I had this conversation with my sister and a friend of mine over girls’ night out (the only one I’ve ever done… sad, huh!) last night, and it hit so close to home that a flood of memories washed into my head while I later spent an agonizing two hours trying to fall asleep.
There seems to be a rather large misconception among a lot of people that I want to clear up from my own experience.
I was one of those said people. Too naive to know better, sad and foolish.
My family is rather traditional. Church every week, Catholic school, saying Grace before dinner. We were taught pretty extreme modesty, a whole dose of physical vanity related to staying “fit” and “in-shape”. My mother was a Stay-At-Home-Mom until I was in college (then she got a job working with computers outside of the home), while my dad worked his ass off as an electronic engineer to provide for his family.
We were expected to stay at home through college and live in my family’s house until we married. Sex before marriage was a no-no and a crime considered punishable by death by being skinned alive. Living together before marriage was “shacking up”. We constantly heard the saying why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free whenever one of our family members *gasp* moved in with their partner before church-sanctified wedding vows were uttered before God.
I wasn’t allowed to shave until the ripe old age of 13 (which was about two years beyond when everyone else started doing it, and I swear my legs must be part Italian). Although I wanted short hair, my parents wouldn’t ever let me cut it. My frizzy locks graced the top of my tush until college.
I was stuck in my parents’ generation and blissfully oddball ways. No popular music because it was trash. I grew up on classic rock. Thank goodness it was an excellent genre of tunes, right? I was never part of the “in crowd”. Quite the opposite, really. My parents scoffed at following trends, and all three of their kids were taught to walk left on the less beaten path when everyone else turned right.
Funny enough, you would expect that they would have been extreme conservative republicans, but they weren’t at all. They were very open-minded and complete liberal hippies in a lot of ways.
Although drugs were the spawn of Satan, they have always been cool with people smoking pot as long as it isn’t them or their kids. Homosexuality isn’t a bad thing or a sin. They have gay friends, and they have always encouraged us to be loving and accepting no matter what someone’s sexual orientation may be. They are huge environmentalists and eat organic foods. Our extended family is very close, and they consist of every beautiful heritage under the sun. I never even noticed as a child that my cousins were Asian and African American and every other color in between. We were always encouraged to look past the color of skin.
For what they taught me about love and acceptance, I am forever in debt. How one particular family could be so conservative in some ways and so very liberal in others is a complete anomaly.
However, this brings me to some of the issues I was left with as a result of this particularly torn upbringing.
While I was in the “sinning” category as far as sex before marriage was concerned, by God, there was no way I was going to live with a man before I tied the knot. My parents couldn’t have been so blind to think I was actually a virgin, but they could pretend because they had no physical proof. But shacking up, well, they couldn’t turn a blind eye to that.
Now, sex before marriage, however tempting and enjoyable, left me with extreme guilt. I felt so dirty and ashamed for wanting to enjoy my husband-to-be that I actually asked him tearfully one day if he would be willing to abstain for the year before we married. He knew how much the guilt was ripping me apart and obliged. What a good guy, huh? I felt relieved by our decision to “wait” until marriage, and was proud that we only had one slip-up. Once we were married, sex guilt wouldn’t be an issue. Heh, so I thought.
But what I didn’t know then was that after I said my vows in the Catholic church, the guilt wasn’t going to magically disappear. No light turned on that suddenly made sex a positive thing for me. I was still racked by guilt of wanting to experience that pleasure, even with my husband.
Part of the problem was our stupid decision to follow the blessed “Natural Family Planning”. You, know, since that is the only “acceptable” means of birth control in the Church… except it’s not birth control, it’s freaking “fertility awareness”. (And if you want to read all about our experience with that, you can view it here.)
But the other reason was something that I didn’t realize until more recently. In fact, it’s taken quite a bit of counseling for me to get to this point and understand what was really going on.
Marriage isn’t just a flip of a switch where everything that was “taboo” before is suddenly okay. If you’re having guilt issues with sex, it’s not going to be taken care of by having a ring on your finger. There are other issues going on.
Just like moving in with someone when you get married versus beforehand isn’t going to make the transition suddenly a “natural” thing. You still have to learn how to be roommates.
Being married didn’t make spending the night with my honey feel suddenly right to me when I saw my parents the day after my wedding. Although sex was no longer a religious crime, I felt embarrassed that they and my little brother suddenly knew for sure that I was doing the deed.
Moving in was the same way.
After all this time, I finally understand that thinking a certain thing, whether it be marriage or anything else that one feels “finalizes” and makes acceptable a particular situation, doesn’t just work like the flip of a switch the way we might naively believe.
Transition takes time and active participation in changing the mindset we may have about something.
As a result, and I don’t care if I get hell from my family about this later, I am not opposed to sex before marriage (hell, I’d be a serious hypocrite) or moving in with your partner before the wedding. Or, in fact, choosing to commit long-term to a partner that one never has the intention of marrying.
While I did a lot of it the old-fashioned way, I feel like society has progressed to point where tradition is not necessarily the best way to do things in all cases. It works for me just as it works for others, but one size doesn’t fit all.
And honestly, I would prefer my kids not have to deal with the same sexual and moving-in-together trauma I have had to experience.
I don’t want them to think sex is this crazy huge deal. It should be a natural thing one shares with someone they are in love with, and they should never feel guilty for enjoying their bodies. It’s a terrible struggle that I am *finally*, at the ripe old age of 27, learning to do myself.
While I know and respect that everyone is entitled to their own opinion based on morals and beliefs, this is just my own.
I believe in education and an acceptance of reality. Not in suppression or an old-fashioned ideology.
Besides, you *know* that all the people before us used to fuck like rabbits before actually getting maried. They just got married long before anyone could possibly know they were knocked up beforehand.
Current Mood:
Mischievous
Angry
Cool