“Love isn’t an emotion,” he said. “Love is a choice.”
About half of you might have inwardly shake your head at these words. These words sound cold to romantic, idealist ears. “Love is a choice.” They sound as if love is a candidate on a ballot; vote “yes” for Love! As if love; that walk on the beach holding hands, that turbulent and sometimes wrenching feeling; is as simple a thought as figuring out how much money to take out at a bank. Love, the “chicken or fish?” of our days.
But the thing is, he’s right. Well, halfway at least. For anyone who’s had love – with our families, with our friends, our lovers, our enemies, even – it’s true. Love is hard work. Love, real love, is sacrificial. Giving up your wants and ways in favor of making another person happy – that’s love. Letting go of “me” in favor of “us” – that’s love too.
But back to the guy with those words. He’s a youth pastor, addressing a room of teens. And I’m sure a few of the kids let out that inward groan, an eyes-to-the-ceiling look to their friends. Few kids that age know the meaning of the word “love” in that manner yet. They know how to love their parents and they know how to love their friends (and at that stage of the game, they’re probably doing better at that “real love” thing with the latter). In that situation, he’s doing them a favor to talk about Love-the-transaction instead of Love-the-impassioned. The audience, being a bundle of hormones rubbed raw by Miley Cyrus pole dances and sparkly Twilight vampires or anything else from the “sex sells” mantra of every day, needs to hear a little of love-as-hard-work. Otherwise the emotion stumbles into the word “passion” and all its scary synonyms: heat, ecstasy, ardor, desire. Those words can get kids in trouble. Those words lead to the terrifying three letter word – Sex. Let’s not talk about sex.
But why the hell not?
It’s a no-no to talk about your no-no. Oh, no.
Right this second, thousands, maybe even millions, of folks you don’t know (and a few that you do) are either having sex or thinking about sex. Or thinking about not thinking about sex, or thinking about the sex they’ll have, or the sex they won’t have, or the sex they could be having if they’d just ask, or maybe they’re just thinking about food or sports until that person with the lovely booty next to them leans over and then, oh, crap, there’s sex. Again.
The human relationship to sex is a persistent one. It’s a completely natural act. It’s a proven mood enhancer! It’s exercise! It’s a bonding experience! It’s a stress release! It’s healthy and happy and could potentially help prevent cancer and it’s somehow wrong to talk about!
Okay, so the cover of any Cosmo or Maxim would prove that last statement false.
But there’s still a quiet taboo to the world of sex. All those covers will tell you is how to do it longer, faster, deeper, more pleasurably. In that lies the problem. This is a world stuck on the mechanics of sex, the physicality of sex; but how often is there talk about what it means? How often is there a magazine headline about the spiritual intimacy that’s involved in sex? Sex is literally either letting someone inside of you or being inside someone else. And if you’re lucky, you’re touching someone in a place that zero to very few others have discovered. But instead, we focus on the wrong parts and take the feeling out of sex – we turn it into the f-bomb, we make it detached, as if the honor hasn’t been taken out of giving ourselves away. Maybe we want the first time every time, so we careen from one relationship to another. Maybe we don’t want to admit what a charged thing we’re offering to a significant other, a drunken stranger. Or maybe we just really, really hate being alone. Sex is one of the only times we’re not solo in this crazy world.
Then again, that’s a lot of maybes for something that just feels good.
Getting back to the motions versus emotions of sex, one group seems to have the hardest time addressing either quality straight on and that’s Christians. More often than not, Christians are seen to the world to be amazingly anti-sex. Think abstinence, only education and those pages and pages of (mostly Old Testament) Bible verses that spell out all the things we shouldn’t do in regards to sex -- which often clashes with the amount of kids in the average Christian family. Someone’s got to be having sex in that house, right?
But with all those Old Testament “don’t do this” Bible verses (which, by the way, were not only meant to be set aside with the arrival of the New Testament, but also specifically pointed towards those of the Jewish persuasion at the time), there’s little doubt about why folks might think Christians have weird hang-ups about sex. Aside from the good advice of not doing the family goat or your mom, as well as not cheating on the person you’ve decided to marry, there’s also not having sex with your neighbor’s wife, not having sex during a woman’s period, having to wash semen off of everything you might get it on IMMEDIATELY, that if a dude doesn’t manage to make babies before he dies, his brother can go nail his widow…
Yeah. The Old Testament’s a weird place.
But what gets forgotten is that an entire book of the Bible can be seen as praise of eroticism: Song of Solomon. “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine,” it begins. Turns of phrase such as “I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste” and “I would cause thee to drink of spiced wine of the juice of my pomegranate” are seen by some Bible scholars as references to oral sex.
Given, this is a slightly controversial stance: in some cases, the Song of Soloman is seen as non-canon, or it’s been viewed as allegorical (the church as bride and Jesus as the bridegroom). But that’s not stopping folks. In recent decades, some Christians have begun to hold it up as a sexual handbook of sorts, and, more importantly, as an allowance to actually talk about sex; which for some time didn’t happen that often. There seemed to be a quiet thought that if something is so pleasurable, it’s got to have some sin attached. But Song of Solomon, they say, is proof that sex is one of the more beautiful gifts that God gave to mankind. And once the talk began…
Wander around online and see the face of sexual fellowship. ChristianNymphos.org initially takes a strong word to grab attention and turns it around. From their homepage:
The word Nympho has a negative connotation for some. It doesn’t have to stay this way. Why can’t we take something “of the world” and make it into something good?
Their categories range from anal sex to masturbation to sex toys, all in the name of sharing from the older women to the young (and sometimes vice versa). They’ve created a safe place where it’s okay to admit to liking sex and to admit having questions about sex (and, actually, there’s some crazy questions – but thank God people are talking). Speaking of sex toys, if you scroll on down the page, you’ll find links for Book22.com (reference to Song of Solomon there), Covenant Spice, and Christian Love Toys – both of which are essentially online sex toy shops without the dirty photos and a little more emphasis on the “love” in “lovemaking”. Oh, and free Bibles!
Then we have Sex In Christ: Sexuality According to the Word of God, where no one seems to be certain whether or not they’re kidding. They sing the praises of fisting:
In the Song of Solomon, the Bible describes the act of fisting and the profound erotic bliss it induces: It is the voice of my beloved! He knocks, saying, "Open for me, my sister, my love, My dove, my perfect one”…My love thrust his hand through the opening, and my feelings were stirred for him. (Song of Solomon 5:2-4) Here we see the lover gently coaxing his companion to open up to him, metaphorically “knocking at her door,” preparing her sexually and emotionally to receive his hand inside her. Gradually he works more and more fingers into her, until the moment when her vagina yields and his hand slips fully inside her, thrusting “through the opening.” She then describes the powerful passion that this arouses in her as she envelopes his entire hand inside her body. Many couples describe this moment, as the fist makes full penetration into the vaginal opening, as transcendent and a sexual revelation. As the woman’s body accommodates her husband’s hand, both may experience a sense of physical, sexual, emotional, and spiritual oneness.
As well as listing out the do’s of having a threesome:
(1) To avoid the impropriety of male homosexuality, a heterosexual couple should not under any circumstances form a threesome with another man.

(2) Both women involved in the threesome must be willing to keep within traditional female roles (i.e., not taking on masculine appearance or behavior in or out of the bedroom) and recognize the male as the leader in the relationship.

(3) If the wife’s lesbian sex partner is unmarried, it may be permissible for the husband to have relations with her only with his wife’s consent.

(4) If the wife’s lesbian sex partner is unmarried, but the wife does not wish her to have relations with the other woman, the husband should respect this.

(5) If the wife’s lesbian sex partner is married, her husband must not have objections to the relationship.

(6) If the wife’s lesbian sex partner is married, the husband should refrain from having any sexual relations with her, and should make every effort to control his fantasies about her. He should concentrate his attention on his own wife.
Let’s just say that some things say far more about the writer than the writer intends and leave it at that.
With this ring, I wait to wed…
So Christians are talking about sex, at least within the context of marriage. And that’s a start. But what about pre-marital sex? The sex we’re not supposed to have, but so many of us end up doing anyways? What about when love shimmies its way down to lust’s hotel and asks to stay the night?
Sure, we talk a good waiting game. An entire industry has been sprung from the abstinence revolution. True Love Waits, most likely the best-known program in this vein, has been around since 1993, asking teenagers and young adults to pledge their virginity until marriage. From their website: "Believing that true love waits, I make a commitment to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future mate, and my future children to a lifetime of purity including sexual abstinence from this day until the day I enter a biblical marriage relationship." It’s a remarkable promise, but it’s also a lucrative business. Purity rings, a symbol of the abstinence pledge, are available through links on their website for anywhere from 25 to 803(?!?!) bucks. There are necklaces, shirts, commitment cards, books…but none of it betrays the facts – no matter how much money is spent on the non-sexual movement, no matter how many papers are signed or pledges announced to the air, the bare bones of it is that some are going to fail.
A survey done in 2008 by Johns Hopkins spells out the ugly truth: in a group of 289 pledgers, eighty-two percent of them reneged on their contracts. That means only 52 of those teenagers chose to abstain pre-marriage. That’s it. Janet E. Rosenbaum, who led the study, may have hit the nail on the head when she stated her reasoning for these results: "It seems that pledgers aren't really internalizing the pledge. Participating in a program doesn't appear to be motivating them to change their behavior. It seems like abstinence has to come from an individual conviction rather than participating in a program."
That statement says a lot about the waiting game and how it’s presented. The TLW culture is marked by a different sort of peer pressure; instead of everyone’s doing it, why don’t I, it’s everyone says they’re not doing it, so I might as well play along. The intent becomes empty.
One of the faltering points of these abstinence programs is that they clearly address the issue, but not the source. There’s a lot of “because the Bible says so” in Christian culture. That’s not something that easily appeases anyone with a streak of curiosity, and our teenage years are probably the most curious of our lives (in a LOT of ways, but I digress). What these kids ought to hear, and maybe what some of us still need to hear, is why God asks these things of us.
For example, one of the tenets of the pledge is that sexual purity means not only abstaining from sex, sexy touching, and its entire person-on-person ilk, but also abstaining from even the thought of sex. In their FAQ, they mention the big one, Matthew 5:27-28: "You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.' But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart". It’s a truthful statement in God’s word, but a hard thing to ask teenagers, especially ones just starting their walk with Christ. Asking teenagers to not have sexual thoughts when their body is barely within their own command? How many of us, even as adults, have control over any of the thoughts that crash through our minds uninvited? You know the game – don’t think about pink elephants. Good luck.
But instead of following up that list with some straight talk about sex, why waiting takes away worries about pregnancy or STDs or being used emotionally for what you do physically, so many writings just keep saying don’t. Don’t because God says no. Don’t, don’t, don’t. Get married. Because, you know, that solves it all. Some programs even throw in a verse from Hebrews: God will judge you if you do, so just…don’t.
Some of these programs feel like someone had either the easiest adolescence ever or completely forgot what it was like. Imagine being a teenager again and trying to control those thoughts alone, especially when you think you’re in love 4-EVA fifty percent of the time. And if you mess up just a little bit, which human beings as sinners will do no matter how hard we try not to, the whole shebang has been lost. You gave in to temptation, you touched the morning wood, you kissed that girl and, crap, you liked it, game over. God might be pissed.
But there’s a reason that God asks these things of us. I read somewhere, “Sex is God's invention. He is the mastermind behind it—and His creation is worth far more to Him than it is to us.” What should happen, instead of signing pledges and memorizing words, is that we need to talk about why.
What’s love got to do with it?
I started this piece talking about love, and there’s a reason for it. It’s one thing to say true love waits, but why? “Just because it’s Biblical” isn’t the final answer. What teenagers need to hear, what everyone needs to hear, is that to not give in to lust is to respect yourself. That to share yourself with just one person will make sex all the more amazing and intimate, and even goofy and awkward, because that’s real.
I don’t have any handy-dandy stats on this one, but numbers aren’t what this is about. So many of us, believers and non, treat sex as casually as that bank transaction I mentioned earlier. And even if it doesn’t go that far, I’m willing to bank that most of our readers have done the deed outside of marriage or at least, um, taken care of themselves. It’s easy to blame a sex-obsessed society for it, but that’s pointing the finger at a symptom, not a cause.
Who knows why we do it? We’ve all got different reasons, and they all come down to just us – I wanted him to love me, I wanted her to stay over, I didn’t want to be alone, I wanted to feel real, I wanted, I want, I want… But what do we need? Sex and all its pleasure is a want. What that want is telling us is that what we need is love. But somewhere along the line, those lines got blurred. When our needs and our wants get smushed together, it’s no wonder we get confused.
Look, this isn’t a soapbox, this isn’t a grandstand. Whether or not you believe in God, God wanted us to wait because He loves us…and wants us to love ourselves just as much. It’s a matter of respect, no matter what value party you’re a part of. And it’s not solely about respecting ourselves, but respecting everyone else; respect enough to not give our bodies, our greatest gifts, up for thirty minutes of want-fulfillment. As far as younger folks go, we need people who will not just spout the words, but to explain love’s part in this. And to not judge when mistakes are made, when we show ourselves to be fallen.
Maybe when everyone learns to actually love ourselves, and to truly love others, we'll have this whole mess figured out. Until then, try to forget about those pink elephants.
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