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'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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