The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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I really appreciate you honing in on a proper response. I know I'm not being entirely clear.
I love the idea of church. A strong community with strong values that are very family-friendly is great. But I feel something that ex-Mormons might feel, and it's that the Bible is based on some seriously flawed principles. It struggles greatly with the problem of evil, as @Hoffmeister25 has elucidated elsewhere. It struggles with the Epicurean paradox. And, if kids are raised like I was, it inflicts some suffering as they encounter and convert to sexual liberalism. The women do okay, they might have a slut phase but they can get married easily if they just lie about their bodycount. The men get fucked up. I feel very damaged, because I am expected to have a high bodycount by now, and I wasn't even true to the principles of what I was taught and I started masturbating to ease the urges. And this is all assuming that they don't just fall out of the religion altogether. I believe I could attend church and say all the right words because a kind God who would understand everything about me is deeply touching. But would my kids appreciate my lying to them? I don't really believe God would send a Son to one tiny region in the Middle-East and damn everyone else who didn't have faith. Or if they aren't damned, then what's even the point of believing in Jesus Christ? I can tell you, statistically, Christians are not helped at all by their faith, except for their community building. If goodwill and karma and a loving God existed, that girl I knew wouldn't have shot herself.
For the dating apps, look, I think I can accept a woman who isn't a virgin. That's just expected these days. But I'm worried she won't accept me. Right now, I can fall in love really quickly. Right now, I don't want to have sex unless I see a very serious chance that I will marry her, but I have no idea how I will feel if I'm deeply in love and accustomed to touching her a lot. I think that most women my age would not have much patience for me if I'm like a preteen and nervous and sweating while touching her. I don't know how many women will have it be a dealbreaker if we don't have sex within a short timeframe, or if I fail to break the touch barrier, or if I suck at kissing. I don't know if they will mind if I have dealbreakers like no blowjobs or no anal sex. I mostly think the old model of expecting marriageable women to be virgins worked really well, there were no pregnancy accidents, less STDs I'd guess, less jealousy on the part of the man, and less expectations for performance on the part of the woman. I think a huge mistake liberalism makes is saying that you need to sleep around to figure out what you prefer sexually, that every time you're with another person, you get closer to your true self. I hate that thought. I think the self is fleeting and changes even as you pursue it, and it's better to be sure about someone before making a commitment. I think sex is special and should be reserved for your life partner, and if she doesn't turn out to be your life partner, it was such a waste, and you were made permanently uglier.
I described them as weird hangups, and they are. I wanted to blame liberalism (including sexual liberalism) to the awful state of the country right now, but it's a little unfair, because Christianity led to liberalism led to people celebrating shooting each other, so they're both bad in that way. I don't know. The world is ugly, the sexual world is ugly, and my brain has been made weird.
I hate to point this out, considering that I myself am more of a traditionalist, but your own life experiences call in to question the validity of the above statement. Your father was immersed in that conservative culture, and he still had pregnancy scares and jealousy issues.
My experiences do not call into question the statement's validity. As @RenOS pointed out, my dad was not really a traditionalist, or at least, not a traditionalist of any tradition I know about. He started a family and kept cutting off any of his own social connections he had made. He didn't go to church. He had us go to the state park with a bunch of milk jugs to fill up drinking water from the spigots there. One year, he got obsessed with nitrogen and fertilizers and chemistry and had us all piss into milk jugs and buckets. I remember, once, the fellow Tae Kwon Do pupils were in the same car as me swinging by my house, perhaps to drop me off after a tournament, and wondered about the dark yellow liquid jugs lined up by the clothes line. They wondered "is that lemonade?". I don't remember what I responded with. Dad was immersed in something other than a conservative culture. Dad still is immersed in something other than a conservative culture. He browses extremist websites every day. He set up an office in the barn with a window AC unit for his elderly grandparents because the actual house is apparently not finished enough to live in (or, since his computer, his bed, and his TV are in the house, maybe he just doesn't want to be bothered by them?). He has spent years doing minor work on the house, and it still isn't finished. The toilet broke, so he set up a "bio-toilet" that doesn't need to be cleaned or piped anywhere or anything expensive like that. He doesn't pay for trash pickup, he just burns what he can and sets non-burnables aside in its own large dumpster. There are bullet casings all over the ground.
I think I'd describe him as "extremely anti-social with paranoid narcissistic tendencies" before I'd describe him as a traditionalist.
But I'm not calling your father a traditionalist. I was pointing out that despite being immersed in a conservative culture, (or at least presenting as conservative), he still fell into all the poor outcomes you described.
Do you think Church membership is a panacea to your father's ills? Every progressive was once the child of devout church-goers. Every liberal once went to Sunday school.
The point isn't so much about how much or how little your father was immersed in traditionalism. The point is that you can't expect a traditionalist culture/mindset to protect you completely from bad outcomes, by itself.
It's simply untrue that the expectation for the women to be a virgin led to reduced jealousy, pregnancy scares, and less expectations of performance from women. You want a tangible example? Islamists expect their wives to be virgins (and their wives are virgins) and are still jealous, and still have expectations of performance. All those issues you describe are issues effecting all relationships, not just "sexually liberated" ones. And if you think a traditionalist relationship will protect you from them, by virtue of it being a traditionalist relationship, then you run the risk of failing to uphold the very virtues you hold.
Do you think conservative parents don't go through divorce, or separate, or fight or get jealous? The Sexual Revolution was partly a consequence of conservatives failing to uphold the virtues they held. You can argue about whether or not it lead to better outcomes or not, but that observation is still true. Many, many conservatives professed conservative relationship mores, just like your father, and then completely failed to actually follow them; that failure undermined the entire conservative zeitgest.
I don't really know where I'm going with this. I guess I am just trying to push back against the feeling that the circumstances of relationships, rather than their actual action determine their development. "In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead" James 2:17. Don't let your theoretical thoughts about relationships dominate them, but allow your understanding of actual reality to guide your actions.
I agree with your point. I think using my father to make it was not very effective, though.
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Tis the power of asking questions, and thank you for being willing to open up so much. This response I think gets us much closer to somewhere useful. And their are a few places where I think you can explore further. But first, to re-echo @FiveHourMarathon above:
This is such an important point, and he elaborates on it well so I won't divulge further, I just want to emphasize how important I think that is.
But onto some specific comments and questions regarding church and romance:
On Church (traditionalism)
Disclaimer: I'm not religious, so the following will be an accounting from people who are/have been close to me in my life...
Agreed, this is something I have really respected about religion (despite not being religious myself), they really do foster community which is so powerful.
I once had an ex-girlfriend who was an Episcopalian, and she told me that at her church, there are active members who don't believe in God but come every Sunday for the community. And the community accepts them. It is very likely that this is a very weird church (it is in SF after all), but the core point here is I do not think you have to have all the same beliefs as the congregation you are in to go to church somewhere. Obviously some baseline stuff is required, i.e. actually believing in God is probably needed at most churches. But every belief doesn't have to be the same. And if the church you find does have a problem with some view.... find a different church. I'm sure some people more religious than me would disagree with this, but I think you can be choosy about what parts of religion and the bible work for you. It doesn't have to be that you believe every word to go to church.
In my world view "faith" and "the existence of a loving god" are too very different things. One is a question of belief (I think a loving god exists), and the other is a question of truth (A loving god exists). I too have doubts as to the latter, but that doesn't mean that people's faith doesn't provide vast amounts of comfort to them irregardless of the truth value to the former.
On dating apps (liberalism)
So, more women than you think will ok with this. Modern media likes to frame women as these "sexual beings", and while those kinds of women do exist, they aren't omnipresent. And more women than you probably think would be ok waiting until things become serious to have sex. And if you play it with the right charisma, this can even come across extremely romantic.
Main thing here The VAST majority of women don't do anal. Anal is very much a product out of porn, and is mostly done because men who have watched too much porn ask women to do it. Most women won't ask for anal.
I think this is another one of those beliefs that really only exist in the outside fringes of liberals. I.e. only the most liberal people (men or women) I know actually believe something like this. Most of the people I know, including my liberal friends, believe something closer to what you said about only wanting to have sex with someone you think you'll want to marry. My personal rule of thumb, is sex is only something I will do with someone who I am in a relationship with, and deeply care about.
Definitely -- My favorite quote from any teacher I ever had was from an old english teacher in high school who said "feelings are ephemeral". I think about that quote so damn often. Because life is, at its core, ephemeral. (God I love that word)
Last question
So here's a thought, and again this comes from a place of curiousity. Why do you believe that sex makes you permanently uglier? Is it a byproduct of your religious upbringing? Or from something else?
Again, thank you for being so open, and I hope some of these, thoughts, questions and observations can help you even a little bit.
It may be more rare than it used to be, but I'm pretty sure "waiting until marriage" still exists from various anecdotes, and is even to some (women) a preference that they might not feel comfortable to state out front for the same reasons OP feels weird about this.
Statistically, there are dramatically more women who say they would like to wait for marriage on anonymous surveys than who actually do so. Revealed preferences and all that, but I think the most obvious explanation is that women are far more likely than men to be interested in waiting for sex.
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I think I can't really give you a satisfying answer. Someone else here has said it before, but the human brain is not so simple that if it has been told that a primal urge is very very special for a good 15 years, it's going to be a really conflicted mess of a concept for it. If it were simple, we wouldn't get all these new sexualities and new genders and new questions from new genders about their new sexualities that we've seen in the last decade. Sex is not tennis.
Sex does not make you permanently uglier. Sex outside of the confines of marriage does. The idea that you shared something so intimate with a woman only to break up and her to take that part with her as she walks away. That you made someone worse, added extra baggage to her, added to her "bodycount" and made her less desirable to everyone else. Made her less good at pair bonding. People have committed murder many times throughout history over women, and sex with them, so I hope you don't think you can talk someone out of that. I understand you're center left, but rhetoric only goes so far.
I am under no illusion that I can change the mind of a person on anything, people don't change their mind so easily. I only really have 2 goals here.
Would you say your own beliefs about pre-maritial sex making someone more ugly, has more to do with the damage being done to ones partner? That by engaging in sex with someone you don't ultimately marry, you'll be making their life actively worse because you believe that having had this sexual experience they will find it harder to ultimately marry themselves? So by making their life worse, you are now uglier for having done that to them?
Damage to them and to yourself. Do you think that a man who has had sex with dozens of prostitutes will truly respect sex with his wife? I don't. I think that process works on a more minor scale for every time you have sex, in a similar way that if you admit micro-evolution exists, that macro-evolution is the obvious undeniable conclusion. If you have macro-intimacy donations to many women, your micro-intimacy doesn't mean anything, and that sensation was robbed from you as if dozens of pickpockets snatched up everything you had little by little as you walked through the medieval town square.
I'm curious how you have arrived at (and remained with) these beliefs. You previously listed a couple of evangelical/fundamentalist-type beliefs (the YEC idea that earth is 6,000 years old etc.), that you have dismissed as implausible. Yet you hold this rather staunch belief (stated in the previous set of replies) that sex makes you (one, us) dirty outside the confines of marriage. Your terms macro- and micro-intimacy here seem very tenuously cobbled together. There are many types of intimacy--should all of these be measured out so carefully lest we sully ourselves or dilute what we have to offer some future friend? If sex is different because of its procreative nature, that's of course an argument. But that's not necessarily intimacy. You seem to be attaching a mystical quality to sex--this without ever having had it yourself.
Obviously to some degree you got these ideas from your father, but you've embraced them and I'm wondering why. I wouldn't normally comment in the face of such a long statement laying bare one's experiences, because I'm not sure I have much to offer you other than stay alive and work things out in fear and trembling. But you're digging in here and I'm not positive that you are digging in in a way that is going to help you.
It's entirely possible that my views will change later, but I was asked to specify, so I did. There is nothing "digging in" here, and I also think that these values were not particularly rare until recently, and I also think that values cannot be changed so easily, and if they were changed easily, then there's not much weight to your principles in the first place. I understand you've had a lot of casual sex, so the viewpoint is probably alien to you. But yes, sex is different to me. It would be convenient if it was not, and it would be convenient if I liked tattoos or fat women, too.
Edited to add: The softening of my young Earth creationist views took literal years of seeing with my own eyes that the Bible is not literally true, that bad things happen to good people for little reason, years of seeing other Christians mention that the "Inspired Word" meant that the Bible could be fallible in a multitude of places, and finally punctuated with taking some geology classes that laid out the evidence for an old Earth irrefutably. The equivalent for sex would probably be to try to get into a bunch of relationships. That is probably ultimately what I need, and it fits with other commenters' advice to just stop thinking so much and go out and do things.
I went without having sex well into my twenties, for what it's worth, largely because I saw it as a sacred act at the time but also because I was terrified of screwing up (no pun intended). And of various other parts involving intimacy. It scared me. I sometimes wonder if my own mystification of sex was a smokescreen for that. But yes, getting outside one's head does wonders.
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I think you'll find that it's not a dealbreaker for all women to be inexperienced, or even wanting to wait until you are in a seriously committed relationship to have sex. It will be for some, but of course they wouldn't be right for you anyway, so the best thing you can do is sincerely wish them well and part on friendly terms. But for the rest, you'll be ok. I was a virgin when I met my wife, and I was very up front about that on my profile. She said after the fact that she actually found it pretty refreshing to not have to worry that I was going to try to get her in bed on the third date or something, and that we could ease into having a sexual relationship. I'm quite certain she's not the only one out there, so try not to worry too much.
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