Okay, don’t get me wrong; I have no objection whatsoever to anyone who wants to wait until their wedding night, and forsake all others for real.
I am, however, SICK of people who feel this way AND feel the need to tell me how immoral and evil I am for:
a) Not being anywhere NEAR a virgin when I was married
b) Not thinking any other adult human HAS to be a virgin
c) Thinking sex doesn’t necessarily have to be all about “'til death do us part.”
There’s hypocricy on both sides, guys.
I am extremely glad I was not a virgin on my wedding night; as I have said in another thread, I deliberately wasn’t because YEARS before I lost my virginity I decided that the best gift I could give my husband was a good sex life…and we all know that practice makes perfect. However, I can easily see where someone else’s system of morality would determine that they COULDN’T bring their potential spouse a good sex life if they WEREN’T virgins. More power to you.
I didn’t think anyone here made me feel bad…I said other people
And I don’t like judging others, either. Hey, that’s great!
Don’t wait because someone else tells you to!
Do what YOU feel is right…
I had a few casual sexual encounters before moving in with ex-BF, who I lived with for five years.
I wish I had saved myself for marriagec because when I marry I would like to be able to present myself to a future husband as a virgin with no sexual baggage.
My ex-bf was lousy in bed. He didn’t give a damn about my needs or what I found pleasurable. He just wanted to get his own rocks off, and if I wound up with a dislocated hip in the process, that was my problem. And, yes, I did let him know what I wanted, liked, didn’t like. If I told him what I wanted, what felt good for me, he said I was being unromantic and killing the mood. If something he did made me uncomfortable, or actually HURT, I was being a prude and interfering with his pleasure. He was lousy out of bed, too. He was cruel, emotionally abusive and controlling. I contunied seeing him (and sleeping with him) after I moved out because he knew how to push my guilt buttons, and I let him do it.
I truly believe that a couple that is committed to making one another happy outside the bedroom will be equally committed to making each other happy in bed as well. If the first sexual encounter, or the first several, are a bit awkward, well, isn’t getting to know one another’s bodies and sexual likes and dislikes as well as you have come to know each other on an emotional level part of the joy of marriage? And if the sex isn’t “clicking”, the Kama Sutra is available at a bookstore near you. If you’ve already been sleeping together before marriage, it seems like it would almost be old hat, there would be no sense of discovery to keep the sexual aspect of the marriage new and exciting, and within a year or two, you would have to resort to toys (not that there’s anything wrong with toys).
I’m actually kind of glad that my ex was an inconsiderate asshole in the bedroom. When I finally meet the proverbial Right Person, he couldn’t help but compare favorably.
The thing is, why won’t the same thing happen after a couple of years of marriage? Why will marriage automatically keep you from getting bored with each other sexually within a couple of years? I don’t get the logic at all. I was nothing LIKE a virgin when I got married (as I’ve said) and neither was my husband (that would be interesting; he’s 12 years older than me and already had four kids). We’ve been married for almost eight years. I slept with him on our first DATE. Stunningly enough, we still get along like a house on fire, both in bed and out of bed.
I mean, on the flip side, one could make this argument:
<note: I am not trying to hijack this thread, nor to make it “all about [me].” I’m just using examples from my life as illustrations.>
Because the enjoyment of the sex wasn’t a factor in their decision to get married in the first place…the other factors, which don’t become “old hat” so easily, were the reasons they got married, so they stay married even if the sex gets stale.
And usually, as a result of those other factors still being strong, they have the desire to see the marriage work and make efforts to re-invigorate their sex lives. Whereas when the enjoyment of sex was a big factor in the decision to get married, the marriage is in serious danger when the sex becomes a little dull. Is that the kind of commitment a marriage is supposed to be?
The above is, in a sense, a part of what I Was trying to say in my previous messages, but it wasn’t until this specific question of yours that the exact wording of it lent itself to me.
Again, I’m not saying that such things happen to all people who sleep together before marriage. But I think statistics bear out the fact that they happen with greater frequency to those who’ve slept together before marriage than to those who didn’t.
Anyone who gets married because of sex is making a huge mistake anyhow. I think your argument is more against the type of people who think that sex is THAT IMPORTANT than it is against sex before marriage in general.
I don’t think the divorce rate has the first thing to do with having sex before marriage. I think it has to do with the fact that people have unrealistic expectations for marriage. I don’t think that going to my marriage bed a virgin would have made it any less difficult to deal with any of the problems we’ve had, and I don’t think the same is true for anyone else, either. You could easily say that people who don’t have sex before marriage are more likely to cheat on their parners, because they think they might be missing something.
I say, for the 5,000th time…if marriage isn’t supposed to be all about the sex, then for christ’s sake, stop making it be all about the sex.
Who are really the ones who think sex is “THAT IMPORTANT” to them: the ones who feel the need to rush into it before marriage, or the ones who are willing to wait until marriage in order to do it?
I agree. However, I think that those unrealistic expectations are more likely to exist in those who have had sex before marriage.
I’m glad that your marriage is of the sort that is strong, based on genuine personal compatibility, and thus survives problems. However, you are as guilty of generalizing about other people as I am. At least I have statistics that back me up.
You could “easily” say anything. However, statistically, those who did not have sex before marriage have a lower divorce rate than those who do.
Back to the first paragraph. Who is it that’s making it “all about the sex”: those who feel (like the OP of this thread) that it’s unwise to not check for sexual compatibility before marriage, or those who say it isn’t?
cmkeller: *At least I have statistics that back me up. *
Not really, Chaim: what you have, if I recall your cite correctly, are statistics that indicate a correlation between lower divorce rates and virginity at time of marriage. Correlation is not cause, and therefore these statistics don’t constitute evidence that the cause of the lower divorce rate is the abstinence from premarital sex. You might as well say that being Jewish makes an American more prone to being mugged, and the statistics would back you up there too; in fact, of course, since muggings are simply more common in urban areas than in rural ones and Jews are less likely to live in rural areas, there’s no directly causal relationship demonstrable there either.
I’d also like to point out that your terminology is rather biased when you speak of non-abstainers as “rushing into sex”; that implies the premise that not having sex before marriage is the natural and correct thing to do and therefore premarital sex is somehow automatically premature and hasty. Which is exactly the premise that many posters here are taking issue with.
You can hold whatever views you want on the subject, of course; it’s just that neither your evidence nor your rhetoric is really suitable for convincing anyone who doesn’t already agree with you. Hamadryad feels that her marriage is better because she wasn’t a virgin when she married; I would not presume to dispute with her on that, any more than I would presume to dispute your claim that your marriage is better because you were a virgin when you married. And neither of you really has any objective evidence for extrapolating from your experience to assume it applies to the majority of other people.
I know all this. I’m pretty (although it’s been a while, so I’ll have to check it out) that the study in question did isolate other potential factors.
My apoligies if that’s the way it was taken. What I meant by “rushing” is that those who have sex before marriage don’t wait, hence “rush.” The word was not intended as a value judgment.
I’m certainly not trying to negate her (or anyone’s) personal feelings on the issue. The fact is that it can’t even be said that a majority of marriages in which the partners had sex beforehand ended in divorce, so it certainly isn’t something that necessarily leads to problems; the study I cited merely says that there is a statistically significantly higer percentage of those who have sex before marriage that divorce than of those who don’t have sex before marriage. It doesn’t necessarily mean trouble for those who do have or who did have sex before marriage, but it should give pause to those who are still virgins and are considering changing that status prior to marriage but who also hope to have a healthy marriage some time down the line. Doing the former doesn’t necessarily make it unlikely that they’ll have the latter, but statistically (if the study I’m thinking of is correct) it does make it less likely.
If so, fair enough, although of course that also oversimplifies the issue of a “healthy marriage.” Certainly a marriage is not necessarily healthy just because it doesn’t end in divorce, and many people who acknowledge the authority of strong cultural or religious prohibitions against divorce are nonetheless not in healthy marriages.