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Waiting for marriage before having sex wasn’t what I expected

I GREW up in the church. Christian family. Christian school. Christian friends. And the number one rule taught to me about sex was this:
Don’t have sex before marriage!

It was drilled into my head that premarital sex was wrong because it would create soul ties between me and all the people I had sex with. Almost like Voldemort whose soul split into seven pieces which attached themselves to every victim he killed, creating horcruxes.

Being the perfectionist that I was in my teenage years, I latched onto this rule and avoided sex like the plague. I suppressed thoughts about sex and avoided all sexual urges.

I was even interviewed by Girlfriend magazine at the ripe old age of 14 preaching abstinence and warning other teenagers against these soul-tying horcruxes that I thought could destroy our very lives.
 
Elissa’s slightly embarrassing appearance in Girlfriend magazine.Source:Supplied
Elissa’s slightly embarrassing appearance in Girlfriend magazine.Source:Supplied

At church, gossip spread about young people who were secretly having sex, older married couples who had confessed to sex before marriage, and the double-standards applied to elite members of the church whose sexual sins were kept forever on the down-low.

“Sexual immorality” always seemed to be dealt with more harshly than any other moral failing: pastors excommunicated for adultery; pornography burning ceremonies; exorcisms performed on homosexuals; abortions to cover up premarital sex; verbal abuse, gossip and slander about or toward the promiscuous; and a church-wide fear of admitting to any sort of temptation or mistake.

Most of the time we don’t even discuss whether it is right or wrong to buy houses and cars that pollute our environment, destroy the ozone layer, wipe out forests and rape the earth, but we will talk incessantly about how much of a slut little miss so-and-so is, and how LGBTIQ people are really perverted heterosexuals.

But by the time I was in my early twenties I was still single, and there were these urges in my body … to touch myself. I wanted to know what it felt like. So I discovered masturbation.

I felt like I’d committed a felony — worse yet, maybe I’d committed the unforgivable sin! No one had actually told me it was wrong, but I presumed that it was, and the guilt I experienced was horrendous. I bawled my eyes out every time I expressed my sexuality in the privacy of my own room and I begged God to send me a husband as that seemed like the only legitimate solution.

Another six years went by in singleness and sexlessness, and then my mother passed away. Strangely enough, the thing I wanted more than anything in the world right then was sex. I wanted the strength of a man’s body to comfort me in my grief.

I started to challenge the idea that masturbation was a sin and pushed the boundaries of my own rules. I invited men into my life who kissed me and touched me in ways I’d never experienced before. One particular man probably saw me as his greatest challenge. My virginity would be his prize — if he could conquer me. He was an alpha male; strong, and in his own way, very patient. I threw away my boundaries around oral sex but I never orgasmed in his presence or allowed penetration.

At age 30, I finally met a man I was content to settle down with. He too was an intercourse virgin and we mutually decided to wait for sex until we were at least living in the same country — he’s American, I’m Australian.

We pushed all remaining boundaries: sleeping in the same bed when we visited each other internationally; engaged in oral sex, Skype sex and mutual masturbation; saw each other completely naked and even showered together. But we did in fact wait for intercourse until we were legally married in February 2015.
 
Elissa and her husband both waited for the big day.Source:Supplied
Elissa and her husband both waited for the big day.Source:Supplied

At age 32 I finally gave my husband the last piece of my virginity. But intercourse wasn’t what I had expected it to be. There were no fireworks or explosions. It all felt quite natural and not as supernatural or spiritual as I’d been lead to believe it would be.

The flip-side of those negative soul-tying horcruxes was that sex was “supposed” to create a beautiful bond between me and my husband that would unite us together in body and spirit for the rest of our lives.
But it didn’t feel that way for me initially and I was disappointed. I’d waited 32 years of my life without ever having intercourse only to find out that I was still exactly the same person after I’d had sex as I was before I’d had sex.

Sex didn’t change me. It didn’t fix me. It didn’t ruin me. It had been blown completely out of proportion in my mind because of the rule I was taught as a child.

Having been married for a year now, I think there is some legitimacy in what I was taught about soul-ties. I have read up on oxytocin, microchimerism and telegony. And I have found sex to be a bonding experience between myself and my husband. But I have also learned that having a sex-life can be really hard work. I certainly don’t have the stamina or flexibility of someone in their twenties.

So, do I regret the decisions I made? No, actually, I don’t. I have learned so much about myself, about human sexuality and about religion, that I am inclined to be grateful for my own story, exactly as it is. I embrace my journey.

I still hold some resentment toward the rules that I was given. I resent how they controlled me and how little I was able to follow my own heart. I believe that the best way for me to heal from this resentment is to share with others my journey and allow them to make their own decisions about how they will express their sexuality and follow their hearts.

My goal in writing my book Grace for Sexual Shame: The Obsessed was to address the many areas of our sexuality that are often condemned in churches. Areas like masturbation, pornography, premarital sex, lust, abortion, fantasy and gay marriage.

I feel strongly that it is time for the church to start preaching grace above abstinence. When statistics tell us that more than 90 per cent of people, Christian and non-Christian alike, have sex before marriage in Australia, we are kidding ourselves if we think that vamping up the abstinence message is going to stop people from having premarital sex.

We need better sex education about contraception and even about abortion. Also, the church desperately needs to rethink its hate-the-sin-love-the-sinner approach to LGBTIQ people.
The church is not capable of loving sinners if it simultaneously shames, judges, criticises, condemns, avoids and slanders their sin.

My hope is that through honest conversation, we may begin to heal our collective sexuality sooner rather than later.

Elissa Anne is a Christian writer, blogger and author of Grace for Sexual Shame: The Obsessed.

Source: News Corp Australia Network:

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