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 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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