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:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
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.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link