I was raised within a context that believed sex before marriage was immoral. Happily, I aligned my life with that, found a good woman with similar outlook, and we've been married for 35 years, two children. We are both moderately educated within a very traditional religious context, and we continue within that today. Our marriage is very real with all the normal difficulties, accompanied with increasing joy and goodness as the years pass.
Nearing 60 now I more and more think of the fixed things one must have, the markers that define how life is to be lived. Sexual values are ever-implicit in those questions, if not central. I think it would help us to at least ask if saving sex for marriage could be healthy, would come closer to maintaining the right kind of respect for one another. It doesn't have to be some sort of nutty notion as it is often caricatured. After all, it would be hard to blame the sexual morass of our day on those who think sex belongs within, and only within, committed monogamous marriage where you throw away the key and give yourself for one another and your children.
I don't pretend this is an easy discussion or that living one's life that way in youth is easy. But it might be easier than the alternative. My peer group and those I had learned to honor kept me on that path. And of course there is this underlying ordering called religion that informed and encouraged. In many ways politics is the new religion and it simply can't go deep enough to save us.
I wonder if the fixed idea of saving sex for marriage might save both, and is a key part of saving us all
