In a world searching for the latest and best ways to have sex, virginity has become an embarrassment.
This is to be expected in a society that preaches pleasure, but not in the church where virtue is assumed but not taught. Books abound on sex for married Christians, but little exists (which is not simplistic and insulting to anyone of average intelligence and normal desires) for the unmarried Christian. After all, people reason, what is there to write about abstaining? Sex is seen as a fulfillment; virginity, as a vacuum.
But it had better be more than that, especially for us single women who, Parade magazine claims, outnumber marriageable men by 7.3 million in the United States. And most of the available ones are not in church. So unless we disobey God outright by marrying a non-Christian, let’s face it: many of us will never marry.
I’ve yet to hear this fact bluntly stated at any singles seminar I’ve ever attended. The thought of celibacy frightens us, and we avoid it. Single women store up treasures in a hope chest. Single men squirrel away dollars for a house or condo. Well-meaning friends tell us to believe God for a mate. But God doesn’t promise us that we will ever marry. He promises us himself.
But who is really teaching us how to know this God of immeasureable tenderness and gentleness who can help us, especially at night when many lonely singles experience the claw-down-the-walls variety of sexual temptations? Although God is not afraid to talk to us about sex, most people in the church are. I feel that most married couples presume that singles live some magical, sexless existence. The subject isn’t even brought up until, say, two months after marriage.
Church, wake up. Your average single Christian is quite sexually knowledgeable. It is impossible not to be—in a society where your daily newspaper carries a sex survey in its Living section, and news anchors on late-night newscasts detail the deviant sexual practices that lead to AIDS. Even an innocent shopping trip to the supermarket takes you past magazines with these titles on their covers: “Sexual Surprises—Which Men Are Best in Bed?” “Smarter, Safer Birth Control,” and “The Enticement of Lingerie.”
In this milieu, virginity is a dirty word. People advise us that the longer we wait, the harder it will be to have sex. Co-workers assume that because we’re not sleeping around at the office, we are either sexless, frigid, or homosexual. Or hopelessly naive, which may be what people think where I work. What they don’t know is that my first job as a police reporter was reading the rape reports. More recently, my desk was close to a co-worker who felt I needed to hear about his sexual adventures of the night before. After a while, these pressures wear us down. We wonder why we have bothered waiting all these years. We lose all sense of God having a stake in our sexual purity. Instead, we feel we are failures because we couldn’t find a spouse.
Fortunately, God makes it clear that he prefers virginity for a holy marriage. Jesus demanded virginity of himself—even though, as Hebrews 4:15 states, he was tempted in all points that we are.
But who ever mentions this? Only a few courageous souls—such as theologian John Stott and poet Luci Shaw—have the guts to broach sexuality and sexual temptation publicly. Shaw described the feelings of loneliness and incompleteness of virginity in her poem “A Celibate Epiphany.” But these are voices in a desert.
More often we are informed that sex is not necessary to human fulfillment. That is technically true—for celibacy frees us for other fulfilling commitments. But I’m waiting for the volunteers who want to test this out. When such messages come from someone who is married, they are like a fat man telling a thin man how to fast.
But while we capitalize on the privileges our virginity offers, we need help in making our sexual abstinence easier to bear.
Give us lots of hugs. That sounds simple, but singles often feel unloved because we are so rarely held and touched.
Invite us over to your homes, not just on holidays, but during evenings and Sunday afternoons—our loneliest times. Why are singles the last to leave church on Sunday mornings? Because they have nowhere else to go. One of the big myths of the church is that singles want to be only with each other. Most singles I know would junk a singles lunch any day to spend the afternoon with a family.
Hugs and invitations are not substitutes for sex, but they help dispel the loneliness that makes us long for sex (which, I’m told, may not cure loneliness anyway).
I recently brought a Christian magazine home to my roommate. Its cover story was “The Gift of Sexuality.” I tossed it in front of her, but she wouldn’t look at it.
“What good is a gift,” she asked, “when you can’t open it?”
Virginity, too, is a gift. Help us make the most of it.
JULIA DUIN1Newspaper reporter Julia Duin attends an Episcopal church in Miami.
