Sex and the Christian Single Woman

Part I

One of the highlights of last year’s Gracious Women’s Advance 2009 was the pajama party. Thanks to all of the women who were honest about the real issues around sex and the Christian woman. This blog is both a continuation of that conversation and a direct response to a heartfelt message that I received a few weeks ago from a friend who wrote:

I have had many dreams deferred, like being a mother and a wife and having a family of my own. As a result, two years ago I became really depressed. I stopped going to church and completely gave up hope in believing that God is a God who really cares about me. My desire for fellowship and community has brought me back to my local house of worship. However, those desires remain unfulfilled. I would like to know what advice would you give me in terms of reconnecting to the Father, redeveloping that intimate relationship with Him, and remaining in faith and love as I wait for the promises of God to become real for me. Thank you, Gail, in advance.

 

Oh, how I could relate to the pain in this letter. There are many single women who are very happy being single. I would be lying if I said I was once one of them. I wanted to be married. I wanted to share my love and life with one special person. And, yes, as a Christian woman, I also wanted to experience sexual fulfillment. At twenty-seven, I married the love of my life. I have openly shared some of the challenges of married life, but I won’t pretend that there aren’t many perks that accompany being married that I enjoy. I am very grateful for the privilege of sharing my life with my husband, Tim. I wouldn’t want to go back to being single and, to stay on topic, celibacy. Jesus is the Lord of my life, but in all reverence, I never claimed to be married to him, as I’ve heard some Christian women testify. I can relate to a Christian woman desiring to love, be loved by, and make love to, a man.

The Biblical prohibition of sex outside the confines of marriage is clear. I was reading on another blog about a preacher who instructed all the married people in his congregation to have sex for seven days straight, and for the singles to eat chocolate cake: (http://blog.beliefnet.com/textmessages/2008/11/do-ed-youngs-sex-sermons-speak.html). I wonder how that worked for the singles? (For that matter, I wonder how it worked for the married folk, but that’s another post.) I have heard some preachers encourage singles to embrace “the gift of singleness.” But it seems that most singles are passing on the chocolate cake and embracing members of the opposite sex instead. Consider these statistics from the book Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity by Lauren by F. Winner:

• 65% of teens have sex before they finish high school
• 41% of women from 15-54 have cohabited with a man
• Couples living together increased 72% between 1990 and 2000
• 52% of women have sex before turning 18
• 75% of women have sex before they get married

 

    Although most Christian women understand that sex outside of marriage is wrong and can quote scripture about “fleeing fornication,” they are getting winded awfully fast. As a church leader, I believe that we are not adequately preparing our young people for the challenges of remaining single and supporting them in their singleness. Since the sexual revolution, sex outside of marriage is a given. Anyone who is single and wants to remain sexually pure in this culture is swimming upstream. The top-selling book, Act Like A Lady, Think Like A Man, by comedian-turned-relationship-expert and confessing Christian, Steve Harvey, advises women to postpone sex (which he calls “the cookie”) for a 90-day, so-called “probation period,” but certainly not to wait until marriage, because who can do that? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQp_Ekr0oGA.

Part of the problem can be traced back to the 60′s. I am not one to bash everything about the 60′s. As an African American, I am grateful for the strides we made towards racial and gender equality. But when we separated sex from marriage, the damage we did to our moral psyche as a nation is incomprehensible. The societal pressure against sex outside of marriage has been removed. As the author, Mark Regnerus, wrote in his book, Forbidden Fruit: Sex & Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers, the issue is not so much premarital sex (i.e., sex with someone you intend to marry), but “pre-premarital sex” (i.e., sex with people you don’t intend to marry), because most people have several sexual partners before they are married.

Another possible factor is that the gap between puberty and marriage has widened significantly. Because young people choose to get their education and establish themselves in careers before they get married, young people are physically ready for sex long before they are actually married. This is a relatively new phenomenon. Abstinence is hard enough at seventeen, but how about at twenty-seven, thirty-seven, forty-seven? Can we at least admit that the Biblical injunction to remain celibate until marriage, regardless of when or if marriage occurs, is extremely difficult and can be painful to live out? I will not tell the young woman who wrote me that she is not “spiritual ” or make her feel guilty because she desires what most human beings on the planet crave. What she is experiencing is no “gift of singleness.” It is difficult and lonely.

Unfortunately, Christian women like my friend are challenged to be faithful to their Christian convictions while struggling alone with their physical and emotional needs for intimacy. What is most wrenching is that women who have done everything right, pursued their education, established thriving careers, and achieved financial stability seem to have the most difficult time of all finding partners as was recently documented about African American women in particular on 20/20: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCoI-B9AYjs. With fewer and fewer available partners, there is a great deal of pressure on Christian women to compromise their Christian beliefs concerning premarital sex or lose the attentions of another “really nice guy.” So what’s a Christian woman to do?

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