Some people don’t know their own strength. 
I agree, if it works, it’s wonderful. It can also work before marriage. Marriage is not the thing that makes it work.
As one example, I had no idea I was into kink before I tried it. And yet all along before that I felt like something was missing, I just didn’t know what – and naively thought it was just me not “getting” that this is just how sex is. In other words, I heard people say that sex was awesome, but my experience of it was that sex was boring. I didn’t know why it was boring, so I thought there was something wrong with me, or my “attitude” towards it, or that maybe my expectations had just been unrealistically high, or something. When actually, I just didn’t know what all my options were. So now, if I had to do without kink in a relationship – well, I wouldn’t, I’d just end it. It would make me miserable, because now I do know what I’m missing.
People have different limits with this stuff. Sometimes they’re very different limits. I’ve had to break up with people over sexual incompatibilities – in fact most of my breakups were over sexual incompatibilities – so it does happen.
To a certain extent preferences are flexible and can be compromised, but some of it is hard wired. Rope vs. fuzzy handcuffs isn’t nearly as big a chasm as bondage vs. vanilla, or every-day vs. twice-a-month. Throw someone who’s kinky in with someone who’s missionary-only, and try to find that compromise. It’s just a divorce waiting to happen.
I’m not saying that it can’t work or that it never does. Of course it does, sometimes. But I, personally, don’t want to spend money, first on a wedding, and then on a divorce, when we could have explored together and figured it out beforehand. Plus, as devastating as the breakups were when we couldn’t find a way to make the sex work, I can’t imagine how much worse it would be if I’d married the guy and had thought it certain we’d be spending the rest of our lives together.
There are, btw, very few notches on my bedpost, if by notches you mean partners. I’m pretty picky about who I’d consider going to bed with.
I knew long before devirgination that I had no interest in ever getting married. So, no, and that’s a no on purpose.
No. My parents did (that’s why they married 6 months after meeting at 23 and just-turned-21, and is the main reason why so many conservative Christian/LDS people marry younger than average - ‘waiting til marriage’ is not easy), and I was raised with the same value system. Which I promptly rejected. I’ve been an atheist for a loooong time (I’m 24).
I wasn’t in a big hurry to have sex though. I didn’t so much as kiss anyone until I was 19, which was a hell of a lot later than everyone I knew (except for the conservative Christian kids).
I have been living in sin for the last 5 years. I can’t imagine marrying someone without knowing what our sex life would be like.
No, and don’t see the point, nor have I ever seen the point. Plus I kind of had the option of waiting taken away long before I could even want to.
I certainly didn’t wait but I know plenty of people who did, mostly cousins, because of the culture. Without fail, every one of them are unhappy with their sex lives. I know that you can make it work, and you can build it, but it just seems like they all had bad luck (or they all are complainers. These two things are not mutually exclusive, of course).
I have never heard of it working anywhere but on these boards. I am happy for the people it worked for, but I’m 34 and unmarried as of yet. I did set a timeline for myself - “no sooner than…” and kept to it within two months. But not marriage.
No, I didn’t … and marriage isn’t really a posibility for me this year or next
Absolutely not. I grew up in Northern Bible Country (rural northwest Ohio), but I had not intention of holding out and did everything I could to disabuse the girls I dated of the notion that doing so was a good idea.
As a result, by the time I met my first wife I had a pretty good idea of how the whole good sex phenomenon worked because I’d practiced. Luckily, so had she and our sex life was incredible right up until the point 12 years later when we stopped talking to each other. Lots of things in our relationship went bad, but the sex never did.
I waited, but it had nothing to do with religion. I was adamant about not wanting kids, and thus about not doing anything that might result in kids until one or the other of us got snipped. Since I was the one who had the strongest childfree requirement I volunteered, but he didn’t want kids either and it’s a lot easier surgery for a guy, so he said he’d do it. Surprisingly, we were able to find a doctor who’d do it on a 23-year-old guy.
Just had our 21st anniversary last week. Still childfree, still happy. No regrets about waiting.
I waited until engagement. I married that guy, and then divorced.
Yes, sex played a big part in why I married young (21), but so did independence in general.
No, I’m not waiting with my current fiancé, and the wedding’s still well over a year away.
Excellent post. I used to lurk on a Christian kids’ messageboard (uberconservative) and there was a girl who had decided to save her FIRST KISS until marriage! :eek:
I’m with the " use your brain" and at least wait til you’re in a secure committed loving realtionship before havign fun camp. Have a HEALTHY attitude towards sexuality!
I was raised Catholic, so as a teenager I was definitely part of the “no sex for me before marriage” camp. Then, as I started moving away from Catholicism and toward atheism, I had to decide what parts of my previous beliefs I wanted to hold on to, and why. Sex was one of those things it took me a while to make a decision about–mostly, I figured I’d rather regret not sleeping with a boyfriend or two, than regret sleeping with them. But I got myself all sorted out by my early 20s, and made my way merrily out of the “sex outside of marriage, omg yes please” camp.
AFAIK, none of my close friends are virgins, and the ones who’re married were having sex well in advance of the wedding.
IMO, anybody who says that there are no potentially insurmountable problems of sexual incompatibility, even between two virgins, is someone who personally enjoys little or nothing besides “normal” missionary PIV sex and assumes that pretty much everyone else does, too.
Perhaps the common factor here is you. 
At the risk of sounding snarky, if you think that cuddling is just as good as sex, you’re doing the latter wrong.
I know a couple whose first kiss was on the altar. Not sure if it was each of their first kisses individually, but it was their first kiss together.
It seems crazy to me, but, hey, they seem happy. I’m not sure I want to get married at all, and I’m certainly not going to put off sex until I (maybe) get married, but I can see lots of people who are quite happy with that, too (of course, most of them are pretty sure they’re going to get married at a fairly young age, as well).
It genuinely surprised me when I first realized there were closeminded bigots on both sides of this issue.
I waited until engagement and it’s been one of the biggest regrets of my life. Not because of who it was (or wasn’t), but because of how much weight my virginity was given and how much pressure was put on the act itself. Plus, it made it seem like I wasn’t giving my husband enough importance himself and instead was marrying him (somewhat) because he was my first. Now I wish I’d simply taken that part away from the equation and based my decision solely on love and not any on guilt. I was 24.
I waited. My husband had lost his virginity before we met, but we didn’t have sex until after we were married. We waited for religious reasons, and we don’t regret waiting. We know several other couples around our age who also waited, all good friends of ours, and none of us have had sex problems. Whoo boy, do we not have sex problems.
“Get married young because you can’t wait” is something I’ve heard about a lot, but I don’t actually know any couples who rushed to the altar to get laid. We have a number of friends who married young- we married young ourselves- but we dated for three years before marriage, and most of the other couples were together between two and five years before getting hitched. We’ve been together eleven years, married seven.
No. I’m an unmarried lesbian parent.
The bolded bit made me do a Beavis and Butthead laugh.
While I totally understand people wanting to wait until they’re married to have sex and can see some advantages to it, and even understand some people wanting to wait until then to kiss, I think the latter is most likely to run into problems. IME, kissing tells you quite a lot about how compatible you are sexually. You can learn most of the rest, but there’s a certain basic ‘chemistry’ which you don’t know will work until you’ve at least kissed.
Any Buffy fans here? Sorry, Straight Dope - silly question. :rolleyes: Remember when Wesley and Cordelia finally kissed after a season’s tension? And then kissed again in the hope that it would work this time? I’ve experienced that a couple of times. It wasn’t ‘we could learn to do it better,’ either - it was repulsive. It screamed out loud these two people do not fit together. Even if you loved the person enough to keep on working at it, especially after plighting your troth to them, that would be a horrible experience to have on your wedding night.
I’ve known lots of people who ‘waited’ till marriage; I grew up in a highly secular area of a highly secular country but happened to have a lot of Catholic friends who were more traditional than your average Catholic. Many of them did pretty much everything except penis in vagina and still counted themselves as virgins, and all of them at least kissed. Except for one couple. They had a horrible brief marriage ending in an annulment.
Hell yeah! Actually, before I came out, I would have said the same. Then I discovered sex that worked for me and it’s a whole different ballgame, so to speak.
I’m not suggesting that everyone who thinks that is secretly gay, but maybe they haven’t met the right person yet or are just not comfortable with their bodies and sexuality or something - either way, cuddling is wonderful and can kinda have a few of the same sensations as sex, but it’s definitely not as good as sex. It’s not even very similar to sex.
It’d be like saying a wholesome vegetable hotpot is as good as sex; they’re both lovely, and sometimes the former is what you really want, but you - presumably - wouldn’t want to share the latter with your Mum.
My brother and his wife were the same way. Until their wedding, they had never been alone together or had physical contact beyond a hug that I know of.
We make a good example of opposites, I joke that he’s the good son. He has a masters degree in theology from Bob Jones, will become a pastor and has a wife that he didn’t touch until they got married. I’m a gay, pagan/agnostic who has been around the block countless times.
My husband and I waited four years until marriage to have PIV sex. We experimented quite a bit in other ways though.
None of it was due to religious considerations, but emotional ones. He couldn’t deal with the possibility of having a kid out of wedlock because he was in the midst of coping with his own guilt (his birth prompted his parents’ shitty marriage). I was too psychologically fragile to make it worth the risk of exacerbating my symptoms. We were both students and even a .01% chance of pregnancy seemed like too big a risk.
Didn’t die without it. Had fun on my wedding night. Don’t regret it.
I wonder if it depends on what you define as sex. I could think that certain types of sex might not be as good as really good and long cuddle. I know for sure that my solo orgasms are not as good as just cuddling with a real person. Of course, that only works if it’s a more sexual type of cuddling. Cuddling with your sister, mom, or best friend isn’t anywhere near the same.