My parents brought me up grown as a Catholic. While this may not have been the most stellar approach from a sound biblical doctrinal perspective, it did give me the fundamentals of an outlook on life anchored on faith in God.
An example of this was an approach to sex that was based on chastity, devotion, conservatism and monogamy. I learned these principles as a child. It isn’t that I gave deep thought to them, it was just the thing I was supposed to do as a child under the authority of my parents.
Things started to change as my body got turbo charged with testosterone at the onset of puberty, and my leaving home for boarding house in high school. It was there that I started seeing severe deviations from the construct I had. Low chastity, materialistic devotions, liberalism and “polygamy” at the level we were at then, which was the dating phase. Some guys ran multiple dating relationships in parallel. Many of the friends I made at this point were quite baffled at my stance. However, there really wasn’t any pressure from my peers to adopt what constituted popular culture from a sexual perspective. The enclosed nature of the boarding school did help to define some bounds.
It was at University that all hell would break lose. With zero parental or other guardianship oversight, I saw blatant & very stark deviations from the values I had come to hold dear. Unlike at boarding school where one would be left alone if one chose to walk solitarily, at University, one could be “hunted down” by members of the opposite. These were sexually formative years for quite a lot of people. A time when many came to discover who they were. This period was also the time when I came to know God in a deeper light, and I chose to keep the values regarding sex, as expressed in His Word.
Habits and approaches to sex, good and bad, from this time have followed many into marriage. There was the post-University/early career phase, but this was uneventful for me as I was already committed to the lady who would later become my wife. However, for others, this probably may have been another “mixed-period”.
If you made it through cleanly and got married as a virgin, as I did, oh, cool. Keep upholding His principles and “working out your marriage” with purpose, and with the Holy Spirit’s help. If you had sexual struggles, but have overcome them, and your marriage is great, oh, nice. Keep going. However if you had no struggles, but now do, or had struggles, and still do, please feel free to reach out to your Church leadership, or anyone you know who is spiritually mature and morally upright, for help. Do not feel bad or condemned. The “journey to perfection” is still on, and we all can have sexually chaste, non-materialistic, conservative and monogamy-based marriages.
[*Aside: the topic of sex is quite complicated and broad. I haven’t gone into deeper issues such as libido mismatches, physiological disorders, prior trauma overhangs, addictions, etc. This is just a broad treatise centered around an approach founded on God’s Word. If you have any other specific complications you would like me to address, please feel free to reach out to me, or to other sound leaders known to you. There is no challenge for which help does not exist.]
—
O.J
