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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I apparently have to make an extremely personal post here. I remember last time I did that, it was because I was having a big existential crisis about whether my career was going somewhere. On that front, I talked to my old software engineering professor, and he was impressed when I told him some of the stuff I'd been doing, and he advised me about how to frame my accomplishments both to myself and to employers, so I think I will be okay.
TL;DR: I am torn between liberalism and traditionalism myself and seeing too many flaws in both. I don't know what to do with myself after I move out.
I was taught from a young age that sex outside of marriage was a grave sin. My father got angry at my brother multiple times when he suspected him of going upstairs to masturbate rather than play with Bionicles, as he claimed. He once asked me and my brother both whether we had any "puppy love" for anyone, and when we sheepishly lied we didn't, he said "good." He once, at the state park, pointed to two girls, one of which I had a crush on, and said "see those girls? never marry those girls". He once showed me a news story of a 12 year old boy getting a girl pregnant and getting disowned. He put it like this: "if you're old enough to do that, you're old enough to move out and get a job". My mother took a more minor role in this, saying that childhood romance is pointless and you shouldn't even think about dating until you're 16 and own your own car. On a different note, Dad didn't like "clowns", and I had taken the Bible verse to "better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt", so every time I felt compelled to make a joke or to talk about myself too much, I felt bad. That old country house had sulfurous water, so my parents decided I should bathe once a week and "smell like a kid" rather than smell like sulfur. We also lived out in the country and had almost no social connections at all, and Dad thought church was a scam, citing that the Bible's original conception of church was that neighbors would host each other on a rotating basis every Sunday. So we instead took turns reading Bible verses aloud on Sundays, though Dad would get angry if you seemed like you were bored or not paying attention, or if you were bad at reading, Dad might angrily take a lotion bottle and tell you to read the back of it using your voice in an interesting way, rather than the dry way that most people read aloud. Anyway, I didn't really have what I would call "friends" until I was 13, due to all of these things. I started taking Tae Kwon Do when I was 10, but the kids I met there weren't very familiar with me, and I never saw them outside of practice or tournaments.
A little more on my dad: he was a geophysical navigator, meaning he would be on a boat 4 weeks on and then be back at home for 4 weeks before the process repeated. I think he hated doing it. He got really interesting photos, but I think he hated leaving his home every 4 weeks. Every time he came back, it was like the world filled with color. It filled with humor and warmth and adventure and interesting ways of thinking and it filled with pain. Random pain, random things that would set him off, too many things to remember all of them. I remember once that he got obsessed with the fact that laundry detergent companies got everyone to use too much laundry detergent so they could sell more. He said he learned that you only need to use a 1/4th cup full, they tested it on the boat, your clothes are completely clean. He had been saying this for a while, and Mom seriously disagreed, telling me to always use a full cup. Well, one day he decided to have me do it and watch me. I was so conflicted between the two of them that I ended up filling it half full to split the difference and hopefully not make him mad. It didn't work, he shouted at me and stormed off to argue with my mother. This was near the end of the marriage; it had taken on a deterioration when I was about 11. He had just gotten back from Kazakhstan, and he had mostly stopped bathing or changing his clothes. Mom decided then that she would divorce him someday, but wanted to wait until we were older, because she knew the statistics on single motherhood. Towards the end, he hadn't gone back on the boat for a good 6 months and he was drinking boxed red wine and playing Lord of the Rings Online about every day. One memory I have was him getting mad that he got killed in "Monster Play" and all of a sudden cutting himself off and looking at me intently. I laughed nervously, and he uproariously laughed at my response.
But he ultimately was consumed by paranoia that my mother was cheating on him. I was so shocked at how harshly he treated her. I remember he accused her of having sex in her chair at work, and she repeated back to him "I'm having sex in my chair at work" in utter disbelief he could say something like that, and he laughed and shouted "Straight from the mouths of babes!" It might have been that same night that they were having a vicious argument like that in front of me, and I think Mom excused herself to do some chore in the bathroom or something and I went to help her and we both tried to avoid talking about it, we made up some stupid cute skit to laugh at as we worked. When we came back, Dad accused us of talking about him behind his back. I remember once he tried to get me to take his side in such an argument, and I couldn't, I said "I am impartial" in the most neutral voice I could muster. But the night of the separation was the worst. An hours-long argument with both parents trying their utmost to hurt each other. The final straw for him was when Mom brought up the "wheat germ oil" incident. The car was out of gas, and I think Dad tried to fill it up with a combination of old gas and "wheat germ oil" to make it work again, he had read that it would work, but it didn't. Dad put out some sincerity when she brought it up and said "I thought it would work..." and Mom said "Because you're a retard!" and Dad got so angry that he took her and threw her out onto the patio. I remember walking off onto the nearby gravel road to try to calm the turmoil in my mind sometime during this argument; at night, it gets so dark in the countryside, and no one is around to hear you cry. When the cops showed up, she showed them her bruise, they took statements from my mother and brother (I declined), and he was taken. To this day, he still holds a bitter grudge against my mother and will easily say quite harsh things towards her. I learned recently that he did not practice what he preached regarding sex before marriage; I have a half-sister that I didn't know about because he fucked a girl he met at church in a one-night-stand type scenario without protection, and my brother was conceived from similar out-of-wedlock sex. My mother regretted getting pregnant like that, because it seriously reduced her leverage in the relationship.
That separation happened in October of 2012 when I was 15. I had respected my father so, so much, so the pain of his separation was very sharp. It felt like my life had gone awry before it had even began. I liked video games, so I likened it to getting the "bad ending" in life, that my life had already ended, I was just seeing the epilogue. Regardless, I started to really come out of my shell when I was 16 somehow. I joined Scholastic Bowl and I made new friends, new jokes, new random mood swings. I found myself popular when I was 17 and I felt I could talk to a wide array of people by then. I chalked this up to being an upperclassman, but now, I'm not sure. Even though I finally started masturbating at age 16, I found that sexually forward women made me uncomfortable and embarrassed. I had to be coaxed into the slow dance circle at the school dance because even touching a woman's shoulders made me very nervous. The virgin valedictorian was hopelessly obsessed with me to the point that I felt bad for her, but I had no idea how to talk to her alone in the first place, and I was also disgusted when I learned even she had given a blowjob once. There were other reasons, besides; I felt like I would just end up hurting anyone who loved me, and I also had extremely low self-confidence somehow. I had no job, I had no car except my brother's which I would borrow, I had no muscle, I had no idea why women would be attracted to me. The second semester of my senior year was marked with a lot of random flip-outs on my part. It felt even more like my life was ending. All my social connections would be severed, and I had no idea what I wanted to do. Graduating was surreal.
At 16, with much guilt, I started talking to a girl 4 years my younger that I met on the bus. She was 13 and I was 17 when I started to notice that I really wanted to be around her. In a very short talking stage with a girl I was talking to online last week, she said I was like a primary school kid in terms of my affections, which was very enlightening to me. A therapist had told me I liked the 13 year old because she was likely traumatized and had been made more mature before her age, but now I think it's probably the other way around; I was very immature, and still am. Once, I met her in the park after graduating, and she touched my chest as a joke, then felt awkward and expressed regret; I felt guilty enough for this age-gap touch that I eventually saw some classmates close to my age and I walked off to talk to them without even saying goodbye. After graduating, I kept talking to her through Facebook. Somehow, the conversation turned dark eventually. I told her I had heard she liked to kick frogs from someone else, and she said she did, because she hated them, and not only that, she liked to cut them open while they were still alive, and watch as their organs throbbed until expiration, because it made her feel alive in a visceral way. I tried to get her to disavow this, but she didn't, and she could tell that I was very disturbed, and expressed some sadness that her honesty with me had driven me away, and that she should be less honest in the future, because honesty hurts her. I told her she was wrong, that honesty is always good, but in truth, it had indeed hurt her; I stopped talking to her the next day. It was near the Christmas reunion, and I had so much turmoil in my mind and was so randomly irritable that I spent most of it upstairs reading. In a reading rage, I finished Crime and Punishment in the course of a couple days.
The first semester of college went well; I had missed the fall semester due to my indecision and due to flirtation with enlisting that went nowhere because my father disliked the idea enough to sabotage it. I got A's in everything, even hard stuff like chemistry and Calculus 1. But I failed to make any friends, something that would carry over into the second semester, when I started taking my first Engineering classes. I started to feel some lack of motivation somehow, and I started to perform less well. This feeling got worse after I checked the social media of the girl I had loved: she had shot herself. On the last day of her life, she was silent until the latter half, getting more and more excited, saying "today's the day" without specifying what she meant. It was a week before her 16th birthday. I found out she had been in a sexual relationship with a man in his 30s, a man working construction on her house, a friend of her stepfather, a man who had previously been convicted of sexual abuse of a different girl under the age of 15 and was on parole. After her death, he was convicted again and sentenced to 77 years. I remember feeling awkward at the funeral because I think some people didn't even know why I was there, but her family was appreciative. I was so surprised at how well her brother had taken it; I apologized to him, and he said "she's in a better place now." Her grandmother had heard of me and thanked me having been her friend and for coming to the funeral, and I said she was welcome and threw in an "I'm sorry", and I could feel the words cut her as she walked away.
I heroically finished my work that semester and got A's and B's, but everything felt pointless. I couldn't believe that the world still spun around after that. Bad ending, indeed. The semester after that, January of 2017, I did horribly in every class. I dropped almost everything except for a natural sciences class and one engineering course and I developed an unhealthy obsession with the speech professor, emailing her too much. One day I had a particularly nasty breakdown and asked her why I shouldn't kill myself, after some test cuts to my wrists and neck, and I was introduced to campus police in my dorm, who took my knife. In response, I went and bought a new knife. One week, I had been having a bad week; I had such stress from finals about to happen, and I had barely been sleeping, and I had had an embarrassment in front of everyone in the science class, and I forgot to mention I had no roommate during this time so I had no one to put a strong face in front of, and I had frustratedly emailed the speech professor again and got a reply back that I had broken her boundaries and made her uncomfortable and she would never reply to any of my emails again. I felt physically sick and dizzy reading it, and I began to saw myself with the knife in earnest in a rage that lasted for probably an hour or so before the cuts were deep enough that they had a sort of aching pain to them. I browsed social media for a while, then thought to call my therapist. I wanted to see her, and she told me I couldn't, because we had no appointment and she was busy. I told her I had cut myself, and she then flatly told me to come in. It was a funny feeling walking outside. It was such a nice day out. The sun was bright, the birds were singing, and the temperature was perfect. I walked into her office and she said "let's see those cuts!" cheerfully. Her face quickly turned to horror seeing the deep pulsating wound in my left wrist. I was put into a chair and some EMS people looked at me; they found I had missed the vein entirely. I had cut vertically, too, so no tendons were cut. I was making some small dark jokes now and again up until I learned that I had to be taken to the hospital instead of just being stitched up and released, to which I finally said "goddamn it." which my therapist laughed at, oddly enough. I had to be wheeled out, but I was so ashamed that I asked if my face could be covered. They obliged, giving me a shirt or a towel or something. The EMS worker in the back of the ambulance was some 40 year old woman or something and, just like the others, was weirdly urgent in wondering if it was a serrated knife or a regular one. She was saddened at what I had done. She tried to tell me everything would get better, that her life had gotten much better and she really enjoyed her life at 40, that I would find similar fulfillment. I cynically told her that 40 was actually the age at which most men killed themselves. She frowned and said "you're killing me!" When she dropped me off at the hospital, she took one last deliberate look at me before walking off. I wonder what she was thinking.
It was in the hospital and the psych ward and the weeks afterwards that I found the reason to exist. The reason is the deep abiding suffering that I inflicted in both of my parents with my attempt. Mom said she was angry when she was driving up to visit me, but upon seeing me, she couldn't help but cry a little, and tried very hard to put on her most affable affect, and she brought me a Mark Twain book and visited me every day. It was only afterwards, witnessing her listlessness and a few flip-outs of her own at my various depressed cruelties, that I realized how much she suffered. Dad did not visit me; he called, and commented harshly that I tried to die without God's permission, and I got mad at him and called him some swear word or other and was outraged that he could call me and say that at a time like this, and he remarked that he had succeeded in his mission of getting me to feel an emotion other than sadness, and I told him that that the illness was actually two emotions, sadness and anger, and he started to cry and asked why I did it. In the psych ward, he kept calling me. He first tried to convince me that the girl was in heaven, but somehow I conveyed to him that I actually didn't even do it because of the girl. I had come to terms with her death by then and informed him that it wasn't my fault, and I stopped talking to her because she kicked frogs, and that was a perfectly natural thing for me to do. This, I think, confused him, because the next day, he called again, wondering if I did it because he wasn't helping me to pay for college. We then got into a bitter argument, me right there in the psych ward battling his stupid justifications. He said "the father usually doesn't even pay for half! he only pays for a third! the SON is the third party involved, and he makes it go three ways!" and I furiously said "then why won't you pay even for a third?!" a little bit louder than my inside voice. I think his justification was that he never agreed for me to go to a private university like I did, but it didn't really matter. The psych ward is a story for another time. I got incompletes for my finals, and went back to finish them later that summer. The natural science professor probably knew what happened to me, but didn't speak of it; he was just friendly to me in a casual way. I saw him in the gym locker room once, the following semester, and he was happy to see me, greeting me, laughing.
I switched majors to computer science, and things started going well again for me in my classes. I found a group of people in the 2nd floor (the Honors floor) lounge that liked to play video games; they would just take in their laptops and play. Usually one of them would hook into HDMI and play, and people would watch him. I really liked this relaxed environment, it was liberating in some ways because you could make so many jokes in such a casual place, with people coming and going whenever they pleased. It was also restricting, because they were almost all game dev majors, and I couldn't talk about shared professors with them, and they were all liberal and didn't have a very broad range of things they liked to talk about. They liked D&D, which I never really saw the appeal of. After 2020, many of them experimented with their gender. Two of them went nonbinary and changed nothing else, one of them went from gay to aromantic asexual, two of them went properly MtF and changed their names to weird ones, and one of those MtF ones went even further and developed into an endogenic system and brought PluralKit onto the Discord server. He played around with it once and then never again.
I will just take an intermission here to speak of LISA: The Painful RPG. It felt like looking in a mirror. Brad Armstrong was a picture of me: bald, bearded, background in martial arts and toxic family dynamics, losing someone he cared about to suicide, a lack of willingness to be intimate, a storm of emotions going on within him that he evidently never let anyone know, and a painful march to the end without even knowing why he was doing it. The humor in the game and the cruel hopelessness of the situation reflected what went on in my heart. I felt empty on finishing it.
For my part, I went strong for a couple semesters; in the third semester, I once again lost all motivation and dropped everything, only this time, I had very little suicidal ideation, just despair. Once again, it felt like the world was ending around me, except this time, it wasn't even due to personal circumstances; Covid had come and closed the university around me, though my downward spiral had started before that. I made at least one professor sad that semester; it was a stern looking yet funny East Asian woman, I think from China or Taiwan, teaching Assembly Language or whatever the low-level computer code language class is called. I think she emailed me for my lack of attendance. I emailed her back telling her I was going to drop it because there was no point in my coming in anymore, she expressed sympathy and told me that I was actually doing better than most in the class. She wasn't the only one. I loved the compassion of many of the professors, including the religions professor and the old calculus professor and the high-effort-paper professor, though half the time, I rejected their allowances for my illness because I felt it would be even worse if I accepted their kindness and then still failed. But the college was finally unamused by my dropping classes this second time. I wasn't making enough progress, they said, and they cut off my financial aid. It was already breaking my mother's finances even before that, so that was the end of my time at that college.
After moving back home, things actually started going a lot better for me. I got a part-time job at the gas station near me. It was fun. Having money for the first time was nice. I spent one off semester just working there. I realized that covid wasn't going to blow over after that, so I bought my first car and resumed my studies, this time at a local state university, a 20 minute commute, no meal plan, no dorms. It was actually fun this time, I'm not sure why. It was nice cooking for myself at home, I had started talking to people I really liked on Discord, and my mother provided some actual warmth in my life. Even though I didn't have any real social connections at college, I had a lot of fun. The professors liked me and I still talk to them sometimes. I was also excited to get a job in my field just a few months out of college in 2023, even despite the state of the industry. I've almost completely paid off my debt by now, and Mom's finances are not at the breaking point anymore, and I bought a newer car this year, not even needing a loan. Coupled with my professor saying I have real job prospects and this wasn't just a dead-end job I'm working, I'm actually pretty excited for the future these days.
However, the romance is something I'm probably going to have a tough time with, and I dread it. I've lost my faith, but yet, I don't belong to either the atheist liberals or the religious conservatives entirely. I think Christianity is deeply flawed in many ways, but I think the way liberalism handles relationships is very ugly. I don't want to give an intimate piece of myself to a woman who I'm not sure I will marry by having sex with her. If we break up, I will have been made permanently uglier in a way that I haven't been up to now, and it won't feel special with the next woman. At the same time, the old belief system I had was flawed; Dad never did what I'm doing now, he was apparently a rampantly sexual creature before marriage. But I think the liberal belief system is ugly, itself. It brought this country to what it is today. All of these thoughts, and then I realize I'm probably overthinking this, and I will have to take anyone who accepts me, because I have too many flaws to be too choosy. Perhaps I should just get into a relationship with someone who I have connections with and see what happens. I know one thing: I actually do need a relationship, regardless of my misgivings of hurting my partner. I predict that if I move out and don't start a relationship, I will quickly wither and crash out of my job, lacking any warmth in my life. Regardless, I need to start before my parents die, or my life will either end with a quick romp through alcoholism and a gunshot, or something similar to Brad Armstrong, a purposeless journey more brutal and agonizing without any end in sight.
Basically, I need advice from smart people. I don't know what to even ask, so I will just end this cutely to hopefully create some juxtaposition within you. Reddit, DAE lack any intimacy and fear the unknown? AITA? Thanks for the AAQC, kind sir! (Please don't AAQC this, I don't want people to see it.)
Hi!
You've clearly had a hard time in life so far. But putting that aside, it sounds like you have managed to find a job out of college, and that's awesome! That's worth celebrating!
You framed the issue as "Traditionalism vs Liberalism" to start. But it sounds to me like your current issue, and the reason your posting, has more to do with learning how to navigate romance. Would you say the current struggle is that the only two frameworks that you've seen for navigating romance is that of the traditionally liberal and conservative worldviews? And your conflict is that you see major flaws in both? If that is the case, I have thoughts that you might find useful, but first lets make sure we've identified the root problem first. If that isn't right, let me know where I went wrong in my interpretation of your problem.
Yes, it's about romance. I don't know. I have some weird values and clearly some hangups about getting intimate with women and accepting their own sexuality. I don't know whether to try the church thing or to try some combination of dating apps and making social connections in the real world. One preserves my original values but requires some beliefs that I think don't work, and are the reason that so many people are falling out of religion. The other opens me up to dating many more people, but they have their own shortcomings, like the belief in the "true self" and the discovery of your "self" sexually. Right now, I can't do either, because I still live at home and I'm in a dying rural area. But once I get a job elsewhere, these options will open up. But @WhiningCoil is who I wanted to hear most from because it sounded like he had a similar situation to me, and he's totally correct that I am thinking too much.
My own experience in life is definitely different than yours in a lot of ways, but I think its important to lay out some of it so you know me somewhat. For example, I come from more of a center-left background, and my childhood traumas are of a different nature than yours. But more importantly, I'm curious about some of what you said in this reply.
on church
on dating apps
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.
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.
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.
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