(Semi) Saving Myself for Marriage: My Search for an Abstinence Loophole
Jesus said to wait, but I wasn’t that patient
Since the dawn of time, teenagers have been hooking up, making out, getting down, and every other verb/preposition combo you can imagine.
It’s just what teenagers do.
And yes, this includes Christian teens.
But to hear my Evangelical church and school tell it, sexual promiscuity was THE thing that would send you straight down to hell while Jesus looked on with a single tear running down his cheek.
Try telling that to the bunch of horny teenagers hopped up on Skittles and organized youth group games!
I personally followed all the sexual rules as best I could, but at 15, my hormones overfloweth. Fantasizing about walks hand-in-hand down a moonlit beach filled my dreams day and night.
I wanted vampires Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise to simultaneously kiss my neck (while wearing puffy shirts with their long hair flowing) as I gasped with rapturous pleasure.
For now, I satisfied myself with these images (and my own hand).
But what if I could feel that ecstatic pleasure with a real, live boy?
Being a hard-working Protestant, I got to work.
After much flirting, a willing participant surfaced. This particular young man possessed all the markers of romance I needed: a Jeep and a dick.
As he walked me up to my door at the end of a date one evening, he bent forward and kissed me on the lips. He retreated to his car and drove away with a wave.
I floated up the stairs and fell onto my bed. With a stupid smile on my face, I stared at the Interview with a Vampire poster on my wall and envisioned our next encounter complete with fireworks exploding in the distance as we stood on a balcony in New Orleans.
Surely the sexual ecstasy would soon come!
The next weekend, I suggested we park in the darkest place that I knew of: the Mervyn’s department store parking lot.
After some small talk about how much we both enjoyed our Subway footlongs, I suggested we move to the backseat of his Jeep.
Our lips met, and we began a hard-core kissing session.
This is it! I thought. I’m on the Sexy Vampire Train to Ecstasy!
We moved our tongues around each other’s tongues with vigor.
A few minutes passed.
Then a few more.
We seemed to be stalled in some way.
Where were the fireworks? Where was the toe-curling rapturous pleasure?
All I could taste was a faint flavor of Doritos.
In order to assess the situation, I opened my eyes just a sliver. He had each of his hands placed on each of my shoulders, and my hands did the same on him.
What was the next logical step in this journey?
He kept his hands on my shoulders unflaggingly at ten and two, so I realized I would have to take the wheel.
Still methodically exchanging tongues back and forth, I slowly slid my hand down his chest. I hovered at the waistband of his jeans, then gingerly moved my hand to his crotch, barely grazing the denim. He jumped and looked at me wide-eyed. I smiled reassuringly, but he disconnected from my embrace and sat back in the seat.
“What?” I asked innocently.
“We should probably stop. We don’t want to get into a bad situation,” he said softly.
A bad situation.
The bad situation was me.
I leaned back and sighed. “You’re right. We wouldn’t want a bad situation.”
Relieved, he opened the backseat door and hurried to the driver’s seat. I quietly followed suit and got into the front seat next to him.
On the ride home, I stared out the passenger window into the dark and saw only my own reflection looking back.
What was wrong with me?
Why didn’t I want what God wanted for me: purity?
Later that night, I lay in my bed in the dark and stared at the ceiling fan. As I thought about the events of the evening, I wondered what exactly went wrong.
My Evangelical church and school taught me the number one rule for Christians: don’t have sex outside of marriage.
This had been drilled into us since day one.
But I had so much desire and so much longing. And I was very confused because I now actually had access to what I had been pining for: a real-life boy with whom to get busy.
So, why was I not experiencing the waves of pleasure that I could give myself as I imagined puffy-shirted, long-haired Louis and Lestat ravaging corseted women in the French Quarter?
A thought began to form.
Making out in the back of the Jeep was fun, sure.
But what if the pinnacles of pleasure I had discovered alone were only accessible with another person during the act of sex proper (capital “S” Sex)? Maybe that’s why my first experience wasn’t what I had envisioned.
But God didn’t want me to have capital “S” Sex until marriage, and marriage was many years away.
Therein lies the rub.
What would I do until then? How would I wait? This was a head-scratcher.
But I was nothing if not resourceful.
I flipped on the lamp on the nightstand and got out of bed. Where did I put that magazine?
Under a stack of textbooks, I found my most recent issue of Cosmo. After taking a quick look at the table of contents, I thumbed through to the article “Spice up Your Sex Life.”
A twinge of guilt came up, but I quickly rationalized: technically, this article was about “life” and not “sex,” right?
My eyes scanned the page. Surely there was a sexual workaround in here somewhere.
Yes! Right there in black and white: women’s erogenous zones include the vagina (nope), breasts (double nope), and… earlobes?
Screw it, I’ll try anything.
On our next date, we ended up sitting on the grass at a park. I was positioned between his legs facing away from him and leaning back against his chest in an arrangement signifying blissful young love.
I turned my head slightly and said with my sultriest voice, “I read in a magazine that ears are an erogenous zone.”
“Ears?” he replied, obviously confused.
“Yeah. Maybe you could touch my ears and it would feel really nice.”
Facing away from him, I leaned back against his chest and settled in. Gazing out at the rest of the park, I smiled proudly.
I can’t believe I discovered this sex loophole! Did anyone else know about this game-changer?
I closed my eyes in anticipation of orgasmic pleasure.
He then reached up with his hands and FLICKED both of my earlobes forward at the same time.
“Ow!” I said and covered both of my ears with my hands.
“Like that?” he asked.
What was happening? I was in the middle of a park with a 16-year-old good Christian boy trying to orchestrate an erotic escapade.
Instead of climaxing with sexy vampires, I was getting flicked in the ears.
“Never mind,” I sighed.
Resigned, I sat back and thought about my predicament.
Was Capital “S” Sex the only thing that was going to get me over the climactic hump?
If so, I was in trouble because Capital “S” Sex wasn’t coming for a long time.
Was there a way to have God-approved sexual encounters that didn’t leave me more unfulfilled than when I started?
How will I make it through these depraved teen years without the apparent apogee of penetration?
Fortunately, my journey away from religion allowed me to leave my obsession with the spiritual world and return to the flesh.
Reconnecting with my body, I realized that pleasure was, and always had been, with me all along.
