It’s hard to argue any of that, but what is your perspective (I’m asking politely
) on those who come on here and are upset/heartbroken after learning their spouse wasn’t a virgin after they were married?
You do realize you are referring to a poster who kept insisting, in posts full of capital letters and exclamation marks, that Josh Duggar was obviously an upstanding Christian man, and what he did as a teenager before his marriage was no one’s business, because he’d obviously moved on from it?
Well, assuming you haven’t been living under a rock – that turned out to obviously be NOT true. (And curiously, she has so far had nothing to say about that.)
Now, I am NOT saying it’s impossible to move on from that kind of thing. And if you believe the Duggars, he disclosed his past to his wife and she married him anyway. But the point is that it’s often NOT as easy to move on from sexual sin, and the disordered approach to sex that often leads to sin, as some might think.
That really is the problem, I think. We tend to focus on the actual sinful acts, and not the reason WHY someone fell into sin. If a promiscuous man sees women as mere sexual objects for him to use as tools for masturbation, it’s not enough for him simply to stop having pre-marital sex because he fears Hell, or to please his parents, or perhaps please a girl who doesn’t believe in sex before marriage.
If he doesn’t repent of the underlying attitude, he may be “chaste” until marriage but treat his wife the same, as a sex object. He may indeed wind up committing adultery after marriage. Even if he comes into the marriage without any STDs or children out of wedlock, that does not mean his past is now irrelevant.
On the other hand, if a promiscuous man (or woman) actually recognizes the disordered approach to sexuality that prompted this behavior, realizes that is not God’s plan for sexuality, and repents not only of the sex acts, but of the underlying selfish approach to sex, that person likely does have much less risk of falling into sin again.
This is why I think disclosure is important in order to make an informed choice of marriage partner. Not because everyone needs to know the exact number of sexual partners a prospective spouse has had out of some morbid sense of curiosity. It is NOT about confessing sins as if to a priest. It is about providing relevant information.
ETA: It’s not even just about sex. If someone was really greedy, and had committed financial fraud and was still on the hook to pay back his victims, this also WOULD be relevant to a prospective spouse even if he had repented of and confessed those sins, too. Even though the sin was not in any way committed against the spouse. I am not seeing this as an issue of “confessing sins”, but providing information to allow someone to make an informed choice regarding marriage.
