the really sad thing is that if you do manage to save yourself for marriage - very few people choose to believe you anyway! After all, if one human being can manage it - that suggests the rest who purport to be Christians might have been able to with a bit more willpower too.
My boyfriend and I find it incredibly hard sometimes - him more than me, I suspect! My strategy is to have started to go to Confession again (after much too long a break) because the thought of telling a man who has taken a vow of cellibacy to help him help get people like me to Heaven that I’d had sex is shaming enough to keep me on the straight and narrow
I also visit here a lot, so I feel less of a freak and more like ‘one of the gang’.
As a human being, I can’t promise we won’t - only that we will try our absolute hardest not to. We both see it as an expression of love and respect for one another and it has made us think more clearly about discerning marraige (although we often joke:"let’s just get married tomorrow!!!)
I think everyone has their own strategy of ‘coping’. Ours is actually not to restrain from showing affection with lot sof hugs and kisses and cuddles. We are both well past being teenagers and having been single for longer than either of us care to remember and having lives where we’ve just had to exercise self control and personal sacrifice - we are well used to not getting our own way some of the time and just accepting what we can’t change (i.e. The Rules)
I think the modern Church has a sort of ‘shutting the door after the horse has bolted’ kind of approach to sex and relationships! Throughout school and college, nobody mentioned the Theology of the Body, and the definition of ‘respect’ usually had the word ‘condom’ somewhere in it
as far as the media was concerned. It’s great and amazing that we have the sacrament of Reconcilliation and couples who have had sex are still offered Marriage - but in 40 years of attening Mass (okay, maybe 35 of actually understanding what was going on…and about 30 of actually knowing what sex was…) I have never once heard a priest actually give a sermon that defines ‘fornication’
I was in my late 20s before I realised that any sex outside marriage was adultery. I never tried it (more from lack of self esteem in my 20s than religious conviction!) but I honestly thought having sex with someone if you were both unmarried was ‘less wrong’ than having sex with somene else’s husband. I also had no idea masturbation was wrong (I mean, Judy Blume wrote about it in Deenie :thumbsup:so it must be okay?!!!)
I wasn’t a cafeteria Catholic - because I didn’t even get to read the full menu!
My ‘moment of mental clarity’ came in a horrible way. I witnessed the misery that comes to a person when he makes his choice of wife fuelled by lust; moves in with her before the wedding and then realises he’s trapped. I was brought up with all these daft feminist notions about how men and women are the same and we’re not! When it comes to sex - woman have the power because we have the right to say ‘no’. That’s nature. The males are bright and gaudy and show off and try, try, try to get it on
but it’s up to the female to choose if and when she’s up for it.
Once I got that into my head, I learned to respect men and treat them with respect - instead of being the insecure little tease I was in my twenties, because I thought you could push a man as hard as you liked - just for one’s own amusement. Not pretty - but I was reading too much Cosmo and not enoug catechism and after all - I never had full intercourse (and that’s the only bit of theology I knew, despite going to Mass every Sunday) so no harm done - right?!!!
I just remind myself that on my wedding day I do not want to be ashamed…