Another thing–I think there is too much of a dichotomy made here between virginity and sexual experience, when in such a situation, both parties might be more or less equally unchaste.
There are many possible permutations, so that a repentant and chaste non-virgin might even be marrying an unchaste technical virgin, in which case all this talk of broken statues is very unfair and unkind to the repentant party.
You are reverting back to strawman arguments. We are discussing temporal consequences.
there’s always the issue of solo unchastity–one can be technically a virgin while still being an enthusiastic onanist.
This is noticeably male-biased, which doesn’t have any basis in fact. Women are just as likely to guilty of sexual sin (while still excluding a partner).
She should be imagining how lucky she is that she was able to teach him the meaning of true love - true self giving love
This seems like the continuum fallacy with appeal to moderation (“it’s not completely bad, therefore it’s good” or “it’s better than nothing”). It reminds me of the annoying tendency amongst some Catholic thinkers to say that “perfection is the enemy of good” (more aptly applied as “perfection is the enemy of good enough”).
Wow, so a man by remaining a virgin is pretty much cutting his dating pool in half. And from all the stories I read on this forum, most catholic women here seem to have married a man who wasn’t a virgin (even if the woman remained a virgin).
As I noted in my comment,
Match.com is rather secular. The survey is for society as a whole, not simply for practicing Catholics.
So from what I can tell, by doing the supposedly family-orientated thing and practicing chastity, men are actually doing a disservice to their hopes of ever finding a wife to have a family with
They are, sort of. You increase your chances of getting married, but you also increase your chances of harming that marriage. Again: better to remain single than to marry and be unhappy.
One of the more annoying things I ever read was a call (by a supposedly Catholic commentator) for men to be sexually experienced at marriage - mainly to facilitate more marriages, since Catholic women (to a far greater degree than Catholic men) reject virgins as spouses (and are more likely to accept non-virgin men, due to a range of factors).
I must make it very clear that I do not support fornication in any way, for any reason, at all, ever. The above state of affairs is just a simple fact of biology (mate choice, etc). For example, one of the explanations offered by evolutionary biologists for the reason that men prefer thin women is because it shows that she isn’t pregnant - something that is important for men to know before investing resources in her.
I thought that sin was supposed to be bad for you and have negative consequences?
It is and it does.
her husband did marry her, and if that is not a proof of love what is?
Because of the existence (and prevalence) of divorce, I would take marriage as being a necessary condition of the expression of that kind of love, but not a sufficient condition. In other words, it is the case that people marry without being in love, therefore, we cannot say absolutely that her husband loved her [the most] (e.g. “he chose you” etc). This is, of course, the case even if her husband did save himself for marriage (but potentially less likely).
We can’t speculate and fill in the blanks and offer feedback based on the assumption that she must be “unforgiving, needing mental help, unsatisfied, spiteful etc…”
All of that seems to occur here on a regular basis.
However, I think what set a lot of us off was this line from the original post: “I think the worst feeling in the world is knowing your spouse has been with other people.” That’s a really weird thing to say (given all of the other awful options available, even just in the marital arena), and I think that that statement may be a clue that the OP is not thinking clearly right now.
This is ironic processing on the part of the OP. Subjectively, the worst pain she is experiencing (or has experienced) is the one she is describing in her post (and she does say “I think” rather than “it is”). Plenty of studies have found that when people try to suppress thoughts about pain it actually makes the pain worse (e.g. Sullivan, Michael JL, et al. “Thought suppression, catastrophizing, and pain.” Cognitive Therapy and Research 21.5 (1997): 555-568., etc). In the case of the OP, it could be a painful experience, but made far worse by her thoughts about it (and thus, the “worst feeling in the world” for her). Since there are other people who require their spouses to be extremely sexually experienced, it seems impossible to say that such a feeling is a universally negative one.
+Sebastian
and one death :sad_yes:- I lost my spouse … two years later and I still feel as if half my heart is missing. Though I don’t understand - I know God has a plan. This was not what I wanted, this was not my plan … but I still make myself “Thank God” every day for the Blessings I received and continue to receive. I thank God even when I have to struggle to think of the good - and want to focus on the loss.