Virgin Regret (Part 5): Conclusion

This is the last post in the series responding to Samantha Pugsley’s article about her regret in remaining a virgin until her wedding night.

Bride and Groom, Just Married, Driving Away in Car

Losing my religion

As a result of all she experienced, Samantha left the faith of her childhood:

I don’t go to church anymore, nor am I religious. As I started to heal, I realized that I couldn’t figure out how to be both religious and sexual at the same time.

Although it’s understandable that she felt a conflict between sex and faith, it really does have to be pointed out that Christians for 2,000 years have not found the two to be irreconcilable. The reason for this is that Christianity has much more to say about sex and marriage than Samantha was ever taught. God made sex! He made it good and enjoyable, he stamped the design into our very bodies. One of the earliest commands in the Bible is to “be fruitful and multiply” and I don’t think God was talking about apples and arithmetic…

Doing things differently

Samantha says that if she could do it again, she wouldn’t have waited until she got married to have sex. I do wonder though what would have been different? I wonder if they would have stayed together if they weren’t married and their first sexual experience was anything like that of their honeymoon.

Samantha also said that if she and her husband could do it again, they “would have gotten married at a more appropriate age”. She doesn’t say in the article how old they were, but since they dated for six years, I can’t imagine that she was any younger than twenty-one, which is young, but hardly an inappropriate age to get married.

In a phrase rather reminiscent of her boyfriend’s earlier comment, Samantha speaks to her readers:

It’s your body; it belongs to you, not your church. Your sexuality is nobody’s business but yours.

All this has left Samantha, in my opinion, in a position no better than she was before:

When I have sex with my husband, I make sure it’s because I have a sexual need and not because I feel I’m required to fulfill his desires.

If I were her husband reading this, I’d be heartbroken. What she was taught before was twisted, but this seems to me to be equally broken. Rather than her, it’s now her husband who is being used and objectified. Sex for her continues to be not about self-donation, but about fulfilling basic biological urges.

The difference good theology makes

Jesus, the Church and Pope St. John Paul II in his “Theology of the Body” point us to something far grander and this must be proclaimed. Couples are called to be living icons of God Himself, spouses are exhorted to image Christ and His Church, all called to chastity, to forget ourselves and live lives of authentic love. This is a truth we must proclaim to the world. We cannot be vague and we cannot afford to water-down the truth.

I am fortunate to be surrounded by couples who live chastely and have embraced the Church’s vision. It is truly beautiful. This is not an ethereal theology, a nice idea dreamed up by scholastic theologians. No, the Church offers us a concrete, robust understanding of the human person and the goodness of sexual union.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

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