I walked down the long aisle in my beautiful silk dress. My heart pounded with excitement as I locked eyes with my handsome husband-to-be. He beamed from ear to ear as I slowly approached him. We were both raised in Christian homes and were taught from a young age that saving sex for marriage was the Biblical and right thing to do. The anticipation of giving the gift of virginity to one another was overwhelmingly exciting. Yes, we had both saved our bodies for one another, but over the years we had both fallen prey to many impure thoughts and sexual temptations in our minds. Being a virgin with your body is encouraged in every Bible believing church, but what about being a virgin with your mind too? A lot of their lustful habits started out as innocently as browsing a Facebook page, accidentally stumbling across a bad website, reading a Christian romance novel, or wandering into an Abercrombie store.
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Sexual Past Is NOT The Most Important Thing
Growing up in a Christian home, I was raised to view my virginity as almost as important as my salvation. I took those warnings to heart. It's difficult to understand if you didn't grow up in the church, but the focus on purity before marriage is so pervasive in many Christian circles that I didn't even question it. Of course I would wait until marriage. How could I think of doing anything else? When I was 15, I signed the pledge to wait to have sex until marriage. My parents gave me a purity ring the following year. Even though I knew that they had lived together for several years before getting married, I never thought of them as being hypocritical, but rather I believed they did their best to keep me from making the same mistakes that they had made in their youth. They were, after all, very different people now.
As the first of my friends to receive such a gift, they came to me for tips on taking care of the first precious piece of jewelry many of us had been entrusted to protect. She looked apprehensive. The concern over leaving her ruby ring just hanging there on a hook was apparent. I slammed my locker, forgetting to take off my own ring. On my 13th birthday, my parents escorted me to a candlelight dinner and presented me with the finest ring I had yet had the privilege to call mine. Accepting it meant I promised to stay a virgin until my wedding night — to keep my mind innocent, my body untouched, my soul blameless — so that I could one day present my husband with the ultimate gift. Protecting my purity was a daily topic in my devout Christian household, located a few rusty miles outside of Milwaukee. In our born-again circles, word spread through church newsletters arguing that Christians could no longer be complacent over the epidemic of premarital sex. These rings sealed the deal when in the mids, an estimated 2.
She promises that she is a virgin too. I am very glad! Yet I worry. How can I marry? I know too little about sex. When I hear guys talk about sex, their talk is dirty stories. I am sorry to ask you to write about such things. But I constantly worry. I need to know what a man should do on his wedding night.
