The odds of that, though, are pretty low. This is because relationships that are begun before you are old enough to follow through on them are more likely to end.
We have encouraged our children to not even bother with romance until it can go somewhere real and lasting. If you’re going to present another person with the opportunity for a relationship, you need to be able to back it up. Otherwise, you are going into a relationship that you expect to end - in which case you need to have a plan in place for how to get out of it. If you are going into a relationship you plan on ending, all the more reason to not commit sexually.
Second, there are a lot of steps between a young person not interested in the opposite sex and your wedding night. Those steps are divided by doors and once a door is opened it’s impossible to lock it. They are closed because God doesn’t want you to be concerned with what is on the other side of the door until you’re ready for it - and when you go opening the doors just because you’re curious, you change everything. This isn’t about the other person, or your future spouse, either, it’s about you. Paul speaks of it as defrauding yourself. When you stand in a new relationship with all of those rooms you’ve already explored ahead of you, it becomes much harder to resist going through those doors.
Something about the doors that is important to know before you start opening them, is that the more doors you open, the shorter the gap is between them. At a certain point, your emotions and hormones are driving the car and you aren’t even making conscious choices. Those doors need to be decided about in advance. The farther you stay away from them, the easier it is to not find yourself on the other side of the door wondering how it got opened.
Each door you pass through is an investment of yourself in the other person, and every investment you make causes you to be more committed to making the relationship work. If someone treated you poorly and you hadn’t even held their hand, the odds are you’d think he was a jerk and walk away. But if someone treats you poorly after you’ve had sex with them, it is much more likely that you will want to come up with a reason that it isn’t what it obviously is.
Sex isn’t the end all be all - but it is a big deal. It always has the chance of resulting in a baby, no matter how careful you think you are. People are stuck in each other’s lives for the rest of their lives because a one night stand resulted in a baby. People who have realized they hate each other and want nothing to do with each other are in each other’s lives because they made a child. For women, this often means living at a lower standard of living than if they were married with a family. For men, this often means losing access to their child as the woman gets married to someone new and takes their child into a new family.
Or you can get STD’s - and these can change your life forever. They can come from regular sex, or oral sex, or anal sex; and they are various levels of nasty. I mention the oral and the anal because more and more young people are engaging in those types of sex in order to technically be “virgins” on their wedding night. Which misses the whole point!
The reason to keep yourself on the outside of those doors isn’t because you’ll leave a trail of value as you walk through them. It’s because YOU are walking through them and you are doing these things to yourself. YOU are worth protecting.
You get to decide what the starting level of your relationships is. You can keep it at hand holding, kissing or wherever you decide. You just can’t *untake* it. Once you go through the door, you are through the door. You can decide to stand on the other side of certain doors after you’ve been through them before, but it becomes much harder and requires much greater effort and accountability. Once you have experienced something physically enjoyable it becomes harder to not experience it again. Sex can be very physically enjoyable! If it wasn’t, there would be no need to discuss ways to keep yourself from getting there before you’re ready - if it was horrible, no one would want to do it.
Really, the key is that you are valuable! Not just anyone should get to walk through those doors with you. You teach others how to treat you and if you don’t value those doors, neither will they. I say make people earn the right to walk through a door with you. They need to do a lot more than look cute and tell you they like you. People do that to get you through doors. When they are committed without access to the doors, you can trust their commitment more.
(I would like to note here that if sex is out of your control, it is NOT sex - it is a violation! If you’ve been molested, raped or forced to do anything else; you do not bear that guilt. The person who violated you does. You may have issues of abuse to work through, but you do not have any guilt to bear.)
Sex is about you - not some future hypothetical spouse. It’s about your value, and your worth, and your self control, and your discipline, and your choices that need to be conscious choices. Sex is a gift from God - which says more about the giver than it does about you. Because, honestly, anyone can have sex. Sex with anyone isn’t God’s plan, though. When God has a plan it’s for our best. Faith - trust - that He has a plan for us, and a partner for us, and that He made us worth holding out for that, is something I want to share the value of with my children.
Too many women in our society today seem to think that if they show a man what kind of a wife they will make, the man will want to marry them. But if a man has access to a free wife without any commitment, he has no real motivation to commit to the relationship more than he already has. There is no reason to undersell yourself. If he wants a wife, he needs to be a husband.
Women often express surprise that their long term boyfriend or husband is abusive because he didn’t treat her that way early on. Of course not! If he did, he wouldn’t get through that first door. But once he’s through all the doors, and you are invested, he doesn’t have a reason to hold back his true self. This works the other way also. Decent men get invested as well, and domestic violence isn’t just for women. It happens to men also.
Relationships involving sex are intimate and sex makes you vulnerable. It’s very important to have your eyes wide open, your senses aware, and your brain engaged at all times when you are in a relationship. The more sexual the relationship becomes, the less this is happening as you are invested in making it work instead of judging with a clear eye the health of the relationship. Protect yourself. You are worth someone proving they are worthy of you. Until they do - and I truly believe that marriage commitment that is not tied to sexual intimacy as a payment or a goal is vital here - they have not earned the right to have access to your most intimate self. Until you give it away, you have the power - not over the other person, but over yourself. And that’s right where it should be.
Great post!
Love this post! Society today gives such a strong message to girls, especially, that their only value is as a sexual object. And it starts young, too. Available clothing options, dolls with impossibly-thin figures and clothes that barely cover the tush, and media images all push sexuality as a defining characteristic (sometimes THE defining characteristic) of children.
It’s definitely important to teach our children that we have an undeniable, inalienable value given to us by God, who knit us together in our mothers’ wombs and made us in his holy and precious image. They should protect their bodies and limit access to their bodies because they are precious, and because they are WORTHY of God’s best.
Too many young people jump into physical relationships in an attempt to gain value and acceptance. But, ultimately, that’s a recipe for disaster. Other people cannot give us worth. And getting too involved too soon will leave us hollow. We weren’t made for that. Like you said, sex is a precious gift from God, designed to be enjoyed in the context of marriage. Having sex in any other context is ultimately unfulfilling.
We have value because we are God’s, plain and simple. Nothing can change our intrinsic worth - no act committed by us or to us, no mistakes, and no message from our society.
Thank you for such a thoughtful post. More young people need to hear this message!