Ah, modern relationships. A young man writes about his successful journey to overcoming the religious admonitions of his mother to abstain from sex.
A couple of things stand out. Firstly, in typical college-age style, he thinks one month is a long time.
It was like this for a month. Sam was patient, but I didn’t want to wait for her patience to run out.”
“One month” and “patient” actually shouldn’t be written in the same sentence. Secondly, in order to get over his upbringing, he decides to stop thinking about his girlfriend as a person. Not what many women would call romantic.
Stop thinking about her as a person,” [his friend] told me. “People are animals, and having sex is a natural thing that animals do all the time.”
Most excellent. So now we’re all animals, just doing what instinct tells us to.
Finally, this story highlights how it’s simply not good enough for parents or priests to just tell people not to have sex, or worse still, scare them into not having sex. Without a bigger picture on how and what sexuality is, most everyone will do what this guy did. And then they end up in the pharmacy, desperate for the morning after pill.
All round sad.
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Jennifer adds: Ah yes, nothing like turning significant things into meaningless commodities. Aquinas once said in a homily that the people were so lacking in their spiritual lives that they couldn’t even have good sex. That’s right, good sex (this is MEANINGFUL sex). Many popes have even said that this good sex is a glimpse of heaven. It’s time to put the antiquated idea that religious leaders and the faithful don’t like sex, well… to bed. But I abstain, I abstain from bad sex all the time.
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Heather P. says
The saddest part about this is that our “if it feels good do it” society is actually making girls do things that *don’t* feel good, and keeping them from things that do.
When I was a teenager, I had too many experiences because it was what was expected of me, because it would give me a false sense of power, or because I felt pressure. No one remotely understood why I felt that way, and I thought I was alone. Even my sex ed classes assumed that if I was “normal” I would be having sex regularly with people I couldn’t trust (ex: you don’t really know if he has an STD, so make sure you use a condom, even if you’re on the pill).
Now that I’m an adult, married, in a safe, trusting, and complete relationship, sex looks nothing like it did then. Now it is an expression of something, it is communication, and I can relax, forget about my insecurities, and enjoy my husband.
I hope that I can somehow get that message across to my son and daughters – louder than the messages they will get everywhere else.