I never want to impose my religious beliefs on anyone, and I find it very intereting to read the viewpoints of others. However, I will quibble with one statement: "a virgin bride is an ignorant bride." That assumes that she has had no sexual experience at all. I often tell my daughter that there is a LOT that young people in love can do that is of a sexual nature without actually having intercourse. In fact, it is the emphasis on those kinds of "foreplay" activities that often help a girl understand how she best reaches orgasm and how to please a young man with her hands or mouth...sometimes jumping right into intercourse bypasses those lovely first, second, and third bases! Obviously, not all Christians take such a liberal view of petting before marriage, but we do...and besides, a long, committed marriage is one night after another in which to learn and grow and have tremendous fun! Charlotte

I fully understand where you are coming from, and, up to a certain point, I can agree with you.

But I also see things from the other end of the spectrum. I am in my 30s, and am still a virgin. Not from lack of opportunities (oh, there've been LOTS of those), but from a conscious decision to save myself for that special someone. It is religious in part, but more personal. I simply wish to be able to say to whoever it is going to be: I loved you when I didn't even know you; loved you so much that I waited all my life for you. Now we can discover what we want together, and can learn about our own personal intimacy without a past.

I've been lied to so many times that I just prefer to wait.

But I can understand what you've said, and why. And, in response to Charlotte, yes, there is a great deal that can happen before that final act. And I wouldn't mind a chance to explore it. Preferably with someone who won't lie to me.

Sharon

Hello DeeMarie,

It is an interesting question but I can't help but think that there are very few communities in the world, either today or in the past, where your question could be asked without being ridiculed, or where the questioner could actually expect the question to be taken seriously.  I'm not trying to say that your question is a bad or stupid question but only that I think you are one of a relatively small minority of people who have ever lived on the planet for whom such a question is meaningful, relevant and worthy of asking.

First, my understanding is that for most people today and for most of those who preceded us, chastity was and continues to be, principally a social and economic issue regardless of whether it also happens to be a religious or spiritual one.  Widespread reliable contraception is a relatively recent phenomena (and still not that widespread) and for many women in the world a child at the wrong time and in the wrong place could cause very severe economic, social or medical difficulties, either for the pregnant woman, the child, her family, other offspring or all of these people.  Equally there are also good reasons why having a child (or lots of them) might be considered a means of avoiding future difficulties.  There is no small number of women for whom having a child or not having a child at a particular time continues to be a life and death issue.  For those of us who live in the 21st century in one of the highly “developed” countries, the risks of sexual adventure are extremely and abnormally low when compared to the risks involved for most of the planet's past and present inhabitants.

Chastity is probably the very last thing I would recommend to someone who is seeking to find a compatible mate.  Within marriage, one essential area of compatibility is sexual compatibility.

How do you define essential?  Essential to what?  To happiness, to joy, to peace of mind, to economic security?  How did you conclude that sexual compatibility is essential?  How many marriages in the world did you analyse and within what philosophical paradigm(s) did you analyse them?  How do you define compatibility, and with reference to what goals?

You suggest that virginity is overrated but I find your arguments weak and it seems to me that there is a better case for arguing that sexual experience is overrated.

If you only ever know one sexual partner, then you have no way of knowing how they might compare to another one. (Which, I believe, is one motivation for pushing chastity – men don't want their wives to know their, um, shortcomings in comparison to other men.)

You imply that not knowing how one partner compares to another is a bad thing, but why should it be a bad thing, how did you decide that it is a bad thing?  When person P can't compare Q with R then they have no reason to be dissatisfied with whichever one of Q or R that they have.  If P isn't dissatisfied with P's partner then P and P's partner are one step closer to being satisfied with one another.  Furthermore if P isn't comparing P's partner with some previous experience, possibly altered by fading memory, then P's partner doesn't have to worry that P might be considering a change of partner and thus both P and P's partner can devote their time and energy to the relationship that they actually have without fearing that their time and effort will be wasted — a very serious matter in most of the world.  The comparison argument goes both ways, but it seems to me that it favours chastity and fidelity over promiscuity since chastity and fidelity promote stability and, for most people stability is a prerequisite to survival, let alone such trivial matters as satisfaction or contentment.

As an aside, are you sure it would be the men who'd be most worried about being found inadequate?  I've noticed that women can be rather insecure about their sexual attractiveness too and not infrequently carve one another up about it.

All this business about how ‘cherished’ virginity is in a wife strikes me as sanctimonious hoohah.  A virgin bride is an ignorant bride.  She has no idea how to bring pleasure to her mate, or even what she herself might enjoy.  And if the man is a virgin, too, that just doubles the trouble.  In that case, it's going to be the blind leading the blind, and it could be a long time before they begin to learn how to have really great sex.  And even when they do, there will always be the nagging knowledge that they have no other experiences to compare it to: is it possible their marital sex life is woefully inadequate, compared to the kind of sex they might have had with someone else?  They will never know.

Greater knowledge doesn't automatically imply greater satisfaction and often leads to greater dissatisfaction.  How often do people leave a perfectly good relationship, causing other people misery in the process for no better reason than that they have seen something else that they think might be better and they want to check it out?  Not being able to do a comparison has at least two possible advantages:  First that you can't experience the sorrow of discovering that you are a lousy lover and that your partner could have done so much better for themselves elsewhere, and second, if you start your relationship knowing that it will be the first and the last then there is an incentive to work hard at improving it.  By contrast in the throwaway society people are constantly looking elsewhere instead of learning to appreciate, maintain and improve what they have.

What if **really** great sex depends on having the assurance that your partner is committed to you, I mean **really** committed, meaning that they are not willingly going to leave you under any circumstances?  If this were true then all of those engaging in free love would, for all of their experience and enhanced technique, have denied themselves the one thing they set their hearts on achieving.

Why should a virgin bride (or groom) be ignorant?  Unsupervised experimentation with the real thing is not the only way to acquire initial knowledge and in fact would be considered reckless or at least a waste of time in many topics of learning.  If the object is to dispel sexual ignorance then there are plenty of ways that could be achieved more effectively than by jumping from partner to partner; unless of course the bride and groom are not only virgins but also deaf, illiterate and possibly blind.

Why should cherishing something be sanctimonious hoohah if in fact it has some real value to the person doing the cherishing?  As already mentioned, the low risks accompanying virginity give it a high social and economic value in many communities.  Additionally it has value by virtue of the fact that a virgin is not bringing the emotional baggage of failed relationships into his or her new one.  In a society where people change partners it is more or less inevitable that some of the relationships will end distressingly for one or both of the partners and that distress then has to be dealt with by the next partner who possibly knows little or nothing about its cause.

But no matter whether it was an exclusive relationship or a one-night stand, the wonderful thing was learning about sex itself, all the glorious ways that a man and a woman could relate at that most intimate level.  And as I learned, I became better at loving men; and it was also obvious to me that men who had more sexual experiences were also better lovers.

I think I can understand that from within perspective of certain philosophies, it would be possible to say that sex was the most intimate level of connection but I'm not at all sure that I would agree.  In fact if sex were the most intimate connection possible I think I'd be pretty depressed.  I agree that with greater practice it should be possible for a person to become better at providing sexual pleasure to a partner but only if you were practising the right thing.  I used to have a teacher who always warned his students that “practice makes permanent, not perfect” the implication being that if you started on the wrong foundation then even if you happened to be top of the class you would nonetheless have under performed with respect to your own potential and would never be better than mediocre when compared to the acknowledged experts in the field.  Of course this argument applies to those who would advocate chastity just as it applies to those who advocate promiscuity, the question then is how does one decide which is the right route to choose, since doing both is impossible?  Clearly the decision cannot be made on the basis of experience since the two proposals are mutually incompatible and hence nobody can experience both routes in order to decide between them.

You seem use the term love as a euphemism for sexual activity which is common practice but does make it difficult to discuss whether you and your sexual partners improved in sexual technique or whether you improved in your ability to love.  I am sure you know that the two are quite different things but I wonder how many people, of all faiths and cultures, would consider that being promiscuous improved ones ability to love, and how many would consider that promiscuity hindered the development of love, and I wonder whether they would consider love or sexual technique to be the more important.

However, the glorious “free love” years came to an end in the 80s, with the discovery of AIDS and the new emphasis on safe sex.

True but that suggests to me that what you call “those glorious free love years” brought themselves to an end since without promiscuity the transmission part of sexually transmitted diseases can't occur and therefore in a chaste society such diseases would be pretty much a non-issue and wouldn't therefore interfere with anybody's satisfaction and happiness.  Given that you also appear to find that sexually transmitted diseases are not entirely compatible with sexual freedom, I find myself thinking that this indicates that promiscuity and sexual “freedom” are not compatible with the nature that you worship; this in turn suggests to me that either nature changed or that your understanding of it isn't yet correct.

Another reason I find your case unconvincing is simply that promiscuity is still widespread and among the people I know the ones who are most contented are those who haven't been promiscuous.

You write as a person who is well educated.  You also have time to be able to think about issues and write long articles which indicates that you have a high degree of economic freedom (many people are too busy surviving to have time for these luxuries).  From your writing I gain the impression that you inhabit a developed country and obviously you are in the 21st century which means that even if you happened to occupy the lowest economic position within your country you would still have immense economic wealth and freedom compared to most of the people who ever lived.  You live in an era when, and (I am guessing) a country where, people are allowed to openly express independent ideas and to deviate from the official party / family / fashionable line of thought and behaviour.  From this vantage point you can justify asking whether chastity is overrated and I and others who view the world from a similar vantage point as yourself, can offer you answers that apply to our very privileged situations.  However I suspect that most people on the planet would find the question too ridiculous to consider and would think us foolish for discussing it.

'Til later ...

Wow, Louise. I was impressed with everything you said. I sometimes disagreed with what you said, but I was still impressed.

I think the value placed on virginity in various countries is indicative of the decreasing value placed on women in those same countries. I do not have the time to begin such an information quest, but it could be interesting to see if the general value of women in general decreases as the value of virginity goes up.

I sometimes think it is not the virginity itself that is so valuable here, if it is, but the meaning behind it. If one has "thrown away" that part of her (or him) in a wild decision made with no forethought, then it is not worth much. But if a concrete decision is made to give that one-time-only offer to someone, whether married or not, whether going to marry that person or not, then the virginity is priceless, and the recipient should be aware of that.

My first time is still to come. As I said before, this is because of choice, not lack of chance. But when I do give it, it will be to and with the person I want to spend the rest of my life in a relationship with, working together to keep it well. And perhaps my saving it for him is the first sign of my submission to him.

As you said, we are in a time where it is our decision to do with it what we will, without being scorned. Like a Taken In Hand relationship, virginity is important only to those who prefer that. Those outside don't need to worry.

Sharon

I think, Louise, the easiest way for me to tell who is NOT special is to immediately eliminate those who want or expect sex as a matter of course. As I have said, my chances have been many. Perhaps sex is like finding a Taken In Hand relationship: you open up about it as soon as you feel the time is right. If the other disagrees with you, the relationship is not going to be what you are looking for.

On the other hand, I had the opportunity to spend a night unexpectedly with each of two of my "prospectives". Neither made an issue of the subject, even though circumstances required that we share a bed. (Of course, I did not know one was getting it elsewhere.)

Perhaps keeping sex out of the relationship for as long as possible allows you to focus on the relationship as a total, instead of just parts of it. Just my opinion.

Suffice to say, should the right one come along (I wish he would hurry up), I will know, and he will get it, as a result of my choosing. And he had better appreciate it, too!

Sharon

I deeply appreciate "Life of Curiosity's" remark on this subject. I respect it and generally agree. It's refreshing to hear this.